Transforming the City of Kolding’s historic centre, in partnership with the downtown business community
Development Framework for Kolding City Centre
Kolding is a successful regional centre in the area known in Denmark as "The Triangle". Here, a significant share of Denmark's GDP is created and there is a healthy climate of innovation, investment and industry that has created a strong regional brand.
The City of Kolding suffers from familiar challenges: transforming patterns of retail and shopping, changing attitudes towards mobility and transportation, and the need to successfully compete as a centre in the Triangle region. We were asked to help take stock of the existing public life in the city and to formulate goals for improving the urban experience. Working with a community of more than 100 businesses, we facilitated a positive debate that resulted in a vision for the future supported by the local community.
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Development Framework
City of Kolding
Kolding City Centre
Kolding, Denmark
Assignment complete 2020
BYSTRATEGI
Our design code 'Invite Your City' establish a shared vocabulary for the transformation and upgrading of shop fronts in the historic city centre. By providing inspiration and insights to building owners and ground floor tenants our design code enables the transformation of threshold zones and facades, creating additional invitations for people to linger and connect with other people and local businesses. 'Invite Your City' guides the business community as a whole to create more attractive destinations to visit.
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Design Code for building owners and tenants
City of Kolding
Kolding City Centre
Kolding, Denmark
Assignment complete 2019
Invite Your City
Under our creative engagement process we facilitated a series of workshops with more than 100 business owners and stakeholders that are active in the centre of Kolding today. Through the workshops we co-created a consensus-based vision for an even more attractive city centre, one that can offer even more invitations, for new groups of people to visit, in the future.
Co-creating the way forward
Jernbanegade street layout
In historic European cities the street leading to the central station is often a key representative public space with important retail and other urban service functions. On Jernbanegade, 'Station Street', in Kolding, we started the process by analysing existing patterns of use by pedestrian, cyclists and vehicles together with stakeholder interviews to hear about local business needs and experiences on the street.
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Through wider public engagement we managed to engage business community and citizens in an open process where a shared understanding and trust was built in the project. New measures were identified that can be taken by the city administration as well as by the group owners and tenants of commercial units, to benefit the centre as a whole. This new shared vision for Jernbanegade, once again, establishes this station street as a key connector between the public transit hub of the city and the historic core for retail and commerce.
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The inclusive approach to engaging the business community yielded additional benefits: An existing design guide for the physical transformation of the street could be adapted and changed to reflect overarching needs for future movement and recreation in this modern center. Working in collaboration with another landscape architect appointed to the project by the city, we were able to deliver a bespoke public realm refurbishment underpinned by high level of user engagement and adoption.
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Jernbanegade street design
City of Kolding
Jernbanegade in Kolding
Kolding, Denmark
200 m
Assignment complete 2019
Land+ Landscape Architects
