Too conspicuous to fail: Copenhagen’s urban redevelopment and obstacles to sustainable city policy learning

In the face of global problems, efforts are being made to construct sustainable city role models. However, the very proliferation of self-proclaimed exemplars of sustainable urbanism over the past decades suggests that planners and decisionmakers still lack actionable knowledge of how urban sustainability might be achieved in practice. Drawing upon the authors’ decades of experience crossing the realms of urban planning scholarship and practice, this paper deploys the concept of conspicuous sustainability to consider the case of Copenhagen, Denmark, examining why sustainable city projects seem so poor at prompting policy learning of good practices in urban development. Sustainable city developments in Copenhagen such as Ørestad, Lynetteholm, and Amager Bakke illustrate how green-looking archicture, the spectacle of sustainability, and strongly spatialised zones of urban exceptionalism contribute to a condition in which sustainable city rhetoric presupposes policy success and in which urban decisionmakers are incentivised to conspicuously promote even large-scale, complex projects as completely successful, regardless of the difficulties that have been encountered during their implementation. We conclude that it is necessary to find methods of communicating both success and failure in urban development.