State-led stigmatisation of place and the politics of the exception

Abstract

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.

Introduction

In his 2010 opening speech to the parliament (Folketinget), the Liberal prime minster declared that ‘a series of holes has appeared in the map of Denmark. Places where Danish values are clearly no longer upheld’ (Løkke Rasmussen, 2010). He referred to housing estates ‘we colloquially call ghettos’. But the speech as well as the policies it introduced shows that applying the term ‘ghetto’ to particular housing estates was not simply ‘colloquial’, and the ‘holes’ evoked by the prime minister were geographically specific: ‘The Government has identified 29 such ghetto areas with particularly severe challenges. These are areas in which a large proportion of the residents are out of work. Where there are many criminals. And where many Danes with immigrant backgrounds live’. These areas were identified and mapped in a policy paper, and criteria for identifying ‘ghetto areas’ were subsequently set out in law. This was one instance in an evolving process of what could be termed ‘state-led territorial stigmatization’ (Kipfer, 2019: 149; also Birk and Fallov, 2021; Fabian and Lund Hansen, 2021; Risager, 2022). Such processes have consequences. As Dikeç (2017) shows for other countries, for example, stigmatised urban areas are epicentres of urban uprisings. But spatial stigmatisation is also intimately tied to a politics of the exception, which can legitimate radical policy measures.

In this article we seek to address ‘the challenge of tracing the production of territorial stigmatization’ (Slater, 2017: 115). We do this by investigating the actual production of a politics of exception through the gradual elaboration, application and institutionalisation of stigmatising spatial categories. More specifically, we analyse how different storylines produce state-led stigmatisation of particular places in Denmark, and how this has enabled forms of exception in politics and policy. Rather than in-depth analysis of particular places and policies, which in the Danish context is offered by others (e.g. Jensen and Christensen, 2012; Simonsen, 2016), we prioritise a long historical perspective. This entails a ‘macro’ perspective that cannot address details of the analysed developments and conjunctures, but enables us to examine process over time. ‘The ghetto’ is an acute instance of spatial stigmatisation in current Danish politics, but we argue that such representations are produced through (and enabled by) longer histories. We thus build on Schultz Larsen’s (2014) pioneering work, and we seek to contribute a perspective emphasising the production of stigmatisation ‘in a field of inquiry that tends to focus on consequence’ (Slater, 2017: 116). Second, we focus on the production of spatial stigmatisation by government and parliament, key (but not sole) actors in stigmatisation ‘from above’ (Sisson, 2020). In this way we seek to address ‘how specific forms of bureaucratic practices, specific law or policies contribute to the production of territorial stigmatisation’, an issue that Schultz Larsen and Delica (2019: 556) identify as wanting in existing research. Policy papers, parliamentary debates and laws are our primary sources, and relating to emerging work on statistics in the production of spatial stigma (e.g. Sisson, 2021; Uitermark et al., 2017), we pay particular attention to the evolving criteria for identifying what were eventually designated as ‘ghetto areas’. Finally, while this article mainly focuses on the production of discursive representations, we discuss how these representations enable a politics of the exception, linking up with a key concern in research on spatial stigmatisation (e.g. Dikeç, 2007; Van Gent et al., 2018). We argue that heterogeneous socio-spatial phenomena have been homogenised into a generic ‘ghetto place’, which has enabled extraordinary policy measures directed at the sector of non-profit housing (almene boliger). Such policies have significant effects, both for the inhabitants in the targeted housing estates and for the cities in which they are situated. But supposedly extraordinary policies may pave the way for more general political changes. In Denmark, the politics of the exception may undermine a housing sector that makes up a fifth of Danish housing and is based on non-profit principles and collective property.

The first section outlines our analytical framework, which takes its point of departure in the notion of territorial stigmatisation, links this to Hajer’s conceptualisation of storylines in politics and emphasises the spatial dimension of stigmatisation. We then investigate how the ‘ghetto place’ has been produced through a range of storylines about particular housing estates that have emerged over four decades and become both structuring and institutionalised in Danish housing politics. Finally, as a preamble to the conclusions, and also summarising and discussing key aspects of the Danish case, we discuss the politics of the exception that emerges from this analysis.

Stigmatisation, storylines and the scaling of place

Territorial or, as we prefer, spatial, stigmatisation relates in particular to the pioneering work of Wacquant. Conceptualised as an emerging regime of ‘advanced marginality’, Wacquant (2008) argues that urban poverty is increasingly disconnected from fluctuations of national economies and concentrates in particular districts. From this, he sees territorial stigmatisation as symbolic defamation of urban places, a ‘blemish of place’ that ‘tends to concentrate in isolated and bounded territories increasingly perceived by both outsiders and insiders as social purgatories, leprous badlands’ (Wacquant, 2007: 67). This proposition has become the subject of a significant body of literature (see Schultz Larsen and Delica, 2019; Sisson, 2020). For the present purpose, we understand the production of spatial stigmatisation as ‘the ways in which noxious representations of space are produced, diffused, and harnessed in the field of power’ (Wacquant et al., 2014: 1273). Importantly, this involves ‘symbolic structures applied to neighborhoods (or other local geographies)’ where ‘neighborhoods become the problem rather than the expression of the problems to be addressed’ (Slater, 2017: 121). As emphasised by Sisson (2020), for example, spatial stigmatisation is produced physically and symbolically, through practices and representations. Symbolic power is defined here as the ability of dominant groups ‘through utterances’ to impose ‘the definition of the social world that is best suited to their interests’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 170, 167). In this article, we focus on the symbolic production of spatial stigma through discursive practices in government and parliament. To this end, we use the discourse-analytical framework of Hajer (1995), which provides a set of concepts that facilitate analysis of symbolic representations in political practices (cf. Olesen and Carter, 2018).

