Børnemagt/children’s power in the Freetown of Christiania: citizenship, agency and vulnerability

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to the field of research on children and citizenship, by analysing retrospective narratives about experiences of Børnemagt (Children’s Power) in the Freetown of Christiania, Denmark, in the 1970s and 1980s, focusing on strategies for agency and rights, as well as on vulnerabilities. Power relations regarding age and space are used as analytical tools. Runaway children from harsh backgrounds found a refuge in Christiania and tried to take charge of their own lives after rejecting the care they had received from adults and societal institutions earlier in life. The freedom experienced in Christiania supported the young people in their elaboration of citizenship, at the same time as the attitude of ‘leaving the children to their own devices’ excluded them from a citizenship based on interdependency and interrelationality. Vulnerability, it is argued, is a constitutive element of citizenship that needs to be further elaborated within this field of research.

KEYWORDS:

• Abject citizenship
• ambiguous agency
• vulnerability
• age
• space
• Børnemagt/Christiania

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Linda Soneryd, Håkan Thörn, Madeleine Tönnies and the peer reviewers for constructive and helpful comments on this manuscript, and Irene Elmerot and Malcolm Barry for language check.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Cathrin Wasshede http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8525-2570

Notes

1. The information about Børnemagt mostly comes from personal communication with people in the Freetown and from interviews made for the research project about the inner city as public sphere (see ‘Methodological Discussions’).

2. Christiania is not only an abject place, it is situated in the centre of Denmark’s capital city and is also considered attractive.

3. Compare this with Sweden where it was made illegal in 1979.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond under grant [P2008-0679:1-E]; and Svenska Forskningsrådet Formas under grant [250-2008-1081].