![What makes Copenhagen happy? Rating cities and nations has become an obsession.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170720061056/http://www.afr.com/content/dam/images/g/x/c/e/2/6/image.related.afrArticleLead.620x350.gxb64q.png/1500356483869.jpg)
I was sitting at a bar in Copenhagen recently, eating pickled herring, when the American gentleman seated next to me turned to the barmaid and said, "You seem very happy!"
"Not so much," she shrugged, "Norway won this year."
The barmaid was alluding to the fact that, after three years in the top spot of the United Nations World Happiness Report, the Danes lost this year to their Viking rivals.
Outside, on the streets of the fashionable Vesterbro district, things still looked pretty jolly to me.
![Melbourne: the Godzilla of liveability.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170720061056/http://www.afr.com/content/dam/images/g/x/c/e/2/8/image.imgtype.afrArticleInline.620x0.png/1500196149438.jpg)
Despite torrential rain and temperatures in the low teens in the middle of summer, people were flocking to the funky boutiques, galleries and eateries that riddle the streets from Central Station to the Meatpacking District.
Restaurants like Fleisch, KUL and Fiskebar have put the disused industrial complex on the foodie map. Art spaces like Galleri Bo Bjerggaard, V1 and Butcher's Lab feed the eye, and boutique hotels such as Andersen ensure the hip have somewhere to stay.
Rating cities and nations has become an obsession. On the one hand it reflects our attraction to lists, readily digestible titbits of information passing for fact. On the other, the increasing focus on our cities' fitness for the future is a result of a genuine concern about their capacity to deal with the imminent crisis of population explosion.
I was in Copenhagen to check out all the happiness (or not), before heading to Berlin for Monocle magazine's Quality of Life conference – ahead of next week's Living Cities Forum in Melbourne.
Leading a more creative approach
![David Gianotten, managing partner-architect at OMA in Rotterdam.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170720061056/http://www.afr.com/content/dam/images/g/x/c/5/5/o/image.imgtype.afrArticleInline.620x0.png/1500171280841.jpg)
In Berlin, Monocle editor-in-chief and self-proclaimed global nomad Tyler Brûlé had assembled an impressive line-up of architects, urbanists, entrepreneurs, hoteliers, retailers and so forth. In short, representatives of sectors susceptible to what is now known as design thinking.
The mayor of Neukölln – "the latest Berlin borough to be hailed as the centre of all things hip", according to Time Out – was there, as was Daniel Libeskind, architect of the city's controversial Jewish Museum, and some bloke who'd invented a lightweight, foldable bicycle (although he was from Vienna).
"We're not like the Economist Intelligence Unit [which ranks the world's most liveable cities] or Mercer's Quality of Living Ranking," Brulé told me. "We try to be scientific up to a certain level, say 70 per cent, then the other 30 per cent we do try to make subjective. We ask ourselves questions about other functions and attributes that you can't measure scientifically."
Attributes such as number of museums and bookshops, level of dog friendliness, or the possibility of getting a meal after 10pm.
![The Neukolln area of Berlin: hailed as the centre of all things hip by Time Out magazine.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170720061056/http://www.afr.com/content/dam/images/g/x/c/e/2/7/image.imgtype.afrArticleInline.620x0.png/1500196193696.jpg)
"It's not just about using big data to make people's lives better," says Tyler.
Neukölln, for instance, is newly groovy because the 2008 closure of Tempelhof airport, one of the world's busiest transport hubs, dramatically reduced road traffic through the precinct, increasing footfall and encouraging the kind of small businesses – the independently owned shops, restaurants, bookshops, galleries – that make for vibrant street life.
Dogs are welcome and the restaurants stay open late. Developers, of course, have had their eye on this vast, flat, inner-city terrain but the citizens of Berlin decided in a referendum to retain it as public 'commons'.
This mix of urbanity and public amenity is what's got Berlin pumping.
![The Feyernoord project is a vast revitalisation of the Rotterdam riverfront district.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170720061056/http://www.afr.com/content/dam/images/g/x/c/5/6/e/image.imgtype.afrArticleInline.620x0.png/1500171926513.jpg)
Comparing Melbourne
Melbourne, however, is the Godzilla of liveability. Apparently. After six consecutive years leading the Economist Intelligence Unit's Global Liveability Ranking, the Victorian capital has become a veritable petri dish in which urban planners can fish for ideas, if not solutions, to problems.