(Hajer’s 1995: 15) framework is based on the premise that policy-making should be ‘analysed as the creation of problems’ – policy-making needs an ‘object’ on which it is possible to debate and act. This process of discursive objectification is established through storylines, and a storyline is for (Hajer, 2005: 302) ‘a condensed statement summarizing complex narratives, used by people as “shorthand” in discussions’. This will often involve a metaphor, and storylines can assume a ritual character and serve the vital function of providing some coherence to complex problems. Storylines are thus intensely political, as they define ‘reality’ in important respects, foregrounding some solutions while foreclosing others. For (Hajer’s 1995: 59), this implies a ‘struggle for discursive hegemony in which actors try to secure support for their definition of reality’ through discourse-coalitions. A coalition is conceptualised here as ‘a group of actors that, in the context of an identifiable set of practices, share the usage of a particular set of storylines over a particular period of time’ (Hajer, 2005: 302). Storylines can be said to have become dominant (or hegemonic) when they satisfy the conditions of discourse structuration and institutionalisation, where structuration implies that actors’ credibility requires them to draw on ideas, concepts and categories from the discourse, while institutionalisation is achieved when the discourse is translated into political practices and institutional arrangements, including legal frameworks. Finally, this two-step process is how a discursive closure is realised, and this is for (Hajer’s 1995: 22) the ‘first and foremost’ requirement of regulation, because ‘the problem needs a definition that gives policy-making a proper target’.

The politics of the discursive objectification of ‘problems’ is central to our analysis, but Hajer does not address spatial dimensions in processes of objectification, the spatialisation of politics and eventually policy, which must be central to analyses of spatial stigmatisation. Wacquant (2007: 69) suggests that spatial stigmatisation involves ‘the dissolution of “place”’, where stigmatised neighbourhoods are ‘reduced from communal “places” … to indifferent “spaces” of mere survival and relentless contest’. We propose that there is more to place and space than this, and we heed Slater’s (2017) suggestion that spatial stigmatisation could be analysed as the production of scale. We approach this as the production of place through scale frames, which Kurtz (2003: 894) conceptualises as ‘discursive practices that construct meaningful (and actionable) linkages between the scale at which a social problem is experienced and the scale(s) at which it could be politically addressed or resolved’. We could say that policy-making not only needs a problem to be defined; it also needs to situate a problem spatially. Neither is politically innocent, and we approach the production of spatial stigmatisation as steeped in the politics of scale; that is, ‘the production, reconfiguration or contestation of particular differentiations, orderings and hierarchies among geographical scales’ (Brenner, 2001: 600). Framing a problem at a particular scale is central to the political definition of ‘reality’. Once a scale framing becomes structuring for political debate and action, however, it is endowed with a seeming permanence and inevitability; a multiplicity of possible geographical scales assumes the character of a place, and as Tuan (1974: 213) influentially suggests, place is ‘a reality to be clarified and understood from the perspectives of the people who have given it meaning’. For those living there, a housing estate could in Tuan’s terminology be an everyday ‘field of care’. But when seen from ‘above’ – from the perspectives of politicians, mass media and the population at large – we argue that highly heterogeneous socio-spatial phenomena in processes of spatial stigmatisation are scaled into generic ‘public symbols’ – places of high imageability that are imbued with significance from ‘the outside’ (Tuan, 1974). We term this socio-spatial representation the ‘ghetto place’, a dominant spatial representation that has come to define and situate a key policy problem. Similar spatial-political metaphors are at work elsewhere, such as Zones urbaines sensibles in France (Dikeç, 2017), probleemwijken in the Netherlands (Pinkster et al., 2020) or utanförskapsområden in Sweden (Scarpa, 2015).

Through existing research on Danish housing politics and our own work with primary sources, we have identified 2004, 2010 and 2018 as central historical conjunctures in the discursive spatialisation of the ‘ghetto place’. These are moments of ‘interpellation’ (Hajer, 1995) where the routine reproduction of a dominant discourse is interrupted and new discursive relationships and positionings are created (or become apparent). These moments were all characterised by a high-profile public speech by the prime minister and a government policy paper, which were followed by parliamentary debates and legislation. But to fully understand the production of spatial stigmatisation over the past two decades, it is necessary to go back to the 1970s and particularly the 1980s. If only briefly, we start our analysis then, before moving on to the production of spatial stigmatisation that crystallised around 2004, 2010 and 2018. To analyse discursive practise in these conjunctures, we have systematically reviewed the parliament’s online archives. The documents we include in the final analysis are transcripts of speeches by prime ministers, policy papers, bills and transcripts of parliamentary debates. These documents were coded to identify storylines and assessed for their degree of structuration and institutionalisation. As a heuristic aid, Figure 1 presents an outline of the identified storylines.

