Mainstreaming marginalized neighbourhoods: resident experiences of non-profit housing transformation in Copenhagen, Denmark

As urban governance has been broadly neoliberalized since the 1990s, the social housing sector in Europe has undergone a transition. As part of this change, some social housing areas are problematized as ‘failed estates’ and targeted by neoliberal urban redevelopment policies. In this politico-discursive environment, housing associations increasingly act as entrepreneurial urban developers under the influence of neoliberal policies and discourses. In Denmark, a state-driven redevelopment policy adopted in 2018 has accelerated the reorientation of the non-profit housing sector towards neoliberal urbanism under the pretext of fighting so-called ‘ghettoization’ through ‘social mixing’. This paper introduces the concept of ‘mainstreaming’ to classify such approaches aimed at transforming non-profit housing estates (and their residents) to emulate an imagined urban ‘normality’. We argue that ‘mainstreaming’ constitutes a multidimensional approach, which we deconstruct into three underlying dimensions: spatial, social, and democratic. Drawing on three studies—including two in-depth case-studies of housing estates in Copenhagen, Denmark—we explore how mainstreaming is experienced by residents as processes of loss and precariousness as redevelopment simultaneously reshapes the built environment, reorders social life, and reconfigures resident influence. We argue that mainstreaming fundamentally changes the relationship between tenants and housing associations and residents’ place in urban space.