On 26 September 1971, Christiania was born inside an abandoned military complex in Copenhagen. But it was not quite a case of hundreds of squatters arriving together one morning and seizing a barracks.

The process had already begun months earlier. The Danish military had been withdrawing from Bådsmandsstræde Barracks between 1967 and 1971, leaving a large area of buildings and open land in Christianshavn without any clear plan for what would happen to it. On 18 May 1971, people from the surrounding neighbourhood broke through the fence and created an adventure playground for local children.

Over the summer and autumn, squatters began moving into the empty barracks themselves. Then the alternative newspaper Hovedbladet publicised the occupation under the headline “Emigrate with bus number 8”, encouraging people who wanted an alternative way of living to come to the site. More followed.

Christiania  grew rather than appearing all at once, but 26 September 1971 became its official founding date. The occupied barracks were turned into the Freetown Christiania: a self-governing community built around communal responsibility, collective decision-making and a rejection of many of the normal rules governing housing and property.

The state tried to remove it almost immediately

Christiania’s unusual position was never based on the residents owning the land. The Danish state did.

That distinction explains much of what happened over the next forty years.

At first, the government tried to find a temporary accommodation agreement with the squatters. In May 1972, the Ministry of Defence and Christiania’s residents agreed on temporary use of the state’s land and buildings. The following year the government said Christiania could remain for another three years.

Then it changed course.

In 1976, the Ministry of Defence began legal proceedings to clear the settlement. Christiania fought the case, but in February 1978 the Danish Supreme Court upheld an order for Christiania to be cleared.

And then something unusual happened: the eviction still did not take place.

Instead, parliament decided that a development plan should be prepared for the area. Christiania remained where it was, still occupying state property but increasingly treated as a political and planning problem that could not simply be solved by sending everyone away.

A temporary arrangement that lasted for decades

That became the pattern.

Christiania was not an independent territory, and its residents did not acquire ownership simply because they had occupied the site for years. But governments repeatedly created arrangements that allowed the community to continue while arguing over its long-term future.

In 1989, parliament passed the Christiania Law, giving the area a special legal framework. In 1991, the Ministry of Defence entered into another agreement recognising Christiania’s collective right to use the area.

So the free town existed in an unusual middle ground. Its residents ran much of their community themselves, but the ground underneath them still belonged to the Danish state.

That compromise began to unravel in the 2000s. The government revised the Christiania Law in 2004 as part of an attempt to end the special arrangement and establish a permanent system of ownership and regulation.

Christiania fought back in court, but in February 2011 the Danish Supreme Court upheld a 2009 ruling rejecting the residents’ claimed rights over the area.

After forty years, the legal position was difficult to avoid: Christiania had built a community on the land, but it did not own the land.

So Christiania created something it had never needed before: a landlord

The landlord, however, would effectively be Christiania itself.

Following the Supreme Court defeat, residents negotiated a settlement with the Danish state. On 22 June 2011, the two sides reached an agreement under which a new foundation would buy some parts of Christiania and lease others.

Contemporary reporting described the land and buildings in the purchase arrangement as being valued at 76.2 million kroner, alongside millions of kroner a year in rent and additional financial obligations.

The residents then created Fonden Fristaden Christiania, the Foundation Freetown Christiania. Crucially, individual residents were not buying plots and turning the free town into an ordinary collection of privately owned houses. The foundation would hold the property on behalf of the community.

When the agreements finally took effect on 1 July 2012, the division was very specific.
The foundation became the owner of just over seven hectares of Christiania, including most of its existing buildings. The Danish state retained ownership of other parts of the enclave, with the foundation taking responsibility for maintaining state-owned buildings there.

The first major payment was 51.8 million kroner in July 2012, financed largely through a mortgage after residents and supporters had also raised money by selling symbolic “Christiania Shares.”

They did not buy independence. They bought security

That distinction is what makes the deal interesting.

Christiania did not purchase all 34 hectares and become some legally independent patch of Copenhagen. Nor did the Danish government simply give up its claim to the property.

Instead, the two sides turned forty years of ambiguity into an ordinary legal structure.

Christiania’s foundation owned one part of the enclave. It leased most of the rest from the state. It assumed responsibility for buildings, infrastructure, maintenance and other obligations. And in 2013, the special Christiania Law was finally repealed, meaning the same general Danish laws applied there as elsewhere.

That makes the ending more paradoxical than the simplified version of the story.

Christiania had begun when people occupied government property without permission and tried to build a community outside ordinary ideas of ownership and planning. Forty years later, after repeated attempts to remove or regulate them and several trips through the courts, their way of securing that community was to create a foundation, take out financing, buy part of the land and sign leases for the rest.

They did not defeat the Danish state and they did not acquire the whole free town outright. They did something more practical: they created a legal structure strong enough to keep Christiania where it was.