Figure 1.

Storylines in the production of the ‘ghetto place’.

Producing the ‘ghetto place’

While it was in the early 2000s that the production of spatial stigmatisation (and a politics of the exception) became noticeable in Danish (housing) politics, three storylines at work in current representations have longer lineages. First, from sometime in the early 1970s, and paralleling similar developments in other countries (Reinecke, 2015), we see the emergence of a hostile-environment storyline on modernist housing estates constructed during the boom years 1958–1972 – the ‘golden age’ of the Danish welfare state. From being widely perceived as incarnating modernity and the good life during the 1960s, in the 1970s the built environment of these housing estate came to be represented as ‘concrete slums’ (betonslum), a source of unwanted emotions and social behaviour (Høghøj and Holmqvist, 2018). This often environmental-determinist storyline has persisted, mutated and merged with other storylines until the present day. Second, the 1980s marked the formation of two storylines that became central in the scale framing of Danish spatial stigmatisation. A key node was the so-called Winther Report on ‘The non-profit housing sector’s role on the housing market’ (Boligministeriet, 1987). We will pause on this report, as it epitomises key discursive representations for the ensuing analysis and allows us to introduce some important context.

The Winther report was produced by a commission appointed by a relatively new right-of-centre coalition government, which included powerful liberalist actors that considered the non-profit housing sector as a market distortion and saw Thatcherite right-to-buy policies as a way to redress this (Schultz Larsen, 2014). The non-profit housing sector has its roots in experiments with housing cooperatives in the early 20th century, but since the 1930s had become a centrepiece in the emerging welfare-state politics. As a compromise between Left and Right, the sector is predominantly organised as private associations that are regulated by law and (particularly through favourable loans) supported by the (local) state. Importantly, these associations must be non-profit and the property is collectively owned by the members; that is, in the final analysis, the tenants (Blackwell and Bengtsson, 2021; Larsen and Lund Hansen, 2015; Noring et al., 2022; Vidal, 2019). The Winther Report did not fundamentally challenge the non-profit housing sector, but it represented two emerging storylines. First, the report was through its terms of reference delimited to the non-profit sector. This fed into a more general development during the 1980s in which the non-profit sector was separated from general housing politics and represented as a sector with particular tasks – and particular challenges (Schultz Larsen, 2014). While historically functioning as a non-market alternative for decent and affordable housing for everyone, non-profit housing increasingly came to serve as ‘social housing’ (Jensen, 1997). This marked the rise of a non-profit housing storyline in Danish housing politics, which poses the sector as a distinct object for policy. Second, while the focus on non-profit housing already involved a scale framing to a particular form of housing, located mainly in and around the major cities, the Winther Report involved a further scaling by identifying 5.5% of the sector as ‘maladjusted’ (samspilsramt). This mainly related to socio-economic problems, but the report linked these to image, poor building style and quality, rent levels and frequent moves. Drawing on the hostile-environment storyline, the Winther report thus helped to articulate a socio-economic storyline of specific non-profit housing estates as being particularly challenged. In a small way, it also inaugurated the practices of using statistics to scale frame particular housing estates for extraordinary policies.

Exemplified by the Winther Report, three intersecting storylines become evident in Danish housing politics of the 1980s: hostile environment, non-profit housing and socio-economy (Figure 1). This facilitated what became known as an area-based approach, a framing of the housing policy problem that came to dominate in the following years and is evident today (cf. Van Gent et al., 2009). In the analysis of (Schultz Larsen, 2014: 1399), this rationale ‘surprisingly fast became a very well-founded illusion’, and the ‘area-based approach was legitimized through its claim to address the specific and spatial problems at the bottom of the hierarchy, while at the same time stimulating economic growth at the top’. While still a decade or more from the ‘ghetto’ designation, a basis for the stigmatisation of places and a politics of the exception had been laid out. The area-based framing was nevertheless contested. The Winther Report included a note of dissent, for example, in which representatives for the centre-left dominated Copenhagen Municipality and the non-profit sector argued that challenges in the non-profit housing sector should be seen in a wider economic and housing political perspective (Boligministeriet, 1987: 18–21). There was, in other words, more than one discourse coalition at play, and while one drew on powerful existing or emerging storylines, framing housing-political challenges on an ‘area-based’ scale, another tried to maintain the more traditional state-wide framing. Nonetheless, also during the centrist governments led by the Social Democratic Party between 1993 and 2001, area-based framing and its constituting storylines played a structuring role in Danish housing policy, a key node being the so-called City Committee (Byudvalget) (Frandsen and Hansen, 2020). These storylines were also institutionalised to some extent through various policy initiatives. By focusing on the non-profit sector and particular estates within it, this involved a measure of spatial stigmatisation. But the policy implications were mainly ‘benign’ in the sense that they focused on extra resources for the identified areas, for example for re-mortgaging (to reduce rent), physical improvements and social initiatives (Munk, 1999).

