Article - 2026 A scar on the cityscape

Reykjavík was born at the harbour. The first settlers established themselves there in the year 874, at the edge between land and sea where the city meets Faxaflói. A scale model of the original settlement can still be visited nearby, and scattered around the area are some of the oldest surviving houses in the country. Before Reykjavík became a capital, before it became a tourist destination or a technology hub or a real estate market, it was a working harbour.

The harbour evolved over generations. Fishing activity intensified and light industry - workshops, nets, shipyards - accumulated around the shoreline. The last remaining operation, Slippurinn, survives as one of Reykjavík’s defining sights. Sitting outside Hamborgarabúlla Tómasar looking up at a colossal trawler suspended impossibly above the ground is one of those uniquely Reykjavík experiences. Industrial, maritime, human in scale, slightly rough around the edges. A reminder that this city was built by labour and by the sea.

But for the last three decades, the old harbour has existed in a strange limbo. Different plans, competitions, proposals have been considered since the early 2000’s. In the meantime, large parts of the old harbour area were bulldozed into a parking lot interrupted occasionally by temporary activities, playgrounds and seasonal events.

An entire generation may now associate the old harbour less with Reykjavík’s maritime history than with a dreadful, half-finished parking lot by the water.

And yet Reykjavík is growing and demand for housing is real. Reykjavíkurborg has identified central areas for densification, and Vesturbugt is an obvious candidate. Few remaining sites are so perfect for people seeking urban living in a neighborhood full of character, and reduced car dependency. Vesturbaer, 101 are the neighborhoods that define the city, the postcards, the DNA of the place.

Ásta Olga Magnúsdóttir grew up and now lives in the old Vesturbær neighbourhood, a short distance from the old harbour. She has spent over two decades fighting to preserve its character, together with residents and neighbourhood groups who repeatedly challenged proposals they believed ignored the spirit of the place. Their resistance, combined at times with financial setbacks affecting projects themselves, managed to delay large scale redevelopment until recently.

None of the proposals presented by the City reflected the desires of the neighborhood. What the neighbors have been demanding is for the preservation of a built environment that is familiar to them, where they want the next generation to live and thrive and share a heritage.

Environmental psychologist Páll Jakob Líndal has dedicated his academic career to studying the psychological effects of the built environment. Again and again, his research points toward the same conclusion: people overwhelmingly prefer human scale environments with visual richness, coherent streetscapes and historical continuity. The residents' call is shaped in part by nostalgia, or a longing to maintain historical continuity. But their wishes also have a different kind of grounding in science. Vesturbær consistently ranks among the environments Icelanders respond to most positively, while the anonymous contemporary apartment block tends to rank at the bottom.

Despite years of opposition, the city went ahead with plans develop Vesturbugt into a large apartment block, across the street from Ásta’s quaint and beloved neighborhood. Another contemporary development largely indistinguishable from many others now appearing across Reykjavík: flat roofed boxes with cage-like balconies hanging off the façade, clad in basic color plain aluminum sheets.

Artist Egill Sæbjörnsson, who represented Iceland at the Venice Biennale, has for years explored how humans perceive the environment and the effect it has on them. In architecture, he argues, buildings are not just functional objects but quintessential in forming our inner well being. As most new buildings are built with simple facades, this is threatening our mental health. He has developed a method he calls Complicated Surface, in order to make buildings more nourishing parts of our lives. Contemporary architecture tends to neglect the smaller scales humans actually experience up close and he wants to bring that back.

This frustration is of course not unique to Iceland. In the United States, where postwar planning produced vast landscapes of highways, parking lots and disconnected suburban sprawl, a group of architects and planners launched the movement known as Congress for the New Urbanism in the 1990s. Their goal was not to freeze cities in time, but to recover principles that had quietly disappeared from modern development: walkability, human scale streets, mixed uses, local architectural language and urban environments designed for people.

One of the movement’s core tools became the charrette: an intensive public workshop where residents, planners, architects, developers and politicians work together in real time. Instead of years of abstract consultations and disconnected meetings, people gather around drawings and models, argue, negotiate, sketch alternatives and gradually move toward consensus.

Architect Rafael Campos de Pinho, who has worked in Iceland since the late 2000s, got involved in the CNU and took part in charrettes in the US and Europe. After meeting Ásta, Páll and Egill through discussions surrounding Vesturbugt, the group decided to organize an independent charrette before final permits were granted for the project - permits that would make the process irreversible.

The workshop took place in spring 2025 and attracted a lot of public interest. Visitors came and discussed ideas, directions, and it was clear that nobody was in favor of developing a boxy block on the old harbour. There was discussion about architectural style - some people think building traditional is an insult to modern times, and refer to Selfoss downtown as “fake Disneyland”, while others were in favor of recreating the buildings that once were on the harbour and acknowledged the obvious success of Selfoss downtown. What was a consensus was that nobody wanted a verktakablokk on one of the most historically sensitive sites in the country.

During the charrette, the team built a detailed 3D model of Vesturbugt that allowed people to walk through the area in virtual reality and experience the proposals at street level. Instead of trying to imagine the city from technical drawings or carefully manicured renderings, visitors could stand in a specific corner of the harbour and instantly compare different versions of the future: the approved perimeter block, a proposal with traditional harbour houses, a contemporary alternative with smaller volumes, and other variations.

This changed the discussion completely. When the city presents projects through technical drawings or sunny renderings filled with greenery and atmospheric lighting, the public is often asked to trust an image that can be highly misleading about scale and spatial experience. Most people are not trained to read architectural drawings, and renderings are frequently produced from viewpoints chosen precisely to soften the apparent size of buildings. The experience offered at the charrette stripped all of that away, and anyone could step into a three-dimensional version of the proposals and understand at a glance what feeling the future visions would actually evoke.

Following the charrette, the group continued lobbying politicians and city officials and attempting dialogue with developers. In the end, however, permits advanced anyway. The city held its course. Drawings of the planned buildings in Vesturbugt were shown neither to elected representatives nor to the public while the final decision-making process was underway.

Vesturbugt will soon become another scar in Reykjavík’s urban fabric. But the conflict surrounding it has revealed something important. More and more people are beginning to question the assumption that growth must automatically maximize density with placeless architecture. Reykjavík does need housing and increased density. But cities also need memory, identity, belonging. Forms and symbols that remind people where they are.

Perhaps the most important outcome of the charrette was not the proposal itself, but the conversation it started. For a brief moment, residents were able to imagine that development in Reykjavík could be more collaborative, more transparent, and more connected to the character of the city around it.

The question was never whether Vesturbugt should be built, or whether Reykjavík should grow. The city needs housing, density and development. The real question is what kind of city Reykjavík wants to become while doing so. Places like the old harbour carry more than economic value or the utility of housing. They carry memory, identity and a sense of continuity between generations. Once that continuity is broken, it is extraordinarily difficult to recover.

The approved development massing for Vesturbugt, as permitted by Reykjavík City Planning.

Alternative massing developed during the charrette, delivering equivalent density in a form rooted in the character of the existing harbour neighbourhood.

A scar on the cityscape: What kind of city does Reykjavík want to be?