Look at the street for a moment, before we look at the boxes.
The buildings behind were raised by people who assumed someone would inherit it, and therefore they took care - they aligned the windows in rhythm, hung the doors on ironwork that still bears weight, and let the facades follow proportions the eye settles into without needing to know why. Two hundred years later it still stands there, and the only thing we've managed to do with it is place something in front.
And here is the contribution.
The Red-Green Alliance's beautification of Copenhagen.
One must acknowledge the ambition. To take a street that already worked, and improve it by filling it with planter boxes cobbled together in a woodshop class where the teacher was clearly blind, and where the only template available was a screenshot from Minecraft, requires a form of courage that only the completely insensate possess.
And as the only creative gesture in the entire installation, they've smeared some yellow stripes across the asphalt, paint spread without meaning or measure. Just noise. It's clearly meant as… joy. But it mostly resembles a smiley drawn on a parking ticket.
It rests in an aesthetic we know. It's the same taste that once found it most beautiful to tear the old down, and whose finest icon is still the country that managed to starve half its population to death while casting enormous clumsy monuments in concrete in honour of the achievement. The craftsmanship is executed by the same vintage that believes the proper treatment of a historically perfect bust is to throw it in the harbour. And it shows. There hasn't been an hour more put into the box than into the contempt for what stood there before.
As urban space it achieves nothing, and as a street it destroys what worked. The car, the bicycle and the pedestrian are squeezed into the same narrowed remainder, where no one knows any longer who should yield to whom, and the only thing that sort reliably produces is more friction between people. The delivery van can't reach the shop, the craftsman can't stop, and the citizen who was supposed to sit and enjoy it quickly discovers that one doesn't enjoy a pallet of soil placed in the middle of nothing.
Because it fits. Not into the city, not into life, not into any Human. But into a spreadsheet. A field somewhere in a spreadsheet at Copenhagen Municipality shifts colour from red to green, a target figure is reached, an Equality has on paper occurred, and a person can lean back in a satisfaction… that none of those who actually live there will come to share.
Imagine someone who in a hundred years digs this up. He'll stand with the buildings around him, still intact, and with a rotted plank box in his hand, and he'll try to understand what on earth we actually believed in.
He won't figure it out.
Because there's nothing to find.
Every generation before us left us something to inherit.
We left something that must be removed.
As quickly as possible.
Preferably along with the party - if this is an expression of the standard for solutions they want rolled out across all axes of Denmark.
❤️🔥🪽
