Copenhagen Complains

The research project is a systematic investigation of complaining as a decisive factor in the making and changing of urban order in eighteenth-century Europe. The project aims to present new knowledge of how complaints constituted a specific form of urban agency and became an essential component in the struggle for influence in an autocratic political system with no formal popular representation. The project studies an exceptional body of evidence, viz. registered complaints of city dwellers of all walks of life and social strata to the Copenhagen Municipality, revealing how the culture of complaint was an important instrument in the everyday negotiation of the city’s political, commercial, social, and spatial order.