Copenhagen gave the city back to its people.

01 The street that stopped belonging to cars

In 1962 the city closed Strøget, its commercial spine, to traffic and left it for walking only. The idea scandalised people: it was said that the Nordic climate and the reserved northern temperament would empty a street without cars. The opposite happened. In the first year there were a third more pedestrians, and by 2005 the space given to walking and lingering had multiplied sevenfold. The architect Jan Gehl summed up the method in an order that Copenhagen ended up applying everywhere: first life, then space, and only at the end buildings. Traffic was not planned first and people fitted in afterwards; it was done the other way around.

02 A harbour you can swim in

Until the 1990s the harbour was off-limits. Nearly a hundred outfalls poured sewage into the water, and swimming or fishing was forbidden. The city rebuilt its sewer system so that overflows went to holding basins instead of the harbour; in 1999 the EU declared the water clean, and in 2002 the first harbour bath opened at Islands Brygge, across from the centre. What is telling is not that Copenhagen built a pool: it is that it gave the working harbour back to people. Where there was once an industrial quay there are now wooden decks and steps down to the water, and the harbour edge is walked and inhabited as if it were a square.

03 The bike is not a gesture: it is the structure

In Copenhagen the bicycle is neither sport nor pose: it is how you get to work, to school and to the harbour. And the city treats it as serious infrastructure. In 2014 it opened the Cykelslangen, the "bicycle snake", a 220-metre elevated walkway with an orange curve that separates those who pedal from those who walk; around 17,500 cyclists cross it on an average weekday. Two years later the Inderhavnsbroen closed the Harbour Circle, a walking and cycling route that links twelve areas of the city. One detail explains everything: here bicycle bridges are built with the care other cities reserve for their motorways.

04 The city at the scale of the body

What surprises you most after a few days here is that the calm is not temperament: it is designed. Distances are kept short; benches and soft edges —those steps and low walls where you feel like sitting facing the passing crowd— invite you to stay rather than cross. The Harbour Circle can be walked or cycled from end to end, stitching together districts the water once kept apart. Even the famous hygge, that comfort of candles and blankets on terraces in mid-winter, makes more sense this way: it is not a mood sold to the visitor but what happens when a street is built for staying, not only for passing through. The coziness many attribute to the Danish temperament is, in large part, design policy.

05 What Copenhagen leaves you

What you take from Copenhagen is not a monument. It is a feeling rare for a capital: that the city is in no hurry with you. You remember having swum in the very centre, having crossed the harbour by bike, having sat where a car used to pass. In front of the coloured houses of Nyhavn, low and at the water's edge, you understand that the scale never grew beyond what a body can take in on foot. That is the lesson, and it is not about looks: a city can be redesigned around the people who live in it, and the result is felt, above all, in the time it gives you back.