Spaces of Welfare: Editorial Introduction

To describe something as spaces of welfare immediately raises questions: What is welfare and what does it have to do with space? First, the noun welfare has a least two meanings. It can signify the state of a person’s or group’s physical and mental health and happiness, for instance in relation to safety and material goods. It also signifies the help given to people in need, for instance by the state or by organizations. There are various ways in which states might or might not provide such benefits. The Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden) are for instance well-known for providing rather extensive services to their inhabitants based on high levels of taxation, a model which political scientist Gøsta Esping-Andersen has described as “a social democratic capitalist welfare state model.”¹ In many other countries, the role of the state is less significant while organizations such as private health insurance companies might be of more importance. Second, welfare – as explicated above – comprises an abundance of elements including people, actions, things and feelings. All these elements interact somewhere, hence the notion of space: Welfare is always situated, for instance as services provided in purpose-built public welfare architecture such as schools, hospitals and nursing homes, but also in many other kinds of spaces. And such services are distributed, which makes issues of movement, distance and scale pertinent to understanding the spaces of welfare.

Locating Welfare

The entanglement of welfare and space is also shaped by an array of historical, political, social, cultural and material phenomena. These factors vary from country to country, but there are similarities and overlaps. In their edited volume Architecture and the Welfare State, Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel compared transnational, site-specific examples and showed that differences, similarities, patterns and lines exist between them.² This special issue of Architecture and Culture explores the specific ways that spaces and welfare are connected in various contexts, yet it started with the context of Denmark. This stems from our previous research as part of the interdisciplinary research project Spaces of Danish Welfare (2017–22) at the Royal Danish Academy.³ Implicitly, the project was a response to Swenarton, Avermaete and van den Heuvel’s call for further detailed explorations of specific national cases. The Danish welfare state is perpetually redefined as changes in national policies and the Danish societal model is also changing, as political scientists Lars Bo Kaspersen and Ove Kaj Pedersen have shown.⁴ In parallel, the research project Welland – Reconfiguring Welfare Landscapes (2016–20), led by landscape architect Ellen Braae at the University of Copenhagen, has examined the changing role and form of landscapes in connection with social housing in the postwar Danish welfare state.⁵ Also, at the University of Southern Denmark, the esthetics of welfare institutions is an emerging field within the research program Design Culture, led by design historian Anders V. Munch.⁶

Spaces of Danish Welfare critically examined the spatial implications of changes caused by various political, social, managerial and economic rationales since 1970. For instance, the tendency to centralize welfare amenities such as the highly specialized hospital system has led to more than a halving in numbers of hospital locations, whereas the size of each hospital has grown considerably. At the same time, a tendency of decentralization concerning other welfare amenities, such as care for the elderly, has led to a growing number of senior housing and nursing homes distributed around the country. To describe such spatial transformations as purely a matter of centralization versus decentralization or of inclusion versus exclusion confines the discussion to Euclidian space and the logics of metric measurability, that is, within the parameters of the quantifiable. Accordingly, we also explored implied qualitative change through studies of specific spaces of welfare including hospitals, schools, crematoria, senior housing and dementia care facilities.⁷ In spatial terms, it included the identification of the simultaneous presence of different spatial conditions. This co-presence can be understood through the Deleuzian notion of the fold: a situation in which actual and virtual layers interlace.⁸ For instance, in the case of the reconfiguration of the hospital system, quantitative measures focus on fewer, but larger hospitals, while a qualitative perspective allowed us to explore how new hospital designs optimized treatments by curating the patients’ sensorial experiences.⁹ Here, imaginaries of the hospital as a healing environment fold into the politics of healthcare. Similarly, the qualitative approach opened up our understanding of the redistribution of welfare services from smaller to larger provincial towns; we explored the socio-cultural impact of these transformations, including the imaginaries and agencies in towns where welfare institutions are being removed and other markers of vividness and city life disappear too. Paying attention to such imaginaries and agencies allows us to better understand the welfare situation of Danish provincial towns, by unpacking folds of welfare spaces, everyday life and political decisions.¹⁰ Indeed, welfare is not simply a matter of the distribution of services and goods, but also of sensations and feelings, of well-being and happiness; the analysis of its spatialization cannot be reduced to measuring the distance between dots on a map. Spaces of welfare comprise ideas of the “good” life and imaginaries of better futures in specific places and often for specific people. Children, for instance, quite often play a crucial symbolic role in such imaginaries that directly, often through public discourse, influence the desires and decision-making processes which lead to transformations within systems of welfare service provision.¹¹

Situated Imaginaries

The Spaces of Danish Welfare project inspired a broader discussion of the entanglement of spaces and welfare: a discussion based on examples from a global horizon, which could test the broader scope of our analyses and hypotheses and add nuance to our findings through comparison with cases outside of the Danish context. Such a move from the local to the global destabilizes the very term welfare. The discussion of welfare presented above arises from a particular Nordic setting, yet by expanding our scope, we expand this definition.

