ABSTRACT
There is one obvious part of Europe to go next on our twenty-first-century Grand Tour. Stockholm and Copenhagen occupy the same distinguished positions in the Pantheon of modern European planning as Athens or Delos in European antiquity. Because urban growth came so late to Sweden and Denmark — at the end of the nineteenth century and in the twentieth — these cities were able to develop effective town planning controls almost from the start. Soon after 1900 Stockholm, still a small city of 100,000 people, began to buy land all around, so as to guarantee properly planned development. In the 1950s and 1960s, its 1952 General Plan provided the basis for a network of planned suburbs systematically located around a new Underground rail network. Today, with 872,000 in the city and 2.1 million in the entire metropolitan area, Stockholm remains the most comprehensively planned city in the whole of Western Europe. In the immediate post-World War Two period, Copenhagen became renowned worldwide for its growth management strategies. Its famous 1948 Finger Plan developed an alternative to Abercrombie's green belt/new town strategy for London, guiding growth into satellite communities along tram extensions and regional rail lines. The strategy has controlled Copenhagen's growth for 60 years, as the city population has stabilized at 500,000 while the wider metropolitan area has 216grown from just over 1 million to 1.8 million. And it has now been dramatically extended into the concept of an international metropolis, uniting Copenhagen with Malmö by the world's first regional metro service and thereby creating a model for the world's first international sustainable metropolis.
