17 ms·

How do you build a healthy city? Copenhagen reveals its secrets

hedgew 9y ago
A Scandinavian economist once said to Milton Friedman, ‘In Scandinavia, we have no poverty’. Milton Friedman replied, ‘That’s interesting, because in America, among Scandinavians, we have no poverty, either’ (quoted by Kotkin, 2009).
- robertnn 9y ago
  It's easy to jump to conclusions on why you'd post this quote here.. Instead, maybe you could expand on what this quote means to you (in this context)?
  - mac01021 9y ago
    Does (s)he have to have a point? It's an interesting anecdote related (even if only tangentially) to the discussion at hand.
- _delirium 9y ago
  That's not even true, though. The highest concentration of Scandinavian-Americans is is in North Dakota, where they make up 1/3 of the state's population, and have a poverty rate that is significantly above zero.
  - protomyth 9y ago
    Actually they are a lot less of the North Dakota population[1] being 4.7% of the population. For 2016[2], North Dakota had a poverty rate of 10.7 (10th lowest in the US). Of that 10.7%, 8% were listed as White. Given this, I don't think a significant amount of Scandinavian-Americans in North Dakota are in poverty. I guess any number is not zero, but North Dakota is probably the wrong state to use for a demonstration. 1) http://worldpopulationreview.com/states/north-dakota-population/ http://worldpopulationreview.com/states/north-dakota-populat... 2) https://talkpoverty.org/state-year-report/north-dakota-2017-report/ https://talkpoverty.org/state-year-report/north-dakota-2017-... https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/ND/PST045217#viewtop https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/ND/PST045217#vi...
    - _delirium 9y ago
      > Actually they are a lot less of the North Dakota population[1] being 4.7% of the population. Your reference [1] says that 30.8% of the state's population reports Norwegian ancestry, and 4.7% reports Swedish ancestry. Overall that's pretty close to the 1/3 I ballparked for Scandinavian-American.
      - protomyth 9y ago
        Opps, I forgot the Norwegian[1]. Well, 30.8% of 8% of 10.7% is a pretty low number and assumes that the 8% is an even distribution over the White poverty rate. 1) I might still hold a grudge over the damn lefse and not being told its was potato before eating it. I was not in good shape 30 minutes later.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
        TheCoelacanth 9y ago
        I think you are misreading your source. You seem to be interpreting it as saying that 8% of people in poverty are white, but what it actually says is that 8% of white people are in poverty. Assuming that the poverty rate is evenly distributed over the white population, then the poverty rate for Scandinavians would also be 8%.
        protomyth 9y ago
        I'm not misreading the source, else 100% of the people in North Dakota would be in poverty. The Native Americans are listed as 35% and that is not their percentage of the population.
        TheCoelacanth 9y ago
        Then why are you taking 8% of 10.7%? The correct way to interpret the statistics is not "10.7% of people are in poverty and 8% of those are white", it's "8% of white people are in poverty and that 8% overlaps with the 10.7% of all people who are in poverty".
  - yetanotheruser 9y ago
    That is an excellent comeback (by Friedman), but maybe it's something that sounds good but is in fact inaccurate.
- henrikschroder 9y ago
  Obvious counterexample: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swede_Hollow,_Saint_Paul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swede_Hollow,_Saint_Paul
callumprentice 9y ago
A well traveled American ex-colleague of mine moved to Copenhagen but left after 6 months. He said he simply couldn't afford to live there on his (Senior) game developer salary and theorized that the reason Danes are so happy is that they have such low expectations. I really hope that's not true (I'm pretty sure it isn't) as I find the idea of moving and raising my family there very appealing.
- mixmastamyk 9y ago
  Devs are not paid as well in Europe, probably a factor.
  - jxub 9y ago
    And then his industry was gamedev...
    - stuaxo 9y ago
      Games being one of the most exploitative bits of the industry :/
- bjohnson225 9y ago
