Maja Hojer Bruun

Social Imaginaries and Egalitarian Practices in the Era of Neoliberalization

How is social equality created, enacted and reproduced in practice in local welfare institutions in the Nordic countries that claim to hold equality and egalitarianism as central political and social values? How are these practices linked to social imaginaries of an egalitarian society? And how does an increasing neoliberalization within the past 15 years affect such egalitarian practices and social imaginaries in concrete social institutions? These overall questions are discussed in this chapter based on ethnographic and historical material from fieldwork in Danish housing cooperatives. Housing cooperatives and their role in meeting citizens’ right to housing in Denmark are explored as an instance of welfare institutions that transgress the conceptual boundaries between state, market and civil society, but that have recently been challenged by neoliberal housing policies.

The financialization of Danish cooperatives and the debasement of a collective housing good

The article tells the story of Danish cooperative housing’s radical transformation from a collective housing good and commons to a financialized asset during the 2000s when neoliberal housing reforms were introduced and the mortgage finance market was deregulated. Processes of financialization of collectively owned housing have to be understood not only in relation to the dynamics of the surrounding housing market and political-economic changes but also to the communities and social relations that they presuppose and feed off, often in contradictory ways, as people are motivated by both solidarity and private interests. Housing cooperatives have existed as a form of collective housing throughout the 20th century, balanced, on the one hand, between the reproduction of kin, family and local communities and the common good and, on the other, between the market and the reproduction of the base for both families, local communities and the larger public sharing the housing commons. During the 2000s, processes of financialization brought the market and the cooperatives’ base so close together, primarily through new mortgaging opportunities, that families and communities have lost their savings and the base has been undermined, both in a material and an immaterial sense.

Political economy comes home : on the moral economies of housing.

Struggles over housing are one of the most pressing social, economic and political issues of our time. Yet questions over access to, plus the redistribution and maintenance of secure housing have only recently begun to be considered anthropologically. Drawing on E.P. Thompsons concept of moral economy, this special issue addresses these questions and considers how contemporary moral economies of housing play out. Citizens try to make their demands for adequate and safe housing heard, but such aspirations are often undermined by, political rhetoric, state officials, loan terms and the law. People claim allegiances to particular moral communities, thus (re)constituting themselves as deserving of secure tenure and proper homes, often in the face of stigma, laws or policies that construct them as the very reverse. By placing fine-grained ethnographic analysis in conversation with the political economy of housing, we redefine housing as an essentially contested domain where competing understandings of citizenship are constructed, fought over and acted out.