How transferable is the experience of one city to another?
"Not much," admits urbanist Dan Hill. "Good urbanism is not a matter of copying and pasting Copenhagen onto Melbourne. That would be not so much a case of comparing apples and oranges as comparing apples and footballs."
![Dan Hill from Arup.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170720061056/http://www.afr.com/content/dam/images/g/x/c/5/6/n/image.imgtype.afrArticleInline.620x0.png/1500171621731.jpg)
Hill is an associate director of Arup Group, London, a visiting professor at the city's Bartlett School of Architecture and an adjunct professor at RMIT.
"In a lot of ways, there's not so much wrong with Melbourne," he reckons. "It has changed the understanding of what an Australian city can be."
Hill will be joined on stage at Federation Square by Los Angeles-based critic and curator Mimi Zeiger; Italian architect and Pritzker Prize jury member Benedetta Tagliabue; Rory Hyde, the curator of contemporary architecture and urbanism at London's Victoria & Albert Museum; and David Gianotten, managing partner of the highly influential Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), based in Rotterdam, and informally referred to as founder Rem Koolhaas's right-hand man.
If the Melbourne line-up is a little less glitzy than was Berlin's, that's an accurate reflection of the respective organisers. Tyler Brûlé founded Wallpaper* magazine in 1996 and is unapologetic in his quest for life's finer things – preferably on his private island in the Stockholm archipelago.
The Melbourne Living Cities Forum is organised under the auspices of the Naomi Milgrom Foundation. Although the scion of the wealthy Besen family and a Financial Review Rich Lister herself, Milgrom is also a philanthropist and patron of the arts.
She is the commissioner of the Australian Pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale, working closely with Tracy Moffatt to nurture her much lauded exhibition to life. And she is the brains behind the annual MPavilion, Melbourne's answer to the Serpentine Pavilion in London.
This summer, in its fourth and final iteration, the MPavilion has been designed by OMA and will take the form of a reconfigurable amphitheatre.
"The Living Cities Forum has definitely grown out of the MPavilion program," says Milgrom.
"Melbourne is often referred to as the world's most liveable city, but what makes it the world's most liveable city? How is it going to handle the expansion of its population to eight million people by 2051. How are we going to maintain the grain that makes it such a liveable city?"
Maintaining the grain means not overplanning to the point of losing all nuance. Not overdesigning to within an inch of the citizenry's life.
Escapism, ambiguity and improvisation
At the Monocle conference, architect and theorist Friedrich von Borries delivered his vision of Berlin's successful resurrection since the fall of the wall in 1989. Berlin's new allure, he reckons, comes from three qualities: escapism (don't be too urban); ambiguity (don't be too radical) and improvisation (it needn't be perfect).
For Von Borries, quirky parklands, guerilla gardening, a mix of tradition and novelty in architectural form, and a less regulated urban environment are the keys to a city's success.
"Direct transfer [of one urban experience to another] is not possible, but lessons can be taken on and transformed to the local context," insists David Gianotten.
In Melbourne next week, he will be presenting OMA's master planning of a new zone on the southern outskirts of Rotterdam as a case study.
Building on the cult status of the Feyenoord football club, the iconic but outdated De Kuip stadium is being converted into apartments, commercial space, a sports centre and a public square. A new, 65,000-seat stadium will anchor the neighbourhood, revitalise the local economy and turn a blight on the banks of the Rhine into a destination.
"Feyenoord is the client for building a new piece of city within Rotterdam," says Gianotten. "It is unique in The Netherlands that a private party takes the initiative to build such a large part of the city with the idea to create a new perspective. Part of the project is a socioeconomic master plan that, among other things, describes social cohesion, the role sport can play in the community, and job creation.
"Feyenoord City is much more than a stadium."
Koohaas and his OMA, Gianotten reveals, are also working on a precinct plan for the tiny Cremorne district of Melbourne, which until 1999 existed only as a locality of the larger suburb of Richmond.
Like Feyenoord, Cremorne is less than five kilometres from the CBD, on the edge of a river (the Yarra) and part of a sports stadium ecosystem (the Melbourne Cricket Ground – capacity 100,000). Interestingly, Cremorne is also home to the Naomi Milgrom Foundation and the headquarters of her Sussan Group fashion empire.
NEED TO KNOW
The Living Cities Forum is on at Federation Square, Melbourne from July 27 from 8.45am until 5pm. Tickets via Eventbrite.
AFR Contributor