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Loop City

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK

Loop City

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK

2010

CLIENT

Realdania

TYPOLOGY

Urbanism

SIZE M2/FT2

109,265 / 1,176,118

STATUS

IDEA

The industrial areas in the Copenhagen suburbs are next in line for urban development. A new light rail is planned to interconnect 20 development zones with a total area of 11 Km2, the size of the entire inner city.

 

BIG proposes to turn the light rail line into a spine of dense urbanity with a series of peaks at the stations. By combing the rail with strategies for energy exchange, waste management, water treatment and electric car stations, the infrastructure could become the base for a new sustainable ring of development around Copenhagen, and an artery of true urbanity pumping life into the heart of the suburbs. At certain points the rail becomes a building itself almost like a Roman aqueduct passing through the suburbs, at other points it forms small pockets of urbanity around the stations.

The proposal includes upgrades to the planned light rail by extending it to form a regional ring around Oresund connecting similar development areas, and creating a new 50 year development perspective for a cross border region between Sweden and Denmark. Where the Finger Plan from 1947 was about connectivity from suburb to center the Loop City is linking a string of highly differentiated urban nodes, universities and working spaces in a center-less metropolitan region around a blue void.

 

This ring, comparable in size to the San Francisco Bay area, has enough development areas to contain the growth of the region the next 50 years, and could become a model for a both sustainable, dense and super recreational development of the region.

Bjarke Ingels Andreas Klok Pedersen Daniel Kidd Lucian Mihail Racovitan Ryohei Koike Søren Martinussen Armor Gutiérrez Rivas Daniel Selensky Kuba Snopek Ole Schrøder Riccardo Mariano Xing Xiong

COLLABORATORS

ReD Associates
ARUP
Tom Nielsen
Dong Energy
Advisory Board
Ringby - Letbanesamarbejdet