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To kick off my 4th season, I’ve just released a documentary I've been working on for the past year in collaboration with my friends at one of my favorite podcasts called 99% Invisible. Here’s a summary of the story:
In 1971, a group of squatters took over an abandoned military base just across the harbor from downtown Copenhagen. They created a politically autonomous anarchist zone -- in other words, a commune -- with its own flag, marching band, and consensus-driven governance process. They decided to call their community Freetown Christiania.
Residents built homes out of salvaged objects, turned a former stable into a church, and transformed a military horse riding arena into a concert hall. They also opened small businesses, including a brewery, a bicycle factory, and a women-run blacksmith shop.
Like many other communes, Christiania’s founders wanted the new world they made within the walls to be as free as possible from all the old world’s rules and customs and hierarchies. They drew up a mission statement, according to which the goal of the commune was “to create a self-governing society whereby each and every individual holds themselves responsible for the well-being of the entire community.”
There were some basic rules, including no private ownership of land or housing, no weapons or violence, and no vehicles, but for the most part, the residents were free to do whatever they wanted, as long as it didn't infringe upon the rights of other people. The individual freedom on offer in Christiania attracted people from around the world.
The Danish authorities weren’t quite sure how to react to the thousand or so people squatting on 85 acres of government property in the middle of the nation’s capital. First they declared it a “social experiment” and let the squatters stay, figuring they’d soon more on. Then after a few years, the police made attempts to remove them, only to be met with determined resistance. Scared of Christiania turning into another of Europe’s squatter battlegrounds, the Danish government eventually changed course yet again and decided to tolerate the commune. In the decades that followed, it become one of Copenhagen’s biggest tourist attractions, and is now visited by over a million people each year.
map of Christiania
But as time went on, a cascade of problems forced Christiania’s residents to rethink some of their most cherished freedoms and depend more and more on help from the rest of Danish society. And many worried the changes were making their counter-cultural haven more like the rest of Denmark in the process.
Many of the problems revolved around the community’s acceptance of cannabis, in violation of Danish laws. Christiania even had a marketplace called Pusher Street, where dealers had stands selling hash and weed right out in the open.
At first, the market was mostly run by locals, but starting in the early 2000s, a new conservative government came into power in Denmark and increased the penalties for cannabis dealing. The effect was to scare most of the local dealers away from Pusher Street. It also drove up prices, and biker gangs like the Hells Angels swept in to fill the lucrative vacuum. Then they began fighting each other for control over Pusher Street, and things started to get really violent, with stabbing and shootings becoming a regular occurence.
All this put the residents of Christiania in a really difficult position. Most people seemed to agree that the best solution would be to legalize cannabis to take power away from the gangs, but the Danish government has always been unwilling to do that. So what other options did they have?
The commune’s residents had spent their lives trying to live without the state – and state violence – as an organizing force. But now, if they wanted to finally kick the gangs out, the anarchists of Christiania would have to ask the state for help.
Listen to my recent episode of Far From Home to hear how — more than half a century after its founding — Christiania is at a turning point, with some people questioning how much longer it will be able to survive.
In the course of reporting my documentary about Freetown Christiania, I took two trips to Denmark and recorded many hours of interviews that unfortunately ended up on the cutting room floor, so I decided to also produce a bonus episode to present some of the highlights as well as some additional context and backstories of the people I interviewed that I wasn’t able to fit into my main documentary.
[N.B.: This episode contains some explicit language]
This was a really complicated but fascinating story to produce, with all sorts of twists and turns. I’m incredibly grateful to my editor Joe Rosenberg and the rest of the 99% Invisible team for helping me develop this from my original concept into the documentary it became!
Thanks so much for listening!
