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The politics of everyday life: urban materialities, modernity and conflictual interactions on two Danish mass housing estates in the 1970s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 April 2021

Mikkel Høghøj Open the ORCID record for Mikkel Høghøj [Opens in a new window]
Mikkel Høghøj*
Affiliation:
Department of History and Classical Studies, Aarhus University, Jens Chr. Skous Vej 5,5, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark
*
*Corresponding author. Email: hismh@cas.au.dk
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Abstract

This article explores the relations between everyday life, materiality and urban modernity on two Danish mass housing estates, the Gellerup Plan and Vollsmose, in the 1970s. Specifically, the article examines a series of conflicts concerning the residents’ use and misuse of seemingly mundane material devices, including shopping trolleys, waste disposal and laundry facilities. In doing so, the article argues that the residents’ daily engagements with everyday materialities and technologies constitute a privileged, yet overlooked, point of entry into the shifting relations between modernity, materiality and agency in the Danish welfare city in the 1970s.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 49 , Issue 3 , August 2022 , pp. 631 - 647
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press.

Introduction

Modernist mass housing has indubitably been among the most contested manifestations of urban architecture in the last half of the twentieth century. In Denmark, mass housing followed a similar trajectory as in many other western European countries. Planned and constructed as part of the infrastructural backbone of the welfare state, Danish mass housing materialized the post-war alliance between Social Democracy, technocratic planning and economic growth. Envisaged as urban totalities, mass housing estates spatialized contemporary notions of the ‘good citizen’ and echoed utopian aspirations of the transnational new town-movement.Footnote 1 From the early 1970s onwards, however, mass housing became subjected to harsh criticism from multiple positions. In architectural debates, popular culture and mass media, modernist mass housing estates were uniformly rejected as places of alienation, social crisis and, ultimately, as markers of the hubris of modernity.Footnote 2

The commonality of this development in post-war northern and western Europe is well documented in the extensive international research literature on the history of modernist housing and planning.Footnote 3 However, despite the richness of this research, limited scholarly attention has been given to the realm of everyday life on modernist mass housing estates in the 1960s and 1970s. Although scholars have attended to the lived experiences of residents in modernist housing estates, typically by focusing on residents’ attitudes towards their housing environment in various contexts,Footnote 4 few studies have addressed the relationship between the residents’ everyday practices and the materialities of their housing estates.Footnote 5

Thus, the purpose of this article is to investigate the intimate and conflictual interactions between the planned modernity of Danish mass housing and the everyday practices of the residents in the 1970s. Focusing on two mass housing estates, the Gellerup Plan and Vollsmose, I examine a series of conflicts concerning the proper use of space and materiality which played out on the estates. These conflicts were mobilized around the residents’ use of seemingly mundane material devices including shopping trolleys, waste disposal and laundry facilities. More broadly, I argue that the residents’ daily engagements with everyday materialities and technologies constitute a privileged, yet overlooked, point of entry into the broader social and cultural transformation that Danish modernist mass housing underwent in the 1970s. Not only do such interactions exhibit how residents were able to appropriate and negotiate the planned modernity of Danish mass housing, but they also allude to the capacity of urban materiality in shaping the realm of everyday life and politics.

Urban materiality and infrastructure have historically been inextricably entangled with prevalent power rationalities.Footnote 6 In recent years, urban scholars have thus pointed to the formative role of urban materiality in the shaping of new forms of political subjectivities.Footnote 7 Yet, as, for example, Stefan Höehne and Simeon Koole have demonstrated in the case of urban transport networks, the practical implementation of new subject forms through urban materiality and infrastructure can, in many ways, be a fluid and unpredictable process.Footnote 8 Often, discrepancies occur between the anticipated and the actual behaviour of the users, as people tend to use material and infrastructural systems in unexpected and unforeseen ways. As I seek to demonstrate in this article, similar dynamics shaped the development of Danish mass housing estates in the 1970s. From one perspective, mass housing estates were constitutive in the shaping of new forms of ‘welfare subjectivities’ in post-war Denmark. By providing thousands of people with a new material infrastructure for everyday life, they spatialized the Danish welfare society as an urban experience and facilitated certain types of welfare lifestyles. From another perspective, mass housing estates were also what Koole has termed ‘indeterminate spaces’.Footnote 9 As the proper use of everyday materialities and technologies for, for example, leisure, consumption and domestic life was not necessarily straightforward, these devices enabled the residents to improvise their daily practices in ways the planners had not originally intended, leading to various conflicts between different groups inhabiting and administering the estates.

