This book investigates co-housing as an alternative housing form in relation to sustainable urban development. Co-housing is often lauded as a more sustainable way of living. The primary aim of this ...book is to critically explore co-housing in the context of wider social, economic, political and environmental developments. This volume fills a gap in the literature by contextualising co-housing and related housing forms. With focus on Denmark, Sweden, Hamburg and Barcelona, the book presents general analyses of co-housing in these contexts and provides specific discussions of co-housing in relation to local government, urban activism, family life, spatial logics and socio-ecology. This book will be of interest to students and researchers in a broad range of social-scientific fields concerned with housing, urban development and sustainability, as well as to planners, decision-makers and activists.
This open access book is about socio-spatial theory in, and the nature of, Nordic geography. From both historical and contemporary perspectives, the book engages with theorisations of geography in ...the Nordic countries. Including chapters by geographers from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, it reflects how theories about the relations between the social and the spatial have been developed, adopted and critiqued in Nordic human geography in relation to a wide range of themes, concepts and approaches. The book also traces institutional developments, distinct geographical traditions and intellectual histories, as well as authors’ own experiences as geographers in and beyond the Nordic area. The chapters together introduce and engage with debates and discussions that permeate Nordic geography and allows readers a glimpse of geographical thinking and the role of socio-spatial theory in the Nordic countries. By providing insights into how geographical ideas emerge, travel and are translated and adapted in specific contexts, the book contributes to debates about historical-geographical situatedness and theorisations of geography.
This article contrasts the intentions and outcomes of the publicly instigated and supported urban renewal of Copenhagen's Inner Vesterbro district. Apart from physically upgrading the decaying ...buildings, the municipality's aim was to include the inhabitants in the urban renewal process and, seemingly, to prevent the dislocation of people from the neighbourhood. However, due to ambiguous policies, the workings of the property market and the lack of sufficient deflecting mechanisms, middle-class inhabitants are now replacing the high concentration of socioeconomically vulnerable people that characterised Vesterbro before the urban renewal. This process may appear 'gentle', but it is nonetheless an example of how state and market interact to produce gentrification with 'traumatic' consequences for individuals and the city as a socially just space.
Largely unrecognised in prevailing historical accounts of (radical) geography, Danish university geography from the late 1960s saw the emergence of a strong radical strand. In terms of student ...support, this radical geography became a dominant feature of geography at the University of Copenhagen, and was a defining element in the establishment of geography at the new Roskilde University Centre. This radical movement spawned its own journal, had a strong impact on upper‐secondary school geography, and played an important part in developing the Nordic critical geography network. As a contribution to the emerging situated histories of radical and critical geography, this article investigates the conditions of possibility for the rise of radical geography in Copenhagen and the movement’s institutionalisation during the 1970s. More briefly, the article also considers the transformative crisis of Danish radical geography in the 1980s.
Resumé
Den gængse historieskrivning om (radikal) geografi overser i det store og hele, at der fra slutningen af 1960’erne opstod en stærk radikal strømning i dansk universitetsgeografi. I forhold til studenteropslutning blev denne radikale geografi dominerende på Københavns Universitet, og den var et definerende element i oprettelsen af geografi på det nye Roskilde Universitetscenter. Den radikale bevægelse grundlagde sit eget tidsskrift, fik stor indflydelse i gymnasieskolen og spillede en vigtig rolle i udviklingen af det Nordiske netværk for kritisk geografi. Som et bidrag til den spirende lokaliserede historieskrivning om radikal og kritisk geografi, undersøger denne artikel mulighedsbetingelserne for oprindelsen af radikal geografi i København, samt bevægelsens institutionalisering gennem 1970’erne. I kortere træk undersøger artiklen også dansk radikal geografis omkalfatrende krise i 1980’erne.
Broadly understood as a housing form that combines individual dwellings with substantial common facilities and activities aimed at everyday living, Danish cohousing communities (bofællesskaber) are ...often seen as pioneering and comparatively successful. Yet, in spite of frequently being mentioned or addressed as case studies in the growing literature on cohousing and, more generally, alternative forms of housing, Danish cohousing experiences have not been systematically analysed since the 1980s. Emphasizing broader trends and evolving societal contexts, this article investigates the development of Danish cohousing over the past five decades. Through this historical analysis, the article also draws attention to the largely neglected issue of tenure structures in the evolution of cohousing. The multifaceted phenomenon of cohousing cannot and should not be reduced to issues of tenure. But if cohousing is to spread and contribute affordable alternatives to mainstream housing, tenure structures should be a key concern.
Ghetto area’ has become an official categorisation in Danish housing policy. This article investigates how this stigmatising spatialisation of politics and policy has emerged through evolving ...storylines for particular housing estates, which gradually have come to structure political debate and become institutionalised in official policy. While political actors can draw on different storylines, it is argued that a range of storylines and associated quantifiable criteria combine to produce a generic ‘ghetto place’ in Danish politics. This scale-framing and objectification have enabled a politics of the exception, making it possible to apply extraordinary measures to particular places. This has significant effects for inhabitants in these places and the cities in which they are located, and it is proposed that, in the longer term, the politics of the exception could also become a battering ram against the collectively owned non-profit housing sector in Denmark.