In his renowned article “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai discusses ideoscapes as one of five different scapes.¹² He points out that terms and master-terms such as “democracy,” “freedom” or “welfare” are globally floating, yet situated locally, hence the meaning of such terms changes depending on local ideologies and counter-ideologies. According to Appadurai, these movements involve semantic problems (of translation from site to site) and pragmatic problems (of entanglement into contexts of political conventions, actors and audiences).¹³ One might argue that globalization dealt a deathblow to the idea that universal terms could be used in a meaningful way. This paradox has obviously always been present, but the differences and disjunctions have significantly increased as globalization has become part of our everyday lives. Various definitions of terms such as welfare and space, arising from different localities, are presented in this issue’s articles. Although these differences may cause semantic and pragmatic problems, they also create new opportunities to understand the entanglement of welfare and space and how it is situated. The same word, defined differently in various locations, offers the potential for comparisons: how are the definitions different, not from some universal signification, but from each other? What welfare and space signify unpacks the contexts that shape the signification of those terms.

Imaginaries attached to the terms welfare and space are part of politically situated narratives, as Appadurai suggests, and they are enmeshed into other parts of society. This allows us to explore the inter-relation and sometimes the separation of politics, cultures, economics and esthetics. Focusing on the intensity or weakness of these entanglements offers a new perspective on each field. It allows for a range of different sites to resonate with each other, while also unwrapping a variety of analytical perspectives and ways to use the terms welfare and space. Through this comparative gaze, some of the assumptions and theories that we developed in Spaces of Danish Welfare have been questioned. The articles included in this issue stimulate exactly this kind of destabilization and opening of our previous context-bound results. They have led to new readings of our investigations within Spaces of Danish Welfare, particularly through the notion of situated imaginaries.

Studies of materialized spaces are not just a matter of designed forms, but also concern the interactions and agencies of human and non-human actors. Various contemporary theoretical strands have proven themselves successful in addressing such relational perspectives, for instance the Actor-Network-Theory of Bruno Latour et al., the Science and Technology Studies of Donna Haraway, Karen Barad et al., and the assemblage theories of Jane Bennett and Manuel DeLanda respectively. This diverse spectrum of theoreticians is often grouped together (sometimes to their own dismay) as proponents of New Materialism, a line of thinking which addresses ontological questions regarding matter, things and assemblages. Lesser tangible aspects nevertheless often remain unobserved, such as intentional as well as non-intentional imaginaries, semiosis and symbolic orders. We propose that a more thorough scrutiny of those aspects could add important new perspectives to the study of situated spaces of welfare. The articles in this issue explore welfare spaces, yet we would like to point to another red thread that runs through the contributions: they explore the imaginaries, ideas, prescriptions and interpretations that undergird the material world. Such imaginaries and ideas are often considered as being universal, but as we have shown are in fact situated, they become comparable only if we recognize their mutual situatedness.¹⁴ So, what could be seen as a problem, as Appadurai has pointed out, is also an advantage, opening for explorations of situated life, welfare and space.

Our move toward qualitative methods in the Spaces of Danish Welfare project and the impact of New Materialism also led us to the work of philosopher Jacques Rancière and what he termed the distribution of the sensible, that is, paying attention to configurations of space, time and forms that constitute the definition of “common sense.”¹⁵ Many of the articles in this issue attest to such a link between politics and esthetics. Contemporary understandings of welfare provisions question the historically instituted ideological notions of universal rights and of economic redistribution, but also what might be termed affective welfare. Attention to the affective aspects of spaces including aspects of agency goes beyond phenomenological architectural analysis. Beyond thinking about how a space is experienced physically or sensorially, affective studies pay attention to what is meaningful in each site and situation. This aligns with Rancière’s distribution of the sensible, it explores how spatial qualities such as openness, transparency or simplicity align with certain political agendas to create a space of the “sensible,” which contains what can be conceived or what can be thought of as possible. Architecture in this sense not only facilitates welfare provisions but also causes specific feelings, sensations and dreams which cannot be separated from such provisions. To function, that is, to realize their agentic and imaginary potentialities, spaces of welfare must become sensible and affective, for instance by causing certain atmospheric experiences. The following three sections clarify how the articles in this issue contribute to a more nuanced understanding of those simultaneous folds of material, imaginary and affective spaces of welfare in specific situations.

