The Amager Bakke plant – designed by celebrated architect Bjarke Ingels – boasts that it will provide social as well as environmental infrastructure near the centre of the city. Can industry become part of the urban fabric once again?

Stroll along Copenhagen’s waterfront and the horizon is punctuated by the smokestacks from the power station at the tip of Amager island. Construction has just begun on a replacement that will run on fossil-fuel free biomass when it opens in 2020. Beside the power plant, the final touches are being put on the striking aluminium facade of Amager Bakke, an incinerator that will double as a recreational space for the city when it opens next year – complete with an artificial ski slope running down its wedge-shaped roof.

Both plants will be green totems for Copenhagen’s ambitions to be the first city in the world to go zero-carbon by 2025, with the incineration plant claiming to be the cleanest burning building of its kind in the world.

But they are also emblematic of something bigger: how industry is trying to transform into something cleaner and greener.



The tagline for the Amager Bakke incineration plant, designed by the renowned Danish architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), is that it will be “part of the city”, providing social as well as physical infrastructure.

Tate Modern was a power plant that turned into a museum. We are trying to make a functioning power plant … Bjarke Ingels

Alongside the all-weather ski slope, there will be a climbing wall to scale the 80m high structure, and a grass area on the roof for visitors to picnic on and enjoy the view over Copenhagen. It is a stark juxtaposition to the building’s main purpose: where streams of trucks will deliver waste from across the city to be converted into electricity for the city’s district heating system.

BIG’s founder, Bjarke Ingels, says Amager Bakke will marry art and science and “change public perceptions of what a public utility should be”. Unlike London’s former Bankside power station – reincarnated as the Tate Modern 20 years after it ceased to produce electricity – Amager Bakke will replace an existing power plant, adding public amenity without losing its original function, Ingels says. “The Tate Modern was a power plant that turned into a museum. What we are trying to do here is make a functioning power plant that also has these other elements.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The incinerator and ski slope near completion. Photograph: Rasmus Hjortshøj/Coast

A similar transformation will take place a few hundred metres away, at the 45-year-old power plant, which currently runs on coal and biomass. The plant will be converted to run entirely on biomass and be reborn as “BIO4” in 2020. If Amager Bakke will serve as the city’s ski resort, BIO4 will be a forestry attraction under architect Gottlieb Paludan’s plans to cover the facade of the 46m high building with hanging tree trunks. The design won the Leading European Architecture Forum (Leaf) award this month.

Frank Jensen, Copenhagen’s lord mayor, says that the two plants were not situated away from the city because they need to feed into Copenhagen’s highly energy-efficient district heating system – the most extensive in the world, covering 98% of the capital’s heat demand. “The central location of our combined heat and power plants is important because it minimises the length of transportation of district heating and thus the heat loss,” he says.

Jørgen Abildgaard, the man in city hall in charge of realising Copenhagen’s climate plan, explains that wind power and geothermal energy will secure Copenhagen’s energy future in the long term. In the medium term, however, the power plant will use wood pellets so it can eradicate the use of coal, which currently powers more than half the district heating system. Coal is both a dirty fossil fuel and more energy intensive than wood.

By converting completely to sustainably sourced wood pellets, the new Copenhagen system will not only be CO2-neutral but extremely low in the environmental pollutants sulphur dioxide (SO₂) and nitrogen oxide (NOx) – an important consideration given that the plant will be sited less than a kilometre away from homes.

The wood pellets are sourced from waste wood that would otherwise rot and emit methane – and not from chopped down trees.

