When it comes to solutions for combating climate change, Scandinavian countries are often perceived in the collective mind as leaders. Myth or reality? The story of two Scandinavian “green experiments”, each on a different scale and trajectory, helps to better understand the nuances.  

Fristaden Christiania (“Freetown Christiania”) was born in the 1970s under the impetus of citizens in a neighbourhood of the Danish capital city of Copenhagen. This internationally known commune was built outside capitalist and consumerist society. Malmö, about 30 kilometres away across the Baltic sea in southern Sweden, took a different trajectory in the 1990s, becoming a model “sustainable city” thanks to ambitious public policies.  

While often held up as examples to follow, Christiania is today facing touristification while Malmö grapples with significant social inequality. What can we learn from their trajectories?  

A model of self-governance 

 Initially located on the 34-hectare site of the former Danish army barracks at Bådsmandsstræde, Christiania was founded by around 50 people in 1971, spurred by Denmark’s housing crisis. After the group destroyed the barracks’ fences, Jacob Lugvidsen, a journalist close to the Dutch protest and libertarian movement Provo, wrote an article announcing the opening of Christiania’s “free town”, and inviting people to join it. 

Its charter, co-written by Ludvigsen and other occupants, defines its operation as a self-managed intentional community: “Christiania’s aim is to create a self-managed society in which every individual feels responsible for the wellbeing of the entire community. Our society must be economically self-sufficient, and we must never deviate from our belief that physical and psychological misery can be avoided,” the charter reads. 

Christiania was thus built and organised on the fringes of Danish society around the principles of self-sufficiency, tolerance, freedom, and well-being. The way the town functions is largely influenced by anarchist thought – even if few of its inhabitants identify themselves as anarchists – with its own assemblies and rules. Christiania has its own flag and anthem, Det Internationale Sigøjner Kompagni – I Kan Ikke Slå Os Ihjel (“You cannot kill us”). Private cars, weapons, bullet-proof vests, camping, and hard drugs are all banned, whereas the sale of cannabis has long been tolerated on the famous Pusher Street. In recent years, however, this has increasingly become a source of conflict with the authorities, following episodes of violence between gangs. Residents have also taken action to prevent Christiania from turning into a haven for drug dealers. 

Christiania’s exceptional history has partly made it a victim of its own success. Between 500,000 and 1 million people visit the “prototype anarchist city” every year, which increasingly looks like an alternative Disneyland.

The free town functions as a “mini-city”, with its own housing, a rubbish/recycling unit independent of municipal services, and its own industrial, craft, commercial, cultural, and theatrical activities. 

To carry the model of the free city beyond the neighbourhood, some residents also ran for office. Tine Schmedes, for instance, was elected to the Copenhagen City Council in 1974 on behalf of the Women’s List; she was sent out at the first council meeting for breastfeeding her child. 

Touristification and resistance 

Today, around 1000 people still live in Christiania. However, the free town has been facing a number of difficulties over the last few years, including conflict with local authorities and the police, gentrification, and overtourism. 

In the early 2000s, conservative-liberal Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen wanted to put a definitive end to the tolerance that had protected the sale of cannabis in Christiania for over thirty years. Over the years, the Danish government has constantly sought to regularise the “illegal” occupation of the site, largely citing drug trafficking to justify its dismantling. The first house was demolished in 2007, leading to a heated protest and conflict with the police.  

Evicting Christiania’s inhabitants, however, is a tricky business for the Danish government. As well as having to find a way to rehouse all the residents, several hundred of them receive social assistance at a particularly low cost to the state due to lower rent. In the event of eviction and rehousing, this assistance would have to be increased to pay for more expensive market rents. 

Government pressure during the fifty years of land occupation led to the creation of a foundation by the Christiania community. In 2012, this foundation succeeded in buying back 7.7 hectares of the original 34 hectares, or 20 per cent. Residents now pay rent to the government and are forced to submit to individual ownership, a principle they initially opposed. The state considers each resident as an individual with his or her own bills and taxes to pay, rather than as a collective of individuals.  