Imaginary People

Although spaces of welfare may focus on where welfare is provided, a question of who is just as applicable: who received or experienced welfare and who provided it? Often, this question is answered by the somewhat vague notion of people, particularly in cases which involve public urban space. Invocations of us, “the people,” as recipients of goods provided by architecture are implicit yet striking for instance in the theme and title of the Venice Biennale Architettura 2021: How Will We Live Together?¹⁶ This vague circumscription of a collective “we” relates to the phenomenon that philosopher Jean Baudrillard has referred to as implosion. Implosion describes the closing of the distance between what is supposed to constitute “the people” and the simulation that is replacing it.¹⁷

In her article “Form Follows People? – Copenhagen’s Ny Nørreport as a Post-Participatory Project,” Nina Stener Jørgensen analyses the redesign of Nørreport Station, a major infrastructural hub in Copenhagen, and how the architects used the notion of “the people” in the creation and explanation of their plan. A photograph of the old Nørreport Station covered in snow with visible traces of the pathways of the pedestrians was part of the architectural competition entry by the winning team. These traces were interpreted by the team as expressing the opinion of “the people” and the team’s design was intended to be a direct translation of those traces: a design for and by the people. However, as Jørgensen shows, the importance of the people became a matter only of storytelling: the original idea of taking the people’s opinion into the design was reversed and the station now nudges the users to walk in a way the architects meant for them to walk. The imaginaries of this contribution are full of hopes and visions and of deceptions and misinterpretations; they reveal the implosion of meaning that this simulated public opinion unravels.

The architectural experience of an unidentified public is also present in Jeremy Payne-Frank and Siri Schwabe’s exploration of the Oslo Opera House. In their article “Staging Openness through Atmosphere at the Oslo Opera House,” Payne-Frank and Schwabe look at space through the notions of “atmosphere” and “staging.” They apply a phenomenological gaze to understand the concrete outcome of an architectural attempt to produce “openness,” a social quality strived for in the context of Nordic cities. This is welfare beyond the state provision of healthcare or unemployment support, that is, welfare as the creation of “livable cities” with the aim of providing physical, perceptual and social wellbeing by the means of urban design. The Nordic notion of “welfare cities” and the sense of “openness” that defines them was stabilized, legitimized, articulated and even branded in the Oslo Opera House through atmosphere and staging.¹⁸ It is a case of architects imagining what welfare is about, namely “openness,” and translating this idea into architecture. Does it work? It might be difficult to design the vague notion of “openness” into spaces so that they are understood in the way intended. Who are the receivers of the message of “openness”? Who is it built for? Is it a landmark of Norway, showing the core value, the master signifier of the country? Or is it a leisure space for the middleclass, now able to be entertained in spaces that are supposed to signify “openness”? Imaginaries and ideas connected to openness seem hard to fulfill through this direct translation. Concurrently, these imaginaries and ideas are isolated in a monument, closing the openness inside the box of the theater.

Similar questions of accessibility and flow in and through public spaces are addressed by Melody Hoi-lam Yiu in her article “Culture Centers in Hong Kong: Welfare Provision or Economic Instrument?” As Yiu demonstrates, the technologies attached to building industries in Hong Kong combined with economic interests play a large part in the construction of culture centers. This represents an ambiguous situation where it is difficult to know whether the buildings are performing as public welfare provision or as capitalist economic instruments. The imaginaries of welfare are mixed with the realities of capitalism in various ways, mirroring the times of designing these buildings and effecting the spaces in ways that makes “welfare space” difficult to decode. As she demonstrates, these ambiguous spaces serve as the manifestations of the folding of capitalism, welfare, culture, consumer life and social life in response to various political and economic climates in Hong Kong.

Security in the Welfare City

The structural premises of welfare and their connection to space also involve imaginaries. Here, the concept of security as attached to the definition of welfare becomes relevant. Lars Bo Kaspersen has explored this topic in his analysis of the Danish welfare state as a relational “security unit.”¹⁹ Security units are protecting against different threats or problems, relative to the context: they can be military, economical, climate-related, etc. The different contexts addressed in the contributions to this issue give rise to different kinds of welfare, different kinds of security units and thereby different kinds of welfare spaces. These welfare spaces might be regarded as imaginaries put into action, planning for futures to come protected from threats. What is protected and how is it done?

