The archive · Public & Social · Strategic decision · 2008–2012
Copenhagen's Superkilen: Nørrebro park built from residents' 60-country objects (2012)
A dead rail strip becomes a park of street objects — swings, fountains, neon signs — chosen by Nørrebro residents from their 60 countries of origin.
Copenhagen Municipality · Realdania
What it had to solve
Nørrebro, Copenhagen's most ethnically diverse and stigmatized district (residents from 60-plus countries), had a dead railway corridor of about 800 metres slashing through it. The city and Realdania raised close to €8 million and brought in architects BIG, Topotek 1 and artist group SUPERFLEX to turn the strip into a park.
How it works
Nørrebro was Copenhagen's most restless district, home to people from more than sixty countries — and cut through by a dead strip of former railway land that sat unused behind fences for decades. In 2008 the City of Copenhagen, joined by the Realdania foundation, put up close to €8 million to convert the scar into a park.
Instead of imposing an official Danish design, the team — BIG, Berlin landscape office Topotek 1 and the Danish artist group SUPERFLEX — made the neighbourhood's own diversity the content of the park. Residents were asked to nominate everyday objects from their countries of origin; the designers then imported the real things, or exact copies, and laid them along the corridor in three zones: a red square for sport and culture, a black square built around a Moroccan fountain, and a green park with lawns and hills.
Every swing, bench and neon sign carries a small inlaid plate saying what it is and where it comes from, written in Danish and the language of its origin. The effect is a kind of world exhibition of street furniture — an Iraqi swing next to a Brazilian bench, a Qatari dentist sign above a Japanese octopus slide — that reflects the actual population of the district instead of a homogenized idea of Denmark.
Public Space's 2012 archive called the result a cosmopolitan celebration of mixture and praised it as an example for other cities facing cultural diversity in their neighbourhoods. The project went on to collect a string of international awards, including the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2016.
Why it lands
- The brief inverted the usual process: instead of the architect imagining the neighbourhood, the residents' own choices — a swing from Iraq, a fountain from Morocco — became the design material.
- Importing real objects (or exact copies) with explanatory plates gives each element a story, so the park reads like an exhibition rather than a vague gesture at multiculturalism.
- Splitting the corridor into three distinct, colour-coded zones kept a 750–800 metre stretch coherent while letting very different atmospheres exist side by side.
- The city deliberately collaborated across disciplines — architects, landscape architects and artists — so the result was neither pure landscape architecture nor pure art.
What it did
Opened in June 2012, the park became one of the most published Danish public spaces of its decade and was selected for the Public Space archive. It won ArchDaily's Building of the Year 2013, the Red Dot Best of the Best and the IOC's Gold Medal in 2013, and the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2016 — the standard cited example of building a public space with a district's 60 nationalities rather than for them.
What you can take
Participation works best with a precise job: ask which object from home each resident misses, not what a park should be — concrete choices build a place that belongs to everyone.
Since then
Superkilen opened in June 2012 and quickly became a landmark of Copenhagen and of participatory public-space design. In 2013 it won ArchDaily's Building of the Year for landscape and gardens, the Red Dot 'Best of the Best' for architecture and urban design, the International Olympic Committee's Gold Medal and the Civic Trust Award; in 2016 it received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. Its design team documented it as a model of 'peer-to-peer design', and it has since served as a reference point in urban-design literature and for cities planning participatory parks in mixed neighbourhoods.
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