Reimagining the Fabric of Community: Dense-Low Housing Architecture as a Medium for Decentralization and Civic Participation in 1970s Welfare Denmark

Abstract

This article aims to examine the intersection of dense-low housing architecture and welfare politics in 1970s Denmark. Although scholars have investigated the role of architecture and housing in the expansion of the welfare state and later neoliberal restructurings, little attention has been given to the ways in which dense-low housing architecture and non-profit housing estates more broadly functioned as experimental platforms for the reimagining of community and decentralization in the context of the welfare state's crisis in the period. Focusing on two housing estates – Galgebakken and Gadekæret – the article identifies two central linkages between housing architecture, shifting welfare values and everyday life. First, the article shows how the design of Galgebakken and Gadekæret intertwined with the implementation of new models for resident democracy in the non-profit housing sector, rendering the housing estates as central sites for developing the meaning of local democracy and civic participation in everyday life. Secondly, the article points to the importance of emotions, particularly nostalgia, in shaping how non-profit housing architecture could emerge as models for community-making and civic participation in 1970s Denmark. In exploring these linkages, the article not only shows how non-profit housing estates came to work as platforms for envisioning, interpreting and practising new welfare values of community and decentralization on an everyday scale, but it also demonstrates the capacity of housing architecture in mediating new relations between materiality, emotions and welfare.