New date! Owner-Occupied Housing – An Environmental Issue
Research Seminars in Architecture
A Historical Inquiry
What does it mean to think of owner-occupied housing as an environmental issue? This paper takes that question as its point of departure. Owner-occupied housing is frequently identified as part of the central challenges of contemporary climate mitigations politics in Denmark, yet the relationship between housing and environment has a much longer and less straightforward history than existing framings tends to suggest.
Working from diverse empirical material connected to Danish housing discourse across the 20th century, the paper explores how ideas of "the/an environment" figured in relation to owner-occupied housing, i.e. not as a stable concept, but as a dynamic one. What is described as “the environment”, what it denotes and denies, and what, ‘boligen’ as a house and a home, has to do with it, changed considerably across the period.
Rather than drawing an environmental history that retrospectively problematizes rising consumption, injustice, and ecological degradation, the paper seeks to showcase what conceptions of environment were at work and negotiated throughout the century, and how our contemporary conception of environmental issues are connected to these changes.
Tid: Fr 2026-05-15 kl 13.15
Plats: Conference Room 6th Floor of the Architecture School Room A608
BIO
I’m Mikkel Bang Maesen, currently a guest researcher at the department. I’m enrolled as a Ph.D.-fellow in History at Aarhus University, where I work with housing, urban, welfare and architectural history. My Ph.D.-project is focused on homeownership in the 20th century, specifically how ownership is constituted economically, politically, culturally and materially throughout the period, and what it constitutes in reverse.
Formerly, I’ve published work on broader subjects within Danish urban history, i.e. working with housing as crises, urban consumption and suburban housing culture. My main focus is tied to the long 20th century and welfare state history. I’m a board member of the Danish Committee for Urban History, and have previously worked within urban planning and development in the municipality of Aarhus.