'The city is not a museum'

The city of Copenhagen is ICORN guest writer Suhael Sami Nader’s home for the next two years. A journalist and cultural critic from Baghdad, Nader recently participated in a public debate on “Life in the city” at the Copenhagen Libraries, together with Associate Professor Henrik Reeh and City Architect Tina Saaby. A few days later, the trend magazine Monocle voted Copenhagen the best city in the world to live in. It is not perfect, but the closest at this point to a “world-conquering urban quality of life”, which is, they say, “a tricky balance between progress and preservation, stimulation and security, global and local”. 

What are the preconditions of a city to foster good life and how do public spaces form the way people live together? At the heart of these questions lie something, to Nader, very fundamental.

Like his colleagues in the ICORN cities of refuge around the world, Suhael Nader fled his home country because his work made him subject to threats and persecution. He was targeted by insurgents after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 for his critical articles on political issues in the region. 

In 2010 the municipality of Copenhagen granted DKK 2 million in order to establish the Danish capital as a City of Refuge, and in 2012 the Cultural Mayor of Copenhagen welcomed Suhael Sami Nader as the city’s first ICORN guest writer; an act of solidarity, providing a safe haven from which Nader can continue his writings. But it is also an act to welcome a distant culture into the local community to open up new perspectives on life and the city. 

In an analysis of the City Hall of Copenhagen and a comparison with city life conditions in Iraq, Nader makes some striking observations and pinpoints what he considers the values and preconditions of life in the city. 

A cultural minefield 
Nader calls the dynamic between the modern and the inherited in Iraq a cultural minefield. Under poor cultural and political conditions, it has resulted in mere folkloristic praise of Baghdad. In architecture there are works of the past that still play a vital role in people’s lives, and should therefore be integrated in new city structures. A condition of a good city life involves an understanding of modernity and the ability to give the old renewed functions and life. But to make the city more suitable for living, working and production demands culture-political decisions. 

This never happened in Iraq. On the contrary, the establishment in power has made dreadful and scattered residential areas with a lack of infrastructure. Their praise of the past is proportional with the destruction of the cultural inheritance of the city. And their city planning has worsened people’s living conditions and made them flee their cities, ruined due to neglect and bad decisions. 

The past hand in hand with the present and the future 
Within only a month of his stay in Copenhagen, Nader came to realise that nothing of the past in this city is permitted to wither; the past is preserved, but is given a new direction in the present. The past is integrated in the present with structures of life, work, nutrition, traffic, green areas, public health and the use of trains and metro. A fair solution of what he calls identity, built on the basis of diversity and democracy. 

In Nader’s view, Copenhagen preserves history with pride and, in a democratic spirit, lets past political rivals linger on the city hall walls. Past rivals who are now mere representatives of their common wish for the best of the city. 

In Iraq, any reminder of a person who leaves an official post will be thrown out like a lampoon, more or less declaring the man a traitor. “There are no monuments. Our buildings have no stories to tell and no anecdotes, we, the land of thousand and one night!” 

To be able to preserve aesthetic values, to safeguard the cultural heritage of a city while at the same time adapting to modern life is, according to Nader, an art. And at the heart of success, lays the fundamental conditions of freedom, justice and democracy. But perhaps most important, he says, the Danes have succeeded in preserving the human norms that unifies, includes and organises without paying a high price. It requires not only political will; it takes stability, continuation and respect. 

A work in progress… 
There is alas always room for improvement and Denmark and Copenhagen has still to strive for “world-conquering urban quality of life”. Monocle’s critique of the country is very much related to the restrictions on welcoming foreign cultures. Their critique sounds as follows: “Denmark’s immigration system requires a massive overhaul – both systematically and in terms of legislation. Designed to make immigration from non-western countries virtually impossible, it means that Danish industry suffers from a chronic lack of skills which it might otherwise be able to source overseas.” 

About Suhael Sami Nader 
Suhael Sami Nader began his career as a freelance journalist and writer in his native Iraq in 1965. He became known for his writing as a fine art and literary critic, and more latterly for his political commentaries. He has held leading editorial posts for a number of publications. His first novel Al Tal (The Hill) was published by the Aafaq Arabiyeh publishing house in 2001. He is a member of the Iraq Journalists Union and the Iraqi Writers Union. 

About Copenhagen City of Refuge 
In 2010 the municipality of Copenhagen granted DKK 2 million in order to establish the Danish capitol as a City of Refuge, and in 2012 the Cultural Mayor of Copenhagen, Pia Allerslev, welcomed the city’s first ICORN guest writer, Suhael Sami Nader. Copenhagen municipality is the official ICORN host, partnered with Copenhagen Libraries.