Alternative capitalism and creative economy:
the case of Christiania
Alberto Vanolo
Draft; final version published in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
1. Introduction
Creativity is certainly a popular keyword today in fields like planning and economic geography, driving a number of policies and interventions in urban space. Usually, as it will be discussed, these actions are market-oriented and driven by a standardized vision of creativity and the creative city. The aim of this paper is to challenge these visions by analysing the Free Town of Christiania in Copenhagen. This town may be seen as a case of creative milieu based on social mechanisms and institutions that are rather different from those proposed in mainstream visions of the creative city. In this sense, the analysis aims to problematize discourses on the creative city: it is possible to imagine a diversity of socially and culturally embedded place-based socioeconomic practices that offer an alternative to mainstream and normative conceptions of urban creativity.
This paper is structured in four sections: the next one will introduce the debate on creativity in the urban space and the mainstream visions of the
creative city. Section 3 will present the case of Christiania, discussing its evolution over time and its peculiarities as an ‘alternative’ space. The following section will present evidence concerning the nature and the image of Christiania as a creative space (4.1), and will analyse locally grounded practices and institutions that stimulate creativity (4.2). The final part of the paper will discuss possible meanings of the Christiania experience, intended as a case of creative space presenting important insights into different ways to organize localities and ways of thinking about the creative city other than the dominant market-oriented visions.
The reflections developed here are based on a period of 4 weeks of fieldwork in the Free Town of Christiania. Most of the fieldwork has been conducted thanks to a local Christiania initiative aimed at attracting researchers1: this allowed me to live inside the community during April 2010.
During the fieldwork, I interviewed 30 local inhabitants, workers and scholars, chosen on the basis of my sensibility with a particular attention towards diversification in terms of gender and age. Declaring that my presence in Christiana had research aims, and above all associating my name to that of the local activist organizing my stay in Christiania facilitated my interactions, and people have been generally helpful, supportive and friendly. People interviewed were asked about their personal histories as
inhabitants or users of the Christiania space, use and perception of space. They were also asked to describe their daily life and their participation in the Christiania governance mechanisms. Finally, they were asked about their eventual participation in creative processes, creative works, and in the use and modification of space. In the case of craft shops and other businesses (10 interviews), specific questions about location externalities and the advantages of the Christiania location were asked. Interviews have been carried on in English – all the interviewees spoke English fluently – and recorded in my notebook.
Finally, participation in daily life and local events, together with occasional chatting with people, allowed direct observation. A vast amount of photos (193) have been shot in order to capture particular social moments and peculiar uses of space inside the community.
The research materials have been organized using thematic analysis (Boyatzis, 1998). Thematic analysis consists in encoding qualitative data through the identification of keywords, particularly within the texts of the interviews, and then combining the keywords and cataloguing them into patterns in order to build up the argumentation presented in section 4.2.
The concept of creativity has been at the center of a number of overlapping scientific discourses in urban studies, including for example creative industries and the cultural economies of the city (Cunningham, 2004; Scott, 2006, 2008; Pratt and Jeffcutt, 2009) and the potential of culture and creativity in driving regeneration policies (Miles and Paddison, 2005; Evans, 2005; Bridge, 2006; Cochrane, 2007; Ponzini, 2009).
In this paper, attention is drawn to one understanding of creativity that has come to dominate the narratives of urban planners, informed by the ideas of Richard Florida (2002, 2005) and Charles Landry (2000, 2006). This ‘normative’ approach to cultural economy has been described by Gibson and Kong (2005) as characterized by several conventional wisdoms:
- contemporary capitalism is characterized by flexible production, the commodification of culture, the injection of symbolic content into all commodity production;
- cities with highly skilled, creative, innovative, adaptive workforces, sophisticated infrastructures, interesting and diverse populations, lifestyle attractions, restaurants and arts institutions which attract the ‘creative class’ perform better than others;
- in order to compete in the new cultural economy, places should seek to implement particular policy initiatives: encourage cultural industry clusters, incubate learning, maximize networks and aggressively campaign to attract the ‘creative class’ as residents.
