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.