Such discrepancies between planning and everyday practice are particularly interesting because they allude to broader shifts in the relations between urban materiality, power and everyday life. In their study of water politics in urban Britain, Vanessa Taylor and Frank Trentmann have specifically encouraged scholars to connect ‘the study of politics with that of everyday life as a variegated field of practice, agency and creativity, rather than one of control, alienation and reproduction’.Footnote 10 In this article, I seek to do so by analysing the ‘material practices’ of the residents. Most residents never publicly expressed their views on the planned modernity of Danish mass housing, yet their daily actions both imprinted on and were facilitated by the built environment of the estates. Such practices constitute the focal point of my analyses: I examine, on the one hand, how residents used and misused the material facilities of Danish mass housing. On the other hand, I examine how the built environment of the estates influenced the everyday practices of the residents. To identify such material practices, I use locally produced residential newspapers from the Gellerup Plan and Vollsmose. These were published monthly by and for the residents and provide unique insights into both the social norms and disputes on the two estates in the 1970s.Footnote 11

Thus, my aim is not to tell the story of individual people but rather to identify tendencies and patterns in how residents shaped and were shaped by the material fabric of the housing estates they inhabited. Still, it is important not to simplify or homogenize the actions of the residents. As James Greenhalgh argues, we are frequently left with ‘a picture of housing estates that all too often portrays inhabitants as unwitting, powerless victims; valorises them in a heroic struggle; or else demonises them as the sole architects of their own demise’.Footnote 12 In this article, I seek to move beyond such narratives by adopting a practice perspective. By foregrounding the subtle conflicts and interactions through which everyday life unfolded on the estates, I seek to capture the complexity and unpredictability of everyday life. I emphasize how the residents were active agents in their own life capable of transgressing the planned modernity of their housing environment while, at the same time, being structured by the rationalities of this specific version of urban modernity.

The article proceeds in two parts. In the first part, I examine the planned modernity of Danish mass housing, focusing on the planning and construction of the Gellerup Plan and Vollsmose. In the second part, I investigate how residents on the two estates interacted with and negotiated this planned modernity through their everyday practices. More broadly, I contemplate on what these findings can tell us about the shifting relations between urban modernity, materiality and agency in Danish welfare cities in the 1970s.

Designing welfare citizens

The 1960s served as the pivotal decade for the planning and construction of Danish mass housing. In this decade, the technical, legislative and economic preconditions, which had been implemented gradually since the late inter-war period, especially by governments headed by Social Democrats, were finally in place, allowing architects, construction companies and housing associations to carry out projects of unprecedented scale and ambition.Footnote 13 Planned and constructed from the mid-1960s onwards, the Gellerup Plan and Vollsmose arguably represent the zenith of this development. Built on the periphery of the second and third largest Danish cities – Aarhus and Odense – the two estates were among the most comprehensive mass housing estates constructed in Denmark in the period. Complete with a broad range of amenities for leisure, community and consumption as well as several public institutions including schools, kindergartens and municipal offices, the estates were envisaged and framed not merely as housing but as urban totalities.Footnote 14 In general, the Gellerup Plan and Vollsmose share many similarities. They were originally planned to house between 15,000 and 20,000 people, and architecturally, they both consist of 4–12-storey housing blocks that enclose open spaces intended for amenities. Moreover, they were developed within the same planning framework, with non-profit housing associations as the primary developers and local politicians as central stakeholders.Footnote 15

As Rosemary Wakeman argues, ‘it was not the towering spectacles of capital cities that captured the postwar imagination so much as the futurology of the ordinary’.Footnote 16 In Denmark, The Gellerup Plan and Vollsmose encapsulated this planning mentality. Compared to other housing projects, these estates stand out not only in terms of their size but also because of the meticulousness with which the planners designed the everyday lives of the residents. This meticulousness particularly found expression in the infrastructure of leisure installed on the estates. In the Gellerup Plan, for instance, the planners designed football fields, tennis courts, a swimming bath and a so-called ‘Culture and Activity Centre’.Footnote 17 Developed as the communal heart of the estate, the centre comprised various rooms for leisure clubs and events, a hotel, a library, a theatre and a church. In this sense, mass housing estates such as the Gellerup Plan and Vollsmose were not just supposed to house the citizens of the Danish welfare society. Rather, the spatiality of estates was designed to elicit specific behavioural patterns among the residents, subjectifying them into socially active, healthy and responsible citizens.Footnote 18

