By Mads Sejer Nielsen, AAU Communikation and Public Affairs

No to ghettos, yes to mixed neighbourhoods. This was the slogan in 2018 when the Danish government gave municipalities several tools for the transformation and urban regeneration of non-profit housing areas. Parallel societies should now come to an end.

The parallel society initiative emphasizes attracting new residents to vulnerable residential areas, but this has had negative consequences for current residents of, for example, Gellerup and Tingbjerg, explains Lasse Kjeldsen, PhD at Aalborg University, who has studied the conditions of urban development in practice.

The existing inhabitants simply do not have any influence on urban development. This creates frustration for both the residents and the practitioners who work with the residents daily as they feel left out.
 
Multiple problems
In a new PhD thesis, Lasse Kjeldsen concludes that the dilemmas between prioritizing investors and newcomers on the one hand and existing residents on the other present practitioners with some difficult choices in the urban development process.
 
The unwillingness of powerful actors to delegate influence to residents and allocate the necessary resources makes it especially difficult for the residents to understand and engage in the complex and lengthy process..
 
”It is paradoxical to want to create a mixed neighbourhood without listening much to the people who live there. A mixed neighbourhood does not arise on its own. We cannot simply construct a mixed city. We have to support social development as well, and we cannot really do that with the current measures," he says.
 
Top-down approach makes for no winners
The research shows that there is a greater commitment from powerful stakeholders – such as municipalities and housing associations – to ensure resident involvement and residents' opportunities for maintaining their involvement over a longer period of time.

Nevertheless, resident involvement is often disregarded when urban developers prioritize professional expertise over resident perspectives.
 
"Professionals and those in the top levels of the organizations decide most things, and then the residents may provide input afterwards. If we want to change that, significantly more resources need to be put into getting residents talking and building a governance structure where their voice is included and they can actually help make decisions," he says.
 
He also points out that the top-down approach fails to include the actual sources of knowledge on the environments around non-profit housing.
 
”We do not draw enough on resources when it comes to the urban development process. There are, for example, non-profit housing large-scale plans, local associations and NGOs that are not really activated in the process. We have not really considered the social dimension of urban development," says the researcher.

We should have learned from others
The parallel society legislation of 2018 required municipalities and housing associations to transform selected non-profit housing areas so that non-profit housing is reduced to a maximum of 40 percent.
 
However, the legislation did not take into account existing research from countries such as the Netherlands, Canada, the United States and England.
 
"The Danish parallel society legislation is a rare sight in an international context. Other countries have experienced that the conversion of non-profit housing into mixed neighbourhoods can also have negative consequences, especially for those who already live in the areas.  I do not think we took this into account in the Danish legislation. The risk is that we will not achieve the parallel society legislation’s goal of breaking down parallel societies and thus improving vulnerable citizens’ integration into society," he says.
 
Overall, the PhD thesis shows that the transformation projects are dominated by an urban strategic perspective that prioritises long-term strategic urban development at the expense of current residents in the shorter term.
 
Attracting investments and newcomers is prioritized over meeting the wishes and needs of current residents; planning expertise takes precedence over resident involvement; and transformation of the physical environment outweighs social and community development initiatives.