During the 1990s and the 2000s, a number of cities all over the word embraced this normative approach as urban development strategies, and the ‘intellectual technology’ of the creative city diffused quickly (Ponzini and Rossi, 2010). Of course, the creative city normative perspective has been constituted with a system of historically and geographically specific discourses: several high-profile ‘popular’ academic books (particularly the above-mentioned ones by Florida and Landry) have hit bestsellers lists and become widely read ‘manuals’ of contemporary economic development thinking (Gibson and Kong, 2005), despite several critical comments from the scientific community (for example Peck, 2005; Markusen, 2006; Scott, 2006, Wilson e Keil, 2008; Atkinson e Easthope, 2009).
In line with a normative approach, according to mainstream economics, and specifically to the position of international organizations such as the World Bank and the OECD, the production and reproduction of a creative and innovative milieu[2] is strictly connected to a proper organization of market forces, in order to maximize the externalities and economic benefits connected to experimentation and innovation, and to minimize the connected risks (see Baumol, 2002; OECD, 2004, 2009). Consider, for example, this statement at the beginning of the OECD report (2004: p. 1):
Innovation and creativity are essential for sustainable growth and economic development. Several core conditions enable innovation and encourage
• strong standards and effective enforcement of intellectual property protection,
• vigorous competition and contestable markets,
• open trade and investment in a stable economic environment,
• a strong and sustainable fundamental research and development infrastructure,
• sound policies and mechanisms to promote the science-innovation interface,
• efficient and transparent regulatory systems, • ethics and the rule of law, and
• a strong emphasis on education at all levels.
To put it briefly, the market mechanism has to protect innovation and creative contents (for example, via copyright and patenting systems); support competition between agents; encourage investments; promote research and development; establish an effective and transparent system of rules, laws and institutions; and provide skills and education for workers. Certainly many of these objectives look sound and may be easily identified as the base of successful creative environments, such as the classic case of Silicon Valley (see Saxenian, 1994), but critiques may be formulated. Firstly, this approach implies an oversimplified conception of space: space is mostly intended as a passive container of economic externalities and banal location advantages (for example the role of sociality in space or the
role of local culture is neglected). There is little space for place-grounded social practices in such a conception of creativity, and Oecd’s list of conditions prescind from geographical scales, as that framework has been applied to cultural quarters, cities or entire regions (in analogy with the concept of cluster: Martin and Sunley, 2003). Secondly, presenting these conditions as universal and natural rules is distorting social sciences, implicitly supporting neo-liberal discourses and perspectives, that is, presenting the market economy as the only reasonable option (see Ong, 2007). In other words, according to this vision, ‘vigorous competition’ and ‘open trade’ are not assumed to be political possibilities, but scientifically determined ingredients at the basis of any creative milieu. Moreover, the creative city toolkit (paraphrasing Landry, 2000), stressing growth-led logics and boosterism, has also been associated in literature with a series of detrimental outcomes, including the gentrification of lower-cost neighbourhoods, zero-tolerance policing and the broader displacement of progressive and welfarist orientations in local politics and programmes, in concordance with a neoliberal political vision (Peck, 2005; Wilson and Keil, 2008; Atkinson and Easthope, 2009; Ponzini and Rossi, 2010).
In addiction, conceptualizing creativity raises a number of questions. How do we define what is creative, and how do we distinguish creative environments, people and products from non-creative ones? The debate on creativity in the social sciences originally derived from cognitive theories,
focusing on the intellectual structures and processes that lead to insights, solutions, and ideas that are novel and appropriate (Sternberg and Lubart, 1999). When these are applied to the geographical and social variability of the world, how can we detect and classify creativity? Certainly, Florida’s notion of the creative class (made up of ‘people in design, education, arts, music and entertainment, whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology and/or creative content’: Florida, 2002: p. 8) is partial and inadequate: recently, authors have shown that poor people (and people in the global South) demonstrate incredible creative energies by dealing with difficult daily situations, by managing multiple jobs, by coping with limited income, limited social safety, etc. (Robinson, 2006; Markusen, 2006; Wilson and Keil, 2008). As emphasized by Peck (2005) and Wilson and Keil (2008), the existence of Florida’s creative class is possible because of the exploding low-wage sector that continuously needs bodies to work in fast foods, coffee bars, restaurants, sushi bars as waiters, room cleaners, etc.: how can they be considered external to the creative class?
