Normalizing Christiania: Project Clean Sweep and the Normalization Plan in Copenhagen

In 1971 a group of activists moved into a vacated military base near downtown Copenhagen and created an oppositional community. Named “Christiania,” this community began as a squat and is now a thriving community of artists, academics, activists and self‐labeled social losers. For thirty‐eight years Christiania has been a space of cultural critique and alterity in the center of Copenhagen. However, in 2002 the newly elected neoliberal‐conservative government decided to “normalize” Christiania by privatizing its cooperative businesses and communally owned housing. Within this specific historical context, I present normalization as a strategy where coercive, spatial and rhetorical practices are employed by the state in order to legitimize Christiania's closure. A police raid and a state report are used as examples of how Foucault's notion of normalization is enacted “on the ground” in a contemporary historical context, and how normalization is responded to by Christiania's residents.