Liquidating Architecture:

The Danish government’s notorious 2018 policy document, “One Denmark without Parallel Societies – No Ghettos in 2030,” targeted neighborhoods as “ghettos” and proposed solutions to eradicate them: privatization, renovation, and mass demolition. Most designated “ghettos” contained modernist architecture built in the postwar period, when their construction signaled evidence of welfare-state triumphs. By 2018, instead, the government argued that “for certain ghetto areas, the challenges of the parallel society, crime, and insecurity are so massive that it can be most expedient, both practically and economically, to liquidate the ghetto area completely and start over.”

In this paper, I present an architectural history of Danish demolitions in motion by analyzing how changes in public and political discourse around the turn of the 21st century allowed what was once vanguard modernist housing to become throwaway architecture. Rather than the buildings themselves – many of which have already been destroyed – I analyze government documents and their use of the term “ghetto” from the 1990s until the teleological 2018 “Ghetto Plan,” which changed the criteria and openly called for demolitions. Here, I trace a history of “liquidation” from discourse to action, probing how demolition evolved into a preferred solution for unwanted architecture and social conditions. What can this discursive history reveal about architectural heritage and its construction in words rather than walls?

If you are interested in reading a copy of the manuscript please contact Jennifer Mack directly at jennifer.mack@arch.kth.se

Bio: Jennifer Mack is Associate Professor and Docent at KTH, a Pro Futura Scientia Fellow of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, and an elected member of The Young Academy of Sweden. Broadly, her work links history, anthropology, and the environmental humanities to investigate the built environment, with projects currently focused on toxicity, populism, climate change, and uncertainty in relation to landscapes and housing. Mack’s book, The Construction of Equality (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), received the Margaret Mead Award, and she has co-edited the anthologies Rethinking the Social in Architecture (Actar, 2019) and Life Among Urban Planners (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020). She serves on the editorial boards of Thresholds and Human Organization and is an Associate Editor of Housing, Theory and Society.