Copenhagen

Copenhagen began as a Viking fishing hamlet called Havn—'harbour'—on a coastline where the Øresund Strait narrows between Denmark and Sweden. That strait controlled the only shipping route between the North Sea and the Baltic, making whoever held its shores the gatekeeper of Northern European trade. Bishop Absalon built a fortress here in 1167, transforming a fishing village into a fortified trading post. By 1443, it was Denmark's capital. The city's founding logic has never changed: control the strait, tax the passage, profit from the flow.

For centuries, that logic worked through direct tolls. The Sound Dues—a tax on every ship transiting the Øresund—funded the Danish crown from 1429 to 1857, making Copenhagen one of Europe's wealthiest capitals. When the tolls were abolished under international pressure, Copenhagen adapted by becoming what it had always been in geographic terms: a hub. The city industrialized around Carlsberg (founded 1847), Maersk (1904), and Novo Nordisk (1923)—companies that turned Denmark's small domestic market into a launchpad for global distribution. Each exploited the same geographic advantage: a port at the crossroads of Northern Europe.

The Øresund Bridge, opened in 2000, added a new dimension. By connecting Copenhagen to Malmö, Sweden, it created a cross-border metropolitan region of 4 million people—the largest in Scandinavia. The bridge didn't just move cars; it merged two labor markets, two tax systems, and two housing markets into a single economic organism. Danish companies access cheaper Swedish labor; Swedish workers access higher Danish wages. The symbiosis is imperfect but productive.

Copenhagen has reduced CO₂ emissions by 78% between 2010 and 2023 while growing its economy and population—a decoupling that most cities claim to want but few achieve. Wind power provides 20% of Denmark's energy, with 52% of installed capacity owned by citizens rather than corporations. The Amager Bakke waste-to-energy plant, known as CopenHill, converts 440,000 tons of waste annually into electricity while supporting a ski slope on its roof. Nearly half of all commutes happen by bicycle across 385 kilometres of dedicated lanes. The city ranks first in both the EIU Global Liveability Index and the Happy Cities Index.

Copenhagen's startup ecosystem grew 31.3% between 2024 and 2025, making it Europe's third-largest AI hub. Novo Nordisk, now Europe's most valuable company thanks to GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, anchors a life sciences cluster that employs over 40,000 in the greater Copenhagen area. The city that once taxed ships now taxes carbon—and profits from the transition.