Last summer, the Danish state offered to sell a good chunk of the 32-odd-hectare former military base at the edge of downtown Copenhagen to Christiania, the alternative community whose residents had been squatting there illegally for four decades. For the residents, who fundamentally reject the idea of landownership, this presented an ideological quandary.
“Christiania has offered to buy it,” said Risenga Manghezi, a spokesman for the community. “But Christiania doesn’t want to own it.”
To resolve the contradiction, Manghezi and a handful of others decided to start selling shares in Christiania. Pieces of paper, hand-printed on site, the shares can be had for amounts from US$3.50 to US$1,750. Shareholders are entitled to a symbolic sense of ownership in Christiania and the promise of an invitation to a planned annual shareholder party. “Christiania belongs to everyone,” Manghezi said. “We’re trying to put ownership in an abstract form.”
Photo: EPA
Since the shares were first offered in the fall, about US$1.25 million worth have been sold in Denmark and abroad. The money raised will go toward the purchase of the land from the government.
Justifying the transaction still takes some artful semantic twists. “According to their system, you are not an owner of a house, you’re a user of the house,” explained Knud Foldschack, the lawyer for the community who negotiated the purchase. “You don’t own the area, you care take the area.”
But after a rocky decade under a conservative-led government, during which the carless, hashish-friendly community faced threats of expulsion and a Supreme Court ruling that said the squatters had no legal right to remain on the land, the residents made a pragmatic decision to buy the property — or, as many would have it, to “buy it free.”
“People were afraid, and we had to respect this fear,” said Allan Lausten, a handyman who took part in the negotiations despite an aversion to bureaucrats.
The Danish state made it easy, too. Not only did officials offer to sell the land for about US$14.5 million, a fraction of what it would be worth if sold commercially, but they also made several provisions to accommodate the Christianites’ way of life.
One sticking point was how to negotiate with a group run by consensus democracy, where a decision is made only if everyone who shows up at a meeting agrees. “Their system of government is very difficult to deal with from the perspective of the state,” said Carsten Jarlov, director of the Danish State Building Agency, who began working on the deal in 2004. “What do you do with all these meetings, where everyone has a say and no one is responsible?”
The solution was to create a foundation, with a board made up of five residents and six outsiders, to act as owners on behalf of the Christianites.
Because it can be difficult for people who reject basic tenets of capitalism to get a loan, the Danish state also guaranteed the bank loan. Further, Danish officials stipulated that the land must remain open to the public. Lastly, any profit from the sale of the land or buildings would immediately revert to the state. “This is a nonprofit zone,” said Foldschack, who called the deal “fantastic” and its eight-year evolution “Buddhistic.”
Jarlov said the decision had broad-based political support. “Danish public opinion is very ambivalent when it comes to Christiania,” he added. “If you ask if there should be space for Christiania in society, they say, ‘Yes, we love it!’ But if you say, ‘Is it a good idea to take over property you don’t own?’ they are against that. Every Dane has this split within himself.”
Jacob Ludvigsen, a newspaper editor who with some friends started squatting on the land the day after a fisherman told him about the unused space in 1971, welcomed the decision. “A 40-year-long conflict has been brought to an end,” said Ludvigsen, who no longer lives in Christiania but said that he carried a piece of Christiania in his heart. “This will give Christiania a real independence.”
Still, the sale makes many here uncomfortable. “I think it would have been better to remain squatters,” said a young man on Pusher Street as he sorted through a bag labeled “Outdoor Skunk.” “Pressure from the outside forces you to evolve, to stick together.”
Others point out that now the ramshackle, do-it-yourself community will have to come up with the money to pay for the land. But for many, the problem is less tangible.
“I have a feeling of sorrow that the state forced us to buy it,” said Ida Klemann, an artist who first moved to Christiania in 1971, then left to have a baby (at the time, there was no running water on the premises), before moving back in 1972. “I thought it was wonderful the Danish state was generous enough to allow this wild little thing to go on living inside itself.”
“When you say, ‘You have to buy it,’ you’re trying to throw it into normal conditions, in a way,” added Klemann, one of the progenitors of the Christiania share idea (she calls herself a “share carer”). “What do we do now? It’s not just money, but identity.”
In November, a small group traveled to the US to promote the Christiania shares. They visited the Occupy Wall Street protest in New York, where they were greeted with cheers.
On Wall Street itself, they had less success. On a blog documenting the adventures of an anthropomorphic Christiania share — which would go on to have both an identity crisis and a love affair with a California road map — a video shows Manghezi performing on the street. “It’s not that there’s anything wrong with investing for profit,” he calls out. “It’s just so yesterday, and a little bit primitive, too!”
As a result of these efforts, the group sold two shares for US$5 each on the steps of the New York Stock Exchange. But thanks to the publicity, sales here surged. “It’s a cultural difference,” Manghezi said. “We thought it was hilarious, and the Danish press thought it was hilarious, but Americans were like: ‘US$10? That’s a total failure! You shouldn’t even talk about it.”’
“We’d like to be a speculation-free zone, an alternative to a society based on gambling and speculation,” Manghezi said. “Of course, if we have to take a loan, we will.”
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby