Rasmus Astrup, Partner and Design Principal in the highly innovative Danish urban design and landscape architecture practice, SLA, realizes that there’s a great demand for biodiverse and sustainable urban development. Read on and find out the Danish architect’s thoughts on what a “real” city should look like.

Much of his childhood was spent immersed in the world of Lego. The “city” universe was his absolute favorite. He literally played the role of an urban God, carefully piecing together his dream metropolis from ground up.

He chose to become a landscape architect in high school, during a day he was sick and at home. It was before he had easy access to the internet, so he decided to read the entire book about potential careers you could have after high school. That day, he selected landscape architecture education as his 1st priority – followed by architecture and engineering, as he had to pick three educations when applying. But basically, he thinks he has always felt a strong connection to nature and gardening. As a child, he remembers volunteering for gardening tasks with his parents at his grandparents’ farm. Back then, and still today, seeing those physical changes through projects, done either by his own hands or by professional contractors, fascinate him.

Today, his company SLA brings a lot of his childhood experience to each project, wherever it is in the world, but also takes a lot of new inspiration and experience home to Scandinavia. In SLA  he spearheads the studio’s largest and most complex international projects. Rasmus is a leading specialist in city nature, sustainable landscape architecture, and integrated climate adaptation and has led SLA’s most forward-looking and award-winning projects all over the world.

“Gardens were essential. With tiny flowers and soft plastic trees filling the spaces between my buildings. Even back in my childhood, I was obsessed with trees – both in my Lego world and the real one,” he stated in an article in the prestigious magazine Monocle.

From creating a catalogue of native Middle Eastern flora and fauna able to survive arid desert conditions (no such reference book existed previously), to greening polluted and industrialized urban centers and creating rooftop ski parks, SLA puts nature center stage to create responsive solutions for each unique location.

Astrup’s perpetual emphasis on creating the best possible places for life – all life – is continuously manifested through inspiring and green urban spaces with living ecosystems that help create robust and biodiverse cities with a higher quality of life. Rasmus is the recipient of several major international honors, amongst them the 2021 World Landscape of the Year Award.

Today, he spends most of his time in his work as an urban designer, rethinking and challenging what a real city could and should be. Despite all the energy and creativity, they hold, urban environments are also responsible for making us sick. They pollute the air with heavy metals, trap heat in concrete jungles and surround us with so much noise that our brains and hearts struggle to find peace. Despite being home to much of the world’s population, cities often isolate us more than they connect us.

As a practice, Astrup has worked on some very impressive and imaginative projects, both at home in Denmark and internationally. Taking one example, Ordener-Poissonniers in Paris is a five-hectare railway site in the 18th arrondissement regeneration zone. His new urban ecosystem, “Jardin Mécano”, couldn’t be more in contrast to such a heavily industrialized location.

Astrup loves cities. He grew up in Copenhagen and lives in the heart of the city with his family, right next to a busy road. He thrives on the energy that cities provide – the inspiration, the communities, the culture and the innovation. Cities are where ideas take root and where diverse people come together to create something greater than the sum of their parts

“The great challenges of our global polluted cities lie on a city and political level,” he says.  “422,000 people in Europe die every year because of air pollution. We must act on this, simple as that. Paris, for instance, now has an ambitious biodiversity plan, which hopefully will inspire and establish requirements for its future development. More cities should learn from that.”

“The design approach in SLA is not something static, it’s quite agile. Our values remain the same, but our approach always adapts to the specific social, biological, environmental, and aesthetic opportunities and challenges that we find.,” he continues.

Astrup wants his children to experience the richness of life in a city, which is why the family has chosen to stay in the urban core. But there are aspects he doesn’t love, the unrelenting traffic, just outside their door and the sheer amount of space dominated by black asphalt, covering about 80 per cent of the public area between buildings where he lives.

But a lot of things happen in Copenhagen. Creating an activity-filled nature park on the rooftop of an 88-meter-high waste-to-energy plant (designed by architectural companies BIG and ARC) is a project that has not been done before. Amager Bakke rooftop park has sports and leisure amenities, rock-scapes and some 300 new pine and willow trees. The design even incorporates a ski slope involving the use of a very steeply pitched roof.

“Fundamentally, SLA’s solutions are always based on an understanding of nature and its values and processes. That’s why we call ourselves a ‘nature-based design studio’. And, as we see it, nature-based thinking requires an interdisciplinary team and approach,” he says and continues, “I am not capable of solving those challenges myself; I need my smart colleagues, and I need the latest knowledge. I need that because we sometimes have to start from an insect, the soil conditions, a piece of natural stone, or by deeply understanding the climatic conditions. With our client’s goals and desires at the center, we start conversations and investigations rather than immediately rolling out the tracing paper and sketching design solutions with a soft pen. This value-driven approach fosters constant learning and cultivates a culture of curiosity within SLA. It’s very rewarding. I would say that we have a culture of being nerds in SLA – in a nice way”.

SLA’s popular fence panels came from an exhibition at Copenhagen’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition focused on the power of trees and nature in cities. SLA’s fence, like trees, represented a small but effective act of resistance against the problems that urban life can create. Noise pollution, in particular, is a silent killer. It causes stress, disturbs our sleep and contributes to chronic health issues. The simple act of planting trees and installing noise-reducing materials can transform a space and dramatically improve our quality of life. Cities should not be places where we merely survive; they should be places that we truly love.

Danish Architect on What a “Real” City Should Look like, Tor Kjolberg reporting

All images © SLA