Mass housing and the emergence of the 'concrete slum' in Denmark in the 1970s & 1980s

By investigating how modernist mass housing was turned into both an ‘object of criticism’ and an ‘object of study’ in the 1970s and early 1980s Denmark, this articles seeks to bring new perspectives to the early history of Danish mass housing. Even though the rejection of urban modernism constitutes a well-established field of research internationally, surprisingly few scholars have so far investigated how this played out in a Danish context. This article addresses this research gap by analysing how mass housing was portrayed and re-evaluated as a ‘place’ in Danish mass media and popular culture as well as within social scientific research from the 1970s to the mid-1980s. The article argues that the public rejection of Danish mass housing cannot be reduced to a question about architectural aesthetics. Rather, this process entailed a complete reinterpretation of the role in which mass housing occupied as a specific type of ‘place’ in Danish society.