hence, Christiania and the conception of urban spaces, transgress- ing society’s norms and regulations, while pushing boundaries of ur- ban welfare definitions, did not come out of the blue. aesthetically and ethically, the Freetown shares similarities with the bourgeois revolu- tions, artistic avant-garde and the individual’s emancipation since ro- manticism. not just artists and activists were influenced by the situa- tionists’ ‘counter-functionalist’ discourse and Christiania’s alternative to rationalist urban planning. Like Eiler rasmussen, architects more or less closely associated with the welfare society’s planning machine were susceptible to radical ideas embedded in a new discourse of the social: team ten’s break with CiaM and interest in the vernacular, su- perstudio and archigram’s organic social structures, Jane Jacobs’ de- fence of the historical city, rudofsky’s writing on architecture without architects, Gordon Matta-Clark’s creatively destructive ‘anarchitecture’, reyner Banham’s planning-sceptical architectural history, Colin rowe’s fascination with rome’s ‘collage city’, Venturi’s iconoclast learning from Las Vegas, Koolhaas’ retroactive manifesto Delirious New York, and oth- er postmodernist projects. in Denmark, Jan Gehl authored the clas- sic Life Between Buildings (1971) simultaneously with Christiania’s con- ception, shifting perspective from objects to social interaction. Exper- imenting with mapping the relation between life and architecture with his psychologist wife, Gehl now heads a successful office, facilitating
post-planning projects, (re)animating life in cities worldwide: cultur- al layers in Copenhagen’s 1990s new town Ørestad, often criticised as lifeless, meeting places and bicycle lanes on Manhattan, etc.
Post-war new towns like tingbjerg were planned according to OnE master plan and narrative, dictated by public authorities. in the sub- sequent decades Copenhagen lost control over its narrative and expe- rienced unplanned interventions, most noticeably Christiania. today, more stakeholders (including the individual/user/inhabitant, private developers, real estate agents, nGOs, etc.) are renegotiating the city. influenced by post-1968 and postmodernist practices and discourses, architects have thus incorporated aspects of the Freetown into contem- porary planning culture: participation of the individual/user/inhabit- ant, values of individuality, innovation, creativity, multiplicity and em- powerment; mixed functions, site-specificity, sustainable solutions, lo- cal democracy, small-scale, re-use and preservation of historical struc- tures; focus on the urban process, culture, communication, dialogue and identity (branding); storytelling and impermanence as methods to initiate urban projects, etc. You can still discuss the premises and degree of democracy, openness, right of decision and veto, question formula- tion, disjunctions of power/knowledge, etc. some also claim that archi- tects know what is best, are better at being visionary-creative than pop- ulist-pedagogue, and that the modernist urban planning process was more transparent (who did what when?), although more hierarchical than today’s flat urban networks, penetrated by new scales, actors and blurring of public/private, urban/rural, local/global, etc.
nonetheless, Danish offices like ZarK, Metopos, Witraz and nOrD, backed up by social sciences and humanities consultants like hausen- berg or 2+1 idébureau, plunge into this morass of moderation and ne- gotiation, offering services of outreach, communication and process facilitation — again full of good intentions. One of their good clients, Copenhagen Municipality, brands itself with slogans like ‘cOPEnha- gen — Open for you’ and ‘Joint City’, invites people to participate in so-
cially engaged urban regeneration schemes such as Område løft (‘neigh- bourhood lift’), and intends to develop Copenhagen’s future new town of nordhavn organically over 50 years, rethinking the old harbour’s ur- ban palimpsest.
Welfairytales
Examining tingbjerg and Christiania, we have seen how attitudes to- wards the planned and the unplanned city have changed on physical and narrative levels. While tingbjerg’s welfare city provided materi- al comfort and public services to Copenhagen’s house-hunting ‘slum- dwellers’, Christiania’s slumstormers opened people’s eyes to more rel- ative aspects of urban welfare. The paradigm shift from an overall goal of egalitarianism to a determining goal, focusing on the individual/us- er/inhabitant’s right to self-realisation, produced new perspectives on the role of urban planning.38
as society transformed towards more individuality, narratives of public happiness were substituted with stories of private happiness, e.g. Christiania’s enclave or the suburban single-family house. From the mid-1970s tingbjerg’s walk-up flats were voided of resourceful Danish families, choosing the building boom’s private ownership. The predict- ed local workplaces never came, whereas unemployment, interest de- duction and immigration grew. Public housing organisations allotted empty rental flats, increasingly subsidised, to those who could not af- ford to choose address. suddenly, the ‘unresourceful’ and immigrants inhabited the welfare city that was designed for working Danish fami- lies. Crime rates and social problems grew while architecture decayed. Explaining tingbjerg’s master plan in 1963, Eiler rasmussen prophet- ically wrote:
reality will probably form itself somewhat differently than the idealists have intended […] still it is important to avoid too much uniformity. if a housing estate or part of a housing estate becomes a sort of ghetto for one particular, less estimated, group of society, it can cause great harm for the inhabitants, not least the children. The housing corporations have experienced material damage to buildings in a town with a uniform bad clientele. it is something tangible that can be measured economically.39 This resembles contemporary media representations of tingbjerg. The already difficult task of creating identity from scratch faced further challenges. after the utopias that defined their programme are faded or forgotten, new towns are difficult to communicate and relate to cur- rent ideals. Contemporaries have trouble understanding why tingbjerg was designed like it was, whilst various actors battle with narratives to redefine it in a state of ‘representational crisis’.
When Denmark was more homogeneous, collectivism implied lighed = likeness and equality, but in an increasingly globalised world, the country and the capital city have diversified. since the social democratic scandinavian welfare model became the subject of dispute and lost he- gemony — in Denmark around EU membership (1972), the Earthquake Election (1973) and the right-wing Foursome Government (1982) — two positions have dominated: some nostalgise it as a golden past, associat- ing progress, modernity and equal opportunities with OnE party. Oth- ers celebrate internationalisation and openness, replacing stagnation and social democratic dominance. reflecting contemporary political quarrels more than historical scholarship, both perspectives are one- sided. Lately, more nuanced discussions of the welfare model’s draw- backs and achievements appear in a complex field, renegotiating repre- sentation, ideology, identity, production of subjectivity, etc.40
swedish geographer Lisbeth söderqvist traces a new politicisation of welfare city discourse where social democratic policies and modern- ist principles are but obstacles for private initiative, economic develop- ment and ‘swedish values’:
a political discourse has been transported into the field of architecture and urban planning. according to that, squares should be planned and built with the needs of corporations as point of departure. to more and more people, the publicly financed built-up environments articulate in- deed another political discourse where the intervening state allows visions of equality and safety to overshadow economical realities.41
This shift is clearer in Denmark where the (neo-)Liberal Party (Venstre) and Conservatives (Det Konservative Folkeparti) supported by the na- tionalist Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti) have governed for a decade. Using strategic urban planning to promote new narratives of public happiness, this also affects Christiania’s future.