Alberstslund (the town where I'm currently living) - at first glance an ordinary, not terribly interesting Copenhagen suburb. Most people, if asked what's wrong with it, would probably suggest that it's boring or that there may be some rough areas. They'd be wrong. Well, they may not be entirely wrong, but they'd only have mentioned run of the mill faults that might be found in ever so many suburbs out there. The very special things that are wrong with Albertslund, the reasons I wouldn't want to live here permanently, are much more subtle and much more interesting. And I'm about to reveal them to you!
The most ordinary fault first: Blocks of flats, and row houses - large numbers of identical buildings. Albertslund has a lot of that, being a rather new town, and a preplanned one too. There are places with more individual houses, most notably (but not only) the small villages that the rest of the town has been built around. But compared to other towns, there's a lot of "mass production buildings". And these kinds of buildings just don't look like homes to me. Especially not the row houses. In blocks of flats I can tolerate the sameness, since the units are smaller than one house, making it more obviously practical not to try to make each unit look individual from the outside. But as for the row houses, it's part of my concept "house" that it's individual, so it really bothers me to see a long row of them looking exactly the same. Also, bricks bother me less than concrete. Concrete just looks industrial to me. None of this is terribly new and interesting - lots of people don't particularly like housing that looks mass produced, and in particular, concrete has been criticised much. What strikes me as funny is that it means so much to me, even when there's a lot of other things in the town that rather tend to create a pleasant and cosy feeling. There's quite a lot of grass and trees and nature in general to be seen here, there are playgrounds and little lakes and nice walking paths in plenty strewn between the too identical buildings. You'd think it made up for them so that, on average, the town felt as cosy and homelike as towns with more individual houses but inferior recreational areas in between them. But it doesn't. Not for me anyway. I like those cosy, pleasant things, I enjoy them very much, but the same way I'd enjoy a walk through the woods, not in the way that I enjoy the feeling of walking through a town that feels lived in. Most of Albertslund just doesn't feel habitated, even if it feel pleasant in other ways. And it makes me feel isolated. Inside the houses and flats there's no problem, here is life aplenty - but it doesn't shine through properly. Perhaps it wouldn't bother me if I'd lived in a place like this all my life, but I haven't. I grew up in Herning, also a relatively new town (though older than Albertslund), but a much less preplanned one. There are blocks of apartmenst, certainly, I'm sure there are also row houses, but the more individual buildings dominate, after all. And though my family has lived in one of the blocks of flats, I was no more than about five when we moved into a real house.
On to the second fault then: Albertslund is really two towns, and they're not sufficiently interconnected. Also, one of them seems to float in space with no proper orientation. Does this sound like some kind of science fiction? The simple reality is that when they made Albertslund, they did something very kind and smart: They made a system of foot and bicycle paths separate from the roads. You can pretty much go anywhere on foot or by bike without ever having to cross a road. It's a great idea, it promotes safety by keeping pedestrians and bicyclists away from cars, it makes it posibble to have pretty walking paths with a view other than cars passing by, it's really a very good idea. But it disturbs my brain! Although paths sometimes follow roads, they don't always do so, and although you can of course get from one to the other, it's only at certain points. And the paths are mostly on a lower level than the roads (because they can then cross the raods simply by passing under small bridges), so often you can't really see what's going on at road level, even if the path follows the road. Combine this with the fact that paths often go through green areas or through areas with lots of identical houses, and that some of them twist rather than go in straight lines. What you end up with is a system of paths that offer very few cues as to where you are and in which direction you're going. I can easily find my way into town on the paths, but my sense of the direction in which I'm headed and how it compares to the direction in which I was headed at another part of the route is very weak. And this is something I'm usually good at. It's how I find my way in unfamiliar places. Well, I use maps too, of course, but normally I can easily vary my route just because I know I'm headed in a certain direction, and then I can just choose random streets that'll lead me in that direction. I generally have some kind of mental map in my head, telling me that these roads go in pretty much that direction and these in that one, and that this place is in that sort of angle and direction relative to that one. The directions are rather up and down, left and right than north, south, east and west, but because I usually have to look at a map when I first go to an unfamiliar place, I generally end up with an "up" that corresponds to north, and so forth. On the paths in Albertslund, I can have this sense of direction, but only for small bits at a time. Yesterday we took an evening walk, and we walked down a path that I didn't immediately recognise. I identified this path as going in the direction "up-down" because we'd been going along a street following Roskildevej, a road which I know to be going east-west, and then turned onto this path, making a fairly right angle. We walked along it a bit, and I noticed we were at a place I pass by when riding my bike to the center of Albertslund. When I go there on bike, I've