Displacing the other to unite the nation: The parallel society legislation in Denmark

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

Documents

  • Fulltext

    Accepted author manuscript, 662 KB, PDF document

In 2018, the then right-wing government in Denmark led by Lars Lokke Rasmussen and supported by the extreme right-wing party Danish People's Party presented new legislation to end 'parallel societies' in Denmark by toughening the criminal law, enforcing Danish knowledge and nursery school assistance to toddlers, and, more importantly for this article, a series of urban interventions in 'ghetto areas' considered as such mainly when the proportion of immigrants and descendants from non-Western countries exceeded 50 per cent. Until recently research has focused on either the discursive elements of the 'ghetto politics' in Denmark or the urban interventions from an architectural or urban planning point of view. However, newfangled research deal with the entwined economic elements. In this article, I compare the different developmental plans proposed in the affected areas because of the legislation, with an aim to reach further and point at the inherent elements of urban b/ordering, that is, measures taken to attain social order and gain legitimacy by demarcating categories of people to incorporate some and exclude others through urban space. Indeed, through this comparison, I conclude that the ghetto legislation is a compelling example of the urban b/ordering inherent to the politics and dynamics of current liberal capitalist social democracies. It is a social experiment that remodels the geography of Denmark in terms that recall the eugenic and hygienic social and urban policies of the 19th century and form part of a worrying pattern that may have consequences that go beyond the stated ones.

Original languageEnglish
JournalEuropean Urban and Regional Studies
Volume30
Issue number3
Pages (from-to)261-281
ISSN0969-7764
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 7 Apr 2023

    Research areas

  • Urban bordering, urban planning, nation-building, ghettos, parallel society legislation, SOCIAL MIX

Number of downloads are based on statistics from Google Scholar and www.ku.dk


No data available

ID: 345064207