Spaces of Welfare: Editorial Introduction

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. Gøsta Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

2. Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel, eds., Architecture and the Welfare State (London and New York: Routledge, 2015). Studies of specific national cases include, for examples: Helena Mattson and Sven-Olov Wallenstein, eds., Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption and the Welfare State (London: Black Dog, 2010); Michael Ryckewaert, Building the Economic Backbone of the Belgian Welfare State: Infrastructure, Planning and Architecture 1945–1973 (Rotterdam: Uitgeverij 010, 2011); Kenny Cupers, The Social Project: Housing Postwar France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Jannie Rosenberg Bendsen et al., eds., Forming Welfare (Copenhagen: Danish Architectural Press, 2017); and Sten Gromark et al., eds., Architecture in Effect (New York and Barcelona: Actar Publishers, 2020).

3. Kirsten Marie Raahauge, Katrine Lotz, Deane Simpson and Martin Søberg (eds.), Architectures of Dismantling and Restructuring: Spaces of Danish Welfare 1970-Present (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2022, forthcoming). For further information, please see the project’s website, Spaces of Danish Welfare, https://royaldanishacademy.com/spaces-danish-welfare (accessed January 27, 2022).

4. Lars Bo Kaspersen, Denmark in the World (Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag, 2013); Ove Kaj Pedersen, Konkurrencestaten. Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag, 2011.The impact of changes in national policies has been explored in two special issues of the Danish research journal Tidsskriftet Antropologi 72 and 73 (2016), edited by Maja Hojer Bruun et al.

5. Welland – Reconfiguring Welfare Landscapes, https://ign.ku.dk/english/welland/ (accessed January 25, 2022).

6. This research focus is part of the larger research program Design Culture, https://www.sdu.dk/en/om_sdu/institutter_centre/idk/forskning/forskningsprogrammer/designkultur (accessed January 28, 2022).

7. The project thereby builds on the findings of research adhering to a so-called spatial turn within the humanities and social sciences during the past couple of decades, for instance in the work of Michel de Certeau, David Harvey, Doreen Massey and Edward Soja, as well as in works by anthropologists as for example Setha Low, Keith Basso, Eric Hirst and Michael O’Hanlon, Irene Cieraad and Marc Augé.

8. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (London: The Athlone Press, 1993 [1988]).

9. Runa Johannessen, “Healing Architecture and the Crisis of Care,” in Architectures of Dismantling and Restructuring, ed. Raahauge et al. (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2022, forthcoming).

10. Kirsten Marie Raahauge, “A Welfare Situation in Tønder,” in Architectures of Dismantling and Restructuring, ed. Raahauge et al. (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2022, forthcoming).

11. Martin Søberg, “Children as Symbolic Figures in Welfare Space Photography,” in Architectures of Dismantling and Restructuring, ed. Raahauge et al. (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2022, forthcoming).

12. Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Theory, Culture and Society 7 (2–3) (1990): 295–310.

13. “As a result of the differential diaspora of these keywords, the political narratives that govern communication between elites and followings in different parts of the world involve problems of both a semantic and a pragmatic nature: semantic to the extent that words (and their lexical equivalents) require careful translation from context to context in their global movements; and pragmatic to the extent that the use of these words by political actors and their audiences may be subject to very different sets of conventions that mediate their translation into public politics.” ibid., 300.

14. As has been the argument of Bruno Latour, eg. in his book On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham, NJ: Duke University Press, 2010). To quote Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s review of the book: “Latour’s artful finesses, however, may open the way to useful alternatives both to the array of more or less dubious views that some philosophers defend as ‘realism’ (roughly, the contention that various things, from rocks, tables and quarks to mathematical truths and moral obligations, exist altogether independent of anyone’s perceptions or descriptions of them) and also to the ‘anti-realist’ views, many of them maintained by nobody (notably, the claim that there is no external reality or that it’s all just discourse), often seen as required by a rejection of such realism.” Barbara Herrnstein Smith, “Dolls, Demons and DNA,” London Review of Books 34, No. 5 (March 8, 2021): 25–26.

15. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Bloomsbury, 2004 [2000]), 7–14.

16. Venice Biennale Architettura 2021: How Will We Live Together? https://www.labiennale.org/en/news/biennale-architettura-2021-how-will-we-live-together (accessed January 29, 2022).

17. Jean Baudrillard, “The Beaubourg-Effect: Implosion and Deterrence,” trans. Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson, October 20 (Spring, 1982 [1977]): 3–13.

18. This mechanism of stabilization, legitimization and articulation through buildings is originally proposed by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. In his analysis of the role of the house in what he coins “house societies,” Lévi-Strauss proposes that “the house” works as a legitimation and an articulation of oppositions and unstable alliances,” the house is a “transfixer” (in Lévi-Strauss’ material, the oppositions concern rank and kinship, descent and alliance); if we transport this mechanism to our field, the spaces of welfare might be unfolded in new ways through this perspective. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Way of the Masks, trans. Sylvia Modelski (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1983 [1979]).

19. Lars Bo Kaspersen, Denmark in the World (Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag. 2013). In his article “Spaces of Welfare, Spaces of Security”, Kaspersen develops a framework for thinking about the merging of security and welfare in a spatial perspective. Lars Bo Kaspersen, ”Spaces of Welfare, Spaces of Security,” in Architectures of Dismantling and Restructuring, ed. Raahauge et al. (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2022, forthcoming).

20. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Introduction à l’oevre Marcel Mauss,” in Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950).

21. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (New York: Routledge, 2009 [1966]): 35.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Runa Johannessen

Runa Johannessen, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the Royal Danish Academy. Johannessen is specialized in the political instrumentation of architecture in sites of societal transformation and conflict. They have pursued their postdoctoral research on the Danish hospital system as part of the research project Spaces of Danish Welfare.

Kirsten Marie Raahauge

Kirsten Marie Raahauge, PhD, is an Professor WSD in anthropology and the leader of the research project Spaces of Danish Welfare; her current project: The outskirts. She is the head of Center for Interior Studies. Field of research: anthropology of space and materiality. Fieldwork: the outskirts, houses and homes, neighbourhoods, urbanity, landscapes, and haunted houses. She has worked at several universities, since 2009 at the Royal Danish Academy.

Martin Søberg

Martin Søberg, PhD, is an art historian teaching at the Royal Danish Academy where he is an Associate Professor of architectural theory, artistic research and poetics. He is the author of Kay Fisker: Works and Ideas in Danish Modern Architecture (2021) and coeditor of The Artful Plan: Architectural Drawing Reconfigured (2020) and Refractions: Artistic Research in Architecture (2016).