The rankings for most livable city on earth have been led by the usual suspects, in differing order, for the last decade: Vancouver, Zürich, Geneva. This year a couple of other European cities began to make inroads, not old favourites Paris or London – too expensive, too overdeveloped and too prone to violence – including Copenhagen, the beautiful Danish capital immortalized by Danny Kaye as Hans Christian Andersen in the most absurd film biography ever made. Hans Christian Andersen had as many dark sides to his ultra-neurotic personality as anyone you could imagine and it is precisely these descents into a threatening and dangerous underworld that characterize his greatest works, apparently simple fairy tales that are full of deadly threats to any kind of attempt to discover a kitschy Disney paradise in Wonderful Wonderful Copenhagen.
On the weekend wonderful Copenhagen erupted into the kind of social violence that you could never imagine happening in other leading European pretenders to the most livable city throne, Stockholm and Munich, cities that my brother and I would be happy to place in competition with Vancouver. They would certainly lose due to the unmatchable splendour of the wilderness within easy reach of Vancouver, not to mention its own waterfront, but they have plenty to offer before they fall behind, one of those things being the relative serenity of their societies. Citizens of Stockholm and München do not find it necessary to challenge the police in ritualistic semi-warfare, as do the citizens of Berlin or Paris, but increasingly such events are becoming established in Copenhagen. On the weekend it was 1000 youths once again engaging the undermanned Copenhagen police force in a running battle featuring tear gas and non-lethal weapons. And once again, the Danish police could not really control crowds looking for trouble. This time it was once again demonstrations recalling the anniversary of the tearing down of a youth centre. Previously it had been violent, even fatal, bouts with the motorcycle gangs or neo-Nazis, and then there are the ongoing semi-violent confrontations concerning the somewhat off-limits alternate settlement of Christania. Copenhagen’s most unruly group may in the long run however turn out to be its large Muslim minority, which is feeling increasingly alienated in a way that is not the case in neighbouring Sweden. If this nasty uneasy relationship continues to sour, Copenhagen will end up light years away from the Danny Kaye version of it.