Problematizing urban segregation: A genealogy of the question of “vulnerable” housing areas in Denmark

This article draws on the late Michel Foucault’s notion of problematization as a theoretical lens for studying policies targeting disadvantaged neighborhoods and urban segregation. While the concept of problematization in recent years has become the object of increasing attention in critical urban research, it seems to have gone unnoticed, how Foucault’s mode of “thinking problematically” has given direction to the urban sociology of Foucault’s former pupil and
collaborator Jacques Donzelot during the last three decades. The work of Donzelot can be characterized as an effort to grasp what he terms “the new urban question” and to analyze and evaluate the shifting forms of French urban policy as conflictual responses to this new problematic oscillating between renewed welfare policies and neo-liberal and authoritarian measures. The first part of the article will give an overview of Donzelot’s work on the new urban
question and urban policy in France and compare this to the more well-known studies of the problematizations of urban poverty and disadvantage and the rise of localist neo-liberal urban policies in Great Britain by Foucauldian analysts such as Nicolas Rose, Ash Amin and Mitchell Dean. In the second part of the article, we will apply the theoretical lens of problematization in a genealogical study of the question of vulnerable urban areas in Denmark from the
establishment of the national Urban Committee in 1993 to the plan for A Denmark without Parallel Societies and the “ghetto deal” from 2018 and its implementation and revision under the current Social Democrat government. The empirical object of the historical analysis is thus the changing understandings of “the new urban question” in Denmark and the implications of the shifting problematizations for political initiatives and interventions in the context of a
Scandinavian welfare state. The empirical analysis of the Danish urban policies is based on a wide selection of primarily national policy documents and greements. The documents reveal the conflictual and composite nature of Danish urban policies since the Nineties, while at the same time identifying overall trends towards an authoritarian turn and an increased targeting of ethnic minorities.