Minoritized space, visibility of difference and the territorialization of integration question in the Danish welfare state

In Denmark, as in other places, the integration question has become largely an urban question. But more than that, the intense affective, legal, political and material investments that mark the governmental focus on the “ghetto” and its eradication over the past two decades, increasingly territorialize the integration question in Denmark. This contribution thus enquires into the why of such territorialization, rather than into what work this obsessive focus on the ghetto does (eg Simonsen 2016). I draw an inspiration from Martina Tazzioli’s (2019) analysis of the dispersal of undocumented migrants from camps in France and Italy as a political technology that, while tied to older colonial tactics of population management of unruly population, serves not only to disperse migrants across space but also to dismantle migrant spaces of life. In parallel, the Danish policy targeting marginalized social housing areas dismantles minoritized spaces of life. What is at stake in such spaces is not “just” their minoritization, or even visibility of that minoritization; but rather the concentration of visibly minoritized and classed difference that is also materially rooted. I argue that it is the confluence of several factors – the Danish historic unease with the visibility of difference, the dogged persistence of early conceptualizations of migrants’ residential scattering as the hallmark of integration, and the neoliberalized welfarism - that has created the conditions of possibility for an obsessive governmental investment in uprooting of such spaces.