Words and Things: Taxonomies of Demolition in Scandinavia
In 2018, then Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen addressed the nation in a televised New Year’s speech, gravely assessing the status quo. Certain Danish neighborhoods had become “parallel societies,” he warned, and “cracks have appeared in the map of Denmark. I am deeply concerned.” What should the nation do to address this scourge? Rasmussen offered solutions: “We must set a new target of phasing out ghettos altogether. In some places by breaking up the concrete. By demolishing buildings. By spreading the inhabitants and rehousing them in different areas. In other places by taking full control over who moves in. We must close the cracks in the map of Denmark and restore the mixed neighbourhoods where we meet people from every walk of life.”
Figure 1. Demolition of a high-rise housing tower in the neighborhood of Brøndby Strand, outside Copenhagen, May 2023. This section, called Brøndby Strand Parks, was constructed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Danish government currently lists Brøndby Strand as a “prevention area” [forebyggelseområde] at risk of becoming a “parallel society” [parallelsamfund]. Photograph by Jennifer Mack.
Later that year, the Danish Economy and Interior Department released the policy document “One Denmark without Parallel Societies — No Ghettos in 2030,” known colloquially as the “Ghetto Plan” or “Ghetto Package.” Using statistics, the authors explained that “ghettos” had large concentrations of residents with low levels of education and employment, high levels of crime, and too many “non-Western” residents. Echoing Rasmussen, they proclaimed:
The ghettos must be completely gone. The parallel societies must be dismantled. And we must ensure that new ones do not arise. Once and for all, there will be a major integration operation where a group of immigrants and descendants have not adopted Danish values and have isolated themselves in parallel societies. Denmark must continue to be Denmark. In places where there are parallel societies, Denmark will be Denmark again.
The report called for “hard ghettos” — neighborhoods it defined as meeting the report’s criteria for four years or longer — to reduce their social housing for families (as opposed to seniors or students) to a share of 40% or less by 2030, through demolition, renovation, and/or privatization. It also recommended that residents be subject to obligatory social programs such as Danish-language preschools, increased punishments for crimes, and more.
Since the Plan’s release, Denmark has seen a surge of such action. Yet the categories “ghettos” or “hard ghettos” are so thin, and arbitrary, that, as a Danish housing activist explained in a panel discussion last month, just officially registering the degrees of a few people who had not had their diplomas accounted for previously lifted his entire neighborhood off the “ghetto list.”
The Ghetto Plan merely represents an extreme example, however, of a larger managerial approach to governance increasingly common in both Denmark and Sweden, my adopted home, where taxonomies — both of people and of neighborhoods — generate policy. These taxonomies are typically based on groupings and statistics, implied to be, but far from, objective and scientific. Scandinavian newspaper headlines frequently describe social problems in statistical terms and categories, addressing angst about immigration, gang warfare, and crime numerically to underscore a need to act. A Swedish morning news program might, for instance, air a segment outlining the number of crimes committed by geography (national, regional, and urban), while omitting other crucial statistics, such as the fact that theft is common in posh, inner-city neighborhoods. Administrative approaches to policy problems are, it seems, more easily justified with reference to numerical data, implied to have a basis in fact. This stance clearly underscored the Ghetto Package.
Swedish and Danish neighborhoods with large numbers of immigrants have long been designated as societal problems and, for many decades, been given disparaging labels in official government documents (Figure 2). They have been called utanförskapsområden (alienation areas, used among right-leaning Swedish politicians the 1990s), utsatta områden (vulnerable areas, used officially by the Swedish Police and in Danish policy documents), ghettoer (ghettos, used most notably in the 2018 plan), and parallelsamfund (parallel societies, used in both countries in official policies and debates). These terms have grown harsher over time.
Figure 2. Lawns and housing in the Swedish neighborhood of Norsborg (classified as an “especially vulnerable area” by the Swedish Police in 2020), Dec. 2018. Norsborg was originally constructed during the Swedish Million Program, which produced one million dwelling units in the years between 1965 and 1974. The 2020 policy document “Right Action in the Right Place” outlined three levels of neighborhoods in need of intervention and called for additional police resources to address this. Photograph by Jennifer Mack.
