The relation between racialization and neoliberalism is relatively unexplored in urban geography, especially in the context of social democratic welfare regimes. This article aims to bridge this gap by applying the concept of racial neoliberalism, here referring to a co-constitutive relation between racialization and neoliberalism, to Denmark. Conceiving the country's so-called ‘ghetto’ politics as an expression of racial neoliberalism, the article retraces the development of this politics over the first two decades of the 21st century. I argue that territorial stigmatization and commodification of marginalized non-profit housing areas have been two co-constitutive expressions of racial neoliberalism that have intensified during this historical period. Examining three key policy moments through various grey literature, the article demonstrates how stigmatization has served to justify commodification, while the failure of the latter has been followed by intensified and bureaucratized stigmatization leading to new commodification efforts until culminating in the infamous 2018 ‘Ghetto Law’.

While gentrification in some contexts has been analysed as a profit-driven process best explained by the rent gap, state governance, e.g. through social mixing, has elsewhere been seen as the main driver of this urban process. With the concept of rent gap governance, the aim of this article is to show that profit and governance can be mutually constitutive parts of gentrification in the neoliberal city. Even when gentrification is a political premise, the rent gap can remain important, but its formation and closure might be unconventional. Empirically, the article centres on Denmark’s 2018 ‘Ghetto Law’, a social-mix policy aiming to govern a racialized surplus population by reducing non-profit housing in stigmatized areas through privatization of housing and land and new-build. Building on recent elaborations of rent gap theory, I suggest three mechanisms for rent gap governance in the Danish case: increased potential rent, depressed ground rent, and subsidized and envisioned rent gaps. I ground this model with a case study of the sale of the non-profit housing complex Schackenborgvænge. I analyse rarely-available qualitative and quantitative data and consider the immediate social consequences of the sale. The result is a murky picture of localized rent gap governance.

Through a case study of a rent strike against a real estate investment trust in a working-class neighbourhood in Hamilton, Ontario, this article asks how we might understand class and class struggle against financialized gentrification in a post-industrial context. While class has been central to gentrification literature, working-class experience and struggle have often been ignored or conceptualized in a way that precludes agency. New research on financialization of housing often focuses on struggles but has so far paid limited attention to class. In this article I draw on Italian operaismo (workerism) and its concept of class composition to contribute to the current debate by suggesting that financialized gentrification and struggles against it might contribute to a recomposition of the urban working class. Through a qualitative account of the 2018 East Hamilton rent strike, I analyse this struggle as two moments of class composition in the sphere of social reproduction. First, the extraction, exploitation and displacement pressure tenants experienced is analysed through the lens of technical class composition. Second, the rent strike itself is analysed as an expression of political class composition involving a confrontation of urban capital, a politicization of housing precarity, and the building of collective, autonomous power.

For 11 år siden udgav David Harvey bogen A Brief History of Neoliberalism, der nu er en af de mest citerede bøger om emnet. Årene efter udgivelsen har budt på nye økonomiske og finansielle kriser, men også nye bølger af modstand. Dette interview giver Harveys teori om neoliberalisme et eftersyn og undersøger, hvorvidt de mellemliggende år bør give anledning til en ændret forståelse af begrebet og fænomenet, og hvordan vi kan tænke og praktisere modstanden mod en stadig mere glubende kapitalisme.

In 2018, a group of tenants from four high-rise apartment buildings in East Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, launched a seven-month rent strike against their landlord, a real estate investment trust (REIT). The tenants protested a proposed steep rent increase and demanded long-standing repairs to their apartments. While some repairs were done, and the strike involved other successful moments, the rent increase was not fought off. Written from the perspective of the Hamilton Tenants Solidarity Network (HTSN), the group that helped organizing the rent strike, this article has two aims. First, we analyse the strategy and tactics of the REIT in the context of deindustrialization and financialization in Hamilton. We break up this financialized landlord’s ‘repositioning’ strategy into five predatory tactics: cutting, squeezing, greening, rent increasing, and bullying and bribing. Second, we reflect on the experiences, successes, and failures of HTSN. Our successes include organizing tenants and training tenants as organizers; having well-executed legal, fundraising, and media strategies; making social events and political actions integral to the strike; and relying on and forging further ties with comrades and supporters. Our challenges and failures concern all the tenants we didn’t manage to involve or involve in an active way; divergent tenant strategies; relationships between tenants and organizers and within HTSN; and underestimating the stakes of going up against a REIT. We conclude by reflecting on the potential for collective organizing in the face of financialized landlords today.