2004: A ghettoisation problem

When the right-of-centre returned to government in 2001, one of the first initiatives was a new attempt to introduce a right-to-buy policy for the non-profit housing sector (Regeringen, 2002). As in the 1980s, the government did not succeed in this ambition (Larsen and Lund Hansen, 2015). In 2004, however, the government launched another policy initiative for the non-profit housing sector, which was not divorced from the storylines and scale framing that had emerged since the 1980s, but marked a decisive step in the state-led production of spatial stigmatisation. This initiative was launched in a high-profile speech by the Liberal prime minister. In his new year’s speech, he said:

Many years of unsuccessful immigration and refugee policy [udlændingepolitik] have, for example, created immigrant ghettos, where the men are unemployed, where the women are isolated and where the families only speak the language of the native country. The children grow up without learning proper Danish. Some are influenced by hardened criminals … We must stop the unfortunate ghettoisation. (Fogh Rasmussen, 2004).

The speech heralded a policy paper, ‘The Government’s strategy against ghettoisation’, which identified ‘ghettoisation’ as an increasing tendency towards the emergence of ‘areas, which are physically, socially, culturally and economically secluded from the rest of society’ (Regeringen, 2004: 7). Measures to counter this development should be pinpointed ‘both with respect to types of problems and the concrete areas’, and it was ‘therefore essential that precise indicators are developed for when an area is evolving into a ghetto’. In the meantime, the government provisionally identified five ‘features that typically characterise ghettos in Denmark’: (1) a large proportion of adults on cash benefits, (2) low educational level, (3) non-profit housing areas with more than 1500–2000 residents, (4) skewed pattern of in and out movements where ‘resource-strong citizens move away from these areas, whereas resource-poor citizens often stay’, and (5) ‘Lack of private enterprise and private investments’ (Regeringen, 2004: 14–15).

The resulting legislation, bill L32, was modest in comparison with the ambitions outlined by the government. In the perspective of this article, however, the bill is notable in three respects. First, L32 (sub-headed ‘Initiative against ghettoisation’) was an amendment of the law governing non-profit housing. The storyline on non-profit housing as being particularly challenged, which had structured political debates and practices for many years, was thus institutionalised. ‘Ghettoisation’ was perceived and addressed as a non-profit housing problem. Second, the bill marked a first step in the institutionalisation of the socio-economic storyline by identifying unemployment as a key problem. In this respect, the bill introduced exceptions allowing municipalities to limit people in receipt of basic public benefits from access to non-profit housing in ‘areas with a high proportion of persons outside the labour market’ (Folketinget, 2005b). Third, if more modest than the government had suggested, L32 introduced the practice of framing housing-political issues in relation to particular geographies according to quantitative criteria, initially levels of unemployment. This had been part of the area-based focus, but with L32 a practice of identifying housing areas using quantitative criteria – and linking this to extraordinary (if still moderate) policy measures – was inscribed in law.

While only subtly articulated in L32, debates on the bill, the prime minister’s speech and the policy paper marked an (explicit) ethnicisation of the policy problem and the emergence of an ethnicity storyline at the level of government politics. This storyline was and is typically outlined in terms of ‘values’, often couched in uneasily cohabiting liberal-national terms (Mouritzen and Olsen, 2013), but is in the final analysis reduced to (and measured as) an issue of migrants and descendants of migrants from ‘non-western countries’. On inhabitants in ‘immigrant ghettos’, the prime minster said: ‘They come to confuse the Danish broad-mindedness [frisind] with indecisiveness. Danish freedom with emptiness. Danish equality with indifference. And they look upon Danish society with contempt’ (Fogh Rasmussen, 2004). Similar, the policy paper presented actions against ‘ghettoisation’ as part of the government’s integration policy. As elsewhere in Europe, ethnic minorities had increasingly become a topic of heated political debate during the 1990s (Mouritzen et al., 2009), and in the wake of 11 September 2001 and the ‘war on terror’, xenophobia and islamophobia became pronounced in political debates (Simonsen and Koefoed, 2020). Debates on migrants and ethnic minorities were not unusual, then, but it was new that such views were openly deployed in housing politics. The Winther Report, for example, had only as an aside noted a high proportion of ‘residents with foreign citizenship’ in ‘maladjusted’ estates (Boligministeriet, 1987: 125). Seclusion was a key point in the emerging ethnicity storyline, and the danger of ‘parallel societies’ (parallelsamfund) was and is a key node in this respect (Freiesleben, 2016). The policy paper put it this way:

[T]he ghetto-areas are typically characterised by being physically secluded [afsondret] from the surrounding society. If the majority in such areas are unemployed, immigrants, refugees or descendants [of immigrants and refugees], the areas can develop into actual ethnic enclaves or parallel societies without significant economic, social and cultural contact with the rest of society. (Regeringen, 2004: 12)

Ethnicity was thus structuring in the government’s initiative and the ensuing debate, but the storyline was not institutionalised. Debates leading up to L32 also mark the emergence of ‘ghetto’ as a metaphor in housing politics. A keyword search of parliamentary debates between 1996 and 2004 shows that before the prime minister’s 2004 speech, ‘ghetto’ was very rarely used at this political level; when it was used, it was mainly by members of the immigrant-critical Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti) (e.g. Kjærsgaard, 1997). Except for the subheading, the notion is absent from L32. But in both parliament and public debate, ‘the ghetto’ increasingly became a metaphor for challenges relating to particular housing estates, which politicians and other actors could evoke as a policy problem drawing on different storylines. For the spokesperson of the Social Democrats, for example, it was the socio-economic storyline that was central: ‘Inequality is rising, among children and youth as well; the gap has grown wider, unemployment has grown, the walls around our ghetto areas have become higher and higher’ (Björnsson in Folketinget, 2005a). Every party except the left-wing Red-Green Alliance (Enhedslisten) voted for L32, which suggests a discursive closure on the socio-economic as well as the non-profit housing storylines.

