The Territorial Stigmatization of Non-profit Housing Areas in Denmark During COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic has in many ways provided a window through which we more clearly see and understand the challenges of urban areas, but also which challenges that are recognized and articulated as problems, and how these are framed, understood, and put into words. Danish politics has for the last decade which become increasingly concerned with issues of segregation. An entire political apparatus has been built up to monitor the performance or vulnerability of particular non-profit housing (NPH) areas, which have been labelled as “ghettoes”, and the Danish Government has taken drastic measures to prevent what has been referred to as “parallel societies”. In this paper, we trace the evolution of the “ghetto” discourse in Denmark and argue that the political discourse on these areas can be understood as territorial stigmatization and cultural racism. Furthermore, we use the COVID-19 pandemic as a lens to explore how the stigmatization of NPH areas unfolds in a time of crisis and the rationalities behind the stigmatizing political discourse. Under the pandemic, NPH areas have frequently been highlighted as “corona hotspots” with the embedded accusations that the residents do not comply with government guidelines. We argue that the COVID-19 pandemic has put a new light on the societal structural injustices in Nordic welfare states such as Denmark, and that there is a need to develop a “new normal” discourse on NPH areas and its residents.