Jesper Gottlieb, creative director of the architects behind the BIO4 power plant, says the educational function of the building was part of the brief from the city’s publicly owned utility, Hofor. The public will be able to follow a nature trail up through the tree trunks to a viewing platform where they can see the workings of the plant and learn about clean and green energy.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest China’s Shenzhen waste to energy plant is set to become the world’s largest when it opens in 2020. Photograph: Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects

Public education will also play a big role in the design of a state-of-the art incineration plant in Shenzhen in China, which was recently awarded to Gottlieb Paludan and fellow Danish firm Schmidt Hammer Lassen. As at BIO4, visitors to the Shenzhen facility will be invited inside to view its inner workings, following a 1.5km circular path to see each part of the process before emerging on to the roof for a panoramic view of the city and the 44,000 sq m of solar panels that will help power the plant.

Gottlieb explains that Chinese authorities are trying to allay public fears about waste incineration, which has undermined efforts to deal with the country’s mounting rubbish problem. It is a pressing issue for the city of Shenzhen, where late last year an illegal 20-storey landfill site collapsed, killing 58 people.

“We are in a position where utility companies want to engage with people and show them that there are no dangerous substances coming out of their smokestacks,” says Gottlieb.

Back to the future

According to BIG, sulphur dioxide emissions in Copenhagen’s new waste treatment plant will be reduced by 99.5% and nitrous oxide by 90% compared with the plant it will replace.

But Philipp Rode, executive director of the London School of Economics’s cities programme, worries about having waste-to-energy plants so near a city, regardless of how advanced the technology to clean their emissions. “In the end these chimneys are still emitting something. We can’t really square the circle.”

Copenhagen is an extreme example, he says, of the paradigm shift in the way many cities around the world relate to industry. In the 20th century cities began positioning industry – and the associated pollution, noise and heavy goods traffic – well away from urban centres.

Now, Rode says, with cleaner technology and the rise of 3D printing, “there’s no longer the enormous pressure to push these facilities out of the city. Instead there’s excitement about maintaining diversity and keeping those [industrial] sites, and their legacy with it.”

In the end these chimneys are still emitting something. We can’t really square the circle Philipp Rode

Martin Powell, global head of urban development at Siemens, agrees. “We call them urban factories, the idea that you can have new industries being put back into the centre of the city. Cities historically have been very, very wasteful. They export a lot of waste; they use and consume a lot of energy. Now they are looking at … correcting that historical inefficiency” by importing those functions again.

He says the BIG-designed waste treatment plant in Copenhagen shows how even an industry as notoriously smelly, loud and disruptive as a waste treatment plant can be situated in a densely populated urban setting. “They are quieter; you can control the odours, and you can create recreational space around it. I always hold this [Amager Bakke] up as an example of how you should think of waste-to-energy plants going forward.”

Nina Rappaport, author of Vertical Urban Factory, which charts the history of factories in cities, says the first contemporary example was Volkswagen’s Glaserne Manufaktur [Transparent Factory] in Dresden in 2001.

VW was persuaded to site the 81,600 sq m factory in the middle of the city by the municipal government in a bid to create jobs in impoverished east Germany after reunification.

The factory, and a similar one built by BMW in Munich, have become tourist attractions, allowing people passing on the street outside to see what is happening inside.

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Rode says German carmakers have only been able to site factories in city centres because they have outsourced the most polluting elements of manufacturing to countries like China. “What you have are high-end components being put together with robotic machinery.”

But the fact that the BMW plant in Munich is sited next door to the company’s headquarters is also significant, he says. “It tells you a lot about Germany, that sense of bringing management and workers closer and creating a nexus of exchange between researchers and the production line. That is part of the selling proposition of the cars … It’s an extended version of a flagship store.”

Rappaport says innovations such as 3D printing have allowed high-end products to be made with smaller machines – and that many companies currently manufacturing in city centres are reusing sites that housed factories early last century, but broken into small units.

She cites examples in London’s Shoreditch and Kings Cross, and the former naval works in Brooklyn, but says it could make the most difference in former industrial cities like Detroit and Manchester which have been in decline. “It’s a great model, but maybe not for the most expensive cities like London, New York and Paris, where the high cost of land may make it less viable. For former industrial cities that have the space and land – and need the jobs – it makes a lot of sense.”

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