Maintenance and Resistance

The context of Danish public housing have the past decades increasingly been subject for a range of assimilation policies – through the so-called “ghetto legislation”. The result of the stigmatization and the implementation of the legislation, which directly targets public housing areas, often results in evictions of tenants and demolition of buildings. Consequently, tenants have found it necessary to organize and to find ways to work against the implementation.
Parallel to the grassroot care practices in these housing areas, architects are hired to make “development plans” – which includes making visualizations and affirming the rhetoric of the law package – and are thus playing a role in the implantation of these plans. The architects make proposals which causes demolition of buildings, of both homes and community houses. Within an architectural care-paradigm, this practice is truly malpractice; it lacks any sense of care – both for the tenants and the environment, as it causes both displacement and CO2 emissions.
There is thus a sharp discrepancy between the non-care of the architect, and the care practices of the communities living there.
How to overcome this gap?
Through interviews and fieldwork, I will speculate on an architectural practice based on maintenance and renovation, which learns from the social movements and care-practices that exists, sketching out a trajectory towards a more situated practice which doesn’t align with the above-mentioned legislation.