Key Messages This article investigates processes of neoliberalization of the academy. It argues that neoliberalism entails shifts from exchange to competition, from equality to inequality, and turns academics into human capital. It suggests that auditing systems are key mechanisms of neoliberalization that produce unhealthy levels of anxiety and stress in the academy.

This article contrasts the intentions and outcomes of the publicly instigated and supported urban renewal of Copenhagen's Inner Vesterbro district. Apart from physically upgrading the decaying buildings, the municipality's aim was to include the inhabitants in the urban renewal process and, seemingly, to prevent the dislocation of people from the neighbourhood. However, due to ambiguous policies, the workings of the property market and the lack of suffi cient defl ecting mechanisms, middle-class inhabitants are now replacing the high concentration of socioeconomically vulnerable people that characterised Vesterbro before the urban renewal. This process may appear 'gentle', but it is nonetheless an example of how state and market interact to produce gentrifi cation with 'traumatic' consequences for individuals and the city as a socially just space.

ABSTRACT. Housing was a backbone of the Danish welfare state, but this has been profoundly challenged by the past decades of neoliberal housing politics. In this article we outline the rise of the Danish model of association-based housing on the edge of the market economy (and the state). From this we demonstrate how homes in private cooperatives through political interventions in context of a booming real estate market have plunged into the market economy and been transformed into private commodities in all but name, and we investigate how non-profit housing associations frontally and stealthily are attacked through neoliberal reforms. This carries the seeds for socio-spatial polarization and may eventually open the gate for commodification -and thus the dismantling of the little that is left of a socially just housing sector. Yet, while the association-based model was an accessary to the commodification of cooperative housing, it can possibly be an accomplice in sustaining non-profit housing as a housing commons.

Cohousing has caught the attention of activists, academics and decision-makers, and Danish experiences with cohousing as bofaellesskaber are routinely highlighted as pioneering and successful. This article presents a mainly quantitative analysis of the development of Danish intergenerational cohousing and investigates socioeconomic characteristics of residents in these communities. First, the article demonstrates how the development of Danish cohousing has been undergirded by distinct shifts in dominant tenure forms. Second, it shows that inhabitants in contemporary Danish cohousing are socioeconomically distinct. This does not diminish the value of cohousing, but it problematises assumptions about the social sustainability of this housing form.

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Broadly understood as a housing form that combines individual dwellings with substantial common facilities and activities aimed at everyday living, Danish cohousing communities (bofaellesskaber) are often seen as pioneering and comparatively successful. Yet, in spite of frequently being mentioned or addressed as case studies in the growing literature on cohousing and, more generally, alternative forms of housing, Danish cohousing experiences have not been systematically analysed since the 1980s. Emphasizing broader trends and evolving societal contexts, this article investigates the development of Danish cohousing over the past five decades. Through this historical analysis, the article also draws attention to the largely neglected issue of tenure structures in the evolution of cohousing. The multifaceted phenomenon of cohousing cannot and should not be reduced to issues of tenure. But if cohousing is to spread and contribute affordable alternatives to mainstream housing, tenure structures should be a key concern.

Ghetto area’ has become an official categorisation in Danish housing policy. This article investigates how this stigmatising spatialisation of politics and policy has emerged through evolving storylines for particular housing estates, which gradually have come to structure political debate and become institutionalised in official policy. While political actors can draw on different storylines, it is argued that a range of storylines and associated quantifiable criteria combine to produce a generic ‘ghetto place’ in Danish politics. This scale-framing and objectification have enabled a politics of the exception, making it possible to apply extraordinary measures to particular places. This has significant effects for inhabitants in these places and the cities in which they are located, and it is proposed that, in the longer term, the politics of the exception could also become a battering ram against the collectively owned non-profit housing sector in Denmark.