Thomas Bach doesn’t talk about sport as a sector. He talks about it as a city strategy. In Copenhagen, the ambition is captured in one confident line: Copenhagen, world city in motion. Not because it sounds good on a banner, but because it describes a political choice. Sport and movement are no longer treated as optional extras that must compete with housing, schools, welfare, traffic or elderly services. They are designed into the city itself, as part of what Copenhagen wants to be and how it wants to function.
That choice didn’t appear out of nowhere. Copenhagen is dense and growing, moving from roughly 669.000 residents toward 725.000 within the next decade, while space stays painfully finite. Traditional sports solutions, another pitch, another hall, another separate facility, hit the limits fast. Bach uses a simple image to make it real: when you’re approaching about 5.000 residents per football field, you don’t have the luxury of building your way out with the old model.
At the same time, Copenhagen is not one uniform city. Around one in five residents has an international background, districts differ sharply and lifestyles shift quickly. Sport is also changing: more commercial providers, more individual activities, less automatic loyalty to traditional clubs. Bach’s point is not nostalgic, it’s practical. When the city changes faster than your structures, your policy must evolve or your system quietly starts serving fewer people.
So Copenhagen reframes the question. Instead of asking, “How do we support sport?” it asks, “How does movement help us build the city we want?” That is the paradigm shift Bach keeps returning to. Sport becomes a shared urban building block, not an isolated activity in its own corner of the municipal budget. This is also where Copenhagen’s policy philosophy gets sharp: if sport is integrated into broader priorities, it stops being a competitor and starts being a contributor.
One concrete example reveals how serious they are about that integration. Copenhagen works with a principle where new schools are automatically linked with new sports halls. It’s not just convenient planning; it’s governance. It makes movement a default in children’s daily environments and it allows investment in sport to be justified through education, community use and urban development. In Bach’s framing, this is how you unlock funding in a crowded political landscape: you don’t isolate sport, you weave it into the city’s core commitments.
But integration without evidence is just ideology. Copenhagen backs its approach with data and Bach clearly sees data as leverage as much as insight. The city systematically monitors health, physical activity and mental wellbeing, especially among children and youth, through a Children’s Health Profile ("Daily out of Breath") that reaches high participation because it is conducted during school time rather than at home. The result is a dataset that can show trends early, compare differences between communities and support prevention long before problems become crises.
The trends themselves are sobering. Physical activity drops steeply as children grow older and gender differences widen dramatically in the teenage years. Bach points to a decline from 41% daily activity in 3rd grade to 24% in 9th grade, with girls dropping to particularly low levels. Even more telling is the gap between schools: in the same age group, some schools see daily activity rates far higher than others. Bach doesn’t present this as a moral failure. He presents it as a planning signal. If the reality differs this much across neighborhoods and schools, the response cannot be generic.
Adults show a different dynamic. Copenhagen is highly active compared with the rest of Denmark, but not mainly because people “go to sport.” The city’s everyday movement culture is powered by transport: walking and cycling to work and education. Leisure activity trends toward flexible, individual options like fitness, strength training, water activities, yoga and dance, often outside traditional club structures. Yet the challenge remains: around half still don’t meet the recommended WHO levels, while a large share of those who are inactive actually want to become more active and many want support to do so. For Bach, that is not a depressing statistic, it’s an invitation. The demand is there; the city must organize access.
“... if sport is integrated into broader priorities, it stops being a competitor and starts being a contributor.”
And access, in Copenhagen, is rarely delivered by one department alone. Bach is candid about a classic blind spot: the sports department doesn’t naturally reach inactive adults, but the health department does. So Copenhagen builds cross-sector partnerships where sport and health collaborate on programs that can meet people through the channels they already trust. It sounds simple until you work inside a municipality. Bach acknowledges that different departmental logics can make collaboration difficult, which is precisely why evidence matters. Data becomes the shared language that helps align priorities and unlock joint action.
For communities facing social and economic barriers, Copenhagen doesn’t rely on occasional projects. It works through long-term partnerships with clubs and local actors, particularly in disadvantaged areas, using mechanisms like leisure guidance, bridge programs and targeted initiatives for groups that too often fall out of the system like girls, refugees and other vulnerable populations. Bach describes this as a structured transition: moving from inactive to active isn’t a single moment, it’s a supported journey.
Then there is the brutal reality of space. Copenhagen’s answer isn’t to complain about density; it’s to treat the city as a canvas and reimagine where sport can live. Bach highlights temporary sport facilities in repurposed industrial buildings, where sport adapts to the building instead of the building being reshaped into a permanent sports monument. Function follows users, not architecture. If the facility is temporary, cost-effectiveness improves because flexibility becomes the design principle.
And Copenhagen goes higher. Rooftops become the new frontier of sports space in a city where ground-level square meters are fought over. The philosophy is clear: if you can’t expand outward, expand upward. Roofs on parking structures like Konditaget Lüders and other buildings can host multi-sport areas, with access hours and safety measures that keep the space open, usable and socially secure. It’s a serious answer to the spatial equation of modern urban life.
Bach also reframes what “sport” is for, especially when talking about young people and mental wellbeing. Copenhagen recognizes the youth mental health challenge as a political priority, and in response, the city invests in social sport projects where community-building is the main intervention. Bach describes approaches where sport and social objectives carry equal weight; from less “train harder,” to more “belong somewhere.” In neighborhoods where life can be fragmented, the city searches for actors who can truly bring young people together and keep them connected. An inspiring example is GAME.
Even elite events are treated as part of the same ecosystem. Copenhagen’s hosting of major competitions is positioned as city activation: moments that can inspire participation, spotlight spaces and energize local communities. In Bach’s narrative, events are not only about spectatorship; they are designed to feed the everyday motion culture.
Underneath all of this sits another quiet crisis: the pressure on volunteers. As welfare responsibilities shift, clubs can end up compensating for gaps with volunteer labor until burnout becomes inevitable. Copenhagen responds by financing professional support within social partnerships so clubs can carry social roles without collapsing under them. Bach frames this as a new municipal role: mediating between social objectives and sports structures and supporting civil society in a time when it is being asked to do more.
That is why Copenhagen, world city in motion becomes an operating principle. The city uses data to see reality, partnerships to reach the unreachable and spatial innovation to make movement possible in places where there seems to be no room left. Sport is no longer an isolated, it is city-making. And in a metropolis where space is limited and complexity is rising, that may be the only way to keep the whole city moving.