Creative, colorful and unique city: Keep Copenhagen Weird

Christiania. Kødbyen. Slussen. Refshaløen. These places are ugly to some eyes and beautiful to others.

Distortion. Pride. Copenhell. Jazz festival. These parties are noise to some ears and music to others.

The rich. The poor. Immigrants. Expats. Tourists. Jutlanders. Danes. Hippies. Hipsters. Families. The old. The young. Construction Workers. IT consultants. Bottle collectors. Copenhagen is for none of us and all of us.

If we make Copenhagen into a city where you don’t find anything ugly, a city where you don’t find anything noisy, a city where you aren’t annoyed by anyone, then we will have failed. Because then we have made it a boring city.

You can’t plan culture, but you can kill culture with bad city planning

In city hall, I want to enable Copenhagen to grow and thrive as a cultural powerhouse. This means more art on the streets, more nightlife, more music venues, more cultural subsidy (“kulturtilskud”), and more free time for people to enjoy it all. It also means protecting the quirky, alternative, and underground spaces that may not generate measurable income but export creativity and make Copenhagen a cool city. I obviously don’t know them all and many may prefer not to be named on a politician’s website, but to illustrate what I’m talking about, I can say that Copenhagen became a poorer city when Den Flydende By sank.

Copenhagen’s Culture Houses are fantastic. They are not a replacement for unplanned underground chaotic sources of creativity like Flydende By that ultimately push the boundaries, but they are fantastic at facilitating the development of ideas as they slowly grow more mainstream, and at giving Copenhageners access to music, art, and events. You can’t plan culture, but Copenhagen’s investment in Culture Houses is a clear example that you can plan for culture. Unfortunately, we’ve recently seen too much of the opposite.

The development of Copenhagen’s newer neighborhoods in Ørestad, Sydhavn and Nordhavn have rightly received critique for unaffordable housing and too few spaces for culture and recreation. And the city has been slowly stealing more and more land from nature, one bite at a time, with the most aggregious examples being the Fælledbyen development in the nature reserve Amager Fælled and the artificial island Lynetteholm, under which guise countless tons of untreated dirt contaminated with chemical waste is being dumped into the channel connecting the Baltic Sea to the world’s oceans. A big driver of this is ultimately a development model whereby the municipally owned company, By & Havn, has run the show with a mandate to pay off the city’s debt, including new debt to finance the metro. Some parties are now promising to dismantle By & Havn without specifying what would take its place. But don’t be fooled: A change of name without a change of model won’t solve anything. I want to change By & Havn’s mandate to include social, environmental, and economic sustainability, as well as a goal of maintaining and growing the city’s cultural potential. I also back Maskinhuset, a proposed project for a Culture House on the remaining development in Sydhavn.

Meanwhile, we need to protect our remaining nature in Copenhagen. Expansion at our green and blue planet’s expense is an addictive habit that humanity has to kick while there is still some nature left. I also promise to uphold the “bevar eller forklar” principle that no building should be demolished without a good reason, because giving the CO2-intensity of construction, the most sustainable building is almost always the building that’s already standing, but also because demolition erases history and culture. This means, for example, preserving the iconic movie theater Palads, which we the municipality should buy and turn into a Culture House now that its owner does not want to keep operating it.

A weird city is a city that people want to come to, for better or worse – so how do we stay open and welcoming, preserve our culture, without driving up the prices? The answer is to expand Copenhagen organically to its north, west and south, creating new thriving urban spaces that compete with and complement the inner city (see Housing for Copenhagen)

Fighting for your right to party

Turning the former shipbuilding facilities on Refshaløen into the city’s semi-isolated cultural playground was a stroke of genius. It is fantastic that we can have big festivals like the Distortion Finale, CopenHell, and O-days on Refshaløen, a twenty minute bikeride from the center that somehow feels very far from the city. I am against building housing on Refshaløen, because I fear that would be the beginning of the end of those festivals, as well as jems like Copenhagen Contemporary, Reffen, and Teaterøen.

As an amateur jazz pianist, I have a special love of Copenhagen’s music scene. I’ve played countless concerts with a Balkan Klezmer band called “Gadekryds” (literally street cross, describing a mixed-race dog but also meaning basterd), as well as a Flamenco/pop/jazz band called “Los Kaminantes” (misspelling intentional) in the city’s collectives, street parties and a few music venues. I’ve also consumed music religiously, having been a regular at both Den Hvide Lam (pictured) and Christiania Jazzklub, and now an all-access member at the global music venue Alice. I am proud that Copenhagen’s music scene is known throughout the world, and want to facilitated this. City Hall should be willing to sometimes say “that’s how it is – that’s part of the implicit social contract of living in a cultural city.”

A person wrote to me because he liked my anti-car stance but wanted to check before casting a personal vote that I would support getting the Distortion street party off his street. I told him that it is precisely the transformed of residential neighborhoods into festival spaces that gives distortion its magic, and if his priority was keeping that out of his back yard, then I was probably not his candidate.

Yes, there need to be limits. But nightlife and festivals are not just a decadent pastime of a hedonistic youth that should get real jobs – they are part of the engine for inspiration and transformation that give life its flavours. I want that in my city.