Thus, the Gellerup Plan and Vollsmos emerged as prime markers of Danish welfare modernity.Footnote 19 Many aspects of this modernity, however, were not specifically Danish but part of a much broader movement, urban modernism, that proliferated globally but was practised locally in different urban contexts by planners and public authorities seeking to produce functional cities through the expert application of scientific principles and knowledge.Footnote 20 In Denmark, the Gellerup Plan and Vollsmose are quintessential examples of this way of ‘seeing the city’ from a planning perspective. Comprised of spaces for residence, work, recreation and circulation, these estates represented holistic attempts to produce self-contained urban communities on the periphery of Danish cities.

While mass housing estates are typically considered material manifestations of Danish welfare modernity, the specific term ‘modernity’ is not free from problematic connotations, stemming from an intellectual tradition dominated by Eurocentrism and imperialism.Footnote 21 This does not mean that we should discard the concept altogether, but perhaps, as Gunn has suggested, a solution could be to pluralize it and instead speak of several ‘modernities’.Footnote 22 This, in turn, encourages us to think of modernity not as a set of historical characteristics prevalent in western societies since the nineteenth century, but as a certain way of perceiving temporality. In his essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’, Michel Foucault specifically argued for an understanding of modernity as ‘the attitude that makes it possible to grasp the “heroic” aspect of the present moment. Modernity is not a phenomenon of sensitivity to the fleeting present; it is the will to “heroize” the present.’Footnote 23 Modernity, in this sense, represents moments in history when the present seems particularly open to societal changes and thus dovetails with the notion of utopianism. In western Europe, the post-war decades represented exactly such a moment, and cities constituted the ideal spaces for social intervention.Footnote 24 This was also the case in Denmark. Not only did the realization of the Danish welfare society to a large extent take place through the modernization of cities, but the ways in which Danish planners, local authorities and architects envisaged future cityscapes and architecture were also permeated by a particularly strong optimism and belief in their ability to ‘heroize the present’.

As demonstrated above, the Gellerup Plan and Vollsmose spatialized certain norms and ideals for everyday life. To encourage the residents to adopt these norms and ideals, the housing associations, which administered the estates, produced different forms of promotional material highlighting various aspects of the planned modernity of the estates. To attract new residents, they produced sales brochures and films depicting the estates as ideal living environments for Danish families, spatializing an everyday life characterized by the comforts of affluence, leisure and technological advancement.Footnote 25 For existing residents, they issued specific housing regulations outlining the overall rules of conduct in regards to tidiness, maintenance and neighbouring relations. In addition, Brabrand Housing Association (Brabrand Boligforening), the main developer of the Gellerup Plan, produced a pamphlet in 1975 entitled Advices and Instructions for the Residents in Brabrand Housing Association.Footnote 26 Besides presenting the various amenities that the Gellerup Plan had to offer, the pamphlet elaborated on the norms for community participation prevalent on the estate. Specifically, it emphasized that the future state of the Gellerup Plan depended on the active participation and engagement of the residents in shaping a flourishing and thriving communal life.Footnote 27 In this way, the pamphlet not only exhibits the norms for communal life on the Gellerup Plan, but it also underlines how the realization of these norms was conditioned by the residents’ inclination actively to reproduce them through their daily lives.

More broadly, this pamphlet exhibits the norms and ideals of Danish ‘resident democracy’ (beboerdemokrati). In Denmark, non-profit housing associations – the Danish equivalent to social housing – can, as political scientist Lotte Jensen puts it, best be understood as ‘semi-autonomous’.Footnote 28 They operate in a legal framework and depend on subsidies, yet they also enjoy considerable autonomy in the day-to-day management and policy-making at the estate level. Administratively, housing associations are organized in different housing departments (boligafdelinger) which operate independently but are legally bound together through the housing association.Footnote 29 In 1970, resident democracy was introduced in the Danish non-profit housing sector. Now, the residents in each housing department had the right to elect and be represented on the department board which was responsible for the daily management of the housing department. The structure and norms of resident democracy are vital to understand the internal social dynamics of the Gellerup Plan and Vollsmose in the 1970s. On the one hand, this system gave the tenants a more prominent voice and provided them with a new space for agency. On the other hand, it also installed community participation as a social norm on the estates.Footnote 30

