Architectures of Dismantling and Restructuring - Spaces of Danish Welfare 1970 - Present

This publication explores a series of urgent questions addressing architecture’s role in the welfare and everyday life of citizens, from the interdisciplinary perspectives of architecture, art history and anthropology. With Denmark as a case, it examines how the spatiality of the welfare system has transformed, since the end of the so-called “golden age of the welfare state” in the early 1970s until today. How have these spatial changes impacted upon the everyday lives and welfare experiences of citizens? What happens when long-standing institutions are restructured, dismantled or displaced elsewhere? How do emerging types of welfare space inform – or become informed by – changed understandings of the role of the welfare system in our everyday lives?

Rather than unfolding a singular narrative of loss and nostalgia associated with welfare dismantlement – or one of triumphant humanization and restructuring of modernist planned environments – it describes shifting spatial materializations of welfare and the “good life” at the intersection of these two tendencies, under the influence of a Danish version of the neoliberal turn and other important societal transformations. A rich analytical sequence of drawn visualization supplements the book’s textual and photographic descriptions of welfare space transformation.

Katrine Lotz

Katrine Lotz is an architect, associate professor and Head of Department at Institute of Architecture, Urbanism & Landscape at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen. Her main research interest is the changing relations between architecture, urbanism and society, with a particular focus on the Nordic welfare states. She has published, co-edited and participated in the public debate within that area, e.g. as a co-editor of Forming Welfare (2017).

Kirsten Marie Raahauge

Kirsten Marie Raahauge is an anthropologist teaching at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen, where she is professor with special duties. She is the project lead of Spaces of Danish Welfare and the head of the Center for Interior Studies. Her field of research is spatial anthropologies. She has been performing as a coeditor and an author of several publications within that field, e.g. Forming Welfare (2017) and The Design Concept (2016).

Deane Simpson

Deane Simpson is an architect teaching at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen where he is professor of architecture, urbanism and urban planning; and head of the master program Urbanism and Societal Change. He is author of "Young-Old" (2015), and coeditor of "The City Between Freedom and Security" (2017), "Forming Welfare" (2017) and "Atlas of the Copenhagens" (2018).