The gradual dismantling of Christiania ended in 2013, with the abolition of the state of exception that had applied there since 1971. This marked the end of forty years of social and political experimentation. The district is now subject to the same laws as the rest of Denmark. 

Today, Christiania’s exceptional history has partly made it a victim of its own success. Between 500,000 and 1 million people visit the “prototype anarchist city” every year, which increasingly looks like an alternative Disneyland, far removed from its original ideals. Concerts and theatrical performances are organised every week. Many tourists continue to buy and consume cannabis, despite the presence of numerous police officers. 

From industrial to sustainable city? 

While Christiania was developed on a neighbourhood scale and under citizen initiative, in Malmö it was public institutions that implemented ambitious public policies to transform the industrial city into a model “sustainable city”.  

With an economy based on the herring trade from the 14th century onwards, Malmö became a major industrial port in the 20th century, thanks to its shipyards, concrete factories, and textile industry. The oil crisis of the 1970s, the recession of the 1990s, and the closing in 1991 of a Saab plant that had been set up less than two years earlier all had a severe impact on the local economic fabric. By the early 1990s, unemployment had risen to 12.4 per cent, forcing the town to radically change course. 

In 1995 and 1999, the Øresund railway bridge and the tunnel linking Malmö to Copenhagen were built. This new link boosted the economy by attracting both tourists and companies originally located in the Danish capital. In 1998, the city continued its transformation by building the University of Malmö on part of the former shipyard. Today, the campus is home to 24,000 students who, together with the 40,000 students at the nearby University of Lund, make this area a dynamic academic hub. 

Malmö is also regarded as a sustainable city. Sweden is famous for its Koloniträdgårdar, family gardens which since the 19th century have enabled apartment dwellers to have a small plot of land and grow their own fruit and vegetables. This system proved particularly useful during the two world wars, guaranteeing food for many households. 

While these gardens still exist, the city wanted to go one step further in distancing its image from that of an industrial city. As part of the 2001 European Housing Exposition devoted to the city of the future, urban planner Klas Tham and the municipal authorities transformed polluted former docks into an eco-district called Bo01. Also known as the “City of Tomorrow”, this eco-district was the first in the world to be fully powered by renewable energy. Disused factories, warehouses, and industrial areas were replaced with 1,300 homes, workplaces, bicycle paths, a rainwater collection system, green spaces (also on the rooftops), the Turning Torso skyscraper, solar panels, and a selective sorting system that produces natural gas from household organic waste.  

This project was the first in a vast operation to rehabilitate the 140-hectare Västra Hamnen district, located on the western side of the former industrial port, and has attracted fresh attention to the city. Other eco-neighbourhoods are springing up in Malmö, such as the eco-city in the working-class district of Augustenborg, which has developed a major urban renewal programme with the participation of residents and the public and private sectors. 

Green policies didn’t stop there. In 2015, Malmö became the first Swedish city to commit to the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and it aims to be carbon-neutral by 2030, 20 years ahead of current EU goals. The city also boasts more than 400 kilometres of bicycle paths and Europe’s largest biogas plant, recycling most of its solid waste and transforming it into fuel for buses and cars. 

The limits of ecological and social policies 

Despite its green reputation, Malmö is one of Sweden’s poorest cities and is marked by significant social inequalities. Its location in southern Sweden makes it the gateway for immigration into the country – starting with waves of Yugoslav, Sudanese, and Iraqi migrants in the 1990s and 2000s, and more recently Syrians and Ukrainians. Around 30 per cent of the population is Muslim. 

In recent years, however, Sweden has drastically rethought its asylum policy. The government which took power in October 2022, made up of a centre-right coalition (moderates, liberals, and Christian Democrats), and supported by the far-right Sweden Democrats – a party founded by neo-Nazis in 1988 – has radically transformed the country’s image as a land of welcome. The Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP), which has long run the Malmö City Council, is still in power through a coalition with the liberals. But in the 2022 elections, the far-right won 10 of the 61 seats, prompting the municipality to implement an increasingly restrictive migration policy. 