If the concept of creative class is controversial (and political), the definition and identification of creative places is also problematic. The assumption of this paper is that there is nothing ontologically creative in geographical terms: a creative city refers to the social construction of an idea of creativity, implying processes of recognition and/or self-recognition. In other words, a city or an urban quarter is creative when recognized as such by external
actors – public policies, investors, visitors, scholars – or when the inhabitants and users self-define the place as creative; it becomes creative when invested with specific cultural and subjective meanings (and practices), expressing a nexus involving questions of cultural identity, power and capital accumulation (cf. Shields, 1991; Zukin, 1991). As a result, only selective interpretations of ‘innovation’ and ‘creativity’ are deployed: creativity is only generally discussed where it is possible for it to be harnessed in productive ways for economic growth (Gibson and Kong, 2005). Conceptualizations of creativity are therefore partial, fluid and even contradictory. This may be argued using as an empirical basis the ‘odd’ case of ‘alternative’ economic space of the Free Town of Christiania, in Copenhagen. As it will be discussed, Christiania represents a marginal and residual space from many economic perspectives (for example, it is a poor area in terms of GDP compared with Danish standards), but at the same time it seems to be characterized by a sort of creative field: how is that possible? What are the relations between local socio-economic practices and creativity in Christiania?
The history of the Christiania commune dates back to 1971, when a group of hippies occupied a 34-hectare abandoned military site right in the centre of Copenhagen, surrounded by the city’s most famous streets and sights. On September 26th they founded the ‘Free Town of Christiania’, a community driven by the many values and ideologies of the cultural revolution of the 1960s, including ideas of anarchism, the squatter movement and social activism (Conroy, 1994). As stated in the Charter of the Free Town,
The aim of Christiania is to create a self-governing society whereby each and every individual holds themselves responsible for the wellbeing of the entire community. Our society is to be economically self-sustaining and, as such, our aspiration is to be steadfast in our conviction that psychological and physical pollution can be averted.[3]
Squatters started to modify the built environment of the military base and to construct new barracks and workshops in order to live and work: to give a rough figure, today Christiania comprises almost 400 buildings and a population of about 900 to 1,000 residents.[4] The community has evolved in many ways, and it still represents, in the eyes of many supporters around the world, a stimulating challenge and provocation with respect to mainstream neoliberal capitalism. Legally, the inhabitants are Danish – for example, they have to pay standard revenue taxes – but, as will be discussed, a great part of their social and economic life is regulated by local mechanisms. The
internal governance structure of Christiania is inspired by ideas of collective self-government and direct democracy, whereby relevant decisions are always taken by consensus and after protracted discussion and negotiation in thematic meetings.
A number of activities developed over time in the community, including the running of social services, health care, a local post office, kindergartens, cultural activities, bars and restaurants, shops and small businesses (notably workshops for bicycles, ovens and furniture). These activities are managed collectively, but many people who live in the community work outside, in Copenhagen, and many shops are run individually. Probably, the most famous economic activity is the selling of soft drugs, cannabis in particular: hard drugs are forbidden, but soft drug commerce is allowed in a contained space, named Pusher Street, and by Christiania residents only (Amouroux, 2009; Moeller, 2009).
Socially, the Christiania community is far from homogeneous. Originally, the squatting was realized by hippies with left-wing ideals, and the population in 1972 was 200 to 300 inhabitants. In a few years, the population reached its current level and became stationary because of the prohibition of building new houses (negotiated with the authorities at the beginning of the 1990s), determining an ageing population. Tolerance being one of the keywords, the community spirit has evolved over time,
incorporating people with different political orientations, while over time Christiania acquired the reputation of a lively stage for social movements: activism is a rule here (Lund Hansen, 2010; see Figure 1).