In the case of Copenhagen, an economic downturn during the 1970s and 1980s was reversed through investments in urban development, as Henriette Steiner argues in “Constructing Copenhagen in a Time of Economic Downturn: Reevaluating 1990s Postmodernist Urban Development before the City Became ‘Livable’.” Steiner demonstrates how the transformation of the city was connected to a neoliberal turn in national and municipal policies. It enabled developers to erect postmodernist buildings in abandoned industrial areas, which became important drivers in the development of the city. Subtle but still evident, these postmodern buildings perform as the forgotten icons of the lost welfare condition. Steiner shows how the imaginaries of neocapitalism folded into the imaginaries of Danish welfare society to create a new imaginary of wellness and livability, bounded by the idea of an economic security unit. This imaginary still permeates the city, yet the effects were costly, transforming Copenhagen into a city of well-off citizens and tourists. In that light, space, security and welfare have merged in new ways, turning Copenhagen into a kind of massive wellness-resort.

In her contribution “Welfare as Warfare: The Role of Modern Architecture during the Colombian Dictatorship,” Maria del Pilar Sanchez-Beltran discusses how modernist welfare buildings erected in Colombia in the 1950s reveal the culmination of a security unit of welfare – or warfare. These buildings were part of the dictator Gustavo Rojas-Pinilla’s welfare campaign as he positioned himself on the international scene of Cold War politics. This is explicit in Sanchez-Beltran’s case study, where unstable relations between agents on the international scene are stabilized through the building of welfare institutions, thus stabilizing a security unit. An important effect of these maneuvers is the articulation of the imaginaries of power and control through architecture and planning. Architecture and planning are applied to articulate the visions of control and power through the orderliness embedded in modernism; at the same time, these government interventions distort the vision of the planner. As politics, power, planning, security and utopias were combined in architecture, it led to misinterpretations and distortions of imaginaries.

In the coastal meadows south of Copenhagen, the Danish welfare landscape of Køge Bay Beach Park has been designed and redesigned since the late 1970s according to changing welfare imaginaries and ideas. These changes are explored through images and text by Anna Aslaug Lund, Gertrud Jørgensen and Ole Fryd in “Layered Landscapes of Welfare Values – Revisiting Køge Bay Beach Park in Denmark.” Shifting imaginaries of welfare have been integrated into the landscape, displaying different notions of what kinds of security were needed. Today, the overall imaginary is welfare landscape as climate landscape, ready to adapt to the rising sea level. The climate emergency is shaping the definition of welfare and the spaces required to tackle it. These shifting welfare imaginaries are not displayed explicitly; they might be invisible to most people who inhabit or visit the area. Just as the history of these changes is understated, the climate-welfare landscape of tomorrow may be experienced as an implicit part of the landscape. These representations and reinterpretations of both landscape and welfare fold into the everyday life of the citizens using the space.

Welfare at Home

Welfare can relate to ideas of home, kinship and other kinds of social relations. It often pertains to traditional relations between age groups, cultural practices that have been forgotten and gaps in an otherwise homogenous social fabric. At this more relational, personal or familial scale, ideas about how to uphold social relations become crucial. Contributors to this issue point to ways that familial relationships and other informal or personal forms of welfare can contribute to state led or formalized welfare provisions. In this sense, “welfare” is folded into “kinship,” “age,” “social groups” and other such notions, thus becoming involved in problems of both a semantic and a pragmatic nature, to paraphrase Appadurai.

In her article “Warm-Soup Proximity: The Spatiality of Eldercare in Hyper-Aged Japanese Society,” Xiaobo Shen investigates the spatial folds of kinship caretaking, in Japan officially expressed through the concept of kinkyo, which means to live nearby relatives. The practice of provision of warm soup operates with “proximity” as a welfare parameter. Welfare policies in Japan focus on the agency and movement of recipients and participants. The notion of proximity also highlights how relative the definition and perception of space can be. In this sense, the floating signifier, coined by Claude Lévi-Strauss, is at work in the way that “welfare” is defined and practiced in Japanese everyday life. As a floating signification of “welfare,” it oscillates from the realm of daily lives and kin relations into something more planned; the warm soup that must be kept warm when transported, becomes the signifying factor of the proximity of welfare to relatives.²⁰ Thus, the warm soup practice folds imaginaries of the preservation of kinship-based care into a regularized welfare provision. This example highlights how the centralized and planned welfare distribution of the state is contrasted with the decentralized work of families and kinship. The tensions between central and decentral, planned and ad hoc welfare provision fold into each other, while spatial proximity remains a key consideration. Furthermore, kinship and its proper performance are at stake, in particular the correct proximity between kin and food as an important element of care. Can close kinship relations be transformed into a systematized welfare policy of urban planning? From personal to institutional or managed systems? What changes when welfare moves from kin to state? Shen’s article explores these questions and explores new ways to combine personal and centralized provisions of welfare.

