Desired landscapes of order in Danish public housing

In 2018, the danish Social Housing Act L38 was adopted that has become known as “the parallel society law” or “the ghetto laws”. Key in L38 is the state’s annual categorizing of selected public housing areas as “ghettoes” and “hard ghettoes”. To classify as a “ghetto”, a threshold must be exceeded in the number of tenants in five political categories based on ethnic and class markers. The legislation is motivated by a political claim of deficit in democratic values and active participation in society amongst tenants in these areas. Promoted as a strategy to change this, L38 legally enforces a number of regulations on “hard ghettoes”. One of the regulations centres architecture and urban space design by enforcing a decrease of family public housing units to 40 % in classified “hard ghettos” by 2030 to change the tenant’s demography.

Based on an ethnographic fieldwork with architects and urban planners, my research examines how L38’s biopolitics emerge in the creation of architecture and urban space design for the desired social life of the areas. I am particularly interested in the ethnic-class nexus of L38 and its regulations of privatization, forced evictions, demolitions, and ideas of “social mix”. I follow Heatherton’s (2018) inquiry into how local states use urban planning regulations as predictive policing to discipline bodies and enhance neoliberal accumulation. I try to grasp these material and structural entanglements with Rajaram’s (2006) notion of aesthetic landscapes of order as dominant and desired colonial state representations of space as known, predictable and thereby governable. This is sustained by identifying dystopic space and naming the bodies that do not fit. My overall question in this panel is how illegality of bodies and spaces surfaces in architecture and urban space design responding to regulations of L38 in (re)ordering the Danish urban public?