The norms of resident democracy particularly found expression in the production of residential newspapers on the two estates. In the Gellerup Plan, the local tenant councils have published the newspaper Skræppebladet since 1970. In Vollsmose, several newspapers were published on a regular basis in the 1970s. In this article, I draw upon material from two newspapers, Granposten and Birkebladet, launched respectively in 1976 and 1977. The three newspapers were alike in terms of both purpose and form. They communicated official messages from the housing associations and department boards, news about national housing policies, advertisements for communal events and various opinion pieces as well as complaints from the residents. By regularly advertising for a broad variety of leisure clubs and communal activities, the newspapers give an immediate impression of thriving social communities on the estates. However, as the next part of the article will demonstrate, they also open a window into the more subtle disputes and conflicts that shaped everyday life on the two estates.

Negotiating modernity: discrepancies between plan and practice

Orvar Löfgren has demonstrated how railway travel in the nineteenth century required that travellers adopted a new set of competences that for many seemed highly novel at the time.Footnote 31 People had to learn how to navigate the new spaces, materialities and behavioural norms of this new form of travel – and not without difficulties. In this part of the article, I argue that a similar process can be identified in the case of Danish mass housing in the 1970s. Residents living on modernist mass housing estates were expected to adapt their daily lives and routines to the planned modernity of the estates. In the early 1970s, the most common resident group in both the Gellerup Plan and Vollsmose were working-class or lower-middle-class families who had moved to the estates from either the inner-city tenements of Aarhus and Odense or smaller urban and rural communities.Footnote 32 They were, therefore, not accustomed to the same standard of amenities as could be found on the two estates, and, as the following three sections will demonstrate, this resulted in a range of conflicts which played out in the residential newspapers published on the estates. These conflicts revolved around the residents’ use of certain everyday technologies including shopping trolleys, waste chutes and facilities for laundry drying – materialities that were all integral to the planned modernity of the Gellerup Plan and Vollsmose.

The material practice of shopping trolleys

To ensure that the residents had easy access to groceries, public services and shopping more generally, the planners of the Gellerup Plan and Vollsmose constructed modern shopping malls as an integral part of the estates. Thus, both the Gellerup Centre and the Vollsmose Centre were completed and opened in 1972. Besides supermarkets, both malls comprised a wide range of specialist shops, banks, post offices, restaurants, bars and child-friendly areas. They were, furthermore, conceived as part of larger plans for cultural and social activity centres on the estates. While only a walking bridge separated the Gellerup Centre from the Culture and Activity Centre, the Vollsmose Centre was conceived as part of a larger precinct that, besides a shopping mall, included a hotel, library and cinema as well as spaces for restaurants, offices, clinics and communal events.Footnote 33

Architecturally, the Gellerup Centre and Vollsmose Centre represented a new type of urban form that proliferated across western Europe in the post-war decades. Developed in the US, the suburban shopping mall gradually translated into the urban geography of European cities, especially through the construction of new towns and mass housing estates, and quickly became a new everyday phenomenon.Footnote 34 More broadly, the introduction of shopping malls was entwined with the shaping of a new kind of citizen, the citizen-consumer.Footnote 35 As Helena Mattsson has demonstrated, the logics of mass consumerism were integral to Swedish welfare modernism from the outset, and this relationship underpinned the construction of welfare architecture and infrastructure for, for example, shopping, automobility and leisure.Footnote 36 In Denmark, the Gellerup Centre and Vollsmose Centre point to a similar development, as both malls spatialized a lifestyle closely tied to the logics of consumerism and affluence. Easily accessible by car and with more than a thousand parking spaces available, the Gellerup Centre and Vollsmose Centre were designed to distribute this type of lifestyle not only to the residents of the adjacent housing blocks but to the inhabitants of many parts of the urban regions of Aarhus and Odense.Footnote 37

In both the Gellerup Plan and Vollsmose, the planners envisaged the practice of shopping as more than just a daily routine. It was a social event strengthening the ties of the local community. As emphasized already in the first draft of the Gellerup Plan from 1963, the planners wanted the projected shopping mall to facilitate informal contact between the residents living on the estate.Footnote 38 In this sense, the Gellerup Centre and Vollsmose Centre spatialized a novel type of shopping experience. In an article about the projected Vollsmose Centre from 1967, the regional newspaper Fyens Stiftstidende envisaged this experience with the following words:

One of the aims of the special design of the centre is to create bustling life just like a shopping street. The shops, all on the same floor, will be concentrated around a pedestrianized street with small places and squares all encircled by buildings with narrow passages. Flowers and bushes will give the customers an impression of sun and warmth – even when it snows outside. Around the centre, benches will be placed, allowing the customers to rest their tired legs and enjoy the view of Volls Mose through the open sides of the pedestrianized street.Footnote 39

As utopian landscapes of modern technology, the Gellerup Centre and Vollsmose Centre were thus designed to facilitate shopping as a social, comfortable and, at the same time, highly modern experience.

