Between the city and the sea: the welfare landscape of Køge Bay seaside park and the urbanization of nature in post-war Denmark

This article is published as part of the Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography special issue ‘Revisiting the Green Geographies of Welfare Planning’, edited by Johan Pries & Mattias Qviström. ABSTRACT This article uses Køge Bay Seaside Park as a case to explore the relations between welfare planning, landscapes and the urbanization of nature in 1970s and 1980s Denmark. In recent years, scholars have increasingly pointed to the constitutive role of green spaces and recreational landscapes in the realization of the Nordic welfare model. Until now, this research has mainly concentrated on green spaces in the form of forests, parks and open green spaces on housing estates. Yet, as this article demonstrates, Danish welfare planning also involved the creation of new city-sea geographies that spatialized the welfare society as an everyday experience. More specifically, Køge Bay Seaside Park exhibits the instrumental role of landscapes the making of Danish welfare urbanism. To demonstrate this, the article draws attention to the multiple and extensive ways in which the seaside park’s landscape rested upon and entailed the urbanization of nature. Focusing on water, the article examines how such processes unfolded through multiple scales and layers of the landscape. In the seaside park, water appeared in many different forms – as bathing water, wastewater, potential floods and as a representation of physical and social well-being – and were formative in the production of new city-sea relations and welfare lifestyles.