”The ’Ghetto’ strikes back: resisting welfare sanctions and stigmatizing categorizations in marginalized residential areas in Denmark”

ABSTRACT

The Danish social housing sector is currently being restructured by national strategies that seek to combat so-called ‘parallel societies’. These strategies entail especially two things: (1) tearing down and/or privatizing social housing in marginalized and vulnerable neighbourhoods and (2) repressive strategies of governance which focus on ethnic minorities, restricting their choices of schools, kindergartens and interactions with social services. Our argument in this article is that despite strong attempts to enforce top-down repressive and discriminatory policies, the ‘ghetto’ continually ‘strikes back’ in a double-sense: Firstly, the Danish policies meant to combat ‘ghettoization’ and ‘parallel societies’ re-create these as statistical (and governable) categories, and secondly, local housing organizations, community workers and residents engage in a struggle from below where they employ tactics to resist the most repressive elements of these urban policies. We show through empirical examples from different neighbourhoods in Denmark, how this struggle from below generate resistance in three forms: they rework classifications and understandings of the neighbourhood; they attempt to generate resilience and increase coping of marginalized groups in the face of punitive state policies; and they mediate recent tendencies to a more punitive state, and mediate and translate active forms of resistance of residents, thereby rewriting scripts of citizenship. We argue that these forms of resistance attempt to change state space production from within.

KEYWORDS:

• Local community work
• vulnerable neighbourhoods
• resistance
• sanctioning welfare

Acknowledgments

We thank our colleagues Steffen Ernø, Merete Monrad, and Maria Appel Nissen for comments on an earlier draft.

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The material in the article draws on two research projects: ‘Views on human beings – welfare policies, technologies and knowledge of human beings in social work practice’ funded by Velux fonden 2014-2018, and the project COHSMO –, inequality, urbanization and territorial cohesion – developing the European Social model of growth and democratic capacity, EU Horizon 2020, grant agreement No 727058;Horizon 2020 Framework Programme [COHSMO, inequality, urbanization and territorial cohesion – Developing the European Social model of growth and democratic capacity, EU Horizon 2020, grant agreement No 727058];Velux Fonden [Views on human beings – welfare policies, technologies and knowledge of humans in social work];