Sitting in my office every day, reading and writing, I tend to forget that my own town, Copenhagen, can be as exotic and fascinating as can the Tanzanian countryside. Almost. Big was my surprise the other day when I arrived at work, opened my computer, and found an email from a colleague in my inbox asking me for the names and contact addresses of anthropologists researching Copenhagen land affairs. Not being an anthropologist myself, I do not know that many anthropologists. And I am not sure that I would refer to an anthropologist, if I knew one. Anthropologists, as I see them, make the world larger, but they rarely make things clearer. But I am digressing...
I do not know of anyone researching land issues in Copenhagen. I did not even think of land issues as a research topic in this orderly capital of Denmark. Land affairs here got institutionalised centuries ago. Actually, I just read an old book which describes how the king gradually got more and more control over land back in the 16th century. He made sure that all land in the realm got registered in jordebøger (land books) in order to collect his land rents from the nobility. Anthropologists back then, had they existed, would probably have engaged in lengthy academic discussions about the pros and cons of registering land in that particular way. Most anthropologists, had they existed, would spend years on the Danish countryside doing fieldwork, describing the traditional, and therefore superior, systems for handling land (these systems, by the way, had been invented by the nobility not that long before to make sure that they got their taxes from the farmers. But I am digressing....).
I did not, in other words, understand why my colleague asked for anthropologists. But now, after having read some newspaper articles about the latest developments in the ongoing conflict between Christiania and the Danish government, I understand why. Christiania is a semiautonomous part of Copenhagen, a former military area, which was occupied by the hippies when the military left in 1971. They founded a ‘fristad’ – a freetown – beyond the control of the Danish state.
The centre-left parties, which made up the majority in the Danish parliament in most of the 1970s, accepted Christiania as a social experiment. But the right wing parties never really liked the phenomenon. First, the right-wingers found, one should not accept that the Christianits never paid for the property they occupied. Second, the right-wingers never came to appreciate the alternative lifestyle in this liberated zone. The direct democracy, the lack of formal decision making structures, and the common ownership were appalling features, they thought, in the middle of the country’s capital (not to speak of cannabis, free love, and the breakdown of respect for authorities...actually I sometimes wonder if the right-wingers ever came to like the 1970s? But I am digressing…).
In fact, no right wing party in this part of the world can encounter a common pool resource (as this kind of communal property is termed academically) without wanting to privatise it. And that is, exactly what Denmark’s current right wing government has been trying to do the last decade. First it aimed at normalising Christiania by making it obey to the same rules and regulations for land use plans, buildings, roads, etc., which apply for the rest of the country. Then, the government suggested selling the area. Now, according to an article in the Danish daily, Politiken, the people living in this green oasis, around a thousand persons in total, have decided to buy the area, which they have occupied for free during the last 40 years, from the state.
According to another Politiken article, however, the Christianits set certain conditions for buying the place. One contentious issue, of course, is the price. Another even more contentious issue is whether Christiania should be able to deny people from outside Christiania the right to move in. The Christianits, seemingly, aim at keeping some kind of communal ownership of the area. But they wish to have a word to say over who can move in. It would not make sense, their lawyer says, that some political hothead, who is against the existence of Christiania, can move in and thereby work against the social, cultural and economical structures we all care about.
The conflict about the ability to exclude outsiders reflects a classic debate within natural resource management studies. In 1968 Garrett Hardin published an article, The Tragedy of the Common, in which he argued that open access to resources, for instance a grazing area in Africa, would inevitably lead to depletion of resources. The solution to the problem, he argued, was either privatisation or state control. The American political economist and Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom has subsequently spent most of her academic life pointing out that Hardin and consorts are wrong. There is a third option, she argues, namely that of common property. It is far more common than we tend to believe. And for some resources, for instance the oceans, forests, and inhospitable desert areas, some kind of common property regime may be more effective in managing resources than the market or the state.
Anthropologists really like Ostrom. Inspired by her, anthropologists have identified numerous tribes in developing countries who manage natural resources through a common property regime. These traditional, common property regimes, they claim, are much more effective than other types of regimes (irrespective of the fact that the native communities appear to be gradually loosing their access to resources most places. But I am digressing...).
I am certain that the anthropologists will also like Christiania. The Christianits, however, should see that as a warning sign. Anthropologists typically prefer tribes, whose traditional lifestyles are threatened by the development. Christiania, for sure, is much more exotic now, in all its anarchy, than it will be if the community gets a title deed and the right to fence off the entire area.
(Photo1: Bent Næsby. Photo2: Nicolai Perjesi. With permission from VisitDenmark)
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