Chiko Makore Ncube and Tatenda Goodman Nhapi discuss how traditional ways of communal and mutual caretaking are being reinvented with a focus on welfare for older people. In their article “Un-African Aging? Discourses of the Socio-Spatial Welfare for Older People in Urban Zimbabwe,” they demonstrate how these issues can be expressed through the philosophy of Ubuntu, which is concerned with community, identity, humanness and the use of consensus in conflicts. However, this rediscovery of traditional practices raises questions of agency and hierarchy – do ways of dealing with old age change as they are imposed from above? Will concepts and imaginaries of old age, welfare and relations between people change? What will be lost and gained as welfare is transformed from relations between people in a kinship network to a centralized welfare system? As definitions of “a good life,” kinship, old age and welfare are changing, spatially and structurally, there are many questions about how tradition can be kept alive while also being supplemented and supported by centralized, bureaucratic systems.

In “The Perforated Welfare Space: Negotiating Ghetto-Stigma in Media, Architecture and Everyday Life,” Marie Stender and Mette Mechlenborg explore the stigma of postwar social housing areas and the negative reputations reinforced by media in Denmark. The media applies spatial terms like “ghetto,” “holes in the map of Denmark” and “parallel society” to describe social housing. This discourse is evidence of a perspective that sees Danish spaces of welfare as becoming “perforated.” As Stender and Mechlenborg argue, what is not understood is removed; what cannot be categorized is turned into holes, holes in the map of Denmark and holes in the discourse. Definitions of “the right way of living together” act as a non-explicit subtext to the discourses. The holes denote spaces that do not fit the preconceptions. The intention of this discourse is to name the problematic spaces in an effort to fix them. But does it work? Are the labels addressing the problems of social housing or simply stigmatizing the spaces and the people that live there? In this sense, the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas’ is helpful. In her book Purity and Danger, Douglas explored the notions of purity and uncleanness in various cultures, explaining that these notions are relative to the cultural and religious context they are part of, while the mechanism is the same in the various systems: “Where there is dirt there is system,” Douglas argued, since “[d]irt is the byproduct of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements.”²¹ Substituting “dirt in the system” with “holes in the map of Denmark,” one might argue that what is at stake is not so much a negotiation of the implication of “ghettos,” as a negotiation of the meaning of “Denmark.”

Spaces of Meaning

As stated above, with this issue of Architecture and Culture we intend to broaden the exploration of spaces of welfare from a Danish to a global scope. Although several of the articles focus on a Nordic context, the issue spurs a dialogue with different definitions and imaginaries relating to welfare. What is understood as welfare in some places might be articulated through other notions such as kinkyo or Ubuntu in other places. The contributions discuss imaginaries, ideas, interpretations, etc. as they appear in specific, situated contexts and in doing so reveal differences and similarities between those contexts. The imaginaries running through the contributions are always situated imaginaries and might be thought of as belonging to different layers or spheres that are entangled, indeed folded. Sometimes similar sorts of welfare occur in similar sorts of space; sometimes definitions and practices of welfare are distinct and tied to a local context. This prompts us to ask whether the two meanings of the noun welfare, as presented initially, are in fact merging? What we understand as care seems to be morphing from a provision of amenities and various forms of social, financial or medical aid, into a question of caring for our feelings of wellbeing – supported and instrumentalized by the staging of atmospheres. However, this raises questions about how to determine who needs help? And in what ways? It also leaves us asking how we can measure the inclusivity and strength of a welfare system and its spaces through its affective impact. Our aim is to develop theoretical framings and understandings of the key spatial conditions of welfare and their transformations and thereby suggest directions for further research and to bring such discussions into education, public debate and the formation of policies. We hope that the dialogue between researchers studying various sites and practices might be enhanced, spotting problems, paradoxes and caveats, and leading to new visions about how space and welfare might be understood, explored and dealt with in real life.

Kirsten Marie Raahauge, Martin Søberg and Runa Johannessen
Royal Danish Academy – Architecture, Design, Conservation, Copenhagen, Denmark
[email protected]

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).

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.