When it comes to the climate, Malmö remains a city in a wealthy country, with a per capita carbon footprint of nine tonnes of CO2 equivalent, well short of the two-tonne target required by the Paris Agreement. 

While conflict with public institutions has prevented Christiania from sustaining itself over time, Malmö lacks radicalism due to insufficient citizen support.

Despite insufficient ecological and social policies, Swedes retain a high level of confidence in the political class, as illustrated by the low abstention rate in the last parliamentary elections (less than 16 per cent, compared with 28 per cent in the second round of France’s 2022 presidential election, for example). This context of functional representative democracy complicates the emergence of radical currents of thought on ecological, social, and democratic issues in a country where voters have a high standard of living, and where the poorest sections of the population are invisible. 

Collectives campaigning 

Several collectives are well aware of the limits of the city’s and the country’s ecological and social policies, and have tried to bring about far-reaching changes. 

A case in point is Allt åt alla, a collective born in 2009 out of extra-parliamentary radical left-wing and anti-fascist movements, and a member of the European Municipalist Network, which defines itself as a social union. Unlike a trade union, the social union is not organised around the workplace, but around all aspects of daily life, without defining itself as a party.  

Today, the collective is present in Sweden’s four largest cities: Malmö, Gothenburg, Stockholm, and Uppsala. In Malmö, the story of Allt åt alla began in 2009, following a wave of housing deprivation that led to a movement of house occupiers. Allt åt alla supported the protest movement, demanding the right to the city and housing for all citizens. Then, faced with the rise of the far-right in the city and across the country, the collective joined demonstrations against the Sweden Democrats.  

Migration has become a new priority for the collective. Allt åt alla Malmö helped to set up and run a reception camp for refugees in the middle of the city. The 200-strong camp highlighted the state’s shortcomings in welcoming refugees, as well as the growing inequalities caused by gentrification in the city centre. 

Today, Allt åt alla Malmö is made up of some sixty people who support various campaigns: the creation of the SVARM magazine and Radio ÅT ALLA, social centre projects in the city’s poorest neighbourhoods, a campaign against the Swedish supermarket chain ICA, support for the revolution in Rojava in collaboration with the Rojavakommittéerna collective, and more. 

Other movements are trying to radically change the system by driving democratisation from below. Such is the case of Democratic Transition, an organisation based in several Swedish cities, including Malmö. The collective’s aim is to drive radical change in society by multiplying the tools and initiatives of participatory democracy at local level, enabling citizens to reclaim political power. Although Malmö’s Democratic Transition group is recent, its six active members are involved in a variety of projects.  

In 2022, they helped translate the Fearless Cities guide into Swedish. Written in the wake of the Fearless Cities gathering in Barcelona in 2017, and co-authored by over 140 people from 19 different countries, the guide is designed as a toolbox; it lists best practices for setting up a municipalist platform, drafting a participatory manifesto, obtaining funding, and winning local elections. This translation gave rise earlier this year to the creation of study circles open to all in Malmö to read and discuss the book. The idea is to follow this with a tour of Sweden to discuss the translated book in other cities. 

The aim of these workshops is to help spread the culture of municipalism and radical democracy among the people of Malmö and Sweden. The Allt åt alla Malmö collective also plan to put its knowledge into practice by writing political proposals for the next municipal elections in 2026. 

A tale of two cities 

Sources of hope and disillusionment, Malmö and Christiania, with their different scales and trajectories, both face specific limitations. 

Originally created and self-managed by citizens, Christiania has never succeeded in fully emancipating itself from the outside world, and is now in danger of becoming an amusement park. 

Malmö for its part remains a city with many inequalities and social problems to which public policies have failed to respond.  

While conflict with public institutions has prevented Christiania from sustaining itself over time, Malmö lacks radicalism due to insufficient citizen support. Above all, these two examples highlight the need for a two-pronged approach which includes both citizens’ movements – to drive forward a political direction that takes account of ecological, social and democratic urgency – and public authorities – to ensure the concrete implementation of ambitious, long-term policies.