  Developer salaries are significantly lower in the whole of Europe than the US, but they’re still extremely well paid positions that’ll give you way over what an average person earns. Describing it as unaffordable sounds a bit off to me when there are people living comfortably on half what he earned (assuming he wasn’t being massively underpaid). If he wanted a garage full of Tesla’s in his city centre garage, then yeah, it’s unaffordable.
  - callumprentice 9y ago
    Yep, understood. I don't know how much he was paid but his definition of not-affordable was not being able to afford more than a 1 bedroom apartment for him, his wife and baby as well as only being able to eat out once a month. Of course, he knew what he was getting paid and it's not difficult these days to get a sense of cost of living for anywhere in world so he must have know what he was getting into.
henrikschroder 9y ago
A quick note on the bikes: 1) Copenhagen is really, really flat, which makes it easy to bike for everyone. 2) Cars in Denmark have an environmental/luxury tax of over 100%, on top of the 25% VAT, making cars incredibly expensive to buy.
- mixmastamyk 9y ago
  1) A 21-speed makes almost any hill easy.
  - rini17 9y ago
    Nonsense, you must maintain some minimal speed otherwise bike gets unstable.
- ssttoo 9y ago
  What if you don’t ride a bike, for either physical or whatever reason? Say butt hurts, wind and rain ruin your hair?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - Fredej 9y ago
    Pretty good public transportation. Metro, busses and trains will bring you most places. I've lived in Copenhagen for 3 years now and don't own a car. I am not an outlier.
- vanderZwan 9y ago
  Speaking of the bikes, I'm usually not nationalistic, but the most patriotic thing I ever did as a Dutchman was complain about the bike infrastructure in Copenhagen :P Obviously, this should be taken about as seriously as trash-talking at a sports game. It was fun to provoke my Danish friends. Having said that, I sincerely wasn't impressed at the time; it was my first time living abroad, and later I realised that Groningen, with its car-free city centre, is bit exceptional. However, Copenhagen does annoy me a bit with their PR machine (although not much more than any other European capital city, I suppose). For example, take this list of "20 most bike friendly cities in the world of 2017" published in the Lonely Planet[0]. I'm still impressed they printed the following paragraphs unironically: > Unsurprisingly, Copenhagen came out on top as the best city in the world for cycling, while the results also saw a selection of global destinations shifting position. Now in its fourth year, the index was released by urban design consultancy Copenhagenize. > (skipping Copenhagen on nr 1 and Utrecht on nr 2) > 3: Amsterdam. The index states that Amsterdam remains the most amazing city in the world for cycling, securing the highest in the baseline score in 2017. However, it came in third position due to the fact that it did not score bonus points that reflect the dynamics in the city moving forward. So a design consultancy tasked with promoting Copenhagen as a bike-friendly city publishes a list of "most bike friendly cities" in 2017, and then puts Copenhagen on top because it scores bonus points for things that will happen in the future. This is about as unbiased as when the car industry ghost-wrote all those news-articles about jaywalking early last century. Well, regarding those "dynamics moving forward": there is so much bike traffic in cities in the Netherlands that we're experimenting with funnel-shaped bike crossings that make better use of the swarm -like movements of groups of bicycles[1]. I haven't seen those in Copenhagen when I visited it a few weekends ago. And then it still makes no sense that Amsterdam has "the best baseline score", because if you ask any Dutch person if Amsterdam is the most bike-friendly city in the country and they will laugh at you. This includes people from Amsterdam. Having said all that, I am glad that the Danes, and cities in the Nordic countries in general, are doing their best to become more bike-friendly. On a more global scale I hope the rise of small electric motors will help with the problem of elevated terrain, which you rightfully point out as a problem anywhere outside of countries like Denmark or the Netherlands. [0] https://www.lonelyplanet.com/news/2017/08/25/cycling-europe-best-cities-2017/ https://www.lonelyplanet.com/news/2017/08/25/cycling-europe-... [1] https://vimeo.com/217846328 https://vimeo.com/217846328

