Copenhagen 25-30 September

I’d never been to Denmark before. I found Copenhagen was buzzing in the city centre when I arrived and everything felt easy to navigate and very much at human scale. Just for comparison, Denmark has a total population of about 5.5 million compared with 9 million in Sweden, but Sweden is something like 10 times as large. Copenhagen and the surrounding area accounts for approximately a third of the country’s total population; the city itself has a population of about 500,000 . Like Malmö it is also a very walkable and bike-able place, with bike users in evidence everywhere.

I very much had a sense of a city in transition, in all sorts of ways. Firstly, there appears to have been an explosion of new building in the last decade or so, and this is still in progress, from housing and offices, major regeneration programmes and high profile public buildings. Some of these I was able to enjoy as a casual visitor, for example the Black Diamond, which is a stunning extension to the Royal Library, the new Opera House (where I was lucky to be able to go to a performance), the Danish Design Centre and the addition to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek by Henning Larsen.  (I also thoroughly recommend a visit to Louisiana Museum of Modern Art though this isn’t new as it first opened in 1958).

Another reason for this feeling of transition may be connected to political shifts. I certainly picked up during my visit a big emphasis on integration of immigrants and also structural changes in local government. I was given a copy in English of the City of Copenhagen’s Integration Policy, published in 2006. In the section on culture and leisure activities it states “immigrants use libraries to a greater extent than Danes, even though in Copenhagen they do not borrow books more often.” It goes on to say that “the libraries’ success in attracting immigrant users is to be exploited, so that, in future, libraries can be a central source of support for language acquisition and cultural participation.” One of its four priorities in culture and leisure is “libraries as learning centres.”

It was clear during my visit that the library service in Copenhagen is also in a period of  structural change. The Consultant for Ethnic Affairs, Kambiz Kalantar Harmoozi (who was my convivial and very helpful guide during my stay), was not the only person who was new in post, as quite a few of the many other staff I met had been appointed to their current position in the course of the last year or less.

The library policy document for 2007-2010 sets out a focus four specific target groups: children, youth, students and non-ethnic Danes. In relation to non-ethnic Danes, the policy states “Copenhagen Libraries should focus on activities, which support the development of language and contribute to knowledge of Danish society.”

With this by way of background, I visited six library branches around the city in very different neighbourhoods, as well as meeting with the head of the service, one of the chief librarians for the branch libraries, and (separately) the Danish Library Centre for Integration, a centralised operation which is not open to the public, but which lends resources in many languages to libraries all over Denmark. 

It is impossible to describe in detail each of my visits here, but it was a fascinating  and intense experience, that gave me some insight into areas of Copenhagen I would never otherwise have seen.   Here are some impressions in brief:

• Sundby: great example of a public library co-located with other facilities in a sensitively converted and extended industrial space by the architect Dorte Mandrup (Kvarterhuset Jemtelandsgade). This included a school,  supplementary classes, a place for young people to make radio programmes, the home of a free community newspaper, offices for a sports employee, an office for volunteer work that also helps young people with educational and work support, a cultural consultant, a cafe, an Agenda 21 centre, a girls’ club, a bilingual playgroup and a wonderful hall for events raised upon stilts. The site was part of a much larger regeneration area and it felt like a place on the up. I was very taken with the librarian’s remarks about how they are involved in local democratic processes (committee of tenants and employees/users of the Kvarterhuset for example). She said that the library is proactive and staff are seen as collaborators by other organisations in a way that didn’t happen before. I took away with me her final comment “There’s no way back to the old way of doing things.”
• Solvang: an entirely different setting. A neighbourhood library also co-located with a school with an adjacent church and lots of housing, all built in a 1960/70s style, that made me think of some new towns in the UK. It felt as if the whole area needed an injection of investment and energy as the original shopping centre had all but faded away. Very welcoming and enthusiastic librarians, and a touching story from one of them about how she was personally affected and broadened her own understanding through an event in the library that she had organised. This event involved a reading and interpretation of the Koran by a local (female) resident who had translated the Koran into Danish.
• Vesterbro library is in a dynamic neighbourhood, with a long history of immigrant settlement but now with a definite sense of urban chic - mixed but also fashionable. I bet property prices have shot up here. This library was an old building, with  substantial resources in different languages, and clearly heavily used.
• Nørrebro was definitely a case of inner-city working-class and immigrant area mixed with cutting edge arty feel. I could immediately sense that the library integrates its activities into all sorts of local networks and community life. The children’s librarian sped along the long floor area in the open library space on roller skates, and the manager had a background in media and communications. I could have spent much longer here asking questions but there wasn’t enough time. Just one example of the kind of work they are doing is a project called Language – gate to an open society which involves one of the staff making visits over several years from new-born babies to childen’s first day at school to introduce them and their parents to books, reading and the library in an imaginative and very personal way.
• By the time I reached Ørnevej library I was beginning to run out of steam, but I liked the touch of having fresh flowers on the library tables. I received a warm welcome and then it was straight off to lunch in a Turkish cafe/restaurant. Again I felt as if I could have been in London!
• My last stop was an altogether different experience. Tingbjerg is further from the centre of Copenhagen. As the terminus of a bus route and physically very self-contained, it doesn’t really get anyone going through it and it shows. Despite physical regeneration, my first impressions were of a very poor neighbourhood, but where the word “poor” doesn’t only apply economically, but also, for example, to the extent of community infrastructure. This begs a question about how far public libraries in this type of environment should go in helping to build community capacity. The librarian was very informative and showed me a wonderful resource that his staff had created: in a formerly thoroughly dingy basement, with minimal resources, they had made an intimate parlour-like space with a special throne for telling stories for small groups. Adjacent was a fantastic dressing up room…it wasn’t in use while I was there, but I was told it was much used and it reinforced for me that imagination and a small amount of money can go a long way.