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’.