To ease the shopping experience further, the managers of the two malls made shopping trolleys available to the customers free of charge. Invented in the US in the inter-war period, the shopping trolley emerged as an innovative solution to carrying groceries in American self-service supermarkets and has since developed into one of the most ubiquitous artefacts of everyday mass consumption.Footnote 40 In Denmark, shopping trolleys gradually entered the realm of everyday life as a new type of shopping accessory following the introduction of self-service grocery stores from especially the 1950s onwards.Footnote 41 In the Gellerup Centre and Vollsmose Centre, shopping trolleys were specifically provided to enhance a feeling of comfort among the customers. The idea was that the customers, when entering the mall, could take a trolley and use it throughout their entire visit. It provided them with a place to store their outerwear when strolling around the perfectly temperature-regulated mall, and, most importantly, it allowed them to transport their acquired goods from store to store without having to carry heavy bags. The Gellerup Centre was even equipped with a moving pavement which allowed the customers to transport both themselves and their shopping trolleys seamlessly between the floors.Footnote 42 Then, at the end of their visit, the customers had to return the trolley, allowing others to enjoy the same level of shopping comfort.

In practice, however, not all visitors complied with these regulations. In the residential newspapers for both the Gellerup Plan and Vollsmose, the misuse of shopping trolleys constituted a highly contested topic of debate throughout the 1970s.Footnote 43 The newspapers frequently printed articles by either the respective tenant boards or dissatisfied residents complaining about abandoned shopping trolleys on the estates. According to these complaints, many residents had grown accustomed to using the shopping trolleys to transport their acquired goods home, and instead of returning the trolleys to the shopping mall, they abandoned them in public and semi-public spaces on the estates such as the green areas, parking lots, hallways and elevators. In Vollsmose, a resident noted that some people even brought shopping trolleys into their flats to empty them and then disposed of them by dropping them from the edge of their balconies.Footnote 44

This problem was not only addressed in critical articles in the residential newspapers, but it also appeared on the agenda during several tenant meetings.Footnote 45 As neither recurrent reprimands from the tenant councils nor information campaigns launched by the shopping malls’ managers seemed to have any particular effects, additional steps were eventually taken. In 1978, Skræppebladet reported that employees from the Gellerup Centre would now begin to collect lost shopping trolleys in the Gellerup Plan twice a week.Footnote 46 The same year, the housing departments in Vollsmose went a step further by inscribing a direct prohibition against the removal of shopping trolleys from the shopping area in the official housing regulations.Footnote 47 Yet, neither of these measures seem to have had the desired effect. In late 1978, a housing department in Vollsmose still referred to abandoned shopping trolleys as a ‘pestilence on the estate’,Footnote 48 and not much indicates that the problem had been solved by the end of the decade.

In January 1979, Skræppebladet gave voice to a resident representing a quite different view on the problem with lost shopping trolleys in the Gellerup Plan.Footnote 49 In an opinion piece, he responded to a letter, which he had received the previous month, officially banning residents from removing shopping trolleys from the premises of the Gellerup Centre. The letter had been co-signed by the managers of the Gellerup Centre and the president of Brabrand Housing Association and thus represented the hitherto most ambitious attempt to solve the problem of shopping trolleys on the estate. According to the resident, the ban was highly unfair for residents who, like himself, did not own a car. He asked: ‘How will I now be able to carry my many groceries home from the centre without either wearing myself out or paying costly money for a taxi?’Footnote 50 Although he acknowledged the problem of lost shopping trolleys on the estate, he also argued that since the residents of the Gellerup Plan constituted the majority of the Gellerup Centre's consumer base, they should be allowed some extra leeway in their daily chores. In any case, the ban would not stop him from using the shopping trolleys in his daily life. This response alludes to a spatial relationship that Michel de Certeau has seminally defined through the concepts of ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’.Footnote 51 The residents, inhabiting the tactic level, had to manoeuvre and improvise their spatial practices within the overall framework of the estates. In this context, their misuse of shopping trolleys can be seen as a subtle way of manipulating the planners’ spatial strategies, thereby appropriating and transforming the spatiality of the estates from planned spaces into lived places.

