Growing up sustainable? Politics of race and youth in Urbanplan, Copenhagen

ABSTRACT

This paper considers how racialized youth in Denmark negotiate sustainability amid contexts marked by intersecting forms of economic restructuring, progressive neoliberalism, white ethno-nationalism, and green urban planning. Urbanplan is a low-income, notoriously “troubled” Copenhagen neighborhood where we conducted fieldwork for 7 months (2019-2020) with fifteen male youth, aged 17-21. Using ethnography, policy reviews, and interviews with city social workers, we explore how intimate experiences of nature, group-identity, and place attachment here relate to and depart from the structural forces actively reshaping the neighborhood. Our analysis combines Cindi Katz's intersectional political economy approach with recent work on green gentrification, Critical Utopian Action Research, and Danish identity politics. The resulting “topography” of youth experience identifies distinctive spatialities of belonging and exclusion, and a faltering sustainability discourse that offers diminishing local returns. While youth in Urbanplan refuse to “grow up sustainable,” they await opportunities to enact more empowering forms of socio-environmental belonging.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainability
• race
• Copenhagen
• youth

Acknowledgements

We thank Kelsey Johnson, Nathan McClintock, and Natalie Gulsrud for their thoughtful and constructive suggestions on various aspects of this project. Major thanks to the Partnership (Partnerskabet), the social worker participants in Copenhagen and beyond, and Urban Dreams/Urban Futures especially for their generosity and insight.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Partnership is funded primarily (75%) by The National Building Foundation which receives monthly rental payments from public housing associations across the country, alongside 12,5% each from a Danish social housing coordinating organization, KAB, and Copenhagen municipality. Such initiatives are allocated to social / non-profit housing blocks that are identified as vulnerable.

2 There are a range of locally implemented social planning initiatives besides CUAR. Social work in Denmark generally is done in networks of diverse actors from the housing companies to the municipality, to schools and daycares, the police, local businesses, residents, and volunteers. see: Mazanti, L. G. A. B. (2017). Socialt arbejde i udsatte boligområder (Vol. 28). Tidsskriftet Dansk Sociologi.

3 The UN sustainable development agenda for 2015-2030 identifies 'youth' as a category of emphasis for sustainability policy outcomes. Each of its 17 goals of sustainable development emphasizes the need for their active participation in the promotion and realization of these objectives and its targets (https://sdgs.un.org/2030agenda).

4 Arguably, this dynamic cuts to the heart of the civic politics of race in the country: Denmark currently denies ready access to citizenship rights for “non Western” youth born and raised in Denmark, including the right to vote in national elections (Liisberg, 2021).

5 In a review article, Valentine (2019) observed that “youth” geographies have tended to be conflated with a broader category of “inter-generationality”, resulting in poor analytic specificity. We aim to address this gap, gently shifting Katz’s focus on children towards “youth” aged 16-20.

6 Katz (2011, p. 51) describes the “waste” figure as a “spectre which haunts the figure of the child as “accumulation strategy”. In effect, the former (waste) interferes with and jeopardizes the circuits of value running through the child as “accumulation strategy”.

7 https://www.masuplanning.com/project/Urbanplan/

8 Development plans at Urbanplan have also included housing, but only for residents that meet certain socio-economic criteria -- meaning that they will be more exclusive than other units. The gentrification of neighboring sections of Amager -- including via what Larsen and Lund Hansen (2015, p. 3) call "stealthy and frontal attacks" by the State on the non-profit housing sector, have weakened embedded resident democracy and encouraged commodification.

9 For a comparable development, consider The Green Sydhavn, which aspires for much of the same as Urbanplan: green infrastructure to achieve safety and neighborhood improvements and integrate with the broader city vision. See: Johansen RV. 2021. Unge fra udsatte boligområder skal gøre Bispebjerg grønnere. København Liv magazine. Website accessed 18 April 2023. https://kobenhavnliv.dk/nordvest/unge-fra-udsatte-boligomraader-skal-goere-bispebjerg-groennere

10 The Ghetto Plan applies to all Danish neighborhoods of over 1,000 inhabitants that fulfill a blatant criteria: over 50 percent non-Western nationality or heritage, alongside at least two of four additional criteria related to employment, criminal convictions, and level of education and income (see: Government, 2018).

11 As Bladt and Nielsen (2013, p. 12), explain, “free space should be understood as a democratic process or procedural norm rather than as an absolute demand for the neutralization of power within a field. As a democratic norm of how social learning processes can be developed and advanced, free space becomes a quality within a learning space, which is created by the methods of action research”.

12 The dialogues proceeded in English. MR's lack of Danish was an unexpected asset, as many youth participants - encouraged by the social workers - seemed eager to try their English, and corresponding knowledge of Anglo-American culture. We suspected that this was related to the youths' corresponding ability to switch to Danish when necessary for privacy reasons. This suspicion was confirmed by several youth near the end of the ethnography.

13 The meetings were also, we came to learn, expressions of the "Future Creation Workshop" that had guided the youths' conversations over the last two years. The "Future Creation Workshop" is a key component of a Critical Utopian Action Research (CUAR). The Future Creation Workshop seeks to mobilize "the future" as a site of self-actualization in the present (Egmose et al. 2020).

14 The Partnership social worker engagements resumed in September of every year, in conjunction with the commencement of the school year. Thus, this reporting insight occurred in early October 2019.

15 For details in the project descriptions, see: https://www.Urbanplan.com/Urbanplan-i-udvikling

16 Later, I would learn that "Urban Futures" had been as many as 30 members in years prior, before an intergroup "rift" had reduced the numbers to a relatively stable 16 -18 (Fieldnotes 06/12/19).

17 Urbanplan 2020- https://www.Urbanplan.com/single-post/farvel-til-ghettolisten. See also: https://www.kk.dk/sites/default/files/politik_for_udsatte_byomraader_-_printversion.pdf

18 See the law text at: https://www.retsinformation.dk/eli/ft/201812L00022

Additional information

Funding

This research is an output of the VIVA-PLAN Project funded by the Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development (FORMAS) Svenska Forskningsrådet Formas - 2018-00175 (Registration number 2018-00175) under the targeted call: National Research Program for Sustainable Spatial Planning.