Gellerup Nature Park

Gellerup is Denmark’s largest social housing project with 6.000 housing units and more than 10.000 residents. It is also Denmark’s most notorious example of 1960’s social planning that transformed most of Europe’s suburbs during this period. Built to provide its citizens with modern amenities and clean air, however most of these housing estates deteriorated during the 1970’s-80’s into ghettos with social and cultural challenges and segregation as a result.

The answer to these social problems has all too often been the demolition of homes to force an eviction of socially weak inhabitants. But this anti-social approach does not solve the deeper problems of our social housing estates and their lack of cohesion and meaning.

In SLA’s project GELLERUP NATURE PARK the goal was to create a new model for transforming these prevalent typologies of 60’s suburban housing estates: From socially challenged ‘living machines’ into socially and environmentally sustainable and humane neighborhoods.

Using our interdisciplinary team of anthropologists, biologists, landscape architects, gardeners and sociologists we applied our nature-based design to create a safe common space for the inhabitants to stay, play and live. The goal was to increase the residents’ life quality, to create community feelings and new social networks, to improve trust amongst the residents – and to increase biodiversity and the ecological impact of the entire Gellerup area. All in all, the ambition was to promote a new understanding and learning of the importance of living together – with nature and with each other.

The park design was conceived in three parts: 1) Through an extensive citizens engagement process where the overall programming of the city nature was determined – these involved amongst others ballparks, football fields, playgrounds, picnic tables, wild berries and spices, common gardens, etc; 2) Through the architectural/artistic design of the park’s architectural elements such as paths, lighting, pavilions, etc; and 3) the creation of new nature in collaboration with citizens, maintenance staff, gardeners and biologist to create a city nature where the grown environment supports and strengthens the desired social change.

The result is a new form of ‘social nature’ that measurably has improved the safety, the biodiversity and the life quality of the area. By conducting our own anthropological and biological surveys we continuously monitor and follow the social and biotic growth and development of Gellerup into a flowering and social neighborhood.