Figure 1 – Examples of activism and political slogans in Christiania
The social composition of the inhabitants looks variegated: there are no statistics available but casual observation shows it includes many families, together with middle-aged hippies living alone, youngsters (often close to hip-hop and Rastafarian subcultures), middle-aged pushers and, quite often, the unfortunates, for example, those who appear to be struggling with alcoholism. This is reflected in evident wealth and social differences: even in the absence of statistical figures, huge wealth differences are visible in the appearance of people, and in the houses (and shacks) where they live. Also, according to some of my interviewees, many residents lament a progressive change in the original spirit of Christiania, accusing a lot of the inhabitants of having no particular alternative values. The term ‘alternative’ is of course subjective and socially constructed; in the case of Christiania, it refers mainly to being different from mainstream economic attitudes, intended as the naked pursuit of profit, and supporting a local social economy focused on ideas of communitarian living, a self-reliant society and humane economic practices (see Amin et al, 2003). Consequently, the
community is run by collectively organized work and by individual contributions: the global budget, allowing the functioning of the common purse, is 70% funded by residents’ payments and 30% by businesses, which pay an annual negotiated rent. As there is no official authority or ‘police’, those who neglect to pay are ‘shamed’ by being listed in the local newspaper and pressured to pay or to move out of the neighbourhood (as in any other case of lack of respect of common rules) but, according to the interviews, it is de facto tolerated that some of the local population (a rough figure of 15 to 20% was cited) is unable or unwilling to pay, work or contribute. The management of the economic base is nevertheless economically functional: a great point of pride among Christiania residents refers to the fact that they have never missed the payment of fees and taxes, and they have ironically been labelled ‘model citizens’ by the Ministry of Defence.[5]
The community members consider an important issue that of being (and to self-represent themselves as) an ‘open’ society, physically and socially accessible to visitors and to the other inhabitants of Copenhagen. For example, it has been mentioned to me several times (and it is quoted in the ‘official’ Christiania guide, produced and sold locally) that, Christiania being largely a rural and car-free area (only bicycles are allowed), many Copenhagen residents come here during the weekend in order to take a walk. The condition of being an outsider – such as being a tourist, or an
observer like me – seems not to be stigmatized: visitors are welcome. As local shop workers testified, tourists are necessary for living and not just for the money they bring: they will take back home the vision of an alternative community and they will share it with the rest of the world.
As regards moving to live in Christiania, the mechanism is informal: when a dwelling becomes vacant, it is announced in the local newspaper, and applicants are invited to a talk with the residents of the area, who choose the most suitable applicant. Money has no role in such a decision, while the will to participate and to contribute to the community are very relevant.
Legally, the Christiania community does not own the land it occupies, and no one is the owner of the house where he/she lives, or the shop where he/she works. A 1972 agreement, resulting from a negotiation with the Ministry of Defence (the owner of the land), recognized the Free Town (collectively) as having the right to use the area on payment of a fee to cover expenses for electricity and water. This controversial concession has been renegotiated many times, leading in 1991 to the stipulation of a framework agreement that reached an end in 2004. The neo-liberal Rasmussen government has manifested since then a firm will to ‘regulate’ and ‘normalize’ the Christiania space. On 22 June 2011, the Danish government concluded an agreement enabling inhabitants of Christiania to buy collectively most of the land on which they live at the price of about 76 million kroner (14 million euro), to be paid before 2018. Christiania
inhabitants consider the agreement as a victory, and fund-raising started in September 2011.
4. Christiania as a creative city
4.1 A creative Free Town?
From the economic point of view, Christiania may be considered a marginal area, because of the low mean income and employment levels: the average income is about 106,000 DDK, which is almost half of the average income in Copenhagen in general; about 33% of inhabitants are officially connected to the job market, 56% being Copenhagen’s average level (Lund Hansen, 2010). But in the framework of Copenhagen’s visions and promotional discourses, Christiania is assumed to be creative.
