Danish Town Research Articles

Improved delineation of the Gassum Formation reservoir zones using seismic impedance inversions: implications for exploiting the Stenlille aquifer gas storage facility as a CO 2 storage demonstration site, onshore Denmark

A quantitative seismic interpretation of the Gassum Formation at the onshore aquifer gas storage near the Danish town of Stenlille is presented with its implications for exploiting the gas storage facility as a potential CO 2 demonstration site. Our objective was to better outline the reservoir heterogeneity of the Gassum Formation based on a 3D seismic volume and 20 wells available from the Stenlille gas storage facility. We derived new absolute and relative P-impedance inversion products, which are useful for delineating lithological distributions of thin sandstone reservoirs and shaly beds within the Gassum Formation. Our results broadly agree with previously published seismic interpretations, and build upon these by the identification of deviations in parts of the Gassum interval that should be considered in any subsequent development of a static reservoir model. Hence, this work is an important contribution to the planning of drilling new CO 2 injection wells as part of the development and management of the Stenlille CO 2 storage demonstration site. Nevertheless, we also recommend a modern seismic reprocessing of the 3D seismic data combined with newly acquired 2D data from the Stenlille structure as input into further quantitative seismic interpretation studies to refine reservoir characterization and reduce associated uncertainties. Supplementary material: video is available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.6662413

The invisible poor in Norwegian and Danish town laws c 1200–c 1350

The most vigorous period of urban law production in both Denmark and Norway failed to regulate urban poverty, in particular for those falling outside the groups that comprised the personae miserabiles, the deserving poor. A close reading of Danish and Norwegian town laws, in Latin and the vernacular respectively, provides an understanding of how poverty fitted into the social and legal system of the towns. A comparative approach reveals both how these regions embraced different strategies towards the urban poor, and how these strategies coincided with general European trends in different ways. This article argues that jurisdiction over the urban poor was not economically or administratively attractive, and thus neither the town nor the church wanted legal responsibility for them. Norwegian regulation followed a European pattern of combating urban poverty through legislation, whereas late twelfth-century Danish towns supported institutions to care for the poor.

Economic Predictive Control with Periodic Horizon for Water Distribution Networks

This paper deals with control of pumps in large-scale water distribution networks with the aim of minimizing economic costs while satisfying operational constraints. Finding a control algorithm in combination with a model that can be applied in real-time is a challenging problem due to the nonlinearities presented by the pipes and the network sizes. We propose a predictive control algorithm with a periodic horizon. The method provides a way for the economic operation of large water networks with a low-complexity linear model. Economic Predictive control with a periodic horizon and a terminal state constraint is constructed to keep the state trajectories close to an optimal periodic trajectory. Barrier terms are also included in the cost function to prevent constraint violations. The proposed method is tested on a state-of-the-art EPANET model of the water network of a medium size Danish town (Randers) and shown to perform as intended under varying conditions.

Communities of Practice within the hybrid cultural institution

Hybrid cultural institutions have emerged in the last decades. LAM (libraries, archives and museums) convergences are a particularly complex hybrid, as they combine different jurisdictions, professions and ideas on how to collect, preserve and communicate cultural heritage. This article explores the LAM convergence of BMA-Maltfabrikken in a former malting house in the Danish town of Ebeltoft. The article presents the findings of a research project into the impact that the process of LAM convergence had on the employees’ disciplinary development. The authors point to three key factors that may engender a sustainable LAM convergence process: LAM convergence as a process of professional development for museum professionals; LAM convergence as sustained by a series of Communities of Practice; and increased awareness of professional identity as a matter of flexible leadership and a loosely coupled organization.

‘The Future is just around the Corner...’ – The construction of urban narratives through temporary supergraphics

Drawings play various roles in (and in-between) the processes of design, construction and the continuous use and appropriation of space. This article explores large drawing elements positioned at building sites. It discusses how decision makers, developers, planners and design professionals actively use such representational means to create site and project narratives for the site preparation and construction phase. Two projects and sites are presented here in order to illustrate and explore the role of large on- site supergraphics during site transformation. The main aim is to explore how they configure specific conceptions of time. The first is Ōtautahi: An Origin Story, a large comic strip mounted on the hoardings of the building site for a new convention centre in Christchurch, New Zealand, as part of the city’s post- earthquake rebuild. The second case is a ground mural in the Danish town of Køge featuring a map in a section of a temporary urban space called The Space of Time that is part of the town’s harbour transformation. The analysis engages with theoretical perspectives on visual culture, drawing and space – in particular urban comics, cartography, mapping, site thinking and transformation. It sheds light on an emerging phenomenon in contemporary urban culture – one characterized by hybrid authorships, ambiguous aesthetics and time-space constellations.