2010: A ghetto problem

Around 2010, the ethnicity storyline became institutionalised in Danish housing politics. At the same time, the policy problem constituted by this and other storylines officially became an issue of existing ‘ghettos’ rather than processes of ‘ghettoisation’. In his 2010 speech to the parliament, the prime minister expressed this as an issue of ‘Danish values’, which he saw as ‘Freedom to be different. Responsibility for the common. Respect for the laws of society. Freedom of speech. Equal opportunities for men and women. A fundamental trust that we want the best for each other. Our ingrained democracy’ (Løkke Rasmussen, 2010). The ‘holes in the map of Denmark’ were for him ‘Places where Danish values are clearly no longer foundational’. But the prime minister also evoked other, longer-standing storylines. Drawing on the hostile environment storyline, for example, the housing estates he had in mind were ‘concrete deserts without lines of communication with the surrounding society. These are the fortresses that we must break through’. The prime minister similarly rearticulated socio-economic issues such as unemployment and emphasised an emerging and quickly institutionalised crime storyline.

‘We must bring the ghetto back to society’ was the prime-ministerial punchline, which informed the title of the ensuing policy paper, ‘The ghetto back to society: a showdown with parallel societies in Denmark’ (Regeringen, 2010; see also Simonsen, 2016). Starting by outlining ‘Danish values’, the paper identified 29 ‘ghetto areas’, categorised as housing areas of 1,000 or more inhabitants that met at least two of three criteria: (1) more than 50% of inhabitants are immigrants and descendants of immigrants from ‘non-western countries’, (2) more than 40% of inhabitants between the ages of 16 and 64 are out of work or education, and (3) persons convicted of breaking the law (crime, weapons or illicit drugs) exceed 270 per 10,000 inhabitants. That these criteria pertained to the non-profit housing sector was a given, set by the framing of the policy paper.

In the parliamentary debates on the bills proposed by the government, the ethnicity storyline was mainly articulated by members of the Liberal Party and the Danish People’s Party, while the hostile environment and socio-economic storylines were raised by Social Democrats and members of the centre-left Socialist People’s Party (Socialistisk Folkeparti) (Folketinget, 2010a). Most parties agreed that the composition of tenants in the targeted areas were ‘out of balance’, for example, but they emphasised different storylines in this regard. ‘In the most exposed (udsatte) housing estates, more than six out of 10 inhabitants are immigrants or descendants of immigrants from non-western countries’, said the Liberal spokesperson; ‘That is a disproportion to the rest of society, which we want to correct’ (Madsen in Folketinget, 2010a: 36). The Social Democrat spokesperson followed a similar line, but with a stronger emphasis on socio-economic factors: ‘The problem in these exposed housing estates is first and foremost too uniform a mix of residents with a high concentration of poverty, unemployment, criminality and, in some places, unfortunate parallel cultures’ (Jensen in Folketinget, 2010a: 39).

The criteria proposed in the government policy paper were passed into law (Folketinget, 2010b). Not only did this mean that ‘ghetto area’ (ghettoområde) became a concept in law; it also meant that in addition to the already institutionalised storyline relating to socio-economic issues, storylines on ethnicity and crime were also institutionalised. Moreover, the law specified that each year the government should publish a list of the areas meeting the ‘ghetto area’ criteria, which became known as the ‘ghetto list’.

Although a range of storylines linking facets of stigma to particular housing estates had become structuring in debate and institutionalised in law, the parliament was split. The law was passed with votes from the government (the Liberal Party and the Conservative People’s Party) and the Danish People’s Party. All other parties voted against the law. The split vote partly reflected wider political manoeuvrings in parliament, but also deeper differences – or discourse coalitions – on the policy problem. This became evident in 2011, when the Social Democratic Party took over government in coalition with the Social-Liberal Party (Radikale Venstre) and the Socialist People’s Party. To better reflect the socio-economic storyline, the government proposed education and income levels as additional criteria. Three of the now five criteria should be fulfilled for a housing estate to be designated as a ‘ghetto area’. This widened the possibility of a housing estate being designated on other criteria than ethnicity, a point that was not well received by the Liberal Party and the Danish People’s Party. The Liberal spokesperson nailed down the issue: ‘The problem with this watering down of the criteria is that we do not tackle the problems where they really exist’ (Elholm in Folketinget, 2013a: 41).

2018: A severe ghetto problem

The ‘watered down’ criteria were passed into law (Folketinget, 2013b), only to be reworked after the Liberal Party returned to government in 2015. The new government did not abandon its predecessor’s five-criteria characterisation of a ‘ghetto area’. Rather, it tweaked this characterisation and combined it with older and newer elements. In essence, the government constructed a three-tiered classification – and stigmatisation – of place. This entailed an entrenchment of existing storylines, but also the emergence of a security storyline. This fed into the hitherto starkest articulation of the politics of the exception in Denmark.