In Copenhagen, as in many other cities across Europe, creativity has become a central keyword, particularly as regards urban boosterism under the activities of the group Copenhagen Capacity, whose main aim is to attract investments, (also) representing the city as a relevant hub for the creative economy. The Copenhagen Municipality and the HUR, the Greater Copenhagen Authority, promoted and celebrated a number of projects (cultural, infrastructural, entrepreneurial, architectural, etc.) in an attempt to
develop and portray the region as a post-industrial, knowledge-based economy (Lund Hansen et al., 2001; Bayliss, 2007; Lund Hansen, 2010). Christiania fits into the plan. It is widely considered and celebrated as a creative, ‘alternative’ space, and a number of visitors go there every day. It is commonly mentioned in tourist guides, and the official tourist website of the city, Wonderful Copenhagen, dedicates a specific page to Christiania. It is seen as second among the top 10 alternative attractions of the city (the first is supposed to be the Carlsberg Brewery). Copenhagen’s discourse is ambivalent, on the one hand celebrating Christiania, and on the other maintaining a distance from it:
Christiania has been described as a life surrounded by art. There is art everywhere.
(…)
Lots of creatively built houses in all kinds of shapes and colours, like the ingenious banana house, adorn the area and organic eateries abound. (…)
Today many will argue that the village has seen better days, however, the area is still a very unique and refreshingly candid contrast to pretty Copenhagen.[6]
The image of Christiania as a creative space is nurtured by many features: most local economic industries are knowledge-intensive (art shops, furniture
and bicycles are the most famous products), whereas cinema, theatre and music are diffused forms of recreation. Moreover, every small corner of the public space hosts a sculpture, a painting, a wrought-iron statue or an installation. Every house is partially or totally self-constructed in curious and colourful ways. Most things are self-constructed from recycled materials, with a strong emphasis on ecological sustainability: two examples among the many possible are shown in Figure 2; a strange missile installation constructed from an old washing machine, and a bicycle holder realized with old bicycle parts. Music is always present in the streets of the central part of the town, and two jazz clubs play live music almost every night.
Figure 2 – Examples of self-constructed ‘creative’ artefacts
Of course, these expressions of creativity/alternative lifestyle are impossible to measure and quantify, and it may be widely questioned whether some of these are ‘beautiful’ or not and potentially ‘economically relevant’ or not, but it is evident that many activities in the public space relate to the creation and consumption of cultural meanings. The inhabitants themselves, according to my interviews, sympathize with the idea of Christiania as a creative space.
Christiania is a very special place for me, a place for creativity, openness and freedom (interview with a local resident, 1 May 2010).
What nurtures this creative milieu, in a place far from the ‘normative’ approach to cultural economy? As I will argue, the mechanics behind the nurture of creativity in Christiania refer largely to place-specific cultures and institutions.
4.2 Creative mechanics
The discussion on the specificities of Christiania’s institutions and their relations with creativity draws upon several (partly overlapping) thematic patterns emerging from the analysis of qualitative data. These concern the lack of private property in the local real estate market; the loose organization of creative processes; the nature of Christiana as a node of a wide network of sympathizers; the lack of policing and formal control over space; the informal mechanisms of knowledge circulation; and the lack of pressure towards consumption and commodification.
The fact that no one is the owner of the home he/she lives in may be intended in economic terms as a deterrent to investment. Why spend money
and time renewing and buying materials when the final output will never be recouped in economic terms? In the place-specific culture of Christiania, the question is often intended and framed differently: since there is no possibility of selling the houses, people feel free to allocate money to whatever they consider will improve their life, including the renewal of their house.
People have little money here, but invest in odd things. Last year we [the area meeting] have had very little money, something like 5,000 kr [about 700 euros]. There are a number of things to fix here, like the roofs and the water system, but we decided to renew a very old and rusty bench. I don’t know why, but everyone thought it was a great idea (interview with a local resident, 29 April 2010).
