State-led stigmatisation of place and the politics of the exception

Abstract

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.

Displacing the other to unite the nation: The parallel society legislation in Denmark

“…Therefore, through the racial neoliberal urbanism that the Ghetto Package is an example of, we also see how certain ideas are implicit about who is displaceable and who is desirable, which go beyond the specific interventions, so much that nobody even seems to question it: the predominant subject is the White male in all the proposed developmental plans. Now, obviously this rests on previous processes of racialization that goes beyond the specific law as such (as several authors such as Risager, 2022b;Olsen andLarsen, 2022 andSimonsen, 2016 have shown very elegantly), but more importantly, it also goes beyond Danish society and point at tendencies that one might argue are more common for urban planning in general (much like authors such as Giovanni Picker et al, 2019, and Ha and Picker 2022 seem to suggest), but also to the neoliberal Capitalist State in its management of poverty and more importantly the so-called surplus populations (Lundsteen, 2020;Smith, 2011;Soederberg, 2021;Wacquant, 2010).…”

“…Until now much literature has focused on the narrative that had been built up during the last decades regarding the failed attempts of the government to integrate what was represented as problematic immigrant ghettos (see Frandsen and Hansen, 2020;Jensen and Söderberg, 2022;Olsen and Larsen, 2022;Seemann, 2021;Simonsen, 2016), and only more recently, authors have engaged with the economic and political interest in privatizing and extending the ongoing processes of gentrification to the corporative housing sector and the entwinement with the previous aspects (see Risager, 2022aRisager, , 2022b.…”

“…In any case, although the potentially created rent gap is certainly an important element, often missing from the many scientific articles on the topic (see Frandsen and Hansen, 2020; Jensen and Söderberg, 2022; Olsen and Larsen, 2022; Seemann, 2021; Simonsen, 2016), an argument diligently put forward by (Risager, 2022a), most certainly the whole machinery, the Ghetto Package and the execution which is often not led directly by economic interests, show incontestable signs of structural racism (see also Risager, 2022b): in fact, such an important economic factor as social inequalities are dismissed or at best downgraded as the essential problem. On the contrary, we find that some social groups are considered problematic and disposable, while others are desired for.…”

Territorial stigmatization and housing commodification under racial neoliberalism: The case of Denmark's ‘ghettos’

“…Yet, the policy presents a remarkable escalation of the neoliberal pressure to commodify racialized non-profit housing areas. If the early attempts at commodifying non-profit housing were unsuccessful but nevertheless cracked open a door for further commodification, as argued by Larsen and Lund Hansen (2015; see also Vidal, 2019), the 2018 legislation further opened this door, even if it has not (yet) proven to be a 'battering ram' to the non-profit housing sector (see also Olsen and Larsen, 2022).…”

“…Indeed, many studies have analysed the Danish ‘ghetto’ politics and marginalized housing in general through this conceptual lens (e.g. Birk and Fallov, 2021; Fabian and Lund Hansen, 2020; Fallov and Birk, 2022; Jensen et al, 2021; Jensen and Christensen, 2012; Olsen and Larsen, 2022). While some have highlighted the relation between territorial stigmatization and housing markets (Schultz Larsen, 2014, 2018) or sales (Jensen, 2021), these studies have generally not had non-profit housing commodification as their main concern (see, however, Risager, 2022).…”