always felt like I was coming to this place in a direction that ran from side to side, not "up-down", so I was convinced I must normally be coming to this point from a different direction that the one we'd come from on our walk. We walked about a little and then started going home. We'd agreed to go home by the prettiest route, a route which I thought would be about the same one I use when I ride my bike to or from the center of Albertslund. So when we started going up the path where we'd first come from, I expressed surprise that we went a different way. Stefan looked confused and said this was the way I usually went by bike, and I started to explain that no, I usually took the other path that lead to that place I'd recognised as one I passed on my bike. We went back to look, and there was no other path! This was the very one I'd come along by bike so many times! I'd simply been so convinced that there must be another path, that I thought I'd actually seen it. And why? Well, because the path we'd come by was one I identified as going in the direction "up-down" whereas I'd identified the path I took when on my bike as going "left-right" - thus, they couldn't be the same path. Normally, of course, this kind of mistake would be corrected because you'd recognise the path and realise you had got the directions wrong at some point - something that may very well happen when some of the time you're not finding your way yourself but are being led by someone who knows the way. But the path offered me no clues that I'd been there before. Like so many of the paths in Albertslund, it was bordered by some plants and grass, and went under some concrete bridges. And that's what bothers me about these paths. They offer way too few landmarks for my brain to hold on to and use to establish where things are relatively to each other. In most towns, you walk along the roads on the pavement, and there are plenty of different looking houses to give your brain something to hold on to. The roads themselves also look different - some are broad, some are narrow, some have heavy traffic, some are very quiet. The paths in Albertslund just don't offer the same amount of clues and landmarks. There are differences between places, certainly, and you can easily learn the way somewhere and be able to recognise where you are. But piecing it all together is harder, at least for me, because it's harder to get everything turned the same way in my mental map, and so I sometimes get surprises like the one I had yesterday. And this doesn't feel nice. In fact I almost started crying yesterday because it felt really creepy that the world just seemed to have moved about and turned things a new way. I like my sense of direction. It makes me feel lost when I try to hold on to the landscape and be aware where I am and which way I'm turned, and then just feel it slipping. This doesn't happen all the time of course. Mostly I feel fine on the paths. But I still don't like the occasional feeling that the world has moved about.
I'll end this with a disclaimer: None of these faults are huge overwhelming things that make me hate living here. There are plenty of nice things here too, and in general I feel just fine. They're just things that sometimes bother me a little. Enough that I wouldn't want to stay here always, but not enough to make me dislike living here for the present and a few years into the future. But it facinates me that this kind of thing is important to my judgment of whether a town is a potential long term home or not.
The most ordinary fault first: Blocks of flats, and row houses - large numbers of identical buildings. Albertslund has a lot of that, being a rather new town, and a preplanned one too. There are places with more individual houses, most notably (but not only) the small villages that the rest of the town has been built around. But compared to other towns, there's a lot of "mass production buildings". And these kinds of buildings just don't look like homes to me. Especially not the row houses. In blocks of flats I can tolerate the sameness, since the units are smaller than one house, making it more obviously practical not to try to make each unit look individual from the outside. But as for the row houses, it's part of my concept "house" that it's individual, so it really bothers me to see a long row of them looking exactly the same. Also, bricks bother me less than concrete. Concrete just looks industrial to me. None of this is terribly new and interesting - lots of people don't particularly like housing that looks mass produced, and in particular, concrete has been criticised much. What strikes me as funny is that it means so much to me, even when there's a lot of other things in the town that rather tend to create a pleasant and cosy feeling. There's quite a lot of grass and trees and nature in general to be seen here, there are playgrounds and little lakes and nice walking paths in plenty strewn between the too identical buildings. You'd think it made up for them so that, on average, the town felt as cosy and homelike as towns with more individual houses but inferior recreational areas in between them. But it doesn't. Not for me anyway. I like those cosy, pleasant things, I enjoy them very much, but the same way I'd enjoy a walk through the woods, not in the way that I enjoy the feeling of walking through a town that feels lived in. Most of Albertslund just doesn't feel habitated, even if it feel pleasant in other ways. And it makes me feel isolated. Inside the houses and flats there's no problem, here is life aplenty - but it doesn't shine through properly. Perhaps it wouldn't bother me if I'd lived in a place like this all my life, but I haven't. I grew up in Herning, also a relatively new town (though older than Albertslund), but a much less preplanned one. There are blocks of apartmenst, certainly, I'm sure there are also row houses, but the more individual buildings dominate, after all. And though my family has lived in one of the blocks of flats, I was no more than about five when we moved into a real house.
