SOCIAL STRATIFICATION AND PATTERNS OF SETTLEMENT

The project is an investigation into parts of the Danish urban housing landscapes, their stratification mechanisms and possible future developments. Specifically, it seeks to illuminate suburban single-family housing landscapes in connection to social inclusion and exclusion, or sociality and difference through a socio-material analysis of the dynamics surrounding the suburban single-family home and its emergence and trajectories in the physical and social landscape of modern Denmark. The project combines cultural geography and urban sociology in a topological analysis of the relationship between space, process and the social.

The topological approach entails an inquiry into the principles of distribution and relations in shifting material and temporal contexts, as well as a sensitivity to the co-constitution of action and context. The approach enables us to ask: What are the patterns in which urban housing landscapes come to perform with human and non-human agents? How is materiality distributed? In what ways are materiality and sociality related? And how does this differ over time (i.e. between generations)? How are imaginations of dwelling shaping and shaped by material contexts, and what are the processes that yield modes of inclusion and exclusion?

I will analyse two specific generations on the Danish housing market, namely the baby boomers (born 1945-55) and their children (born 1975-85). The post-war generation experienced a novel mode of spatial organisation between 1960 and 80 brought about by economic growth coupled with increased industrialisation and the simultaneous emergence of the universalistic welfare state. This generation is truly the first large-scale Danish middle class; the foundations on which contemporary society is built.Their children, on the other hand, to a large degree grew up in a prosperous welfare society and are about step onto the housing market ladder. Studies show that a large proportion of this generation imagine themselves owning a suburban home, but over the last decade this has become increasingly difficult. We may therefore argue that the suburban single-family home has moved from being a vector of greater equality and prosperity to an object of contention, inequality and possibly inter-generational conflict.

In conclusion, the project seeks to illuminate the topological presuppositions of social theory and argue that space and place are active co-constituents of social inclusion and exclusion.

The suburban single-family home partake in the social in a variety of ways, or, as I analyse it, through various topologies as it both orders the social, links socio-material actors, connects materiality and sociality, and distributes inclusion and exclusion socially and materially.

Emneord

Boligens betydning, Boligkarriere

Faser

Tidsplan

Bevilling

1.530.000 kr.

Projektleder

Cecilie Juul Jørgensen