Page - 43 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

43 (re)forming Vienna’s culture of resistance with a monofunctional development — as well as the bu- reaucratic, centralized reinforcement that made it possible, was contested on a number of fronts. Most of all this policy for renewal did not provide help for the pressing problem of providing housing because the new subsidized housing was more than the rents in the old buildings that had been torn down, and putting the construction out to tender on contracts the city was paying for encouraged speculation on apartments and letting them stand empty.] (Mayer 2012, 44) Public policy encouraged owners to let their buildings fall apart so that they would receive public funds to replace them with something more “modern,” leading to the organization of pro- tests. In 1965 students in Amsterdam occupied buildings to prevent them from being demolished; in 1968 young people in Zürich fought police in the streets to try to get the site set to become Switzerland’s first shopping center turned into an au- tonomously governed social center (Sedlmaier 2014, 205), while in 1971 abandoned military barracks and ramparts in the Chris- tiania section of Copenhagen were moved into by people inter- ested in creating a self-governing, economically self-sustaining “freetown,” which still exists, although residents were forced in 2012 to buy, that is, take out a mortgage to purchase, the land they had been living on for over forty years.6 Other notable early protests occurred in West Berlin, where “the early squats, the Georg-von-Rauch-Haus (December 1971) and the Tommy- Weisbecker-Haus (March 1973), were named after two members of “Movement 2 June” who had been killed in shootouts with the police” (Sedlmaier 2014, 206); in Frankfurt in 1972–73, when ten houses in the posh west end were “politisch besetzt” [“occupied for political reasons”]; and in Hamburg in 1973, when some 200 youths occupied a house in the Ekhofstraße for five weeks to turn it into a much needed “‘Studenten-, Lehrlings- und Gas- tarbeiterwohnhaus’ und Begegungszentrum” [“‘apartments for 6 The lengthy Wikipedia entry on “Freetown Christiania” offers a useful overview of the history of this development.