Building Climate Resilient City through Multiple Scale Cooperative Planning: Experiences from Copenhagen

Abstract

Copenhagen, as one of the well-known European green capitals, has dedicated efforts to implement a series of policies and take action on climate adaptation strategies from 2008 to 2020 to address the challenge brought by global warming. Climate adaptation in new urban planning for stormwater management opens up the dialogue in-between new possibilities for cooperation with multiple stakeholders and climate adaptation projects are developed in multilevel governance. However, in many cities, the organizational capacity of multiple stakeholders at the various level required to combine climate resilience with further sustainability targets may not be available. The paper focuses on the Copenhagen climate adaptation case, and further explores how the city strategically meta-govern the boundaries between the expert governed large-scale water management scheme against small-scale place-based bottom-up projects in collaboration with citizens and other placebased stakeholders. Furthermore, we summarize the experiences of building a climate adaptation city in Copenhagen, which refers to adequate data preparation in the early stage and rigorous planning, well- integration of stormwater management design & landscape design of urban space coordination of various stakeholder’s interests and public participation. Key words: Climate change adaptation; Urban stormwater management; Sustainable cities; Public participation; Green infrastructure