The lack of planning and technical building rules in Christiania very much opens up the field to creative expressions. Formally, the Free Town must obey standard rules for security and construction, but given the particular status of this space, no one feels pushed to observe any kind of rule or standard. This produces very radical architectural expressions: some houses have strange shapes (as in Figure 3), determining what Doron (2000) labelled as ‘architectures of transgression’, that is, transgressing spatial constraints in order to produce different environments. The environment does not always have a specific ‘resistance’ or ‘protest’ content: the aim is
simply to change the use and design of places using technologies and materials that are available to anyone, in order to provoke and to renegotiate the limit of what we consider ‘normal’.
Figure 3 – Transgressive architectures in Christiania
This results in every house being unique and unrepeatable, sometimes a piece of art, sometimes a shanty. This attention to originality is not restricted to the outside, in the facades (as a public display), but also applies (in my experience) in the interiors, where strange self-constructed artefacts abound. According to the interviews, there is no evidence of social pressure towards creativity: simply, everyone seems to agree on the fact that people are naturally happy to express themselves, and this place gives them the freedom to do so. Of course, it can also be argued that Christiania is a clustering of people who are intrinsically fascinated by the hippy-oriented communitarian way of life, including a liking for ‘alternative’ and ‘odd’ art. Investigations concerning the processes driving the realization of art installations in the public space testify the ways in which creative processes develop.
It is not as someone said ‘we have to make paint here’. Probably, one guy was smoking on a bench, and then screamed ‘it would be great to make
paint in this way here! You can help me!’ (interview with a local resident, 30 April 2010).
This kind of logic operates for other sorts of activities and productions, such as the most famous local manufacture, i.e. bicycles. Christiana bicycles (currently produced by an external factory but designed and assembled in Christiania) are famous all over the world for their quality and extravagant design.
The first model was realized in 1984. We had a lot of free time in the laboratory, and we played at realizing fanciful models (…). They are still famous because we continuously keep on developing them (interview with a local worker of Christiana Bikes, 3 May 2010).
In other words, the free time connected with the loose organization of work apparently nurtured an experimental attitude, and, in general, the whole Free Town is characterized by a relaxed experience of time, with plenty of people just strolling, drinking, chatting at all times of day and night – a feature that may also suggest diffused unemployment and social marginality.
A further element emerging from the investigations concerns the idea that the Free Town is a node in a very active network of people, including many artists, who sympathize with the Christiania experience.
We have many friends that come, visit and exhibit freely. We have had Bob Dylan, and all the best Danish groups are likely to play here! (interview with a local resident, 30 April 2010).
The symbolic power of Christiania as a magnet for artists and celebrities is evident. A local (unverified) legend refers to rock star Lenny Kravitz being willing to pay any price in order to buy a house here (and, of course, he was turned down). Concerts of international relevance take place here, in a huge military building named Den Grå Hal. It is estimated that about a million visitors come to Christiania every year, and in the Lonely Planet tourist guide (2007), for example, Christiania is rated third among the ‘11 things to see in Copenhagen’. In other words, Christiania is interesting in the view of the market economy.
It is important to note that there are no official activities aimed at attracting people: for example, there are no hotels and no city marketing initiatives. The Christiania community has just institutionalized a small info-cafe and published a short guide in English and Danish describing the history of the Free Town, an etiquette for visiting (no hard drugs, no weapons, no violence, no cars) and a town map. Some branded merchandise is sold, such as flags and t-shirts designed by a local group of residents, but without a particular strategy. To put it another way, Christiania is open to tourists, artists, activists and people in general, but never actively advertises for
them. This nurtures an idea of spontaneity connected to local cultural expressions: for example, musicians are supposed to be happy to play here, despite doing so for free or for very little money; the impression is therefore that a Christiania concert will be more ‘genuine’ than elsewhere. Of course, whether this is true or not is beyond the perspective of this research, but this discursive framing is popular.
