“I think it’s a shame they are calling us a ghetto, I don’t think this a ghetto.”: Enactments of underprivileged neighborhoods and how to live there

With this article, we examine the ambivalent and complex experiences of living in so-called underprivileged neighborhoods. Based within STS thinking, we examine how two neighborhoods in Denmark, formally categorized as respectively underprivileged and ‘ghetto’, are multiply enacted through the entanglement of material, discursive and human actors. The article furthermore explores the entanglement of identities of subjects and places. By this framework the article opens for a discussion of what a ‘good’ neighborhood is by showing how the two areas are simultaneously enacted as good and bad places to live with many ways of being a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ resident. The data thereby challenge the implicit
superiority of the middleclass neighborhood as the universal best version of a
neighborhood, by showing that a ‘good’ neighborhood comes in more than one version. The article combines different sets of theoretical thinking. One based in the notion of multiplicity (Mol, 2002) and one based in the discussions of place (Massey 1995, 2004) situated in Housing studies (e.g. Casey, 2001; Easthope, 2004).