Modernist neighbourhoods constructed in Sweden during the 1960s and 1970s were pillars of welfare state ideology, developed through government research for life, work, and play. Normative, standardized designs would promote a socially and economically equal society, centred on the nuclear family and hopes of liberating women by making domestic work more efficient. But even with an explicit focus on women across Swedish research, in industry, and in government design guidelines, these visions of collective living left modern women’s social roles ambiguous. While multifamily residential areas were meant to support women’s new professional roles in paid labour, community and domestic chores remained assigned to ‘mothers’ and ‘housewives’. In turn, women residents crafted a delicate balance between the promises of emancipation and the more limited realities they found on the ground. We argue that women’s efforts fostered a ‘hertopia’, a spatial practice within systematized welfare: they used their dual and ambivalent status as both breadwinners and caregivers to adapt and enact spatial and social change when faced with the shortcomings of their environments. Connecting government reports, building norms, and media accounts from the 1960s and 1970s with interviews with long-time women residents in the modernist landscapes of Sweden, we explore discrepancies between welfare-state design logics and women’s experiences of newly constructed neighborhoods. Through hertopia, women not only demanded the idealized spaces and services they had been promised — they co-opted and reproduced new social and spatial practices.

This report documents the conversations that occurred during two seminars, “Caring for Plans: Narratives of the Parallel Society Package”, held at the Copenhagen Architecture Festival CAFx, October 17, 2021,1 and “Solidarity in Times of Repressive Politics: A Seminar on the Effects of the Concepts ‘Particularly/Vulnerable Areas’”, held at Folkets Husby, October 15, 2022, in the Stockholm suburb of Husby.

Narratives about the “failure” of large-scale housing from the postwar decades are now guiding major physical, social, and economic changes in neighborhoods all over Europe. Denmark and Sweden have long been known for their welfare-state systems and benevolent housing policies. However, in recent years, both countries have enacted new national “anti-segregation” measures that call for major physical and social changes to neighborhoods built in the 1960s and 1970s. In these processes, the opinions of local communities and residents of the neighborhoods have seldom been heard. By working with “witness seminars,” a method adopted from oral history, it is our aim to foreground residents’ perspectives and how they have enacted solidarity and collective resistance to these measures.

Narratives about the ‘failure’ of large-scale post-World War II housing are now guiding major physical, social, and economic changes in neighborhoods all over Europe. This is true even in Denmark and Sweden, which have long been known for their welfare states and benevolent housing policies. Today, however, both countries have enacted new national anti-segregation measures that call for major physical and social changes to neighborhoods built in the postwar era, even as the opinions of local communities and residents of such neighborhoods have been only sparsely heard – if at all. By working with the method ‘witness seminars’, we – as the research collective Aktion Arkiv – foreground residents’ perspectives and their collective resistance: the effects and affects of top-down changes. While sharing their lived experiences and actions, residents say that architects and planners can ‘simply say no’ and thereby refuse to participate in these actions.

Has modernism evolved from a means to create a utopian future to an architectural discontent co-opted for racist purposes? The planners who built mid-20th century Scandinavian, modernist suburbs conceived of them as places of innovation, possibility, and visionary thinking. By the 1970s, however, this assessment had shifted dramatically: near-monolithic media and popular representations depicted environments of failure, insecurity, and ugly architecture – despite the half-finished states of the projects at the time. As these opinions evolved into “facts,” the areas became linked to ideas of intractably dangerous designs and, later, dangerous people. This set the stage for near-continuous physical and social interventions, beginning in the 1970s and continuing into the present. Today, in Sweden and Denmark, modernist neighborhoods are labeled “problem areas,” “concrete suburbs,” “vulnerable areas,” or even “ghettos,” where residents, often with family histories of migration, live in so-called “parallel societies.” Politicians have persistently positioned them as perilous places that never joined the present. This attitude renders them symbolically malleable sites, paving the way for recent radical densifications, privatizations, and demolitions, whereby the (half-century) histories of these suburbs are typically ignored. This history of the recent past focuses on how the “blame” for the problems of modernist urbanism – especially around perceived dangers – has shifted from buildings to people to a politically convenient combination of the two, or what I label “hereafters.” I contend that discourses of “unfinished” and “dangerous” places with “criminal” residents have made modernist urbanism a perfect target for xenophobic political discourse, where buildings and landscapes have become scapegoats for less socially acceptable feelings and concerns. Yet caricatures of modernist suburbs as “dangerous” obscure the fact that these supposedly failed cities of the future are now, decades later, places with both long histories and abundant everyday life. I therefore call for new “hereafters” for modernist suburbs: narratives that understand them as living neighborhoods in the present tense.