The misuse of shopping trolleys thus illustrates how the residents through mundane everyday actions were able to appropriate and challenge the planned modernity of the Gellerup Plan and Vollsmose. However, to interpret these disputes as merely a conflict between planners and residents would also be too simplistic. As the findings above show, it was often residents themselves who identified abandoned shopping trolleys as a problem and tried to resolve it through the elected tenant councils. In this respect, these disputes also point towards internal differences between various resident groups living on the estates.Footnote 52 While some residents challenged the planned modernity of the estates, others not only lived in accordance with the prescribed norms of conduct, they also actively reproduced them by trying to regulate the behaviour of the former group.

The material practice of waste disposal

Like the shopping malls, the renovation systems of the Gellerup Plan and Vollsmose initially appeared highly novel and innovative from both a planning and user perspective. This was particularly the case in the Gellerup Plan, where the planners, inspired by Swedish housing estates, had installed a new type of renovation system with the purpose of automating the entire process of waste disposal. As was the case on other Danish housing estates, residents in the Gellerup Plan could dispose of their rubbish through a waste chute. However, instead of ending up in a garbage bin below, the new system sucked the rubbish directly to the nearby renovation central through a large, underground tube. Here, the rubbish was burned and the released energy converted into central heating which was then utilized in heating the entire estate. The system had been costly, yet Brabrand Housing Association anticipated that it would prove financially profitable within only a few years due to an expected decrease in daily operating costs for manual waste disposal.Footnote 53

Besides being highlighted in journals for engineering as a prime marker of the high technological standards of the Gellerup Plan,Footnote 54 this system was used as a unique selling point by Brabrand Housing Association in a sales brochure:

Here, you will not find foul-smelling rubbish bins. Just place the rubbish in the chute that leads into a huge, underground tube. From here, a ‘giant vacuum cleaner’ carries the rubbish all the way to the renovation central…The suction capacity of the vacuum cleaner is enormous – items as large as bricks can be transported through the system.Footnote 55

In this sense, the ‘giant vacuum cleaner’ emerged as what Albert Borgmann has termed a ‘device’.Footnote 56 Serving as an intermediary between the residents and the broader technological networks for renovation on the Gellerup Plan, the ‘giant vacuum cleaner’ was developed to make the daily practice of rubbish removal as effortless as possible while simultaneously concealing the machinery of the system. In doing so, it also materialized notions of health and cleanliness – qualities often associated with modernist architecture and design.Footnote 57 As in many other national contexts, the practice of urban modernism in post-war Denmark relied on the idea that the built environment could improve the physical health of the urban population.Footnote 58 Removing rubbish effectively and isolated from human contact, the renovation system of the Gellerup Plan was clearly conceived within this paradigm of cleanliness and hygiene. This objective also found expression in the local newspaper Brabrand og Omegns Avis. In a special issue dedicated to the projected Gellerup Plan from 1969, the newspaper specifically described the ‘giant vacuum cleaner’ as a powerful tool to further improve societal hygiene.Footnote 59

In practice, however, the ‘giant vacuum cleaner’ did not fulfil its potential. On multiple occasions, the residents in the Gellerup Plan challenged and overburdened the capacity of the system through their daily use. In Skræppebladet, janitors regularly complained about clogged chutes, blaming the residents for wrapping their rubbish wrongly and using the waste chute to remove too large items.Footnote 60 In 1972, for instance, a janitor noted that he had so far encountered branches, bundles of newspapers, fishing poles and even Christmas trees when unclogging the tubes.Footnote 61 To resolve the problem, the janitors urged the residents to be more considerate about how they used the waste chutes, and in 1975 the housing regulations for the Gellerup Plan were updated with detailed guidelines for the disposal of rubbish.Footnote 62 According to the new regulations, all kitchen waste needed to be soundly wrapped and all items with a length of more than 40 centimetres had to be broken in half before entering the chute.

