Infrastructural citizenship: the everyday politics of slum clearance in mid-twentieth century Copenhagen

This chapter investigates how residents on Danish mass housing estates used ‘resident democracy’ as a platform to negotiate welfare citizenship in 1970s’ urban Denmark. Introduced in 1970, resident democracy allows the residents on Danish non-profit housing estates to participate actively in the daily management of their estate. The system is unique, even in a Nordic context. Besides installing community participation as a social norm on the estates, this arrangement provided the residents with a platform to collectively oppose both discursive and economic challenges that they faced in the 1970s. Focusing on three housing estates – Gellerupplanen, Vollsmose, and Brøndby – the chapter examines a series of local conflicts that played out between the residents and various external and internal actors. By analysing the residents’ protests as ‘acts of citizenship’, it suggests that although Danish resident democracy emerged from a certain understanding of democracy, it also provided the residents with a platform to expand and transgress this category. Danish modernist mass housing estates not only illustrate how welfare was planned architecturally in the 1950s and 1960s, but they also open a window to how the social order of the Danish welfare society has been continuously negotiated through the collective efforts of urban communities.