It’s fødseldag week for Denmark’s most rebellious brainchild; can you guess who it is? Freetown Christiania, the black-swan neighborhood at the heart of Copenhagen, is turning 53. For tourists, it is one of the country’s biggest attractions: a small town self-proclaimed as autonomous, embodying the best and the worst of the hippie ‘70s. Where is it now, more than five decades later?
Christiania, located in the neighborhood of Christianshavn, was founded in 1971 after a group of countercultural activists took over an abandoned military space. Injected with the rage and freedom of the flower power era, it quickly developed a vibrant arts scene and a micro-communist type of society, functioning to this day as a consensus democracy. Naturally, cannabis soon became a common currency in the area, giving birth to the infamous Pusher Street.
Over the years, the Danish government learned to negotiate with the Christianites: their relationship oscillated between tolerance and attempts to regulate the area. The turn of the century, however, posed new challenges on the community as external drug-dealing gangs started taking up the space to do their business. Friction between gangs escalated to violence, including shootings related to the organized crime and drug trade, something Christianites never had an interest in in the first place. And although their people stand solidly against the Danish “system”, they and the Danish Ministry of Defense finally came to a truce this past winter, when the locals asked for help getting rid of the externals.
In a historic turn of events, April 2024 was the date when Christianites, police forces, and common civilians came together to – quite literally – dig up Pusher Street. With the famous cobblestoned street dug up completely, the town said no more to the gangs that had been disturbing its peace for years. Whether Christiania will remain a less eventful, hippie neighborhood or eventually see the return of black face masks and cannabis stands is yet to be seen. In the meantime, they blow their birthday candles to half a century of rebellion, counterculture, and flower power, sitting right at the center of one of the world’s calmest capitals.