Cohousing has caught the attention of activists, academics and decision-makers, and Danish experiences with cohousing as bofællesskaber are routinely highlighted as pioneering and successful. This ...article presents a mainly quantitative analysis of the development of Danish intergenerational cohousing and investigates socio-economic characteristics of residents in these communities. First, the article demonstrates how the development of Danish cohousing has been undergirded by distinct shifts in dominant tenure forms. Second, it shows that inhabitants in contemporary Danish cohousing are socio-economically distinct. This does not diminish the value of cohousing, but it problematises assumptions about the social sustainability of this housing form.
Key Messages
This article investigates processes of neoliberalization of the academy.
It argues that neoliberalism entails shifts from exchange to competition, from equality to inequality, and turns ...academics into human capital.
It suggests that auditing systems are key mechanisms of neoliberalization that produce unhealthy levels of anxiety and stress in the academy.
This paper presents a theoretical analysis of the neoliberal production of anxiety in academic faculty members in universities in Northern Europe. The paper focuses on neoliberalization as it is instantiated through audit and ranking systems designed to produce academia as a space of economic efficiency and intensifying competition. We suggest that powerful forms of competition and ranking of academic performance have been developed in Northern Europe. These systems are differentiated and differentiating, and they serve to both index and facilitate the neoliberalization of the academy. Moreover, these audit and ranking systems produce an ongoing sense of anxiety among academic workers. We argue that neoliberalism in the academy is part of a wider system of anxiety production arising as part of the so‐called “soft governance” of everything, including life itself, in contemporary late liberalism.
Résumé
L'anxiété suscitée par l'université néolibérale
Cet article expose des réflexions théoriques portant sur l'anxiété suscitée par les universités néolibérales de l'Europe du Nord chez les membres du personnel enseignant. L'article s'intéresse particulièrement à la montée du néolibéralisme liée aux systèmes d'audit et de classement établis afin de générer un monde universitaire qui valorise l'efficacité économique et la concurrence. Nous défendons l'idée selon laquelle de puissants modes de concurrence et de classement du rendement universitaire ont émergé en Europe du Nord. Ces systèmes sont différenciés et établissent des distinctions, et servent à jauger et promouvoir le néolibéralisme dans le monde universitaire. En outre, ces systèmes d'audit et de classement suscitent un sentiment permanent d'anxiété chez les travailleurs universitaires. Nous soutenons que le néolibéralisme dans le monde universitaire s'inscrit dans un système plus large qui suscite l'anxiété et qui prend naissance dans la soi‐disant « gouvernance modérée » de tout, y compris la vie elle‐même, sur fond de libéralisme tardif.
In this article, we analyse the evolution and transformation of Danish spatial planning from its tentative origins in liberalist politics, through its rise as a central feature of the welfare state ...project, to its more recent entrepreneurial forms in a context of neoliberalisation. The article demonstrates how transformations of Danish spatial planning discourses and practices must be understood in context of previous discourses and practices sedimented as layers of meaning and materiality through time and over space. These layers do not completely overlay one another, but present a palimpsest saturated with contradictions as well as possibilities. We propose the notion of the ‘planning palimpsest’ as a helpful metaphor for drawing attention to the historical-geographical characteristics of planning discourses and practices.
The history of Danish geographers during the Second World War is almost synonymous with that of Gudmund Hatt (1884–1960), the Professor of Human Geography at Copenhagen University. Hatt was a key ...figure in the development of Danish geography and assumed the role of a public intellectual, particularly through his geopolitical analyses as they unfolded in a staggering number of radio speeches, newspaper essays, books and articles during the late 1930s and early 1940s. But this industriousness, which accelerated during the first years of the Nazi-German occupation of Denmark (9 April 1940–5 May 1945), was also the direct reason for Hatt's hard downfall – academically as well as personally. For his wartime activities, Hatt was as the only Danish university professor tried by a post-war public servants' tribunal. It found that he had engaged in ‘dishonourable national conduct’ during the occupation and dismissed him from his professorship. Drawing on archives and published sources from the period, the paper focuses on Hatt's wartime activities and geopolitical analyses in the complicated political context of the occupation, and it pays particular attention to the conflict between ‘science’ and ‘politics’ as it crystallised in the post-war trial of Hatt.
•Presents a history of Gudmund Hatt and the German occupation of Denmark (1940–1945).•Focuses on Hatt as public intellectual during the politics of cooperation (1940–1943).•Examines the post-war trial of Hatt for ‘dishonourable national conduct’.•Discusses conflicting ideas of science, politics and national interest.
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