HBY

Resumé

The Danish net of highways forms an ‘H’

connecting the country north-south and

east-west. This is the starting point for a

discussion of contemporary urbanism. The

article points out that the increasing

physical and virtual communication blurs

well-known distinctions between centre/

periphery and urban/rural. The majority

of planning tendencies aims at recreating

and emphasising these distinctions by enhancing

the public space of historical city

centres and keeping the landscape clear

of permanent human activities. The article

argues against these tendencies. It refers

to the Danish ‘golden age’ painters who

successfully tried to construct a national

identity in the first half of the 19th century.

They did so by sampling parts of the

existing cultural landscape and combine

them to a slightly enhanced reality in their

paintings. The article tries to do the same

by combining already existing elements

and tendencies to a polemical image of a

partly existing reality based on hybrids

between the urban and rural.