From isolated enclave to integrated urban area: New ideals for infrastructure in social housing areas

This paper focuses on infrastructure and safety in the redevelopment of selected post-war large-scale housing areas in Denmark. We discuss how the shift in planning practice from traffic separation to traffic integration affects the areas' residents and qualities of the areas. The paper shows that traffic separation and traffic integration are two different perspectives on creating safe, child-friendly, and livable neighbourhoods. In the paper, we display how the resident's perceptions of traffic integration in post-war large-scale housing areas differ from urban practitioners' view. Interviews with residents reveal that they often appreciate their recreational housing area without cars. Simultaneously, planners want to change the infrastructure to integrate the site into the surrounding city and ensure safe neighbourhoods with less crime and greater diversity. The question is how these drastic physical changes will affect the housing areas' DNA and whether the changes will create a feeling of safety and for whom. Through interdisciplinary methods as mapping, architectural analyses, qualitative interviews and ethnographic go-along, we display ways of investigating the complexity between planning ideals, qualities of the areas and the lived life in selected social housing areas. The paper is based on data from an evaluation of the redevelopment of 15 disadvantaged large-scale housing areas in Denmark. The evaluation, conducted by a team of interdisciplinary researchers from BUILD, Aalborg University, is following the development in the sites for ten years and will complete the same interdisciplinary investigation every second year to understand which long-term effects physical changes have on the lived life in the housing areas.