The prime minister began 2018 by articulating ‘the ghettos’ as places of danger and emergency, not just for those living there but for Danish society at large:

[T]he ghettos … send tentacles into the streets, where criminal gangs create insecurity. Into the schools, where neglected children are living on the edge. Down into the municipal coffers, where revenues are smaller and expenditures larger than they need to be. And into society, where Danish values such as equality, broad-mindedness [frisind] and tolerance are losing ground. (Løkke Rasmussen, 2018)

In such ways, the ‘ghetto place’ had by 2018 become reified, not just as a generic place but also as an object that ‘does’ things to society, threatening and dangerous things (see also Frandsen and Hansen, 2020). Conversely, this securitisation suggested that extraordinary measures were needed to contest ‘the ghetto’ (and its ‘parallel societies’) and pushed the boundaries for the methods that could be applied. This led to 22 ‘ghetto initiatives’, which were presented in the policy paper ‘One Denmark without parallel societies – no ghettos in 2030’ (Regeringen, 2018). The dominant Danish conception of integration as assimilation and cultural sameness (Jensen, 2015) is here subtly indicated by entitling the paper ‘One Denmark’.

The policy paper rehearsed and intensified existing storylines and the emerging storyline on security. It also proposed a recalibration of the ‘ghetto’ criteria. First, we should take note of the paper’s articulation of ‘ghettos’ as places in need of extraordinary measures, as places of exception. Aside from contributing to stigmatisation, the direct effect of the ‘ghetto’ designation had hitherto mainly been regulation of access to targeted housing estates for particular groups, and an emphasis on implementing comprehensive housing-social plans (boligsociale helhedsplaner); that is, a combination of exclusionary as well as integrationist measures (cf. Van Gent et al., 2018). The policy paper prepared the ground for more radical measures. On the one hand, this concerned individuals, as the government would target ‘the citizen-directed proposals so that they only apply to those areas and those citizens that are most challenged. We do not want to limit the many in order to target the few’ (Regeringen, 2018: 7). On the other hand, the government also sought to target the housing estates, ‘Among other things through the sale of existing buildings and targeted demolitions. And through development of private housing’ (Regeringen, 2018: 7). The initiatives were startling enough to make headlines outside Denmark (e.g. Barry and Sørensen, 2018).

The government’s political aspirations were mainly realised through L38, yet another amendment to the non-profit housing act (Folketinget, 2018c). The bill introduces a three-tiered categorisation of non-profit housing estates. First, ‘exposed housing area’ (udsat boligområde), a category including all but the ethnicity criterion of the ‘ghetto area’ criteria established during the preceding government (i.e. employment, crime, education and income). To be a ‘exposed housing area’, an estate must meet two of four criteria. Second, a ‘ghetto area’ (ghettoområde) is reconceptualised as an ‘exposed housing area’ in which 50% or more of the inhabitants are immigrants or descendants of immigrants from ‘non-western countries’. In this way, the ethnicity criterion is singled out as a defining characteristic of the formal ‘ghetto’ definition. Finally, L38 introduces the category of ‘severe ghetto area’ (hårdt ghettoområde) for housing estates that for 4 years have met the criteria of ‘ghetto area’. The lists published in December 2019 identified 40 ‘exposed housing areas’, 28 of these were further categorised as ‘ghetto areas’, while 15 of these were designated ‘severe ghetto areas’. The last category is home to around 41,000 inhabitants (Transport- og Boligministeriet, 2019a; 2019b; 2019c).

Bill L38 contains several radical, extraordinary and place-specific policy measures. Most conspicuously, this includes the requirement that in housing estates categorised as ‘severe ghetto areas’, the share of family housing must be reduced to 40% of the original housing stock by 2030. This can be done, for example, through demolition, conversion to other tenure forms through sale, construction of other than non-profit housing units, establishment of property for commercial or governmental operations and/or conversion of family units into youth or senior housing. The non-profit housing association and the municipality must propose a plan to this end. If a plan is not approved by the responsible ministry, the state can force the housing association to reduce the share of non-profit housing to 25% of the original stock. Notably, L38 does not include provisions for the construction of affordable housing units to replace those sold or demolished (Geist et al., 2019).

What became known as ‘the ghetto package’ (ghettopakken), L38 and other legislative changes to address the government’s ‘ghetto initiatives’, also included measures directed at individuals to counter development of ‘parallel societies’. These measures are not as extensive as proposed by the policy paper, but one got particular attention. In housing estates categorised as ‘exposed housing areas’, bill L7 decrees that children above the age of one must attend a somewhat paradoxically named ‘compulsory learning offer’ (obligatorisk læringstilbud) of 25 hours per week, which must ‘support the children’s Danish language skills and general learning preparedness and introduce the children to Danish traditions, norms and values’ (Folketinget, 2018b: 1). The parents must similarly participate in training to support their child in achieving this. Failure to comply with this results in termination of child benefits.

