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The neighbours are our best barricades. (Naboerne er vores bedste barrikader.)

Popular Slogan, Nørrebro Residents Association

(housing activist group active in Copenhagen, 1973–80)

Squatting has always been a mode of confrontation. If you want to change something, you have to not only engage in confrontations but also provoke them.

Amsterdam squatter¹

On 29 April 1980, a children’s adventure and activity playground on the corner of Stengade and Slotsgade in the working-class district of Nørrebro in Copenhagen was demolished in a major police operation. The playground known as ‘Byggeren’ (slang for a ‘place to build’) was squatted in June 1973 by activists from the Nørrebro Beboeraktion (NB), a grassroots tenant association that had been formed a few months earlier to challenge the planned urban redevelopment of the neighbourhood.² Over 800 police officers were deployed to provide support to the work squad whose bulldozers crashed into the makeshift structures erected on the site. A number of activists had, however, climbed on top of the structures to protest their destruction. They fell to the ground as the roofs caved in and were forced to scramble away to avoid being run over by the bulldozers.³

Local residents and activists responded to the brutal tactics adopted by the police by erecting a series of barricades in the streets. A city bus was commandeered and placed sideways across an intersection to block traffic, its tyres deflated. Containers from a number of building sites were also used, with banners draped across them reading ‘Police out of Nørrebro – Byggeren will never surrender’ (‘politet ud af Nørrebro – Byggeren overgiver sig aldrig’). In the street fighting that ensued, the police were driven out of the neighbourhood.⁴ The playground was carefully rebuilt during the night, only for it to be destroyed again a few days later in another major police operation. As one activist recalled:

We were beaten up by the police; they followed us up the stairways and inside the flats; they drove down the streets on their motorcycles randomly beating up people with their clubs. A legally assembled protest demonstration was violently smashed – people were held isolated for weeks in prison … It was civil war in Nørrebro.⁵

What became known as the ‘Battle of Byggeren’ (‘Slaget om Byggere’) led to a series of violent confrontations with the police over the next two weeks. A number of protesters and officers were injured. Several arrests were made.⁶

At the same time as the Copenhagen police were busy demolishing a playground, a few hundred miles away in Amsterdam a group of squatters were making the final preparations for a day of action to mark the coronation of Queen Beatrice. The coronation was, by law, required to take place in Amsterdam. While authorities were planning a day of national celebration, they were worried about the threat of disruption from the city’s growing and increasingly radical squatters’ movement. It was, after all, only a month earlier that tanks had rolled on to the streets of the city as part of an operation to evict a squat on the Vondelstraat.⁷

For their part, the squatters’ movement declared April to be a month of action under the slogan ‘no housing, no coronation’ (‘Geen woning, geen kroning’). What this meant in practical terms was twofold. The squatters planned, on the one hand, to use the campaign to draw further attention to an ongoing housing crisis in Amsterdam. On the other hand, they saw the coronation as an opportunity to ‘crack’ and squat as many houses across the city as possible.

Some squatters, however, were unsatisfied with the tactics adopted by the wider movement and advocated a more aggressive and confrontational approach. A group calling itself the Autonomen (Autonomists) began circulating (anonymously) a flyer across the city advocating a ‘day of action’ (‘aktiedag’) on 30 April 1980. The flyer itself included pictures of Beatrice superimposed on bombs, a reference perhaps to the smoke bombs which disrupted her wedding in 1966. A second poster appeared a few weeks later calling for a demonstration ‘with effects’.

Most squatters were at pains to distance themselves from the proposed demonstration, which nevertheless went ahead despite police efforts to lock down the city. It sparked a series of violent riots that drew in a large crowd, many of whom were not squatters. The ‘Coronation Riots’ lasted well into the night and were some of the worst that Amsterdam had ever seen, prompting widespread public condemnation. Over forty arrests were made, none of whom were connected to the squatters’ movement in the city. Thirteen were later convicted.⁸

The ‘Battle of Byggeren’ and the ‘Coronation Riots’ are events that have come to occupy an important place within the history of squatting in Copenhagen and Amsterdam respectively. Social historians often remind us that riots are insurrectionary moments of crisis.⁹ They throw into sharp relief the breakdown of wider economic, social and political structures. They also tell us something about their participants and the various populations and movements from which they emerge. ‘To act,’ as one leading scholar of protest has recently concluded, ‘is not just to do something, it is to be something.’¹⁰

To ‘be’ a squatter in Copenhagen or Amsterdam in April 1980 increasingly meant that one was also part of a wider social movement with all its achievements, goals and routines as well as its disappointments, disagreements and losses. For squatters, events such as the ‘Battle of Byggeren’ and the ‘Coronation Riots’ helped both to shape and to question the activist identities that they collectively shared. At the same time, these were events that did not work on the basis of any single vision of social change.¹¹ To be in a movement was to be part of a complex process that challenged how a city could be imagined, lived and ordered differently. The squats set up by activists in Copenhagen and Amsterdam were more than spaces simply to live. They were sites of radical possibility and promise as well as sources of intense despair and disappointment. These were, finally, spaces whose histories have also helped us to understand how an urban social movement comes into being, develops, and later falters and declines.¹²

Social movements are usually seen as a form of ‘contentious politics’ characterised by sustained campaigns of ‘claim-making’ that, in turn, depend on an array of performances and practices. These are often claims to the rightful assertion of specific identities and the exercise of alternative social and political programmes.¹³ In the case of squatting, the story in Copenhagen and Amsterdam begins in the 1960s as young people across the United States and Europe started to move in and occupy classrooms, university departments, parks, factories and abandoned houses in order to create free spaces for alternative living but also, in many cases, to meet immediate needs around housing.¹⁴ The first occupation of a house in Copenhagen began on 24 February 1963, and was undertaken by a small radical anti-imperialist and socialist organisation known as Gruppe 61, who were active in the Danish campaign for nuclear disarmament.¹⁵

A couple of years later, a row of condemned seventeenth-century houses near Christianshavns Square were occupied by a group of young people. The squatters were successful in negotiating an agreement with the owner of the houses. They were allowed to occupy the houses, forming an autonomous community that numbered between 100 and 150 people. The community was known as the Republic of Sofiegården after the street on which it was located. The houses were finally cleared in 1969 and 1970 by the police. Some of the former residents became involved in the development of student housing, though many turned to the squatting of abandoned flats and buildings in Copenhagen.¹⁶

The city’s first squatter movement (Slumstoermerbevægelesen) was, in this way, born. Building on a combination of radical youth subcultures and DIY practices, the early wave of squatters in Copenhagen and elsewhere in Denmark were known as slumstormers (Slumstormere) and included students, activists, runaways and former drug offenders. They occupied abandoned houses and set up a series of utopian experiments and hippie-inspired communities (Hudegården, Jægergården, Stengården, Fredensgården, Tømrergården, etc).¹⁷ There were admittedly other squatters who, in this context, were active as early as 1966 and were based in the old working-class neighbourhood of Nørrebro studying as apprentices at the local bricklaying college. By the end of the decade they were widely seen as part of a citywide movement which was starting to find its feet.¹⁸