A relevant theme connected to the proliferation of events – concerts, art exhibitions, theatrical performances – refers to management, order and security. On some occasions – e.g. commemorative dates, such as the thirtieth anniversary of the Free Town – several thousand people converge on Christiania at the same time to attend public events (e.g. concerts). In a place where there is no police (or any equivalent, such as security staff), and where there is de facto free consumption of soft drugs and alcohol, the problem of event management may be relevant. Yet very few accidents have taken place over the years: how is it possible to manage complex situations (such as the above-mentioned example of big concerts) without rigorous planning?
There is no simple answer. An hypothesis suggested in two interviews (Nyt Forum worker, 29 April 2010; local resident, 31 April 2010) is that people coming to Christiania – both to live and for a short visit – are implicitly or explicitly invested with a responsibility: they are free to behave as they
prefer, but they are invested with the consequences of this freedom. They have to negotiate every encounter with other people, without considering a superior order or rule. This leaves a lot of space for dialogue and interaction and definitely for an ‘order from below’, which is very close to the anarchist organismic vision of the community. Although this may be seen as merely a suggestive hypothesis, certainly the Christiania experience represents a social experiment dealing with complexity and self-organization: it is possible, here, to have creativity without a well-defined system of laws and tutelage, as described in the above-mentioned OECD documents, but on the basis of place-specific informal rules.
Space is an important ingredient in the display of creative activities: many activities take place in public venues, and public space is prefigured as ‘safe’ by users, both in terms of personal security and in terms of the security of the artistic elements and the built environment. For example, the possibility of ‘art’ installations being stolen or vandalized is considered remote and improbable: according to interviews, thefts happen sometimes, but quite rarely, since Christiania is a relatively poor area, and therefore not very attractive to external thieves. And if something is stolen details of the object are published in the local newspaper, so that its use or commerce becomes difficult inside the community. The sensation of a sort of mutuality and trust between residents emerges: everyone watches the common space, and everyone feels invested with the responsibility to intervene in the case
of necessity. In addition, the binary distinction between public and private space is certainly present, but in a blurred way: boundaries between the common space (such as the street) and the private space of houses are often absent or purely symbolical, and it is quite easy to look inside the residents’ dwellings. There are exceptions: some households, in beautiful locations, are surrounded by fences, testifying to the limits and contradictions of Christiania’s communitarian idea. But public space is not inhibited by too restrictive rules, and it is perceived as open for any expression: for writing poetry on a wall, for building a huge iron statue portraying a frog, for whatever comes into one’s mind. There is no formal limit to what can be done and displayed in public (in terms of decorum or political content); in the case of conflict between residents (for example, regarding the use of a certain space), the problem will be dealt with in the area meeting, with a long series of public (and, in some cases, private) discussions. This implies a very intimate form of knowledge shared by people living in the neighbourhood: the temper, tastes and orientations of each one are well-known, nurturing a form of communitarian trust that some may recognize as a peculiar form of social capital and knowledge circulation. Formal educational levels are in fact relatively low in Christiania in comparison with Copenhagen’s average: most of the knowledge circulates in ‘tacit’ form and particularly relates to working capabilities.
Finally, the whole organization of life in the community never stimulates capital accumulation or circulation. Although they are just anecdotes, there are various examples of attempts to demonetarize consumption: inside the town, there is a stand where people are free to leave second-hand clothes and small objects, and to take whatever they want; once a week there is a ‘collective kitchen’ meal where people bring and share self-cooked food with each other. Of course, Christiania is still visibly a capitalistic market economy, but in a place-specific (and even contradictory) way.