As the quote above demonstrates, Brabrand Housing Association depicted the suction capacity of the renovation system as remarkable. The daily experience of the system clearly conflicted with this narrative. This discrepancy was recurrently noted by residents who blamed the inefficiency of the renovation system rather than their fellow residents.Footnote 63 One resident specifically stated that while the renovation system was frequently praised in various academic journals, it had not yet proved to be practically operational in the Gellerup Plan.Footnote 64 In this sense, the conflicts of waste disposal were, to a great extent, conflicts between the residents and the janitors. Although the janitors could in principle be residents themselves, they represented an intermediary authority figure on the estate officially employed by Brabrand Housing Association.Footnote 65

Despite the high expectations, the ‘giant vacuum cleaner’ never came to work satisfactorily, and in the late 1970s Brabrand Housing Association announced that it would be replaced by a different type of waste disposal system.Footnote 66 What was initially framed as a prime marker of the high technological standards of the Gellerup Plan proved to be incompatible with the behaviour of the residents. However, in contrast to the case of the shopping trolleys, this case displays how the ‘tactics’ of the residents could cause the housing association to depart from their initial ‘strategies’. In this respect, the history of the waste disposal system illustrates not only how the daily practices of the residents conflicted with the planned modernity of Danish mass housing, but it also points to the fragility of this modernity. It took no more than a few fishing poles and Christmas trees to dismantle one of the great technological promises of the Gellerup Plan.

The material practice of laundry drying

In both the Gellerup Plan and Vollsmose, washing machines and tumble dryers were installed in the largest flats.Footnote 67 To serve flats without such amenities – these were mainly one- and two-bedroom flats and student dorms – common laundry rooms were provided in the housing blocks. In sales brochures for both estates, the housing associations emphasized how the modern laundry facilities, as well as the general technological facilities of the home, were designed to ease the residents’ daily lives.Footnote 68 More broadly, these amenities echoed similar notions of cleanliness and hygiene as could be found in Brabrand Housing Associations’ representation of the ‘giant vacuum cleaner’.

Similar to the cases of the shopping trolleys and waste chutes, laundry quickly developed into a controversial issue on the estates. It turned out that some residents preferred to dry their laundry by using the edge of their balcony as a drying rack.Footnote 69 This practice was not tolerated either by the housing associations or the housing departments, and in Vollsmose it even prompted an alteration of the official housing regulations in the spring of 1979.Footnote 70 In the updated regulations, the housing departments underlined that the drying of laundry predominantly had to take place in the designated laundry rooms on the estate. To ensure that the residents complied with these rules, the housing departments called on the janitors to report any misconduct. In this way, the residents’ tactical use of balconies led the housing departments to officially ban particular practices from the estates, thereby limiting the tactical space of the residents further. Yet, as continuous complaints in Granposten attest, this ban did not have any immediate effect.Footnote 71

Besides showcasing discrepancies between the prescribed norms of conduct on the estates and the daily routines of the residents, this specific case alludes to how some residents imported daily routines and practices from their previous housing environment. As noted above, many residents came from traditional working-class neighbourhoods located in the inner cities of Aarhus and Odense. These typically consisted of tenements constructed for working-class families in the last half of the nineteenth century. As was the custom not only in urban Denmark but in industrial cities worldwide, the residents in such housing environments typically dried their laundry by using clotheslines that spanned the tenement buildings. Luc Sante, for example, has defined the clothesline as ‘the flag of the tenements’ in late nineteenth-century New York.Footnote 72 As an intrinsic component of the urban landscape, the clothesline can thus be identified as a visual trademark of everyday life in industrial cities. In the Gellerup Plan and Vollsmose, new technologies for washing and drying had made this arrangement redundant. However, the way in which some residents used the edge of their balconies as a drying rack suggests some continuity between these two types of housing environment. More interesting is the fact that various actors on the estates found this seemingly mundane practice highly inappropriate. Whether it was because it echoed the unhealthy sanitary conditions of the industrial city or simply because it gave the estates an untidy appearance, it was deemed incompatible with the planned modernity of the Gellerup Plan and Vollsmose.

The ways in which the residents in the Gellerup Plan and Vollsmose continuously misused shopping trolleys, waste chutes and facilities for laundry drying display how they through mundane everyday practices negotiated the planned modernity of the estates. Moreover, these examples point to how urban materiality in itself can catalyse certain events, practices and disputes. Focusing on the relations between physical violence and architecture in Odessa, Caroline Humphrey uses the concept ‘affordance’ to delineate the social potentiality of specific material structures and objects.Footnote 73 Although in more subtle ways, a similar dynamic can be identified between the materiality of the shopping trolley or the balconies and the practices of the residents in the Gellerup Plan and Vollsmose. These materialities, in other words, afforded behavioural patterns that conflicted with how the planners, housing associations and some residents perceived the ideal modernity of the estates.