The (un)celebrated asylum centre: How Danish media hijacked an ethnographic fieldwork and altered local realities

Denmark’s oldest asylum centre has been in operation in the small town of Jelling since 1993. Here, over time, the institutions of the local community and the asylum centre have merged, spatially and socially. Today, a local daycare centre and the local after-school club operate on the premises of the asylum centre. Based on an ethnographic study of the everyday institutional neighbourliness between ‘asylum centre’ and ‘local community’ in this small Danish town, this tale from the field pertains to the overwhelming national media attention that hit the research case halfway through its term – and unpacks how public media collaboration came to alter the very local state of affairs that I was in the middle of studying. It is argued how, more than simply dissemination partners or collaborators, ‘the media’ instead turned into actual co-creators of the ethnographic field – and so of the concrete empirical findings and analyses.

Vi bygger for livet

This article explores the “medicalization” of contemporary Danish hospital architecture. In the modern age, architecture and spatial design have been mobilized as remedies to further the health of the individual patient and of the population in general. In order to understand the present type of medicalization – as opposed to the early modern and classical modern types – we suggest a distinction between two kinds of biopolitics, in Michel Foucault’s sense of this term, respectively a biopolitics of bodies and a biopolitics of feelings. If the original medicalization was a somatic biopolitics, the contemporary medicalization could be described as an affective biopolitics, we claim. We focus on the ongoing boom in the construction of new hospitals in Denmark, discussing as empirical cases a planned hospital in Northern Zealand and a “multisensorial” delivery room in Herning, a Danish provincial town.

Using data from smart energy meters to gain knowledge about households connected to the district heating network: A Danish case

In Europe, one of the most sustainable solutions to supply heat to buildings is district heating. It has good acceptance in the Northern countries, a low-carbon footprint, and can easily integrate intermittent renewable energy sources when coupled to the electrical grid. Even though district heating is seen as a vital element for a sustainable future, it requires extensive planning and long-term investments. To increase the understanding of the district heating network performance and the demand-side dynamics of the connected buildings, several countries, including Denmark, have installed smart heat meters in different cities. In that context, this paper presents several methodologies to analyze the datasets from the smart heat meters installed in a small Danish town. The first method is concerning data curation to remove the anomalies and missing data points. The second method analyses measured variables (heat consumption, outdoor temperature, wind speed, and global radiation) to acquire new knowledge on the building characteristics. These results were compared with the values given by the energy performance certificates of a smaller sample of 41 households. Finally, to communicate and visualize the analysis outputs in a user-friendly way, an interactive web interface tool has been created.

Moments of meaning: Enacted narratives of occupational engagement within a dementia town

ABSTRACT Engagement in meaningful occupation is important to health and well-being. People living with dementia are challenged in engagement due to consequences of their disease and environmental barriers. In Europe, there is increasing interest in addressing these challenges by transforming care services into dementia-friendly contexts such as dementia towns. It is unclear, however, how engagement in occupation occurs within a dementia town. This study applies a narrative, ethnographic approach to explore how people with moderate dementia engage in occupation in the context of a Danish dementia town, and how meaning is related. Data were generated and analysed based on the “narrative in action” approach. We produced in-depth knowledge of engagement and meaning through participant observations by following nine persons for an extended period while they participated in occupations in the everyday life of the dementia town. The narrative analysis revealed an overarching narrative of “moments of meaning – possibilities for engagement” that illustrated the thin line between potential engagement and deprivation from occupation. The stories that emerged in the analysis showed how people with dementia enacted meaning through occupation. Meaningful engagement seemed to be a way for people with dementia to connect to self, others, and place. The enacted narratives display the significance for people with dementia of being able to enact their story and thus create meaning from everyday life situations. However, the process of being engaged in occupation depended on co-creation with others, who supported the enactment process by drawing on the person’s occupational biography.

A millennium of population change in pre-modern Danish Ribe.

