The huge, wooden scale model of Odense, inside a temporary information centre opposite the town hall, looks initially like a replica of the Danish city. But give them a few minutes and a local would begin to spot some differences, especially to the main traffic route bisecting the urban centre.
Thomas B Thriges Street was built in the 1960s as a solution to growing car congestion: a fast-moving, four-lane road laid like a curved ribbon across the middle of the city.
That ribbon was first trimmed 18 months ago when a central section of the street was closed to vehicles. More is to come in the next few years, as the rest of the road is transformed into a new heart for Odense, reserved for bikes and pedestrians, and lined with shops, cafes and homes.
It is the centrepiece of a hugely ambitious, and initially controversial, near-£3bn makeover for Denmark’s third-biggest city, which is attempting to revive itself from slightly struggling post-industrial area to a hi-tech hub for education and industry. And at the centre of this transformation is the thing Odense boasts it does as well as anywhere in Europe: liveability.
“We try to think about people living here all their life, and having a good life here,” says Anker Boye, the city’s veteran mayor, a house painter turned professional politician. “The investors are coming because they know people want to live in Odense.”
The lure comes in two parts, which until recently might have seemed a confusing meld of right-wing business notions and more left-leaning urban design.
Boye’s centre-left coalition proudly claims to have created the most business-friendly environment in Denmark, with low taxes and various business fees abolished. But in parallel to this is a city where 50% of all central trips are made by bike, and private cars are increasingly and deliberately kept away from the centre.
While Copenhagen has long been the place of pilgrimage for foreigners with a yearning to experience Denmark’s famously pro-bike culture, Odense quietly but firmly stresses its national primacy on two-wheeled transport.
Following decades of work to build infrastructure and embed a cycling culture, the statistics are astonishing. Odense, a city of just under 200,000 people, has almost 350 miles of bike lanes and 123 cyclist-only bridges.
Most impressive is the inclusivity of cycling, with 81% of children riding to school and training programmes in place to get even two-year-old kindergarten entrants to trundle to and from home on a balance bike.
Troels Andersen, head of cycle projects for the city, says the embedded bike-ness extends to the other end of the demographic curve. “It’s very rare that older people stop cycling because of the infrastructure and safety, it’s mainly because of balance problems,” he says.
“With some people, when they can’t cycle any more because of their age they push their bike along as a walking frame, leaning on it. They don’t like to use a normal walking frame, as then you look really old and frail. They walk around the city with their bike, and they feel normal.”
Odense was formerly one of Denmark’s industrial centres, especially for shipping, building huge container vessels for the Maersk group until 2012.
Its hoped-for economic future is based heavily around reshaping the centre to reflect the new purpose. An old harbour is being rebuilt with offices and homes, as well as a cultural centre, all linked to the centre by a just-finished, sweep-curved cycle bridge.
Meanwhile Thomas B Thriges street – named, inevitably, after a famous local industrialist – will in its rebuilt form host not just bikes and pedestrians but also a new tramline, linking to the city’s university and hospital. Cars can approach the city centre via ringroads but will be channelled to park-and-ride systems or new underground parking.
A few years ago the city adopted a new motto, At leger er at leve (To play is to live) – appropriate for somewhere which claims more than 120 parks and 250 playgrounds. Central to this is the cycling strategy which, Andersen explains, has to approach the subject from a different perspective than somewhere like Copenhagen – let alone London or New York.
Andersen says that congestion in Copenhagen makes it easier for city authorities to tempt people into cycling with new infrastructure. That incentive is not so strong in Odense. “Unlike in Copenhagen, we don’t have the benefits of traffic congestion,” he says. “In Copenhagen they just build infrastructure and they get a lot of cyclists. People do it here for free. When people are cycling here they do it for the fun and pleasure, and for health.”
A key element is thus promotion and encouragement, especially with younger people. Foreign students who come to study at one university in Odense receive a bike with their university room. Machines from the municipal bike-hire scheme need to be unlocked using a mobile phone code, but then cost nothing to use. One intrepid city employee dresses in a head-to-toe cuddly duck outfit and, in the guise of a character named Cycling Anton, rides between kindergartens to spread the two-wheeled message via stickers and hugs.
The result is clear in Odense’s post-school mini rush hour. While many children do cycle with their parents, a number of others, even of primary age, ride alone or with similar-sized siblings. The official policy is that routes to schools should be sufficiently safe for those aged six or older to cycle alone if the family chooses.
Klaus Bondam, who heads the Copenhagen-based Cyklistforbundet, or Danish cyclists’ union, admits Odense has the lead over his city on this: “In many places in Copenhagen we do have a cycling environment, but you don’t feel safe sending a kid out to cycle. Odense are doing good.”
Odense has spent many years building up its cycle infrastructure and culture, and Andersen stresses that for other similar-sized cities to follow does need time and continuous political support. But he, adds, it need not cost too much.
Between 1999 and 2002, the city undertook what became known as the 20, 20, 20 scheme. A programme to boost cycling that brought a 20% rise in cyclist numbers, and a 20% reduction in bike-related crashes, and all for a cost of just 20m krone, or about £2m.
“We’re very average as a city,” Andersen says. “There are hundreds of cities like this around Europe. So it’s more interesting – you could have hundreds of cities like Odense, all over.”
Boye’s press team show me Odense by lending me a Christiana bike, one of the three-wheeled contraptions in which the luggage or, in this case, my five-year-old son, can sit inside a compartment at the front.
The idea of riding around London’s combative and feral streets in such a way, especially given overnight snowfall, would be unthinkable. But in Odense it is easy, not least as a fleet of mini-tractors carrying rotating brushes have swept the bike lanes clear. It’s not just the ubiquitous infrastructure which inspires confidence, it’s also the sheer number of fellow cyclists, and the concomitant care drivers take when interacting with them.
Much like the Netherlands, Denmark lost a good deal of its bike-based culture from the 1960s, as big roads like Thomas B Thrige street were pushed through city centres.
Boye says cities like his need to accept that this era is over. “In the 1960s people thought it was good to get a house and a car, and we built our new family houses in suburbs around the city,” he said. “Odense became a big, flat city. Now we’re concentrating things inside the old industrial areas, but we’re trying to do it in a clever way.”
The mayor says he sees no contradiction between the futuristic industries now arriving – Odense hosts a major international test centre for drones – and a transport network based around bikes and trams, technologies which have not changed fundamentally since the 19th century.
“More and more investors are coming here, because they believe in the way we’ve transformed this old, industrial city into a new city,” he says. “We know we need to live from private businesses, so we need to have good conditions for that. But we care about the whole life of people. It’s all these many things together.”
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