Kulkransporet as Transformed Infrastructure

‘Kulkransporet’ is an example of how infrastructure can be transformed and reconfigured into a new role in its urban surroundings. It is also an example of how urban frontside and backside elements can be used strategically to establish new urban situations. Does it appear as an authentic urban situation when the former backside urban life has been transformed into a ‘social condenser’ (Koolhaas) or a collective public domain? Is it an agent of (an unavoidable) gentrification, where the backside becomes a new ‘artwashed’ or 'squatwashed’ frontside?

From an urban design point of view, this ambition is highly interesting because what happens when you strategically short-circuit the schisma between the city's front and backside? Where architectural elements and social infrastructures of the backsides are proactively used to establish an atmospheric or urban life-based setting for developments that you would typically refer to as front sides? Does it provide new possibilities to the backside's lifeforms, or is it a gimmick that nurtures gentrification? What is being returned when cultural capital from the specific user groups that don’t have a big (economic) power (e.g., the artists, the students, the homeless, etc.) are turned into economic capital as a driver for urban development?

This article gives an insider’s in-depth analysis and discussion on motifs and effects of a transformed infrastructure project, where new social and spatial formations and relations are at stake. During my position at TRANSFORM Architecture and Urbanism, I was the project leader and lead architect on the urban transformation project, ‘Kulkransporet,’ in the Southern Harbour district in Aarhus, DK., where a former structure for a coal crane was to be re-designed into a new urban space ala New York’s High Line, embracing its existing and future contextual users, spanning from homeless people to investment bankers. The project should illude and narrate the site’s cultural (industrial) history, and it should facilitate the site’s homeless people, the near context’s artists, and the abundance of small business startups.

If a piece of infrastructure grows out of age (retires) and is being transformed into a spatial backbone in new developments, its ‘raison d’etré’-based relation between form and function is challenged. If the infrastructure is understood and approached as an urban public space, it can be analyzed and discussed with the parameters of site-construction or placemaking, and it becomes interesting to discuss notions of authenticity of the space. Most placemaking taxonomies contain an analysis of the place’s narrative (history), its physique, and its organization (Simonsen). The changes in narrative and the changes in the organization are especially relevant to analyze in a discussion of the social effects.
When a place like Kulkransporet, which is normally characterized as an urban backside, strategically is used to create a new attractive and vibrant frontside – what is staged and authentic?

The paper will be informed with interviews and insights with the project's different stakeholders, representatives from the municipality, architects, and future users.