Aesthetics of the (un)desirable: Visualizing and shaping future Danish public housing areas

Through a document- and image analysis and ethnographic interviews and field observations with professional actors, I will present how looking at aesthetic dimensions in visualizations of potential and speculative futures for Danish public housing areas on the governments so-called “ghetto list” can grasp different aspects of territorial stigmatization and de-stigmatization in the current top-down, gentrification projects in the areas. Inspired by the idea of the Danish welfare state as an aesthetic laboratory (Kjældgaard 2019) in which politics and art evolve and shape each other, I apply an understanding of aesthetics as not neutral but processes of universalisation of dominant subjects’ experiences (Tolia-Kelly 2016). The “ghetto-legislation” is structured around five political citizen categories primarily based on ethnicity and class markers, and the goal of the law is to change the resident composition according to this categorization system in selected public housing areas. The main tool to this is privatization of large parts of the public housing. Interdisciplinary research has pointed to how increased neoliberal privatization is changing the focus of architecture from functional to experiential to attract capital investment (Klingmann 2007), making new techniques for representations such as CGI renderings central, as affective sensory experiences are used to appeal to customers and clients (Degen et. al. 2017). In the presentation, I pay particular attention to how the dominant role of ethnicity in the governmental “strategy against ghettoization” and privatization as virtue in both the political legislation and current urban planning schemes become embedded as aesthetic relations shaping and being shaped by the work of professionals. By doing different readings of architectural renderings, models, drawings, and urban space designs produced for the areas, I discuss how notions of aesthetics come to play a role in de-contextualizing and de-historicizing the (re)- making of the public housing areas as the visualizations simultaneously becomes visible, bounded representations of bodies, behaviours, buildings, physical appearances and values in the desired futures of the areas and invisible erasures of other bodies and all of that which is being moved out of the visualisations.