Urban Planning for Socially Mixed Communities: Battling Parallel Societies – or Building for Parallel Lives?

The paper explores redevelopment approaches in disadvantaged social housing estates in Denmark in the wake of the so-called Parallel Society Act’s (PSA) call for mandatory tenure mixing in a number of targeted social housing estates in Denmark. Drawing on extensive research indicating that tenure mixing too often fails to deliver on social integrationist goals such as improving social capital and battling parallel societies, chiefly because redevelopment strategies rely too heavily on housing and fail to undergird tenure-mixing with inclusive community building efforts. In this paper, I explore the impact of the PSA on urban practitioners’ balancing redevelopment efforts aimed to attract socioeconomically advantaged newcomers with efforts aimed to include and engage current social tenants and build cohesive cross-tenure communities. Drawing on Bourdieuian planning perspectives I argue that the degree of convergence around a shared habitus and the relative distribution of capital among actors may be more or less favorable to prioritizing community building and promoting social inclusion.