LAST SUMMER, the Danish state offered to sell a good chunk of the 80-odd-acre former military base in central Copenhagen to Christiania, the alternative community whose residents have been squatting there for four decades. For the residents, who fundamentally reject the idea of landownership, this presented an ideological quandary.
“Christiania has offered to buy it,” says Risenga Manghezi, a spokesman for the community.
“But Christiania doesn’t want to own it.”
To resolve the contradiction, Manghezi and a handful of others decided to start selling shares in Christiania. Pieces of paper, hand-printed on site, the shares can be had for amounts from $3.50 (€2.76) to $1,750.
Shareholders are entitled to a symbolic sense of ownership in Christiania and the promise of an invitation to a planned annual shareholder party. “Christiania belongs to everyone,” Manghezi says. “We’re trying to put ownership in an abstract form.”
Since the shares were first offered in autumn, about $1.25 million worth have been sold in Denmark and abroad. The money raised will go towards the purchase of the land from the government.
Justifying the transaction still takes some artful semantic twists. “According to their system, you are not an owner of a house, you’re a user of the house,” explains Knud Foldschack, the lawyer for the community who negotiated the purchase. “You don’t own the area, you caretake the area.”
But after a rocky decade under a conservative-led government, during which the carless, hashish-friendly community faced threats of expulsion and a supreme court ruling that said the squatters had no legal right to remain on the land, the residents made a pragmatic decision to buy the property – or, as many would have it, to “buy it free”.
“People were afraid, and we had to respect this fear,” says Allan Lausten, a handyman who took part in the negotiations despite an aversion to bureaucrats.
The Danish state made it easy, too. Not only did officials offer to sell the land for about $14.5 million, a fraction of what it would be worth if sold commercially, but they also made provisions to accommodate the Christianites’ way of life.
One sticking point was how to negotiate with a group run by consensus democracy, where a decision is made only if everyone who shows up at a meeting agrees. “Their system of government is very difficult to deal with from the perspective of the state,” says Carsten Jarlov, director of the Danish State Building Agency, who began working on the deal in 2004.
“What do you do with all these meetings, where everyone has a say and no one is responsible?”
The solution was to create a foundation, with a board made up of five residents and six outsiders, to act as owners on behalf of the Christianites.
Because it can be difficult for people who reject basic tenets of capitalism to get a loan, the Danish state also guaranteed the bank loan. Further, Danish officials stipulated that the land must remain open to the public. Lastly, any profit from the sale of the land or buildings would immediately revert to the state.
“This is a non-profit zone,” says Foldschack, who describes the deal as “fantastic” and its eight-year evolution “Buddhistic”.
Jarlov says the decision has broad-based political support.
“Danish public opinion is very ambivalent when it comes to Christiania,” he adds. “If you ask if there should be space for Christiania in society, they say: ‘Yes, we love it!’ But if you say, ‘Is it a good idea to take over property you don’t own?’ they are against that. Every Dane has this split within himself.”
Jacob Ludvigsen, a newspaper editor who with some friends started squatting on the land the day after a fisherman told him about the unused space in 1971, welcomes the decision.
“A 40-year-long conflict has been brought to an end,” says Ludvigsen, who no longer lives in Christiania but says he carries a piece of Christiania in his heart.
“This will give Christiania a real independence.”
Still, the sale makes many here uncomfortable. “I think it would have been better to remain squatters,” says a young man on Pusher Street as he sorts through a bag labelled “Outdoor Skunk”. “Pressure from the outside forces you to evolve, to stick together.”
Others point out that now the ramshackle, do-it-yourself community will have to come up with the money to pay for the land. But for many, the problem is less tangible.
“I have a feeling of sorrow that the state forced us to buy it,” says Ida Klemann, an artist who first moved to Christiania in 1971, then left to have a baby (at the time, there was no running water on the premises), before moving back in 1972. “I thought it was wonderful the Danish state was generous enough to allow this wild little thing to go on living inside itself.”
Klemann, one of the progenitors of the Christiania share idea, adds: “When you say, ‘You have to buy it,’ you’re trying to throw it into normal conditions, in a way. What do we do now? It’s not just money, but identity.”
In November, a small group travelled to the US to promote the Christiania shares. They visited the Occupy Wall Street protest in New York, where they were greeted with cheers.
On Wall Street itself, they had less success. On a blog documenting the adventures of an anthropomorphic Christiania share – which would go on to have both an identity crisis and a love affair with a Californian road map – a video shows Manghezi performing on the street. “It’s not that there’s anything wrong with investing for profit,” he calls out. “It’s just so yesterday, and a little bit primitive, too.”
As a result of these efforts, the group sold two shares for $5 each on the steps of the New York Stock Exchange. But thanks to the publicity, sales here surged. “It’s a cultural difference,” Manghezi says. “We thought it was hilarious, and the Danish press thought it was hilarious, but Americans were like: ‘$10? That’s a total failure! You shouldn’t even talk about it.’”
Manghezi adds: "We'd like to be a speculation-free zone, an alternative to a society based on gambling and speculation. Of course, if we have to take a loan, we will." – ( New York Timesservice)