The Floating Community

The Floating Community is a festival-like book about a spontaneously evolved and self-organized community, known as both the Harbor of Peace and the Pirate Harbor, located in the central parts of Copenhagen, next to Christiania. Here, a number of diverse people, who don’t fit into the rigid modern city, have created their own dwellings on the water. The floating community is constantly evolving as the result of some kind of collective creativity. It embodies a disorder, which the urban sociologist Richard Sennett has said is essential for our development as human beings, and which is what the city is supposed to offer. The floating community share many characteristics with the sea-nomadic cultures that once existed throughout the world, who attempted to live in harmony with nature, but were eliminated by modern western culture, which attempts to control nature and other cultures. The struggle with the authorities about the right to live a different life in the city is not only about access to urban resources, but, as the urban theorist David Harvey has pointed out, about the right to change the city – and thereby ourselves. The book is based on 3 years of action research on site and created in close collaboration with current and former residents. It includes illustrations of the art (art brut) they create and the way they live (off-grid), small permaculture experiments and simple low-tech solutions, the mapping of its development, as well as studies of other nomadic cultures around the world.