Denmark experienced major socioeconomic changes, including overall population growth, during the Viking, medieval and post-medieval periods from ca. AD 800 to 1800. Archaeological skeletons provide a unique perspective on the population structure of Ribe, a Danish town in Jutland, during the millennium that immediately precedes the industrialization of northern Europe. This skeletal study adds temporal depth to our understanding of an overall trend toward longer life as seen from historical records and in modern studies. Adult male and female mean age at death and mortality profiles during three time periods are based on 943 adult skeletons from three urban cemeteries that collectively represent a cross-section of this urban community. For both males and females, the mean age at death decreased slightly from the Viking (males 38.5 years, females 38.6 years) to the medieval (males 37.4 years, females 36.9 years) periods. This decline was followed by an increase in mean age at death for both sexes from the medieval to post-medieval (males 40.4 years, females 43.2 years) periods, a notable gain of 3.0 and 6.3 years for men and women, respectively.

Moving to the ‘Wild West’ – clarifying the first-hand experiences and second-hand perceptions of a Danish university town on the periphery

ABSTRACT A country’s internal migration is often explained using a life-course perspective. When a new academic year begins, study cities hope to attract a good portion of new students. In Denmark, the major trend is that young people leave the western part of the country to study in larger cities in the eastern part. This paper examines a much less extensive reverse flow of students who move to Esbjerg in western Denmark to study. Using interviews with 30 students, this paper analyses how this counter-movement is experienced by young students themselves and perceived by their friends. Based on the literature on the transformation of places and regional representation and attractiveness, this study shows the concurrent presence of opposing trends. On the one hand, the interviewees describe Esbjerg as a great town with friendly people, good study opportunities, etc.; i.e. they experience the city positively. On the other hand, their friends disagree and criticize Esbjerg without having much substantive knowledge on which to base their negative perceptions. These findings are discussed in relation to value attached to places, views on the size of towns connected to life modes among students, and opportunities for places to transform their identity.

Mining archival genealogy databases to gain new insights into broader historical issues

Purpose Several genealogical databases are now publicly available on the Web. The information stored in such databases is not only of interest for genealogical research but might also be used in broader historical studies. As a case study, this paper aims to explore what a crowdsourced genealogical online database can tell about income inequality in Denmark during the First World War. Design/methodology/approach The analysis is based on 55,000 family-level records on the payment of local income taxes in a major Danish provincial town (Esbjerg) from a publicly available database on the website of The Esbjerg City Archives combined with official statistics from Statistics Denmark. Findings Denmark saw a sharp increase in income inequality during the First World War. The analysis shows that the new riches during the First World War in a harbour city such as Esbjerg were not “goulash barons” or stock-market speculators but fishermen. There were no fishermen in the top 1per cent of the income distribution in 1913. In 1917, more than 37 per cent of the family heads in this part of the income distribution were fishermen. Originality/value The paper illustrates how large-scale microdata from publicly available genealogical Web databases might be used to gain new insights into broader historical issues.

An ancient and industrious place: visual geographies and urban identity in a Danish provincial town,c. 1780–1915

AbstractThrough the example of Danish provincial town, Odense, the article explores the role of visual culture in the construction and transformation of nineteenth-century provincial identities and placemaking in an industrial town. It demonstrates that while representations may follow certain aesthetic conventions of urban imagery and ideas of urban prestige, they both reflect and contribute to the construction and reproduction of a specific local, imagined geography; an imagined geography where initially history and nature and as time progresses signs of industriousness and in particular an infrastructure of civic culture merges into a narrative of an ancient and industrious place.

Accurate bus occupancy estimation for WLAN probing utilising probabilistic models

This paper obtains an enhanced estimator of the number of people on buses using probabilistic models and wireless local area network (WLAN)-based device counts. The improved estimator exploits probabilistic models of false positives and false negatives of a previously presented baseline estimator. False positives of the baseline estimator result from devices on the roadside outside the bus that fail to be filtered out by the used threshold approaches. False negatives may be caused by low probe emission frequency, message losses due to collisions of the WLAN transmissions, medium access control (MAC) address randomisation, WLAN channel selection, and occur in particular when passengers stay on the bus only for short duration of time. The extensions of the baseline model by probabilistic models for false positives and false negatives enables to apply maximum likelihood estimation. Distribution parameters for false positives and false negatives are found from measurements. Field tests on buses in a Danish town are used to validate and quantify the gain of the enhanced estimator.