Paradoxically, most of these neighborhoods were built through welfare-state housing programs in the mid-twentieth century, on plans by architects who imagined their work in utopian terms, as sites where citizens across the socioeconomic spectrum would enjoy technologically and socially advanced lifestyles. Modernist in physical form, they came to be seen as dated within a generation and were disparaged as “ugly” and “dangerous,” making them “symbolically malleable,” as I have written elsewhere. When major policy documents adopt this rhetorical strategy, it creates imperatives to critical, clear action. Indeed, with the labels “ghetto,” “vulnerable area,” and “hard ghetto,” the authors in 2018 clarified that “it must be possible to completely liquidate the[m] . . . as public residential areas.” To be designated, then, not just a theoretical, but actual, physical threat. In Sweden, the 2020 national report “Right Action in the Right Place” adopted a similar approach, dividing designated neighborhoods into three categories: “vulnerable area,” “risk area,” and “especially vulnerable area.” It called for different levels of new police presence in each rather than renovation or demolition, though the inherent threat to the material conditions of the neighborhoods was palpable.
Meanwhile, people living in targeted neighborhoods in both countries — many of whom moved there after forced migration — have also been slotted into categories. Since the 1970s, as Ingvar Svanberg and Mattias Tydén write, new residents of Sweden have been called, among other names, utlänningar (foreigners), invandrare (immigrants), migranter (migrants), asylsökande (asylum seeking), or perhaps nysvenskar (New Swedes) — the last two adjectives rather than nouns. Denmark’s Ghetto Package, too, is marbled with terms like ikke-vestlige (non-Western in Danish). Linking geography and terminology, the authors write that “Every third citizen with a non-Western background lives in a public residential area where at least 25% of the residents have a non-Western background.” Later in the document, they explain that “With the updated ghetto criteria, 25 public housing areas will remain on the ghetto list. Of the roughly 60,000 residents in the 25 ghetto areas, two-thirds have a non-Western background.” Classified people are then said to have specific traits: “The Foreigner and Integration Ministry’s citizenship survey shows, among other things, that almost 40 per cent of people with non-Western backgrounds find that the man is the natural head of the family.” The physical changes prescribed by the plan are intended to relieve these neighborhoods of this unwanted “other” (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Building construction in Tingbjerg, outside Copenhagen, Sept. 2022. In Steen Eiler Rasmussen’s original urban designs, this was the site of a commercial center, which was demolished to make way for new housing for compliance with the Ghetto Plan. One way to reduce family social housing to less than 40% of the total is to build new privately-owned homes and rental housing for other groups, such as students or the elderly. All of these strategies are being used in urban planning for Tingbjerg, which moved from the “hard ghetto” [hård ghetto] list (called “conversion area” [omdannelseområde] from 2021) to the “prevention area” [forebyggelseområde] list in 2022. Photograph by Jennifer Mack.
“When dehumanizing social categories meet disparaging spatial categories . . . the rhetoric catalyzes disciplinary measures against the built environment.”
Mainstream Swedish politicians initially disavowed the activity in Denmark as racist and extremist, but the recent rise of the far-right Sweden Democrats (SD) has changed this calculus. When SD first qualified for seats in parliament by capturing five per cent of votes, parties from the right to the left eschewed them. Over time, their discourse has traveled leftward. With SD the second-largest political party in Sweden in the 2022 election, earning 20.54% of the vote, politicians in the Moderate, Christian Democrat, and Liberal parties have embraced SD rhetoric to varying degrees — in part because the parliamentary system requires parties without clear majorities to forge coalitions. While not forming part of the government, SD became kingmakers.
In the weeks and months leading up to the election, and in the context of increasing media attention on gangs and crime in Sweden, even the Social Democrats (the traditional workers’ party, from whom many SD voters had come) began to echo SD’s rhetoric (Figure 4). This slippage allowed the Social Democrats to appear “tough on crime” and “realistic.” For example, a proposal from the Social Democratic politician Anders Ygemen, then Integration Minister, suggested that no more than half of any given neighborhood should be utomnordiska (extra-Nordic in Swedish) residents, saying, “I think it is bad to have areas where the majority have extra-Nordic origins.” This rhetorical shift appears to have worked, at least up to a point: the Social Democrats received the largest share of the vote, although not enough to form a government, which left the door open for the right-wing parties to do so.
