Odense is approximately 200k in population with 30k college students, making it similar in size and student demographics to Eugene. After our long bike rides, we went straight into a meeting with city traffic planner Connie Juel Clausen.  She gave us an enthusiastic and impassioned overview of the recent investments in the city including:

• A new cycling bridge over the train tracks into the redeveloping harbor area
• A new tram line that opened 1 month ago, connecting city center to the university
• Removing a freeway from the city center, which allowed for a large mass of land to be repurposed into housing, space for bicycles, and space for the tram. This also allowed the city to reconnect the shopping district and the museum district.
• Investing in cycling superhighways to the outskirts of the city.

In addition to physical improvements, we heard about the campaigns to encourage cycling including:

• Cargo bikes to borrow from businesses
• Cargo bikes for kindergartens
• Cycle play to teach kids to bike and to enjoy cycling
• Cycle Happy School to encourage classes to take bicycles to museums, swimming pools, and have mobile classes
• Traffic gardens at several schools (instead of the one in Copenhagen)

The city is continuing to work to make the city more attractive to college students and families.  The city is engaging the water and the harbor to activate the space. The college campus is large, but disconnected from the city center so students commute from Copenhagen by train and tram rather than moving to Odense.  We took the tram to the campus on Sunday, and it definitely had a deserted, eerie feeling.  There were several new-looking buildings but no restaurants, cafes, or housing closeby.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Odense definitely has a different feel than Copenhagen – it’s less dense with fewer people, so the bicycle lanes aren’t as packed.  There are more single family homes and more cars throughout the city.  The crosswalks all have pedestrian “beg buttons” requiring you to wait for the light to turn to cross the street. The bicycle infrastructure is extensive and well integrated.  It feels pretty comfortable to get around the city by bike (though I’ve been geographically confused a few times.)

I love visiting mid-sized cities because it’s inspiring to see how cities of this size invest in big projects to improve communities for people.  I see many parallels to Eugene in terms of opportunity and inspiration as the city reconfigures Franklin Blvd and pursues EWEB redevelopment – these projects have been in the works for several years. Franklin Blvd has roughly the same traffic volume as the freeway the city of Odense removed from city center.

We’ve been visiting several mid-sized Scandinavian cities, and I’ve been impressed by the large-scale redevelopment of industrial areas in city centers.  How are they getting things done so quickly when we struggle in the U.S. to get such massive projects off the ground? The level of housing construction and focus on making quality places in these defunct industrial areas is impressive.  While the focus of my research was on one particular housing/infrastructure policy in Sweden, I’ve been interested in understanding what makes housing construction more feasible in these countries. As I mentioned in a previous post about my sabbatical research, the systems for planning and housing are more similar than different.