A Scandinavian economist once said to Milton Friedman, ‘In Scandinavia, we have no poverty’. Milton Friedman replied, ‘That’s interesting, because in America, among Scandinavians, we have no poverty, either’ (quoted by Kotkin, 2009).

robertnn 9y ago
It's easy to jump to conclusions on why you'd post this quote here.. Instead, maybe you could expand on what this quote means to you (in this context)?
- mac01021 9y ago
  Does (s)he have to have a point? It's an interesting anecdote related (even if only tangentially) to the discussion at hand.
_delirium 9y ago
That's not even true, though. The highest concentration of Scandinavian-Americans is is in North Dakota, where they make up 1/3 of the state's population, and have a poverty rate that is significantly above zero.
- protomyth 9y ago
  Actually they are a lot less of the North Dakota population[1] being 4.7% of the population. For 2016[2], North Dakota had a poverty rate of 10.7 (10th lowest in the US). Of that 10.7%, 8% were listed as White. Given this, I don't think a significant amount of Scandinavian-Americans in North Dakota are in poverty. I guess any number is not zero, but North Dakota is probably the wrong state to use for a demonstration. 1) http://worldpopulationreview.com/states/north-dakota-population/ http://worldpopulationreview.com/states/north-dakota-populat... 2) https://talkpoverty.org/state-year-report/north-dakota-2017-report/ https://talkpoverty.org/state-year-report/north-dakota-2017-... https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/ND/PST045217#viewtop https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/ND/PST045217#vi...
  - _delirium 9y ago
    > Actually they are a lot less of the North Dakota population[1] being 4.7% of the population. Your reference [1] says that 30.8% of the state's population reports Norwegian ancestry, and 4.7% reports Swedish ancestry. Overall that's pretty close to the 1/3 I ballparked for Scandinavian-American.
    - protomyth 9y ago
      Opps, I forgot the Norwegian[1]. Well, 30.8% of 8% of 10.7% is a pretty low number and assumes that the 8% is an even distribution over the White poverty rate. 1) I might still hold a grudge over the damn lefse and not being told its was potato before eating it. I was not in good shape 30 minutes later.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - TheCoelacanth 9y ago
        I think you are misreading your source. You seem to be interpreting it as saying that 8% of people in poverty are white, but what it actually says is that 8% of white people are in poverty. Assuming that the poverty rate is evenly distributed over the white population, then the poverty rate for Scandinavians would also be 8%.
        protomyth 9y ago
        I'm not misreading the source, else 100% of the people in North Dakota would be in poverty. The Native Americans are listed as 35% and that is not their percentage of the population.
        TheCoelacanth 9y ago
        Then why are you taking 8% of 10.7%? The correct way to interpret the statistics is not "10.7% of people are in poverty and 8% of those are white", it's "8% of white people are in poverty and that 8% overlaps with the 10.7% of all people who are in poverty".
- yetanotheruser 9y ago
  That is an excellent comeback (by Friedman), but maybe it's something that sounds good but is in fact inaccurate.
henrikschroder 9y ago
Obvious counterexample: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swede_Hollow,_Saint_Paul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swede_Hollow,_Saint_Paul

callumprentice 9y ago

A well traveled American ex-colleague of mine moved to Copenhagen but left after 6 months. He said he simply couldn't afford to live there on his (Senior) game developer salary and theorized that the reason Danes are so happy is that they have such low expectations. I really hope that's not true (I'm pretty sure it isn't) as I find the idea of moving and raising my family there very appealing.

