Superkilen

Listen to the ground under your feet. In one place it is smooth and rubbery, painted in shades of red and pink. A few steps on, it turns to black, crossed by curving white lines. Bicycle bells ring past you, someone is playing music from a phone, and children shout from somewhere ahead. Welcome to Superkilen, a long, narrow urban park that feels like a small world packed into one Copenhagen neighbourhood.

First, a quick note on where you are. Superkilen lies in Nørrebro, a district of Copenhagen just a short ride from Frederiksberg. The two areas sit side by side, and many visitors cross between them in a single afternoon. Nørrebro is one of the most diverse parts of Denmark. People with roots in dozens of countries live in the apartment blocks around you. That fact is the starting point for everything you see here.

The name gives you a clue. In Danish, the word kile means wedge. Superkilen is the super wedge, a strip of public space that cuts through the dense streets of the district. It runs for several hundred metres, and it carries one of the city's busy cycle routes right through its middle. So this is not a quiet garden where you sit apart from daily life. It is a corridor that people use to get to work, to school, and to the shops.

The park opened in 2012. It was designed by three partners working together. One was BIG, the Danish architecture office led by Bjarke Ingels. Another was Topotek 1, a landscape architecture firm from Berlin. The third was Superflex, a Danish artist group known for projects that mix art with social questions. The result does not look like a typical Scandinavian park... and that was the intention.

Here is the idea behind it. Instead of filling the park with standard Danish benches, lamps, and playground equipment, the designers asked local residents what objects reminded them of the places they or their families came from. Then they gathered those objects, either as originals or as copies, from around the world. The park holds more than one hundred of them, connected to around sixty countries. It is a kind of open-air collection of everyday things — chosen by neighbours, not curators.

The park is divided into three zones, and each one has its own colour. The Red Square is the most active area, with surfaces made for sport, games, and events. The Black Market, sometimes called the Black Square, works like an outdoor living room, with benches and tables where people sit and talk. The Green Park is the softest part, with grass, small hills, and space for picnics and play. Walking the full length is like moving through three different rooms.

Now, take a closer look at the Black Market. Those white lines on the dark ground are not parking markings. They bend and flow around the benches and trees, and from a higher point they look almost like a drawing. Older residents often sit here to play board games. On a warm evening, this area can feel like a town square in southern Europe or the Middle East, rather than a corner of northern Copenhagen.

Here is something many visitors miss. Most of the objects come with a small plaque. Each plaque names the object and its country of origin, written in Danish and also in the language of the place it came from. So as you walk, you are reading many alphabets and scripts side by side. Try to find a few that you recognise, and a few that you do not.

Some of the objects are easy to spot. Look for neon signs that came from different countries, some advertising shops or hotels far away from Denmark. Look for a large black bull, a copy of the roadside bull figures known across Spain. There is a fountain in a Moroccan style, swings that trace back to Iraq, and a children's slide shaped like an octopus, modelled on playground slides from Japan. Each one is a small story about someone's memory of home.

Another detail is easy to walk past. Somewhere in the park there is a small mound of soil, brought from Palestine. It is not a sculpture or a sign, just earth. For some people who live nearby, that simple object carries a lot of meaning. It is a reminder that the park is not only playful. It also deals with ideas of belonging, distance, and identity.

Superkilen has received international attention. In 2016 it won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, a prize that honours buildings and public spaces serving communities with a strong Muslim presence. Architects and urban planners from many countries come here to study it. Not everyone loves it. Some critics have asked how much the residents really shaped the final design, and how well the bright surfaces age. Those debates are part of its story too.

And yet, the best way to judge this place is simply to watch how it is used. Notice the cyclists who barely slow down. Notice teenagers practising tricks, parents pushing prams, and groups of friends sharing food. Notice how the furniture is used in ways the designers may not have planned. A public space only works if people make it their own, and here you can see that process happening in real time.

If you have the time, walk the whole length slowly, from one end to the other. The light changes as you go. In the Red Square, colours look strongest in bright sunshine. In the Black Market, evening light makes the white lines glow against the dark ground. In the Green Park, the low hills soften the noise of the city. Each section rewards a short pause.

Before you leave, stop for a moment wherever you are standing. Look at the object nearest to you and read its plaque. Somebody in this neighbourhood once said that this thing reminded them of home. Now it is part of a Danish street, used by strangers every day. As you walk back into the city, you may start to notice the small objects in your own streets differently — and wonder which ones someone might choose to carry with them.