Wet Heritage: Redesigning 'urban nature' in a heritage protected park.

Climate changes affect cultural heritage directly as well as indirectly. Existing parks, squares and streets in the densely populated city center of Copenhagen are going to play a key role in the recently ratified Copenhagen Cloud Burst Plan (2012).

One of these open spaces, Enghaveparken, is a 3,5 hectare early 20th Century park, canonized for its neoclassical design, will in the coming years be redesigned to be able to store 28,000 m3 of rainwater, mostly on terrain. These new mitigation requirements also entail a desire for more ‘urban nature’ – a new, but influential concept in Copenhagen’s planning holding the promise of reconciling nature and city. Furthermore the climate change adaptation is now to be negotiated with two other strong agendas for the Enghave park: heritage protection and citizen involvement. This paper scrutinizes the five entries in an architecture competition for the Enghave park redesign (2014). We will examine how ‘urban nature’ is constructed in these design projects, negotiating between climate change adaptation, preservation and user involvement agencies. Starting with the indivisibility of culture and nature, we articulate the different design projects’ understanding of heritage values in a climate-adaptation context and discuss their underlying assumptions, in particular concerning ‘urban nature’.