This article traces the various forms and roles of intellectuals and intellectualism in the Occupy Wall Street protest camp in Zuccotti Park in New York in 2011 while simultaneously serving as an introduction to the movement. It shows how the movement was formed by a range of intellectual ideas, both in terms of the political questions it posed and the tactics it employed. It also shows how Occupy affected the intellectual and political climate insofar as it became a phenomenon that everyone with an interest in public debate (and space!) had to take a stand on. The article argues that Occupy, with its experiment in alternative social and democratic structures, was an exercise in a form of organic and collective intelligence that attempted to guide American society in a more democratic and equal direction. By way of conclusion, the article discusses the aftermath of the protest camp and the effects of the movement.

In March 2015, the anti-austerity movement, Blockupy, protested the inauguration of the ECB's new premises. This article explores Blockupy's construction of a sociospatial imaginary of a ‘Europe from below’. The article: (1) analyses the construction of the transnational Blockupy network, (2) compares the territory of the elite's austerity Eurozone with that of a different ‘Europe from below’, and (3) shows how the ECB premises have been the central place of European austerity and protest. This approach supplements recent debates on multispatiality, and shifts the lens used to analyse crises from a structural one to one emphasizing ongoing politicization ‘from below’.

This article traces the various forms and roles of intellectuals and intellectualism in the Occupy Wall Street protest camp in Zuccotti Park in New York in 2011 while simultaneously serving as an introduction to the movement. It shows how the movement was formed by a range of intellectual ideas, both in terms of the political questions it posed and the tactics it employed. It also shows how Occupy affected the intellectual and political climate insofar as it became a phenomenon that everyone with an interest in public debate (and space!) had to take a stand on. The article argues that Occupy, with its experiment in alternative social and democratic structures, was an exercise in a form of organic and collective intelligence that attempted to guide American society in a more democratic and equal direction. By way of conclusion, the article discusses the aftermath of the protest camp and the effects of the movement.

In 2011, social movements occupied parks and squares around the world. Occupy Wall Street and the Egyptian uprising were among the most spectacular. In this article, I investigate the physical, symbolic, and performed relationship between these social movements and their occupied places. I claim that these movements (re-)created their occupied places as eventful places where cosmopolitan (re-)creations of collective identity and social relations were imagined, enacted, and became prefigurative microcosms of an alternative communal world. First, based on a critique of mainstream social movement studies, I develop the concept of eventful place and link this to cosmopolitanism. The bulk of the article then examines the eventful (re-)creations that took place in Tahrir Square and Zuccotti Park through first-hand accounts. A critical discussion of the reproduction of conflict in the eventful places then follows. I conclude by suggesting that the eventful and cosmopolitan imagination may live on and inspire future mobilisation.

Purpose - On 18 March 2015, the transnational anti-austerity Blockupy coalition protested the inauguration of the new European Central Bank premises in Frankfurt. The purpose of this paper is to analyse this mass protest event by highlighting the organizational differences, possibilities, and conflicts that was involved.Design/methodology/approach - The paper is based on participant observation of the Blockupy event and interviews with a group of Danish activists who also participated.Findings - The paper constructs sociospatial narrative that unfolds through three different scales of organization: the Blockupy coalition, the participating formal and informal organizations, and the activist subject. This narrative explicates the mode of organization as a "convergence space" (cf. Routledge, 2003), with different "roots" and "routes" of organization (cf. Davies, 2012).Originality/value - Thus, through an analysis of the modes of organization constituting this mass protest event, this paper restates the relevance of the concept of organization, which have recently been ignored or understated in favour of master-narratives of networks or the dichotomy of horizontalism and verticality. It concludes by posing a set of questions for further discussion among both activists and sociologists.

This article reviews the theoretical and political history of the concept of precarity, used to describe various forms of insecurities, primarily those related to conditions of labor, employment, and wage. Precarity and the related neologism precariat have recently gained ground in Anglophone intellectual and political discussions. It is the premise of the article that, with an increasingly globalized economy, discussions and movement action based on precarity may be of growing importance in a Danish context. The aim of the article is to show how the history of these concepts has unfolded in sociological discussions and social movement practices since the turn of the century. I begin with the sociological discussion about the concept of the precariat, a class formation based on the conditions and experiences of precarity. I then show how the concept of precarity has a history in activist thought beyond these sociological discussions and how social movements, based on this thought, throughout the 2000s have mobilized around the concept, primarily in the so-called EuroMayDay parades. In the last section, I discuss how the economic crisis has affected social movement practices and how labor unions have begun paying attention to the predicaments of precarity.

Mikkel Bolt: Krise til opstand. Noter om det igangværende sammenbrud. Aarhus: Antipyrine, 2013, 192 sider