Property and carceral spaces in Christiania, Copenhagen

Abstract

This article addresses the recent legal and property changes, and their socio-spatial consequences in Christiania, Copenhagen. During recent years the community that has always been against private ownership has lost its special legal status, and has become a property owner of a vast area in the middle of Copenhagen. We analyse the situation in relation to Christiania’s current housing condition, individual residents’ privatisation efforts, and decades-long normalisation efforts by the state. We argue that the processes of normalisation, legalisation, criminalisation and privatisation are expressions of the carceral in more-than-institutional context, and that questions of property are strongly involved in these carceral practices in Christiania. Not only in the relations between Christiania and the state, but also in socio-spatial relations inside of the community, defining who is included or excluded, or how people behave towards each other. Moreover, a part of the community is cultivating a carceral culture towards those in favour of privatisation, using the rights of the property owner and the community’s ideologies as justifications.

A very Nordic set of concerns?

“…Gressgård and Jensen (2016) examine Nordic urban planning to support ethnic pluralism, while various scholars explore particular settings that either facilitate cross-ethnic cohesion or highlight inter-ethnic friction, from parks and other public spaces (Jacob & Hellström, 2010;Kuurne & Gómez, 2019;Lapiņa, 2016;Mouratidis & Poortinga, 2020;Pries & Jönsson, 2019;Simonsen et al, 2017;Stanfield & van Riemsdijk, 2019;Thörn, 2012;Trandberg Jensen & Jensen, forthcoming), to schools (Sernhede, 2018), to friendship networks and moments of urban mobilization (Andersen, 2019;Hansen, 2020;Keskinen et al, 2019;Merrill & Pries, 2019). One particular district of Copenhagen has received extensive scholarly attention: the "freetown" of Christiania was established in the 1970s by activists seeking a space "autonomous" from overweening state regulation, but has been subjected over the last 20 years to various attempts at "normalization", which have been studied for their impacts on equity, surveillance, and integration (Amouroux, 2009;Coppola & Vanolo, 2015;Jarvis, 2013;Ntounis & Kanellopoulou, 2017;Rannila & Repo, 2018;Winter, 2016). Even among pronounced discourses of integration in Denmark and much of the Nordic region, researchers show stigmatized differences shaping differentiated urban experiences for socio-economically, ethnically, and spatially marginalized populations (e.g., Qvotrup Jensen et al, forthcoming).…”

Legal diversity and the strategies of negotiating public spaces in Christiania

“…Christiania's situation is somewhat exceptional because of its complex legal spaces and multiple layers of control that result from the overlapping of Danish law, Christiania's own spoken law, the ordinances of the city, and the rules of the police and the pushers (Rannila & Repo, 2017). Nevertheless, it opens up discussion about the legal orders in less normative contexts.…”

“…The community drifted into a decades-long conflict with the Danish state, the city of Copenhagen, and the police over Christiania's ownership, the right to use the area, and its legal status (Rannila & Repo, 2017). Many conflicts were linked to a cannabis trade that originally began as small sales between the residents and led to extended business carried out by organized crime groups.…”

“…Christiania's spoken law that is based on consensus democracy is the first and foremost law for the residents, although the law does not have legal value from the state's viewpoint. The overlapping of the community's own decision-making process with the state's laws has led to legal pluralism (Rannila & Repo, 2017;von Benda-Beckmann & von Benda-Beckmann, 2014) and a hyperpoliced neighborhood. As a result of this, legally ambivalent public spaces have developed where different actors-such as the residents, drug pushers, and the police-perform their own tactics and strategies.…”

Spatial control and care in Finnish nursing homes

“…The field of carceral geography has typically concentrated on spaces that detain and lock up “problematic populations of one kind or another” (Philo, , p. 4), which can include nursing homes. As Milligan (, p. 21) notes, “[i]nstitutional care has been seen to represent a spatial solution to particular ‘problems’ usually arising as a consequence of frailty and age.” Recently, there have been calls to extend the concept of the “carceral” beyond “traditional” environments, such as prisons (Moran, ), to institutions such as schools (Gallagher, ), orphanages (Disney, , 2017a, 2017b), social housing estates (Villanueva, ) and even communities (Rannila & Repo, ).…”