mixmastamyk 9y ago
Devs are not paid as well in Europe, probably a factor.
- jxub 9y ago
  And then his industry was gamedev...
  - stuaxo 9y ago
    Games being one of the most exploitative bits of the industry :/
bjohnson225 9y ago
Developer salaries are significantly lower in the whole of Europe than the US, but they’re still extremely well paid positions that’ll give you way over what an average person earns. Describing it as unaffordable sounds a bit off to me when there are people living comfortably on half what he earned (assuming he wasn’t being massively underpaid). If he wanted a garage full of Tesla’s in his city centre garage, then yeah, it’s unaffordable.
- callumprentice 9y ago
  Yep, understood. I don't know how much he was paid but his definition of not-affordable was not being able to afford more than a 1 bedroom apartment for him, his wife and baby as well as only being able to eat out once a month. Of course, he knew what he was getting paid and it's not difficult these days to get a sense of cost of living for anywhere in world so he must have know what he was getting into.

henrikschroder 9y ago

A quick note on the bikes: 1) Copenhagen is really, really flat, which makes it easy to bike for everyone. 2) Cars in Denmark have an environmental/luxury tax of over 100%, on top of the 25% VAT, making cars incredibly expensive to buy.

mixmastamyk 9y ago
1) A 21-speed makes almost any hill easy.
- rini17 9y ago
  Nonsense, you must maintain some minimal speed otherwise bike gets unstable.
ssttoo 9y ago
What if you don’t ride a bike, for either physical or whatever reason? Say butt hurts, wind and rain ruin your hair?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Fredej 9y ago
  Pretty good public transportation. Metro, busses and trains will bring you most places. I've lived in Copenhagen for 3 years now and don't own a car. I am not an outlier.
vanderZwan 9y ago
Speaking of the bikes, I'm usually not nationalistic, but the most patriotic thing I ever did as a Dutchman was complain about the bike infrastructure in Copenhagen :P Obviously, this should be taken about as seriously as trash-talking at a sports game. It was fun to provoke my Danish friends. Having said that, I sincerely wasn't impressed at the time; it was my first time living abroad, and later I realised that Groningen, with its car-free city centre, is bit exceptional. However, Copenhagen does annoy me a bit with their PR machine (although not much more than any other European capital city, I suppose). For example, take this list of "20 most bike friendly cities in the world of 2017" published in the Lonely Planet[0]. I'm still impressed they printed the following paragraphs unironically: > Unsurprisingly, Copenhagen came out on top as the best city in the world for cycling, while the results also saw a selection of global destinations shifting position. Now in its fourth year, the index was released by urban design consultancy Copenhagenize. > (skipping Copenhagen on nr 1 and Utrecht on nr 2) > 3: Amsterdam. The index states that Amsterdam remains the most amazing city in the world for cycling, securing the highest in the baseline score in 2017. However, it came in third position due to the fact that it did not score bonus points that reflect the dynamics in the city moving forward. So a design consultancy tasked with promoting Copenhagen as a bike-friendly city publishes a list of "most bike friendly cities" in 2017, and then puts Copenhagen on top because it scores bonus points for things that will happen in the future. This is about as unbiased as when the car industry ghost-wrote all those news-articles about jaywalking early last century. Well, regarding those "dynamics moving forward": there is so much bike traffic in cities in the Netherlands that we're experimenting with funnel-shaped bike crossings that make better use of the swarm -like movements of groups of bicycles[1]. I haven't seen those in Copenhagen when I visited it a few weekends ago. And then it still makes no sense that Amsterdam has "the best baseline score", because if you ask any Dutch person if Amsterdam is the most bike-friendly city in the country and they will laugh at you. This includes people from Amsterdam. Having said all that, I am glad that the Danes, and cities in the Nordic countries in general, are doing their best to become more bike-friendly. On a more global scale I hope the rise of small electric motors will help with the problem of elevated terrain, which you rightfully point out as a problem anywhere outside of countries like Denmark or the Netherlands. [0] https://www.lonelyplanet.com/news/2017/08/25/cycling-europe-best-cities-2017/ https://www.lonelyplanet.com/news/2017/08/25/cycling-europe-... [1] https://vimeo.com/217846328 https://vimeo.com/217846328