Events
In this lecture, Iben Holck (Roskilde University Denmark) will share their work in progress on how professionals narrate safety as a core issue that must be solved by design solutions in current large-scale urban development projects in a number of Danish public housing areas.
These areas are on the governments so-called ‘Ghetto List’ and the development projects were enforced on them by the state in 2018 when a broad political agreement classified them as ‘Hard Ghettos’. The primary reason for this label is that more than 50% of the tenants living in these public housing areas are categorized by the state as “Non-Western Immigrants and their Descendants”. Being classified as a ‘Hard Ghetto’ has severe consequences for an area, one of these being a demand to reduce the amount of public housing in the area with 60% before 2030 through sale, demolitions, and densification.
In a two-year long ethnographic fieldwork with professionals and reading through documents and plans, the act of creating safety appeared as one of the most concerning matters for the professionals in these projects, and urban space and landscape design as their solution to achieve this.
Venue:
TU Berlin | BH-N 230,
Ernst-Reuter-Platz 1
Berlin,
10587
Deutschland
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Public Lecture: The “Ghetto Laws” and Desired Landscapes of Order in the Danish Welfare State
Program
During the presentation, Holck will critically engage with these narrations by sharing moments, images, and design models in and from the fieldwork where safety revealed itself as a field of negotiation, contestation, and conflict rather than a one-dimensional problem-solution issue, hinged on anti-immigrant and neoliberal state politics.
The discussion will bring in decolonial thinking on state desires for aesthetic landscapes of order (Rajaram 2006) as known, predictable and thereby governable space, and scholarly work on Danish national belonging and othering through hegemonic ideas of ‘tryghed’ (safety) to question how urban securitization emerges in the so-called universal Danish welfare state. By showing how the il/legality of different bodies is rendered visible in the design of the state’s desired future areas, Holck also invites for a discussion on the role of architecture and design in state politics.
