Transforming the Welfare City

Description

The seminar Transforming the Welfare City (16-17 November 2023) was jointly organized by the research network The Representation of the Welfare City and the research project ‘Reassembling the Ghetto’. The ambition was to bring together scholars from different academic fields, including history, architecture, linguistics, and literary studies. The seminar was hosted by the University of Southern Denmark, where the first of two days took place. The second day was case-oriented and was held in Vollsmose, the largest housing area on the infamous Danish list of ‘parallel societies’ (formerly known as ‘the ghetto list’), where well over 9,000 people live. We met representatives from the municipality and took a guided tour to see the area and the realization of the ambitious transformation plan named, with reference to the plans before it, ‘The Last Vollsmose Plan’.

The seminar was centred around four questions:
1. What are the theoretical stakes of the concept of ‘transformation’ and of the transformation plans understood as narratives about a better future?
2. What practical outcomes do the plans have? How do planners, architects, artists, and inhabitants intervene in order to affect the outcome of the plans, that is, the future?
3. What are the contexts for the plans? How are they related to a contemporary moment characterized by neoliberalism, and thus very different from their moment of origin? What does this mean for the symbolic content and narrative potentiality of the welfare city and its concrete blocks?
4. How are the plans narrated, mediated, and interpreted in public discourse as well as in cultural representations?

The Representation of the Welfare City is a transdisciplinary international research network funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark and headed by associate professor Anne Elisabeth Toft, Aarhus School of Architecture. The network examines the way the architecture of the welfare state is represented in the mass media and wishes to stimulate interaction between researchers and promote research exchange, with the aim of bringing forward new perspectives and knowledge that can contribute to development in architectural research.
‘Reassembling the Ghetto’ is a research project funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark in 2021–24, based at the University of Southern Denmark and headed by associate professor Jon Helt Haarder. It is divided into two subprojects. One covers the literary history of the concrete suburb in Denmark by charting the changing depictions of public housing estates found in Danish literature (and to some extent films as well) from 1945 to the present. The second project studies the relation between the concrete suburb and the emergence of rap in Danish.

Period	16 Nov 2023 → 17 Nov 2023
Event type	Conference
Location	Odense, DenmarkShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International