THE INSPIRATION — KBH MAGAZINE
City design is for everybody …
KBH magazine, founded in 2005, changed the landscape of urban planning and design in the Danish capital, Copenhagen — engaging an entire population and spurring a new interest in the physical space shared by more than a million people.
KBH Magazine was founded, and is still overseen, by CityChange’s founding partner, Anders Ojgaard.
… because everybody knows best
KBH Magazine writes purely about the design of Copenhagen and published 57 print issues from 2005 to 2010 before it went digital-only.
The printed edition reached a steady circulation of 32,000 copies — equivalent of a circulation of apr. 440,000 had it been published in a city with the population of London’s.
Today, as a digital magazine, the magazine’s articles are read around two million times a year. The magazine has a larger social media following, and higher engagement, than the Copenhagen section of Denmark’s largest national newspaper.
Said about KBH Magazine
The city as a living project
It is unique that Copenhagen has KBH Magazine. A magazine that deals with urban culture in a competent and relevant way with popular appeal and with the purpose of creating visibility and debate around the current and future Copenhagen, making it clear to all that the city is a living project that we ourselves take part in creating every day.
KBH is the magazine that in a talented, informal and pragmatic manner communicates to all Copenhageners about the city’s reality and present developments. […] We simply cannot be without KBH Magazine.
The value for the city of Copenhagen is enormous. The magazine reflects the city’s aesthetics and spaces in an unparalleled journalistic concept. The loving-critical attitude towards architecture and cityscapes makes KBH Magazine a major image booster for the Danish capital. I love that magazine.
Engaging digitally
In the digital KBH Magazine, the people of Copenhagen cannot only follow their shared spaces and how they are evolving. They can also:
- Comment
- Write posts and letters
- Present their own illustrated visions for the city
- Vote the visions of others up and down
And this they do — in significant numbers. Almost 7% of the entire adult population of Copenhagen follow the magazine on social media. A higher percentage than Brits following the UK’s biggest newspaper or Americans following the US’s. The magazine can regularly be found on the top-10 of most-interacted-with Facebook pages in the country.
This inspired the creation of CityChange. Given a convenient and engaging opportunity, there are few things people like more than expressing their opinion about the world around them — especially if their voice may actually contribute to the improvement of that same world.