5. Concluding remarks: learning from Christiania
As we have seen, Christiania is a meaningful space in terms of a ‘Creative Copenhagen’ strategy. It is assumed to be creative – and therefore economically relevant – if made available for consumption in the market, particularly as a tourist attraction. The ‘normalization plan’ may be thought as the attempt by the Copenhagen municipality to remove the ‘excesses’ of Christiania, and particularly the hash market. In fact, the municipality of the Danish capital has never expressed the desire to annihilate Christiania, but to ‘maintain’ the place while ‘normalizing’ it, i.e. implementing specific rules and ‘opening’ the place to forms of consumption by a larger population of visitors (what Sharon Zukin, 1995: p. 28, called ‘pacification
by cappuccino’, and Osborne and Rose, 1999: p. 756, named ‘city of pleasure’). Of course, to ‘normalize’ and to maintain the original Christiania spirit is impossible: being an interstitial space, it incorporates the desire for autonomy as well as the realities of compromise with the state and police (Pickerill and Chatterton, 2006; Lund Hansen, 2010). It is a laboratory for resistance and creation, and considering the desire not to be co-opted, Christiania is intrinsically an exceptional, limited and ephemeral space. There is more. Christiania represents a wider experiment for the practice of an ‘alternative’ economy, a space in which to limit the general neoliberal logics of waged work, corporate control and privatization. Most of the creative milieu is probably nurtured by the rejection of instituted social heteronomies, such as religion or the state (Castroriadis, 1991; Pickerill and Chatterton, 2006). The inner act of refusal and resistance is itself a creative act.
The Free Town is, of course, a partial, daily negotiated and often even contradictory experiment: after all, the inhabitants are not self-sufficient, there are visible internal social divides, and inhabitants have to pay fees to the Copenhagen City Hall and Ministry of Defense. From this perspective, the dichotomies between ‘normalization’ and ‘antagonism’, or between ‘capitalist’ and ‘alternative’ economic practices, reveal ambiguities: there is an ongoing hybridization between market and autonomist logics, producing an assemblage of place-specific practices and institutions that may be
described in terms of ‘relatively autonomous spaces’ or ‘relatively alternative practices’ (cf. Curry, 2003; Gibson-Graham, 2006).
However partial and marginal, though, the Christiania social experiment is still alive. It represents a serious ‘exception’ in terms of the Western idea of an inevitable neoliberal universal globalization, with a high symbolic power. The flag itself, displaying three yellow dots on a red background, is a well-known evocative symbol of protest and resistance, so important that it has been copyrighted (firms producing merchandise using that symbol must pay a fee to the Christiania Free Town): another strange contradiction – but definitely a compromise with the market economy – in this odd space. The aim of these reflections is not to celebrate the case of Christiania (revealing criticalities and contradictions), nor to suggest that it can be considered a ‘model’ for the development and reproduction of a creative milieu. Nevertheless, planners interested in the creative city may look with interest at Christiania and learn something from this town. First, that creativity, like laughter, is not to be had on demand (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Lund Hansen et al., 2001). Secondly, that creativity is a fluid and situated concept: the Free Town is an example of the infinite varieties of place-specific social institutions that may foster innovation, creativity and communal spirit. A number of social institutions that are central to the Christiania experience, like the role of informal economies, voluntary and neighbourhood work, emotional labour, community economy and social
experimentation, are simply ignored in most of the mainstream normative approaches to creative cities, and to start thinking of Christiania and other ‘diverse’ experiences as ‘real’ cases of creative economics is also a means of troubling urban planning: fostering the creative city becomes an open question (what kind of creative city would we like to live in?) and not an initial presumption.
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1 CRIR - Christiania Researcher in Residence: http://www.crir.net
2 In this case – as in the OECD (2004) sentence quoted later – the terms innovation and creativity are used together,
even if they have different meanings. Essentially, innovation is generally seen as a process improving the current technology (the stock of knowledge available to a certain society at a specific moment), for example by R&D processes, whereas creativity is a fuzzy concept (Markusen, 2006), as discussed later in the paragraph.
3 The Charter of Christiania has been kindly provided by Christiania’s Nyt Forum (a photocopy of the 1971 Danish
original).
4 There are no official statistics for Christiania. The data presented here have been orally communicated to me by the
Christiania Nyt Forum, and are compatible with those presented in other articles on Christiania, as in Bidault-Waddington (2006), Hellström (2006), Midtgaard (2007) and Amouroux (2009).
5 In 1995. The declaration is quoted in English in the Christiania Guide on p. 8. See also
http://www.christiania.org/inc/guide/?lan=gb&side=8 (cons. 16 May 2010). 6 http://www.visitcopenhagen.com (cons. 30 April 2010).
