The Sense of the Dense: Experiences of living in the dense city during the pandemic and after

As a result of previous pandemics, Danish architecture and urban planning have traditionally favoured relatively low density neighbourhoods, stressing the importance of distance, daylight, and fresh air in the built environment. Yet in recent years, the building density has increased considerably in a range of urban neighbourhoods, while there is limited knowledge on how this impacts people’s lives. Whereas most research on density focus on quantitative aspects, the qualitative socio-spatial dimensions of urban density remain underresearched.
As most people had to ‘stay home’ for periods, the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns offer a unique opportunity to scrutinize critical aspects of living in the dense city and revisit experiences of urban density in relation to shared spaces, neighbour relations, and domestic boundaries. How is the dense city and nearness to others sensed and perceived from within the homes – and did it change during and after the pandemic? This paper explores how residents in dense neighbourhoods experience living close to others and how the pandemic impacted their ways of sensing each other and sharing spaces and built environments. Furthermore, the paper focuses on whether this time of emergency has created lasting changes in how the residents of the dense city experience the density.
The paper is based partly on Corona-diaries from people living in Copenhagen collected by the Danish National Museum and partly on post-pandemic architectural-anthropological case studies in two of Copenhagen’s denser neighbourhoods: Nordhavn and Vesterbro. Comparing residential experiences from a newly built versus a hundred-year-old neighbourhood the paper shows how various spatial and material properties of the built environment, including windows, walls and staircases, all take part in the ongoing creation of social relations and porous domestic boundaries.