What Copenhagen Has Become and Who It Left Behind

My grandmother lived in Vesterbro her whole life. Her father was a dock worker. Her building was demolished in the slum clearances of the 1970s and she moved to a social housing block in Amager. The building she grew up in is now an upscale residential development.

Copenhagen’s transformation over the past thirty years is the story of a city that was genuinely rundown in parts and which has been changed by investment, by design, by international reputation, and by the arrival of people with money and the departure of people without it. The outcome is a city that is objectively pleasant to live in if you can afford it and increasingly unaffordable to people on average or below-average incomes.

The social housing stock: Denmark has a strong tradition of almene boliger — social housing — and this is the main thing preventing Copenhagen from becoming as stratified as London or San Francisco. The waiting lists are long and the system is under pressure but it exists and functions. Families who have lived in Nørrebro for generations still live there in housing connected to that history. This is not nothing.

The question I am asked sometimes: would I leave? No. This is my city in the way that a city you were born in and grew up in is your city — not because it is perfect but because it is what your interior map is calibrated to. I am aware of what it has cost. I think the awareness is the obligation that comes with the attachment.