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

Abstract

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’.

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).…”

“…Be that as it may, the purpose of this article has not been to argue the contrary, nor go into further detail, but rather argue that the three different interpretations put forward in the introduction are best understood in co-relation to each other. Although gentrification is indeed proposed as a measure to promote social mix, at the same time promoting and implying neoliberal ideas regarding marketization, privatization and the social in general, at the same time, in line with what authors such as Risager (2022b) and Mele (2019) argue, these ideas and projects are inexplicable without reference to racialization and the territorial stigmatization enacted by the law. Furthermore, they both connect to a larger, more abstract vision of the Danish society and maybe even Western liberal societies by large, because through these urban transformations and this social experiment, certain moralities, and moral communities of belonging, are being put in force.…”

“…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.…”

“…Dealing with this understudied topic builds upon a large amount of literature devoted to racialization and racism in the housing sector at large or the public or private housing sector in particular (Picker, 2017;Quillian et al, 2020;Rothstein, 2017;Taylor, 2021), and more interestingly, recent studies dealing with racial capitalism in relation to the housing sector (Clare et al, 2022), gentrification measure applied to non-profit housing via racialisation or territorial stigmatization (Bridge et al, 2014;Risager, 2022aRisager, , 2022bSlater, 2021) and urban displacements (Soederberg, 2021).…”

“…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.…”