Governing urban diversity through myths of national sameness – a comparative analysis of Denmark and Sweden

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore problematisations of urban diversity in urban and integration policies in Denmark and Sweden; the paper aims to show how such policies express social imaginaries about the self and the other underlying assumptions of sameness that legitimise diverging ways of managing urban diversity and (re)organising the city.Design/methodology/approachInspired by anthropology of policy and post-structural approaches to policy analysis, the authors approach urban and integration policies as cultural texts that are central to the organisation of cities and societies. With a comparative approach, the authors explore how visions of diversity take shape and develop over time in Swedish and Danish policies on urban development and integration.FindingsSwedish policy constructs productiveness as crucial to the imagined national sameness, whereas Danish policy constructs cultural sameness as fundamental to the national self-image. By constructing the figure of “the unproductive”/“the non-Western” as the other, diverging from an imagined sameness, policies for organising the city through removing and “improving” urban diverse others are legitimised.Originality/valueThe authors add to previous research by focussing on the construction of the self as crucial in processes of othering and by highlighting how both nationalistic and colour-blind policy discourses construct myths of national sameness, which legitimise the governing of urban diversity. The authors highlight and de-naturalise assumptions and categorisations by showing how problem representations differ over time and between two neighbouring countries.

Territorial stigmatization and housing commodification under racial neoliberalism: The case of Denmark's ‘ghettos’

“…Other studies of Denmark's ‘ghetto’ politics have mostly ignored the question of housing commodification in favour of a focus on the spectacular ‘ghetto’ discourse and its relation to important questions of immigrant governance, citizenship, nationhood and more (Frandsen and Hansen, 2020; Jensen and Söderberg, 2022; Schmidt, 2022; Seemann, 2021; Simonsen, 2016). Simonsen presents the most explicit example of the epistemological priority of discourse over materiality.…”

“…The Danish Prime Minister's was a powerful diagnosis ‘invested with the power to bring into being what it claims is already there’, as Wacquant (2008: 142) describes the debate about the marginalized French banlieues (see also Schultz Larsen, 2011). While Løkke Rasmussen's (2010) geographic targets were ‘[a]reas that we in everyday speech call ghettos’, his speech instigated a new chapter of ‘ghetto’ politics in which this everyday speech was made objective as a racialized sociospatial category: evoking the ‘ghetto’ as a specific, non-Danish place involved a ‘ spatialization of otherness’, an otherness that ‘pollutes the unity of the imagined national space of Denmark’, as put by Simonsen (2016: 90, 94; see also Jensen and Söderberg, 2022; Seemann, 2021).…”

Displacing the other to unite the nation: The parallel society legislation in Denmark

“…Until now much literature has focused on the narrative that had been built up during the last decades regarding the failed attempts of the government to integrate what was represented as problematic immigrant ghettos (see Frandsen and Hansen, 2020;Jensen and Söderberg, 2022;Olsen and Larsen, 2022;Seemann, 2021;Simonsen, 2016), and only more recently, authors have engaged with the economic and political interest in privatizing and extending the ongoing processes of gentrification to the corporative housing sector and the entwinement with the previous aspects (see Risager, 2022aRisager, , 2022b.…”

“…In any case, although the potentially created rent gap is certainly an important element, often missing from the many scientific articles on the topic (see Frandsen and Hansen, 2020; Jensen and Söderberg, 2022; Olsen and Larsen, 2022; Seemann, 2021; Simonsen, 2016), an argument diligently put forward by (Risager, 2022a), most certainly the whole machinery, the Ghetto Package and the execution which is often not led directly by economic interests, show incontestable signs of structural racism (see also Risager, 2022b): in fact, such an important economic factor as social inequalities are dismissed or at best downgraded as the essential problem. On the contrary, we find that some social groups are considered problematic and disposable, while others are desired for.…”

An investigation of politicians' responses to urban diversity and disadvantage: The case of the Danish ‘parallel societies’

“…In 1998, the first integration law was passed, including measures to cut welfare payments to migrants (Simonsen, 2020). Since then, policy has reflected an assumption that integration takes place by participating in the labour market (Sjørslev, 2011), and that integration is synonymous with assimilation to Danish cultural norms and values (Jensen & Söderberg, 2021; Phillips, 2010). By the 2000s, even mainstream parties, such as the currently ruling central left Social Democratic Party, adopted positions on immigration that would previously have been considered right‐wing (Simonsen, 2020).…”