Høringssvar vedrørende Idéer og forslag, VVM for Ørestad Fælled Kvarter - forudgående høring

Jeg er imod byggeri på Amager Fælled -- and for all the reasons outlined in Amager Fælleds Venners earlier submission. For my part, however, allow me to put the insane plan of covering Amager Fælled with houses in a newcomer's perspective. I am a film director who moved to Denmark in 2011 to complete the films The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, and Copenhagen is now my home. One of the truly special things about Danish capital is the presence of nature so close to the city center - and Amager Fælled is the jewel in the crown. Given Copenhagen's reputation for being environmentally friendly, it never occurred to me that the city's equivalent to Central Park or Hyde Park might be under threat. COPENHAGEN'S CENTRAL PARK Calling Amager Fælled Copenhagen's City Park is not an exaggeration: it is a vast green space that reaches right into the centre of the city. (The entrance at Islands Brygge is just across Langebro from Rådhusplads & Tivoli.) But Amager Fælled is not simply the largest park in the city. It is a magically beautiful area with a feeling of true countryside, a place of meadows (enge), marshland and woods where herds of deer and cattle graze, pheasants and even eagles nest. Here young people can hike, ride horses for the first time, forage for ramsløg, peberrod, hasselnøder, havtorn, mirabeller, and æbler. The most beautiful view of the old city is across the enge from the three hills - reminiscent of the view of Oxford from Christ Church Meadow. Truly, Amager Fælled compares favorably to the Bois de Bologne, Hamstead Heath, Los Angeles's Griffith Park (which is similarly wild), and even Dyrehaven. But unlike Dyrehaven, Amager Fælled contains large areas of land that have been nearly untouched for over 5000 years -- and these are precisely the areas that the By og Havn plans to destroy. It is thus tragic and shocking that By og Havn would be allowed to destroy our collective natural heritage -- moreover, by building on Amager Fælled's most ecologically important and unique section. Copenhagen spends millions of euros branding itself as the world’s greenest city (through its “Wonderful Copenhagen” tourism campaign), but I cannot imagine less-green London or New York doing anything like this. Even sprawling, car-addicted Los Angeles would not do this to any of its city parks. Residents of Copenhagen deserve to be able to take their parks for granted, and not fear that they will be destroyed -- just as residents of Stockholm, Oslo, LA, NY, Washington, Paris and London do. If houses are built on Amager Fælled (or if it is some day bisected by harbor tunnel construction and then covered with a motorway entrance at the tunnel's mouth), Copenhagen will deservedly have flushed its reputation as an environmentally friendly city down the toilet -- along with the millions the city spent to buy this image: all that money will only have purchased hypocrisy. (And we documentary filmmakers will do whatever we can to help publicise this shame.) Finally, there is a great deal of discussion about Copenhagen's rising population. Yet as the city's population increases, green areas - especially those near the centre - become ever more important. As the city grows more crowded, our children and grandchildren have have ever more need for space to play, discover, and connect with this earth of mankind's, which is, after all, the only foundation upon which our shared humanity can be built. What kind of city do we want to leave our children? And a note: is it not inconceivable to imagine a similar area north of Copenhagen being destroyed like this. For example, would the government be allowed to sell tracts of Dyrehaven to a developer? There are thus class dimensions to this discussion that the Social Democrats ought to note -- or pay the consequences in this year's municipal elections.