Reykjavík Grapevine - 23.05.2008, Blaðsíða 15

Feature | Reykjavík Grapevine | Issue 06 2008 | 15
The problem is not so much the poor condition of
many of the houses in the city centre, but rather
the lack of direction, lack of vision even, for how
city’s centre should develop.
In recent years, developers have bought
up house after house along Laugavegur and sur-
rounding streets, in the hope of tearing them
down in order to build something new, something
bigger, something that better utilizes the valuable
square-metres of land where the property stands.
The problem is that these new develop-
ments are nowhere near completion, or nowhere
near beginning, truth be told. A ferocious battle
is being fought on the administrative/political
level over these lots. A backlash from Laugavegur
conservationists has all but halted developments.
Their claim is simple: the city centre should be
kept as is, and any developments should focus
on rebuilding old houses and recreate the early-
twentieth century look of city centre. On the op-
posite end of the debate, Laugavegur revivalists
claim that the city needs considerable redevelop-
ment in order to meet the demands for a modern
commerce centre.
Reykjavík’s mayor, Ólafur F. Magnússon, is a
firm conservationist. His first act as a mayor was
to buy two houses, Laugavegur 4 and 6, that were
already being torn down and put them on the
path for renovation. The battle still rages for other
houses, but in the meantime the mayor has put
the clamp on further developments. The result
is the Vacants: boarded up houses, lifeless build-
ings, deserted construction sites.
Now, I am not going to choose sides in this
debate, but I will say this: it doesn’t really matter
what you choose to do, it is the status quo that is
going to kill Reykjavík centre.
Vacant houses and empty lots are a sure-fire
way to gut the city centre of everything that makes
it an exciting place to visit. Slowly and painfully, it
will drain the life out of downtown Reykjavík, cre-
ating a snowball effect that could spell economic
disaster for the whole city.
No one wants to visit a vacant city. Not the
tourists, not the locals, not the high-end compa-
nies Reykjavík hopes to attract. What downtown
Reykjavík needs, more than anything, is not build-
ings, but Life. Empty buildings don’t attract peo-
ple. This is a simple fact.
Bring Life back to the city. Either open up
the Vacants and allow people to operate there,
or redouble all efforts to build something else
instead, posthaste. Either way, we must bring life
back to this ghost town.
Text by Sveinn Birkir Björnsson Photos by GAS