Conclusion

For Löfgren, railway travel was part of a much larger project: ‘The railway became a powerful metaphor for social change, but also a very concrete materialization of modernity. In retrospect, we can see how railway travel became a form of schooling, turning people into modern citizens, working as an integrating and homogenizing technology.’Footnote 74 As the analyses above suggest, Danish modernist mass housing served similar purposes. As laboratories of modernity and social engineering, the Gellerup Plan and Vollsmose were designed to foster certain types of residents and welfare communities. In this context, the misuse of shopping trolleys, waste chutes and facilities for laundry drying can be understood as more than just local, mundane disputes. These quiet conflicts allude to the broad variety of ways in which the residents were constantly subjected and subjecting themselves to different forms of disciplinary measures. From another perspective, however, these conflicts also point to agency of the residents in the Gellerup Plan and Vollsmose. As this article has demonstrated, they were not just passive bystanders who unwittingly internalized the logics of the planned modernity of Danish mass housing. Rather, they were able to negotiate and, to some extent, challenge this modernity and thereby the expectations for how to live in the Danish welfare city.

The interactions between the planned modernity of Danish mass housing and the residents’ everyday practices thus open a window into a world of subtle conflicts and disputes which have typically been overlooked in studies dealing with the history of urban modernism. Besides displaying the relations between materiality and everyday life on the Gellerup Plan and Vollsmose, these conflicts point to the social heterogeneity and complexity of the two estates. As demonstrated above, the disputes over shopping trolleys, waste disposal and laundry drying were not simply a struggle between the planners and the residents. Indeed, these conflicts played out along both vertical and horizontal axes on the estates and involved housing associations, janitors and residents both in the role of culprits and as representatives of the boards of the housing departments. Moreover, the different conflicts mobilized these groups in different ways. While the housing associations and the individual housing departments in the Gellerup Plan and Vollsmose could agree that abandoned shopping trolleys constituted a problem on the estates, the case of waste disposal reveals conflicts between the housing departments on the Gellerup Plan and Brabrand Housing Association, as the housing departments called for a decrease in the rent level due to the inefficiency of the renovation system.Footnote 75 Obviously, this study has not been able to fully capture the many social layers, dynamics and identities which have constituted Danish mass housing estates. This calls for further studies examining the lived experience of welfare cities in the post-war decades. Nevertheless, I hope to have shown that Danish mass housing estates were more than just architectural visions and sites of political decision-making. They were the homes of thousands of people who did not necessarily comply with the planned modernity of the estates.

Footnotes

†

I want to thank Silke Holmqvist, Helle Nissen Gregersen, Christian Ringskou, Mikkel Thelle and Tina Langholm Larsen as well as two anonymous referees for highly valuable and constructive feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

References

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37 See BLA/BBG, Gellerupparken og Toveshøj; OCA/HBV, Vollsmose – Et nyt grønt bymiljø i Odense.

38 BLA/BBG, plan entitled Giellerupplanen (1963), 3.

39 FS, 11 Nov. 1967. Author's translation. In similar terms, Brabrand Housing Association emphasized how the Gellerup Centre rested on brand new principles that would turn the practice of shopping into a ‘human-friendly’ activity. See BLA/BBG, Gellerupparken og Toveshøj, 11.

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42 BLA/BBG, film entitled Miljø for millioner, 1972.

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47 OCA/HBV, Birkebladet, May 1978, 13–14.

48 Ibid., Aug. 1978, 2. Author's translation.

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61 Ibid., Mar. 1972, 5

62 BLA/BBG, Råd og anvisninger, 16.

63 BLA/BBG, Skræppebladet, Mar. 1971, 10; Jan. 1973, 2; Jun 1976, 26; Nov. 1976, 10.

64 Ibid., Jun. 1976, 26.

65 BLA/BBG, Råd og anvisninger, 19.

66 BLA/BBG, Skræppebladet, Oct. 1977, 6–8; Jul. 1978, 6; Sep. 1978, 9.

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69 OCA/HBV, Granposten, Feb. 1976, 17; Jun. 1979, 19; Jul. 1979, 6; Aug. 1979, 15–16.

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