UN City

The concept of a more efficient and coherent United Nations was strongly underlined in the declaration of the UN Millennium Summit of World Leaders in 2000.

The Government of Denmark, wishing to lend its support in practical terms to the idea of a stronger and more unified United Nations, decided soon after the Millennium Summit to investigate into all possibilities of moving all Copenhagen based UN agencies into one single compound. The philosophy was not only to obtain considerable savings on economies of scale, but also to facilitate the cooperation on substance among the agencies.

Bringing the ten agencies under one roof also provides an opportunity for the UN agencies to consider the enhanced options for coordinated work within human resources, common procurement, joint tender committees, shared support staff, joint information programs, and more fundamentally a merging of all parallel functions of the same nature.

The plans for a UN City in Copenhagen were born in 2002, and the location at Marmormolen was selected in 2005. Campus 1 on Marmormolen currently accommodates about 1,300 staff members from all ten agencies. Campus 2, located by the container port, constitutes UNICEF’s new state of the art high bay warehouse and is currently the largest humanitarian warehouse in the world.

UN City is platinum LEED certified and has been awarded European Commission’s Green Building Award for New Buildings. Read more about ‘Green UN City’ and LEED