‘This is not a ghetto’: Residents’ resistance and re-negotiation of neighbourhood narratives

Abstract

Over the past few decades, there has been a wave of urban renewal of multi-ethnic neighbourhoods across cities in the Global North, and movements for housing justice have emerged. The literature on housing struggles has mainly focussed on collective acts of resistance, neglecting mundane and individual forms of resistance. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in Mjølnerparken—a multi-ethnic public housing neighbourhood in Copenhagen, Denmark, targeted by the ‘ghetto legislation’—this article highlights residents’ various forms of resistance. Combining the ‘ABC of resistance’ framework with conceptions of place as continuously becoming, the analysis shows how residents enact a homeplace and re-negotiate the hegemonic narrative of their neighbourhood as a ‘ghetto’. Thus, the article contributes to the literature on housing struggles by broadening the understanding of resistance using ethnographic methods and an analytical framework from resistance studies. Simultaneously, it adds to the ABC framework by underscoring the place-making dimension of resistance.