Figure 4. Campaign posters for the 2022 Swedish elections in central Stockholm, Sept. 2022. Many Swedish politicians focused on crime, especially from gang members, in the campaigns and the idea of “safety” [trygghet], seen here. Notably, posters for the Christian Democrat politician at center include the slogan: “Build beautifully — no more concrete boxes.” Photograph by Jennifer Mack.
Figure 5. Model showing planned urban design with new rowhouse construction in Tingbjerg, to be built for compliance with the Ghetto Plan, June 2023. The real estate development company NRep is one of the actors carrying out new projects in Tingbjerg, and the model is displayed in their local showroom. Photograph by Jennifer Mack.
The government that came to power now looks to Sweden’s southern neighbor for inspiration. Its “Tidö Agreement,” written in the aftermath of the election, promises a “paradigm shift” around migration and integration, focusing on asylum seekers and “third-country citizens,” among other groupings. To justify severe new measures targeting migrants, including DNA data collection and a residential “transit center” for asylum seekers, the authors call for “coming to terms with the shadow society.” They suggest that the government should collect “biometric information like DNA-data about third-country citizens who apply for residence permits in Sweden,” including minors, “to a larger degree than today and save [it] in searchable databases” (Figure 5). In the realm of the built environment, they call for “cooperation with joint and mandatory responsibility between the public and all property owners to carry out long-term improvement work in residential areas,” perhaps through “what are called in English Business Improvement Districts (BIDs).” More recently, SD party leader Jimmie Åkesson has proposed the demolition of Swedish mosques.
In The Order of Things, French philosopher Michel Foucault analyzes how the assumed supremacy of taxonomies legitimizes specific groupings as “true,” even when they are largely idiosyncratic. The Tidö Agreement’s “shadow society” is circumscribed by taxonomies with subjective assessments (such as of “poor conduct”) that have nothing to do with residents’ mobility across borders or legal status. Its authors write that
anyone who is in Sweden and enjoys Swedish hospitality has an obligation to show respect in relation to fundamental Swedish values and not disregard the population in their actions. An investigation must therefore be initiated to analyze the conditions for reintroducing the possibility of deporting foreigners with poor conduct. Poor conduct means conditions such as non-compliance, association with a criminal organization, network or clan, prostitution, substance abuse, participation in violent or extremist organizations or environments that threaten fundamental Swedish values or if there are otherwise unequivocally established objections regarding the way of life.
Meanwhile, the ostensibly more centrist Danish government of 2021 opted to switch to describing targeted neighborhoods as “parallel societies” in response to widespread international criticism of the use of the word “ghetto.” At the same time, it added a new category, “prevention areas” [forebyggelseområder], which designates areas at risk of landing on the list because they contain, for example, more than 30% “non-Western” residents. New labels continue to condemn areas as beyond the reach of the Danish state: as external, both socially and culturally, to a wider, more desirable (White) realm (Figures 6 and 7).
Figure 6. Landscapes and housing in Hallunda-Norsborg in the winter, 2018. The original landscape designs included bushes like these to reinforce traffic-separated, modernist urban planning concepts of the late twentieth century. Photograph by Jennifer Mack.
Figure 7. Landscapes and housing in Tingbjerg in the spring, 2023. The courtyard spaces outside existing mid-rise housing are designated for infill with rowhouses, according to the current plans for the neighborhood. Photograph by Jennifer Mack.
When dehumanizing social categories meet disparaging spatial categories for neighborhoods, the rhetoric catalyzes disciplinary measures against the built environment: privatization, renovation, and demolition. Unwanted people and places are imbricated, making one synonymous with the other. Tearing down housing blocks or selling them to private, often predatory, investors occurs in parallel with proposals to confiscate jewelry from asylum seekers to pay for their own processing, or to move them to facilities in third countries to await application decisions. In a turn that could be understood as an extreme form of state-led gentrification, the “parallel society” is to be eradicated, while the new and improved suburbs — scrubbed of their aging welfare-state housing — will feature those born in “Western countries,” preferably “Nordics,” along with more traditional forms of architecture and urbanism. When words and things are treated as synonymous, these discursive turns facilitate politics that brand individuals, groups, and environments as disposable.
Citation
Jennifer Mack, “Words and Things: Taxonomies of Demolition in Scandinavia,” PLATFORM, Dec. 18, 2023.
