About

Sønder Boulevard in Vesterbro is a paradigmatic example of a landscape-led, municipality-driven street transformation that combines liveability improvements with climate-adaptation objectives. The boulevard’s central reservation was redesigned and planted between the mid-2000s and 2008, when the City of Copenhagen and local landscape practice SLA turned a traffic-dominated thoroughfare into a 1.3 km linear park and multifunctional public realm.

Design decisions reflect an evidence-based approach to multifunctionality. The central lawn strips, perennial planting, rain gardens and tree pits together replace a substantial area of former asphalt with permeable surfaces; project documentation and subsequent case studies report that several thousand square metres of hard surfacing were converted to green infrastructure during the works, with hundreds of new trees and diverse plantings installed to secure ecological connectivity and microclimate benefits. These measures produce quantified co-benefits: increased infiltration capacity, lower midday surface temperatures, and improved acoustic comfort through traffic calming and vegetative screening.

Academic and practitioner evaluations of Sønder Boulevard stress two linked outcomes. First, the project demonstrates how urban design can operationalise nature-based solutions at street scale — integrating hydrological function with programme (play areas, sports courts, seating) to make climate adaptation socially legible and useful.

Second, it shows how participatory and iterative design processes produce resilient public spaces: residents’ needs shaped the arrangement of facilities and management routines, which in turn enhanced everyday use and stewardship. These themes are recurrent in the scholarly literature on Copenhagen’s adaptation experiments and in governance analyses of nature-based projects.

Sønder Boulevard provides concrete lessons in how street-scale design can simultaneously address environmental and social objectives. The requalification not only introduced ecological functionality but also substantially enhanced everyday liveability. Surveys and behavioural observations conducted by the municipality and local universities recorded significant increases in public use and diversity of users following the transformation — from children and families to elderly residents and commuters. The sequence of lawns, play areas, sports courts and seating zones fostered informal encounters, physical activity and outdoor life, while traffic calming and improved lighting strengthened perceived safety. These outcomes demonstrate that climate-adaptive design can be socially productive: by turning a former transport corridor into a vibrant shared landscape, Sønder Boulevard has become a focal point of neighbourhood identity and urban well-being in Vesterbro.