The Precariat as Place: A Literary History of the Danish Ghetto

Abstract

This article provides the Danish official policy on ‘ghettoes’ with a literary prehistory and in doing so makes the argument that the present-day conception of ‘ghettoes’ as by definition linked to non-western immigrants is only the latest in a long line of figurations. Danish fiction and poetry from the 1960s to the present day on the design, building and habitation of modernist mass housing projects tell a three-chapter story of recession. High hopes and an ambition to remedy class barriers in the sixties give way to despair and a reconfiguration of class society during the seventies. Built for both the working class and the middle class, the estates gradually, not least in the public imagination, become the epitome of a precarious existence on the margins of society. When immigrants arrive because of globalisation, the Danish welfare state moves them into an existing social architecture, figuratively as well as non-figuratively speaking. In this contemporary context the article charts site-specific conceptions of class and gender before suggesting – by way of Bruno Latour and Manuel DeLanda – new answers to the question: ‘What is a ghetto?’ [A corrected version of this article was published on 9 February 2021; the new version is indicated by v2 in the filename.]