Diversity and assemblage filtering in ground-dwelling spiders (Araneae) along an urbanisation gradient in Denmark

We studied the effects on spiders of a three-step rural-urban urbanisation gradient near a Danish town embedded in a historically forested landscape. Using pitfall traps set in forested habitat patches, we collected a total of 3075 adult spiders of 80 species; the habitats under different degrees of urbanisation had 45–47 species. We found support for Gray’s Increasing Disturbance Hypothesis: the species richness trap−1 was significantly higher in the rural habitat than in any other one, and decreased from the rural forest to forest fragments dominated by non-native trees in the urban park. The number of forest specialist species also decreased along the urbanisation gradient. Neither the presence of generalists nor light-preferring species increased under more urbanised conditions, but web builders and hygrophilous species were more species-rich in the rural habitat than elsewhere. Using indicator values, we identified Coelotes atropos, Walckenaeria corniculans, Walckenaeria cucullata, and Pachygnatha listeri as species linked to the rural and suburban habitats; Trochosa terricola, Saaristoa abnormis, Robertus lividus as characteristic of the rural habitat; and Gongylidium rufipes and Diplocephalus latifrons as urban habitat specialists.

Chapter 9 – Migration, violent extremism and social exclusion

Chapter 9 – Migration, violent extremism and social exclusion

Whose Castle is it Anyway?: Local/Global Negotiations of a Shakespearean Location

Kronborg Castle in the Danish town of Elsinore is a location strongly associated with Shakespeare thanks to the setting of Hamlet. It is a place where fiction currently eclipses history, at least in the context of a cultural tourist industry where Shakespeare’s name is worth a great deal more than Danish national heritage sites. Indeed, Kronborg is now widely marketed as ‘Hamlet’s Castle’ and the town of Elsinore has acquired the suffix ‘Home of Hamlet’. This article examines the signifiers implied in the naming and renaming of Kronborg as a Shakespearean location, while also looking at its unique international Shakespearean performance tradition, which spans two centuries. It describes how the identity of the castle has been shaped by its Shakespearean connection against the backdrop of changing ideologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and poses questions as to how this identity may continue to develop within the current contexts of renewed nationalism in Europe and the world.

Det Danmark, vi spiser. Visioner om et andet Danmark i “Frikadellesagen fra Randers” og Nyt Nordisk Køkken

Anette Vandsø: “Eating Denmark: The Implied Visions of ‘Another Denmark’ in the ‘Meat Ball Case’ from Randers and the New Nordic Cuisine”In January 2016 two very different food related events drew headlines in the Danish and the international press: On the one hand readers could read about the political agreement made by the local politicians in the Danish town of Randers, stating that all public institutions must serve pork, and on the other about the Danish elite restaurant and main exponent of New Nordic Cuisine, Noma’s massive success in Australia. This article investigates the salient similarities and differences between the way the two cases relate food and national and regional identity.

Epidemiological and serological investigation of a waterborne Campylobacter jejuni outbreak in a Danish town.

Following an unusually heavy rainfall in June 2009, a community-wide outbreak of Campylobacter gastroenteritis occurred in a small Danish town. The outbreak investigation consisted of (1) a cohort study using an e-questionnaire of disease determinants, (2) microbiological study of stool samples, (3) serological study of blood samples from cases and asymptomatic members of case households, and (4) environmental analyses of the water distribution system. The questionnaire study identified 163 cases (respondent attack rate 16%). Results showed a significant dose-response relationship between consumption of tap water and risk of gastroenteritis. Campylobacter jejuni belonging to two related flaA types were isolated from stool samples. Serum antibody levels against Campylobacter were significantly higher in cases than in asymptomatic persons. Water samples were positive for coliform bacteria, and the likely mode of contamination was found to be surface water leaking into the drinking-water system. This geographically constrained outbreak presented an ideal opportunity to study the serological response in persons involved in a Campylobacter outbreak. The serology indicated that asymptomatic persons from the same household may have been exposed, during the outbreak period, to Campylobacter at doses that did not elicit symptoms or alternatively had been exposed to Campylobacter at a time prior to the outbreak, resulting in residual immunity and thus absence of clinical signs.

The Energy Walk: Experimenting with Aesthetic Methods in STS?

In 2014 the research group Alien Energy, based at the IT University of Copenhagen, performed an experiment into the potential of creative intervention as an ethnographic method, in researching the development of new energy forms, such as wave- and geothermal energy. To this end the Energy Walk was created: a carefully choreographed and digitally guided audio walk leading the participant around the harbour area of the Danish town Hanstholm, whilst telling stories of energy and infrastructures. In this paper I argue, that the walk manoeuvres a layered landscape of energetic and infrastructural visibility and invisibility, hereby sensitizing the participant to the manifold energy forms constantly present in our daily lives. Drawing on the aesthetic philosophy of John Dewey I argue, that in doing so, the walk effectively facilitates what he calls an aesthetic experience, and suggest that the walk might best be understood in terms of aesthetic experimentation as a relevant method in STS research.