Copenhagen’s city hall talks constantly about car-free streets, wider bike lanes and less traffic in general. Yet buried in the city’s own planning rules sits a mechanism that keeps the car firmly embedded in nearly every new building project in the capital: the parking norm.
Copenhagen parking norm: how 80 percent became the new “car-free”
The parking norm is a central planning tool within Copenhagen’s municipal plan, updated every four years, and it dictates exactly how many parking spaces a developer must build every time new housing or commercial space goes up in the city. The calculation runs off a ratio tied to total floor area. In dense parts of the city, developers must provide one new parking space for every 250 square metres of new housing, stairwells, shared spaces and all.
Requirements vary depending on which part of the city is involved, whether that’s the historic centre or a newer district like Nordhavn, but the underlying principle has stayed consistent: new construction triggers a fixed number of new car parking spaces, usually built on site or nearby. That has real consequences for the city. Parking facilities eat up both money and space, especially when built as multi storey car parks, easy parking makes it more attractive for new residents to hold onto a car in the first place, a dynamic known as induced demand, and the high cost of underground concrete parking structures can push housing prices even higher.
By & Havn Nordhavn parking shows exactly how the mechanism plays out
For a while, Copenhagen genuinely looked like it was moving away from this model. The previous municipal plan, from 2019, stated that urban development areas could be established as fully or partially car-free, and every new district was subsequently required to at least assess whether going car-free was feasible.
That door has since swung firmly shut. Under the current municipal plan from 2024, the rule was tightened considerably, meaning developers in growth areas like Nordhavn can now cut a maximum of just 20 percent from the standard parking requirement, and only with political approval. In practice, that means at least 80 percent of the standard car parking requirement still gets built in concrete, even a short walk from a metro station, a point about to become newly relevant as the M4 line gains two new stations in Nordhavn and the new Kløverparken district gets its own stop on the M5.
Nordhavn offers a particularly clear example of who actually carries out this obligation. By & Havn (read more here), the semi-public company developing the district, is responsible for delivering the parking spaces the local plans require as a precondition for realising each new neighbourhood, and its parking business is required by law to operate on a commercial basis, competing on price, service and efficiency like any other operator. By the start of 2024, By & Havn owned and ran 13 parking garages across Nordhavn and Ørestad, totalling around 6,500 parking spaces, with more added as each new construction phase requires it. The parking norm, in other words, doesn’t just shape how many spaces get built. It hands the job, and the ongoing commercial revenue that comes with running those garages, directly to the city’s own development company.
That structure has already shown up in resident wallets. Building underground parking beneath individual plots instead of shared multi storey garages would push the price of owner occupied flats in Nordhavn up by an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 DKK, according to figures previously cited by a By & Havn board member, which is part of why the district relies on centralised parking houses instead, structures that are themselves expensive to build and that By & Havn has said generate no windfall profit, even while operating as a standalone commercial business.
The view from London and Berlin
Two of the European capitals Copenhagen most often gets compared to have taken a very different path on parking and the space between buildings.
London scrapped mandatory minimum parking requirements for new buildings back in 2004, the exact rule Copenhagen still enforces today, replacing them with a cap on the maximum number of spaces a project could include instead. The shift showed up in the market almost immediately. Developers dropped car parking entirely from a quarter of all new housing projects following the reform, and the average number of parking spaces per new home fell from 1.15 to 0.63, nearly a halving. One analysis concluded the change resulted in almost 144,000 fewer parking spaces being built across London over the following six years than would otherwise have been the case.
Berlin went even further, dropping all legally mandated minimum requirements for car parking back in 1997, leaving only accessibility and bicycle parking rules in place. Fears of traffic chaos or public backlash never really materialised, helped by the fact that the city already had strong public transport and comparatively low car ownership. Later studies found the change also helped keep construction costs down on new housing. Since 1994, Berlin has leaned on an entirely different tool to shape its build environment too, the so called Biotop-Fläche factor, requiring a fixed share of inner city building plots to be set aside for green space, whether through green roofs, planted facades, small parks or permeable paving, aimed at cooling the city during heatwaves and absorbing the growing volume of stormwater from heavy rain.
From parking quota to tree quota?
The idea of swapping technical parking requirements for green space requirements has already surfaced in Copenhagen politics. Ahead of the last municipal election, Moderaterne’s lead candidate, Ellen Emilie Mindegaard-Müllertz, proposed flipping the logic entirely and replacing the parking norm with a genuine tree quota for new construction, echoing Berlin’s approach. Rather than a legally binding requirement for car parking, despite only around one in three Copenhagen households actually owning a car, she wanted a binding requirement for new trees per square metre of new construction instead.
For now, though, Copenhagen continues to require new parking spaces with virtually every new building project. The parking norm is next up for review when Municipal Plan 2028 is drawn up and adopted.
