A
Postdoc
Institute of Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape
Gunhild Askehave
I am an architect-turned-researcher, and my work grows out of a simple observation: urban projects rarely turn out as planned. I study how values, frameworks, and practices shape spatial decisions — from municipal-level architecture policy to the negotiation of heritage and sustainability in large-scale urban development. My research aims to speak to academia, practitioners, and policymakers.
Urban projects rarely turn out as planned. To understand why, we need to go behind the façade
What happens between the glossy masterplan and the finished neighbourhood? For 18 months, Gunhild Askehave sat in the offices where a new Copenhagen is being made — and came back with a rare account of how "urban quality" is not designed, but negotiated.
Most research on urban development studies plans, policies, and finished buildings. Askehave studies something far harder to reach: the daily work in between. Through eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork inside Jernbanebyen — the Railway District, one of Copenhagen's largest development projects — she followed the investors, developers, architects, and landowners as they turned architectural visions into a concrete local plan.
It is a world that is normally closed to outsiders. Askehave gained access to the meetings, the models, the sales concepts, and the negotiations where the future of a neighbourhood is quietly decided. Her conclusion is deceptively simple: the quality of a city is not a property of its buildings, but the outcome of continuous negotiation — and those who craft the most convincing version of "quality" at the right moment get to steer what gets built.
We talk about cities as if they were shaped by a single visionary gesture. But a neighbourhood is the sum of thousands of small negotiations — in meeting rooms, in budgets, in sales brochures. If we want better cities, that is where we have to look.
Askehave's research shows how the words we use to describe good city life, "community," "green space," "urban life," "the blended city", quietly change meaning as they move through a development process.
In one case, she observed how a shared ambition to build a strong, urban community was translated by the developers into a living concept. It became a service on the ground floor, written into the rental agreement, an amenity residents could access much like a gym or dry cleaning. One idea was that prospective residents even had to apply, with a motivated application, to prove they would contribute. The home was being performed as a lifestyle product, and community as something you qualify for and buy access to. It is a small detail with large implications: for what a home is, for what it means to live together in a city, and, not least, for who gets to live there at all.
She traces the same slippage with urban nature. Everyone was committed to "the green," but not to the same thing. To citizens, it meant places to be outdoors. To the municipality, it could mean biodiversity. To developers, it was mostly non-buildable square metres in the plan. What began as a citizen's dream of a park ended, several translations later, as artificial-turf football fields: a shared ambition for urban nature, delivered as green plastic.
A seemingly shared ambition — greener, more community, higher quality — can hide completely incompatible visions of the city. Everyone nods at the same words, and only much later does it become clear they were never talking about the same thing.
Askehave's current research turns to one of the most urgent questions in the green transition of the built environment: why do we keep tearing buildings down, when preservation is so often the more sustainable choice?
Here, she investigates how the preservation of existing buildings is negotiated in Danish urban development. How developers, municipalities, and citizens imagine competing futures for the same buildings, and how those imaginaries and value systems decide what is kept and what is lost. The research examines the transformation process in an obsolete industrial neighbourhood in central Denmark.
Demolition is rarely just a technical decision. It is a decision about whose vision of the future counts. Long before the excavators arrive, a negotiation has already taken place. And that is where we can still make a difference.
Askehave trained as an architect at the Royal Danish Academy and worked in practice before moving into research through an industrial PhD. That trajectory shapes how she works: she studies urban development not as an outside critic, but as someone who knows the professional world from within, with curiosity rather than accusation.
She writes in both Danish and English, moving between academic journals, public debate, and the professional field. She is currently writing a book based on her doctoral research, Kvalitet til forhandling: Byudvikling bag facaden (Quality Up for Negotiation: Urban Development Behind the Façade), which gives readers a rare seat inside the offices where a new Copenhagen is made. She has brought the same insights into public debate through opinion pieces in Dagbladet Information, and teaches and supervises at the Royal Danish Academy, including a PhD course on ideology in urban development.
- What really happens behind the scenes of major urban development projects
- Preservation vs. demolition in the green transition of the built environment
- How "community," "sustainability," and "quality" are used, and change meaning, in city-making
- Global investment funds as new players in Danish urban development
- Architecture policy, design governance, and the gap between vision and outcome
- Ethnographic methods in architecture and planning research