The Perforated Welfare Space: Negotiating Ghetto-Stigma in Media, Architecture and Everyday Life

Abstract The Danish postwar social housing developments originally epitomized the dawning welfare state, promoting ideals of equity and community. Today, a number of these neighborhoods have come to occupy the reverse role and are publicly represented as “parallel societies,” “ghettos” or even “holes in the map of Denmark,” thus perforating the welfare state as a socially coherent space. Based on a media analysis and field studies in the so-called “hard ghettos,” this paper relates current media representations of disadvantaged Danish neighborhoods to architectural and residential ways of coping with territorial stigma. We argue that media representations of these housing developments contribute to rendering them spatially and socially detached from the surrounding society and that the architectural attempts to open up these housing developments may, in some cases, reinforce the stigma, further perforating the neighborhoods. Residents contest the stigma, yet those who can do so tend to detach themselves from the stigmatized neighborhoods.