Through these and other measures, the area-based framing of intersecting storylines has come out in force. Whereas during the 1980s this framing was mainly introduced to separate non-profit housing (and ‘maladjusted’ estates) from general housing politics, the framing is today used to encroach directly on estates within the sector. Housing in the non-profit sector is collectively owned but ‘private’ in the sense that it is owned by non-profit housing associations rather than the (local) state. This had been a barrier when the government in the early 2000s tried to implement a right-to-buy policy; it did not look good that a government led by the Liberal Party could be seen to expropriate ‘private’ property, which according to the constitution is ‘inviolable’ except when ‘required in the public interest’ (Jensen, 2013; Larsen and Lund Hansen, 2015). For housing estates categorised as ‘severe ghetto areas’, L38 clears this obstacle by permitting compensation for expropriation. As the responsible minister put it during the hearing, ‘we can have different understandings of what serves the public interest. But it is my understanding that it serves the public interest to settle accounts with these parallel societies’ (Olesen in Folketinget, 2018a: 40). Similarly, some measures directed at inhabitants in target housing estates breaks with usual legal standards by applying special measures to people according to place of residency. Areas categorised as ‘ghetto’ are, as we will discuss in the next section, scale-framed as places of exception.

‘The ghetto package’ was hotly debated in parliament and in public. In the perspective of this article, the key point of this is that it entrenched already institutionalised storylines in Danish (housing) politics – and exposed what were to date the starkest implications of the resulting spatialisation of politics and policy. One point should be noted, however. L38 was passed into law with a substantial majority, not only from the right-of-centre coalition government and the Danish People’s Party, but also from the Social Democratic Party and the Socialist People’s Party (the latter voted against L7). These parties could emphasise different storylines, but they formed a coalition in framing the essentially spatial policy object – the ‘ghetto place’.

The politics of the exception

Over four decades, storylines have been constructed and combined into a dominant narrative of the ‘ghetto place’, a generic place of perceived homogeneity, which has paved the way for extraordinary political measures. This is a general feature of spatial stigmatisation: ‘Once a place is publicly labelled as a “lawless zone” or “outlaw estate”, outside the common norm,’ (Wacquant 2007: 69) points out, ‘it is easy for the authorities to justify special measures, deviating from both law and custom’. We approach this as the politics of the exception. Much has been made of Agamben’s (2005) notion of the ‘state of exception’ as a paradigm of government, not least in war-like contexts (e.g. Ek, 2006). Closer to our concern, Gray and Porter (2015) trace exceptionality in urban governance as a special kind of moral law, which by making references to a purported ‘public good’ claims to address ‘exceptional circumstances’ through ‘exceptional measures’. However, ‘The non-exceptional result is accentuated socio-economic polarisation, socialisation of risk and privatisation of gain, democratic deficit and shifting geometries of power in governance, and weak integration of projects with wider urban processes and planning’ (Gray and Porter, 2015: 387).

Structurally, the politics of the exception is in our case starkly illustrated by ongoing plans to demolish, convert and/or sell significant parts of non-profit housing estates categorised as ‘severe ghetto’. An estimate suggests that 5,368 family units will disappear, affecting a total of more than 11,000 people (Nielsen, 2019). Current tenants will in most cases be offered alternative housing, but not necessarily control over its location and costs. However, whether non-profit housing units are demolished, sold or converted in a targeted estate, they are not necessarily replaced elsewhere. This amounts to ‘exclusionary displacement’ (Marcuse, 1986) in the sense that low-income households are deprived of affordable housing possibilities. Such developments have been noted elsewhere, for example in the Netherlands (Van Gent et al., 2018). The politics of the exception as applied to the ‘ghetto place’ also affects people in the targeted areas more intimately. Through their emphasis on work and education, for example in quantitative measures, ‘ghetto’ initiatives have long been a variant of what (Painter 2013: 1247) terms regional biopolitics; that is, ways in which ‘populations are constituted and governed geographically’ to enhance ‘the economic potential and productivity of the workforce’. But recent initiatives, such as the ‘obligatory learning offer’ for toddlers in ‘exposed housing areas’, are explicitly about governing the mentality of geographically defined people. The politics of the exception for the ‘ghetto place’ is not only about ‘bricks’; it is crucially also about governing people.

Issues of race and ethnicity are often identified as a central element of spatial stigmatisation (e.g. Slater and Anderson, 2012), and the production of the ‘ghetto place’ clearly draws on and adds to xenophobic and nationalist discourses and practices in Danish politics. (Simonsen 2016: 84) argues ‘that Danish national identity needs the ghetto as a negation that allows Danishness to appear as a fixed and full identity’. In stark contrast to the stated aim, this ‘implies the impossibility of the ghetto’s integration into Denmark’ (Simonsen, 2016: 84). Epitomised by imagery and stories from particular estates, the ‘ghetto place’ becomes a ‘public symbol’ (Tuan, 1974) in the sense that it organises heterogeneous socio-spatial phenomena into centres of meaning; for Stender (2018), this is a ‘dystopian place-branding’. As Simonsen (2008: 147) puts it, places are ‘by means of signification and categorization constructed as spatialized “otherness”, which at the same time homogenizes them and produces boundaries between those being inside or outside the area’. In this perspective, specific ‘ghettos’ can disappear but the ‘ghetto place’ must remain as a spatialised ‘other’.

