On The Edge - What If?
“Our sanctuaries have been bought up and lost. Cities sell their land - e.g., via the neoliberal grip that is now being marketed as ‘the Copenhagen model’. This divestment is a drastic curtailment of the democratic territorial power and of the potential dynamics that naturally follow, if the ground of the city is a common good.”
Peter Schultz Jørgensen, urbanist and author, is writing on the edge of the abyss. He’s challenging us to imagine an urban future based on common land ownership, ecological urbanization, and participatory democracy.
By Peter Schultz Jørgensen, urbanist and author
Photo: Naraa .in.ub/Unsplash
“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.” This is how Italo Calvino ends his utopian journey in the small book The Invissible Cities.
Here we stand!
Cities change - slowly and unnoticed over a long period of time or abruptly - while everyday life with family, work and neighbors goes on.
Over the last decades, changes in Copenhagen and other cities have gone fast and been remarkable. At the same time, the determining economic riptides have almost been invisible and have on the surface been considered almost as natural as the weather. The difference is that we protect ourselves against the weather, but not against capital.
The urban turbulence manifests itself in many ways, with the number of people being one of them. In 40 years from 1910-1950, the City of Copenhagen grew by 312,000 citizens. But during the next 40-year period up to 1991, the municipality lost 303,330 citizens. It was a turbulent and dramatic experience. Since then, well over half of the loss has been recovered.
What is the reason for these shifts in the human mass?
After World War II, the societies and their urban communities experienced a boom that lasted until the 1960s, where capital and production left the central part of the old industrial cities. They went into decay.
Many people relocated to the suburbs, which grew and became economic zones of expansion for investors in terms of urban development and for the ‘consumer society’. However, many of us stayed in the neglected apartment blocks.
In the old city centers, gaps were left with empty plots, redundant port areas, and abandoned buildings. In the perspective of capital, it was a crisis. For many citizens, these were situations of opportunities.
Buildings and plots were occupied and used for testing collective environments, forms of democracy, aesthetics of urban environments, and much more at the same time. The common backdrop were the regular demonstrations against the American Vietnam War, against housing speculators, against the closure of the city's larger workplaces, for the environment, for free education, etc. There was life and free spaces in the city!
Behind these movements, which consisted primarily of young people, were vague utopias about the next society, with a different kind of cities and ecourban environments.
Many of the occupied places became alternatives, which had attained the status of a symbolic force which led to the authoritarian city government and the state to deploy the well-equipped law enforcement and remove them.
During the general economic crisis of the 1970s, the state and the capital responded by using the neoliberal toolbox. The welfare state was put under pressure and the market was expanded at the expense of the community. The unions were hit with hard means. The housing supply and capital markets were liberalized. Financing of the economy was generously stimulated by the money factories of the central banks.
With the competitive state and entrepreneurial municipalities, cities, especially their old urban centers and harbor areas, became framework conditions and taxed runways for the exponentially accumulating capital.
In the western world, most big cities can relate to this story of the capital which left them and returned with hyper-muscles! The city became a prey. Geographer Neil Smith has called them revanchist cities.
The consequences are well known. Our sanctuaries have been bought up and lost. Cities sell their land - e.g., via the neoliberal grip that is now being marketed as ‘the Copenhagen model’. This divestment is a drastic curtailment of the democratic territorial power and of the potential dynamics that naturally follow, if the ground of the city is a common good.
To keep the game running the dominant blind growth paradigm based on stacking units, credits and profits is being repackaged as – ‘CO2-friendly big cities’, ‘liveability cities’ and so on – to keep the game going with more of the same, much more, higher and higher – denser and denser - more and more expensive.
The citizens – including those who have been pushed out of the city where they grew up but cannot afford to live any longer – have gained many living experiences with this 'hell' and will no longer accept the commercialization of their city and the loss of their last sanctuaries. Why keep on accumulating stressful times and a stressed economy while the great biosphere is in a process of mass extinction and the common climatic space are threatened by burnout?
Yet, on this edge, they have nevertheless got the hang of the possible 'non-hell'.
This continues with questions.
WHAT IF, we the citizens (in the broad sense of the word) collectively unfolded our creation in a transformation of the city's environments and social relations? Not as a compulsion, but as a basic quality of life in relation with the non-human nature?
What if we owned the land and the city we live in?
What if our neighborhood assemblies made plans for what was to happen here?
What if the economy developed democratically, circularly, as a common good?
What if we shared this freedom with the non-human nature and invited them to have a voice in a common democratic space?
Many might think that the above is not possible and will instead insist on ‘the realistic’, but precisely this ‘realism’ may be the worst enemy of necessity! Freed from the ‘realistic’ status quo, the imagination can be stimulated to both the profound systemic changes and to the immediate reforms.
In my book Byernes Jord (The Land of the Cities) I have a utopian opening chapter about the free Copenhagen in the next society after the great transformation with radical reforms for land as a common good, ecological urbanization and participating democracy:
“The major reforms made everything simpler but at the same time more challenging because we entered a new country where we could decide for ourselves. It was new to us. Of course, some of the benefits we had already seen before. But we must also admit that several mature opportunities were in our blind spot. They were blurred and maintained by old thought figures. Once they were destroyed, it swarmed with initiatives that called for realization. At the same time as the development of the city as a free space took place, the limitations of the cadastral society appeared shamefully clear.” [1]
[1] Schultz Jørgensen, Peter (2019) Byernes Jord. Bogværket, page 393
Photo: Naraa .in.ub/Unsplash