Stigmatizing narratives are now justifying major changes to the built environment, as we see again and again in large-scale, postwar housing estates all over Europe. Negative narratives and representations support renewal and demolition projects that often do not take residents’ views into account. Whose cultures and heritage will be privileged, and based on what narratives?

This is our call to action: to locate alternative means and words and stories of describing the same neighbourhoods to create a messy, yet more diverse and hopeful perspective through the missing scale of individual residents and groups' experiences.

In this paper, we present residents’ own narratives – as they respond to, fight against, and reimagine recent, repressive housing policies in Sweden and Denmark. The policies claim to solve urban segregation in areas built during the 1960s and 1970s and give them the stigmatizing names ‘parallel societies’, ‘ghettos’ or ‘vulnerable areas’. 

Recently, a dramatic paradigm shift in notions of solidarity has occurred within Nordic welfare states. With this transformation, the universal notion of welfare for all, which has guided numerous welfare policies in the Nordic countries since World War II, is losing ground. We study the expression of this shift in official, government-sponsored documents that support and recommend the reshaping and redefinition of social housing estates in Denmark and municipal estates in Sweden.

Over the last decades, a significant paradigm shift about notions of solidarity as a core value of the “classless society” within Nordic welfare states has occured. Global economic shifts, climate change, and forced migration challenge earlier conceptions of the boundaries of welfare state communities. This is reflected in the rise of assimilation policies with the Swedish categorization “utsatta områden” (vulnerable areas); and in the drastic example of the Danish so-called “ghetto plan”. Officially entitled, “A Denmark without Parallel Societies – No Ghettos in 2030,” the plan applies to designated “hard ghettos” by reducing their stock of family dwellings, by enforcing mandatory childcare for families on social benefits, and by requiring longer sentences for local crimes.

To support its initiatives, the “ghetto plan” uses infographics along with photographs of deteriorating concrete and children with certain words (like “vulnerable” and “reform”). In response, we study evolving notions of solidarity by closely examining documents related to the “ghetto plan” and “vulnerable areas” with particular focus on the pairings of images and words that government actors use to present statistical findings, social orientations, and spatial hierarchies. These documents are positioned as political tools connecting tech-nologies of graphic design, architecture, and planning to concepts like “parallel society,” “segregation,” and “mixed city,” often simplifying complex conditions in ways that causally link the built environment and social problems. How do images and words work in parallel to create the sense of inevitability Between Technologies of Power and Notions of Solidarity: A Response to the Danish “Ghetto Plan” and Swedish “Utsatta Områden”that underscores documents such as the “ghetto plan”? How do extreme practices of coercion and demolition become normalized when translated into visually appealing action plans? The presentation critically concludes by calling for an ontological reframing of solidarity that values, nourishes and adds to ‘what is there’.

How did discourses about design, children, and migration in Sweden evolve, intersect, and dissemble from 1970 to 1995, a period when non-European migration to Sweden increased dramatically? Late welfare state ideals for children’s spaces were represented in the reports commissioned by the Swedish national government and released in the series known as the State’s Public Invesigations (Statens Offentliga Utredningar), covering topics from social services to laundry rooms. Research about spaces for children (such as playgrounds, youth clubs, and schools) represented a frequent topic of inquiry in these efforts, with the seminal report “Children’s Outdoor Space” (Barns utemiljö), published in 1970, comprising a key document. Intriguingly, however, designs for and discourses about the architecture and landscape architecture of children’s spaces were initially separated from simultaneous discussions about migrant children.

In the mid-20th century, “problem youth” – children of the working class said to loiter unproductively on street corners – were to be disciplined through membership in condoned, municipal clubs offering “appropriate” activities (ungdomsgårdar). During the 1970s, however, when labor migration increased, and in the 1980s, Sweden’s “decade of the migrant” according to its Migration Board, these designs and discourses began to evolve to include children not born in Sweden. Newspaper articles and government research about “migrant youth” then became pervasive, reflecting the new forms of anxiety about children as espoused by civil servants and politicians. Even if government reports posited spaces for play and education, among others, as the design of spaces to produce particular, desired futures, children arriving to this new Swedish world brought new needs, including help with their traumas of the past from war and other catastrophes, and often had uncertain futures (owing to migration status). Their “welfare landscapes” took on new dimensions.