On to the second fault then: Albertslund is really two towns, and they're not sufficiently interconnected. Also, one of them seems to float in space with no proper orientation. Does this sound like some kind of science fiction? The simple reality is that when they made Albertslund, they did something very kind and smart: They made a system of foot and bicycle paths separate from the roads. You can pretty much go anywhere on foot or by bike without ever having to cross a road. It's a great idea, it promotes safety by keeping pedestrians and bicyclists away from cars, it makes it posibble to have pretty walking paths with a view other than cars passing by, it's really a very good idea. But it disturbs my brain! Although paths sometimes follow roads, they don't always do so, and although you can of course get from one to the other, it's only at certain points. And the paths are mostly on a lower level than the roads (because they can then cross the raods simply by passing under small bridges), so often you can't really see what's going on at road level, even if the path follows the road. Combine this with the fact that paths often go through green areas or through areas with lots of identical houses, and that some of them twist rather than go in straight lines. What you end up with is a system of paths that offer very few cues as to where you are and in which direction you're going. I can easily find my way into town on the paths, but my sense of the direction in which I'm headed and how it compares to the direction in which I was headed at another part of the route is very weak. And this is something I'm usually good at. It's how I find my way in unfamiliar places. Well, I use maps too, of course, but normally I can easily vary my route just because I know I'm headed in a certain direction, and then I can just choose random streets that'll lead me in that direction. I generally have some kind of mental map in my head, telling me that these roads go in pretty much that direction and these in that one, and that this place is in that sort of angle and direction relative to that one. The directions are rather up and down, left and right than north, south, east and west, but because I usually have to look at a map when I first go to an unfamiliar place, I generally end up with an "up" that corresponds to north, and so forth. On the paths in Albertslund, I can have this sense of direction, but only for small bits at a time. Yesterday we took an evening walk, and we walked down a path that I didn't immediately recognise. I identified this path as going in the direction "up-down" because we'd been going along a street following Roskildevej, a road which I know to be going east-west, and then turned onto this path, making a fairly right angle. We walked along it a bit, and I noticed we were at a place I pass by when riding my bike to the center of Albertslund. When I go there on bike, I've always felt like I was coming to this place in a direction that ran from side to side, not "up-down", so I was convinced I must normally be coming to this point from a different direction that the one we'd come from on our walk. We walked about a little and then started going home. We'd agreed to go home by the prettiest route, a route which I thought would be about the same one I use when I ride my bike to or from the center of Albertslund. So when we started going up the path where we'd first come from, I expressed surprise that we went a different way. Stefan looked confused and said this was the way I usually went by bike, and I started to explain that no, I usually took the other path that lead to that place I'd recognised as one I passed on my bike. We went back to look, and there was no other path! This was the very one I'd come along by bike so many times! I'd simply been so convinced that there must be another path, that I thought I'd actually seen it. And why? Well, because the path we'd come by was one I identified as going in the direction "up-down" whereas I'd identified the path I took when on my bike as going "left-right" - thus, they couldn't be the same path. Normally, of course, this kind of mistake would be corrected because you'd recognise the path and realise you had got the directions wrong at some point - something that may very well happen when some of the time you're not finding your way yourself but are being led by someone who knows the way. But the path offered me no clues that I'd been there before. Like so many of the paths in Albertslund, it was bordered by some plants and grass, and went under some concrete bridges. And that's what bothers me about these paths. They offer way too few landmarks for my brain to hold on to and use to establish where things are relatively to each other. In most towns, you walk along the roads on the pavement, and there are plenty of different looking houses to give your brain something to hold on to. The roads themselves also look different - some are broad, some are narrow, some have heavy traffic, some are very quiet. The paths in Albertslund just don't offer the same amount of clues and landmarks. There are differences between places, certainly, and you can easily learn the way somewhere and be able to recognise where you are. But piecing it all together is harder, at least for me, because it's harder to get everything turned the same way in my mental map, and so I sometimes get surprises like the one I had yesterday. And this doesn't feel nice. In fact I almost started crying yesterday because it felt really creepy that the world just seemed to have moved about and turned things a new way. I like my sense of direction. It makes me feel lost when I try to hold on to the landscape and be aware where I am and which way I'm turned, and then just feel it slipping. This doesn't happen all the time of course. Mostly I feel fine on the paths. But I still don't like the occasional feeling that the world has moved about.
I'll end this with a disclaimer: None of these faults are huge overwhelming things that make me hate living here. There are plenty of nice things here too, and in general I feel just fine. They're just things that sometimes bother me a little. Enough that I wouldn't want to stay here always, but not enough to make me dislike living here for the present and a few years into the future. But it facinates me that this kind of thing is important to my judgment of whether a town is a potential long term home or not.
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