However, it is important to acknowledge that the politics of the exception for the ‘ghetto place’ can serve other (or additional) political ends than xenophobia or nationalism. While it is beyond the remit of this article to pursue the issue systematically, we suggest that the politics of the exception could have far-reaching implications for the non-profit housing sector and its collective property. Since the 1980s there have been attempts to implement right-to-buy policies in the non-profit sector, but the resulting legislation included important restraints and led to very few tenure conversions. While tenure conversion is currently confined to the ‘severe ghetto’, the politics of the exception has broken what Jensen (2013) terms a ‘taboo’ against privatisation of non-profit housing. And once the genie is out of the bottle in particular places, privatisation could well be up-scaled to the wider housing-political space (cf. Uitermark et al., 2017). The politics of the exception for the ‘ghetto place’ could, in other words, be generalised as a key element of the ‘revanchist city’ (Smith, 1996), which in the Danish context – with emphasis on home ownership – has been dubbed ‘class struggle from above’ (Olsen et al., 2014). It is in this respect noteworthy that the policy paper presented back in 2004 found that ‘Ghetto areas are not attractive for private investors’ (Regeringen, 2004: 55). At a time when domestic and transnational investors are taking an interest in Danish housing (Christophers, 2022), however, non-profit housing estates in and around the main cities have become attractive. Indeed, a government-commissioned study concludes that ‘there are good opportunities for the sale of housing in the ghetto areas to both private and institutional investors’ in the ‘attractive’ larger cities (Næss-Schmidt et al., 2019: 9). Half of a Copenhagen non-profit housing estate categorised as ‘severe ghetto’ is in the process of being sold to an investor (Dahlin and Wang, 2020), for example, and in a less ‘attractive’ city, a similarly designated estate has been sold to an investor at well below its estimated worth (Larsen, 2020; Risager, 2022). In Denmark, too, spatial stigmatisation may thus be ‘actively used to promote a given policy alternative, or even to devalue areas further before the redevelopment, gentrification or privatisation of public housing or land’ (Schultz Larsen and Delica, 2019: 547). Moreover, while this may further neoliberal projects of privatisation and commodification, these dynamics concurrently feed into and rely upon nationalist projects (cf. Kipfer, 2019).

In this article we have focused on the production of the ‘ghetto place’ from ‘above’, from perspectives of state politics. This is not divorced from the lived realities. Wacquant (2008) suggests that stigmatisation is internalised by inhabitants, a suggestion that has been criticised (e.g. Jensen and Christensen, 2012). It is beyond our scope to pursue this and other issues relating to everyday life in the ‘ghetto place’. But as Høghøj and Holmqvist (2018) shows, stigmatising notions such as ‘concrete slum’ were already locally resisted in the 1970s. Public debates and policy interventions about ‘ghettos’ have impacts on inhabitants in the targeted non-profit housing estates (Jensen, 2015). But as elsewhere (Sisson, 2020), spatial stigmatisation is also resisted ‘from below’. A vivid example is Almen Modstand (Common Resistance), an activist network established to counter the 2018 ‘ghetto package’ (Fabian and Lund Hansen, 2021).

Conclusions

When the Social Democrats returned to government in 2019, the new minister responsible for housing declared that he would stop the use of the word ‘ghetto’. To this, his Liberal predecessor responded: ‘It is crucial that we call things by their right name, and it is ghettos we are talking about’ (Støjberg in Christiansen, 2019). In a sense, the outgoing minister was right, for ‘ghetto area’ is today instituted in law – and the new minister did not intend to change these laws. ¹ While it is not unusual that ‘ghetto’ is used in debates in and beyond Europe (e.g. Pinkster et al., 2020), Denmark is currently the only European country to use the term as an official classification of urban space (Slater, 2021). This is a highly suggestive (and stigmatising) metaphor, of course, and one could ask why ‘ghetto’ has become a legislative concept in a country that (rightly or wrongly) used to be known as a humanistic and egalitarian welfare state. However, our point is not logocentric and we do not aim to unpack the brand of nationalism that pushed forward the ‘ghetto’ metaphor in Denmark (see Simonsen, 2016). Rather, by analysing the longer history of the Danish case, we aim to show that spatial stigmatisation is a long-term process. This also helps to explain the endurance and political malleability of spatial stigmatisation. In the terminology of this paper, spatial stigmatisation draws on a range of historically produced storylines, which actors and (shifting) discourse coalitions can evoke and combine to scale-frame places as objects for politics and policies. For different purposes and from different perspectives, however, this produces a generic place – in our analysis, the ‘ghetto place’ – derived of historical-geographical specificities. And whatever the name, this political production of place involves processes of ‘exceptionalisation’ that ligitimatise potentially radical place-specific policies.

In Denmark, as elsewhere, the state plays a crucial role in spatial stigmatisation and the politics of the exception. As for state-led (or ‘public-policy-led’) gentrification (Lees and Ley, 2008), the state is not the sole actor. Other social and economic actors and process are also at play. But our analysis adds to suggestions that the state often plays a key role. Kallin (2017) suggests that the state can be leading in opening ‘reputational gaps’, which can facilitate state-led closure of rent gaps (on Denmark, see Risager, 2022). But through the politics of the exception, state-led stigmatisation of place may go further than that. In one form or another, spatial stigmatisation always targets property, and whether private or otherwise, ‘property cannot exist without regulation’ (Singer, 2000: 8). In the Danish case, the supposedly exceptional conditions of the ‘ghetto placed’ has been a lever for redefining the property regime of the non-profit housing sector, which in the longer run may have serious implications well beyond the targeted areas.