Fabian, Louise, & Anders Lund Hansen. Common resistance against state-led stigmatization and displacement. In G. Baeten, C. Listerborn, M. Persdotter, & E. Pull (Eds.), Housing Displacement: Conceptual and Methodological Issues (pp. 125–143). 2020. Routledge.

This chapter focuses on the role of the Danish state in stigmatizing and displacing groups from targeted common, non-profit housing estates (the so-called ghettos). It looks closer at the resistance movements, with special focus on Denmark’s largest non-profit housing estate, Gellerupparken. The chapter draws on an intersection between the literature of critical urban theory and social movement research. It highlights the increasing production of inequalities in Denmark and the concentration of precarious socio-economic groups in rental housing. The chapter explores the government’s ghetto politics, relevant policy documents, and state-led territorial stigmatization and displacement. It addresses how different actors have been trying to subvert the ghetto stigmatization through different forms of resistance such as the new social movement Almen Modstand (Common Resistance) as well as independent activists fighting against what they see as a racist politics. The ‘ghetto package’ has been met with a growing number of resistance movements and activities in Denmark.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429427046-9

Lundsteen, Martin, Displacing the Other to Unite the Nation: The Parallel Society Legislation in Denmark, European Urban and Regional Studies, 2023.

In 2018, the then right-wing government in Denmark led by Lars Løkke Rasmussen and supported by the extreme right-wing party Danish People’s Party presented new legislation to end ‘parallel societies’ in Denmark by toughening the criminal law, enforcing Danish knowledge and nursery school assistance to toddlers, and, more importantly for this article, a series of urban interventions in ‘ghetto areas’ considered as such mainly when the proportion of immigrants and descendants from non-Western countries exceeded 50 per cent. Until recently research has focused on either the discursive elements of the ‘ghetto politics’ in Denmark or the urban interventions from an architectural or urban planning point of view. However, newfangled research deal with the entwined economic elements. In this article, I compare the different developmental plans proposed in the affected areas because of the legislation, with an aim to reach further and point at the inherent elements of urban b/ordering, that is, measures taken to attain social order and gain legitimacy by demarcating categories of people to incorporate some and exclude others through urban space. Indeed, through this comparison, I conclude that the ghetto legislation is a compelling example of the urban b/ordering inherent to the politics and dynamics of current liberal capitalist social democracies. It is a social experiment that remodels the geography of Denmark in terms that recall the eugenic and hygienic social and urban policies of the 19th century and form part of a worrying pattern that may have consequences that go beyond the stated ones.

DOI: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/09697764231165202

Risager, Bjarke Skærlund, Territorial Stigmatization and Housing Commodification under Racial Neoliberalism: The Case of Denmark’s ‘Ghettos’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2022, 0308518X221141427

The relation between racialization and neoliberalism is relatively unexplored in urban geography, especially in the context of social democratic welfare regimes. This article aims to bridge this gap by applying the concept of racial neoliberalism, here referring to a co-constitutive relation between racialization and neoliberalism, to Denmark. Conceiving the country’s so-called ”ghetto” politics as an expression of racial neoliberalism, the article retraces the development of this politics over the first two decades of the 21st century. I argue that territorial stigmatization and commodification of marginalized non-profit housing areas have been two co-constitutive expressions of racial neoliberalism that have intensified during this historical period. Examining three key policy moments through various grey literature, the article demonstrates how stigmatization has served to justify commodification, while the failure of the latter has been followed by intensified and bureaucratized stigmatization leading to new commodification efforts until culminating in the infamous 2018 ”Ghetto Law”.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X221141427