Urban Competition and Urban Crisis. City and security: the Case of Social welfare in Denmark, with a Focus on Housing

Abstract

This essay is about the development of welfare policies in general, and housing policies in particular, in Denmark in the post World War Two period. Housing is the most important item when it comes to the well-being of the individual and/or his or her family, and, housing policy was a central element in building up the welfare society. The building of public social housing took off from the mid 1960s, and a decade later the housing market could be said to have been in balance. State intervention had taken place along two dimensions: on the one hand, the public housing sector received substantial subsidies for the construction of dwellings, while on the other home ownership was supported by fiscal welfare, since interest on debts could de deducted from taxes. This development changed the geographical and social segregation of the urban space and population. These early beginnings coincided with the ?golden years? of the welfare state from 1945 to the mid-1970s. The expansion of publicly supported housing and of privately owned one-family houses took place outside the city centres, which created middle-class suburbias and huge public housing estates. The (lower) middle classes populated the former, while workers, both skilled and unskilled, moved into the latter. In the 1960s to mid-1970s both public housing and suburbia were considered nice places to live, relatively spacious, with high levels of comfort and lots of fresh air and green external surroundings. However, since the mid-1970s, the public housing estates have gradually changed, although the middle-class suburban spaces have maintained their positive image. New groups of people started to move into the public housing estates, notably immigrants and socially marginalised sectors of the population. In the public discourse, public housing estates have developed into ghettos with an over-representation of ethnic minorities with little or no attachment to the labour market, and ethnic Danes equally marginalised from the labour market and from mainstream institutions of social integration. Simultaneously, suburban one-family home-owner neighbourhoods have developed into equally homogeneous middle-class ghettos. From 1984 to 1997, over-representation of the most vulnerable recipient of social assistance rose by 85% in the socially deprived areas of the largest urban districts. The essay concludes that the trend is towards a stronger division in society between the middle classes and the marginalised sectors of the population. The former are enjoying integration into society by relying more on market and corporate solutions, while the latter are exposed to exclusionary processes because of their dependence upon public provisions that, whether deliberately or not, place them outside the mainstream