Conference Abstract | Henriette Steiner

Gigantic Welfare Landscapes and the Ground beneath Høje Gladsaxe

This paper conceptualises the idea of the ‘welfare landscape’ in relation to post-war Danish social housing architecture and politics. It argues that the importance of multiscalar relationships is key to the category of the welfare landscape as such, and that this relationship to scale crucially involves a sense of gigantic abstraction. To discuss the consequences of this insight, I turn to the work of architectural historian and Lefebvre scholar Lukasz Stanek and his application of Foucauldian concepts of instrumentalization and biopolitics in relation to post-war social housing. My paper takes as its case study the Høje Gladsaxe estate, one of Denmark’s bestknown modernist projects from the mid-1960s. I analyse how the estate is portrayed in two fictional works: the animated film Bennys badekar (Benny’s bathtub) from 1971, and the novel Jorden under Høje Gladsaxe (The earth beneath Høje Gladsaxe) from 2002. While a study of two fictional works does not suffice for a fullfledged cultural-historical analysis, they allow me to interrogate the concept of the welfare landscape in connection to the question of scale and scalability, in the context modern industrial culture and its past and current crises.

Literature

Camilla Christensen: Jorden under Høje Gladsaxe (Copenhagen: Samleren, 2002)

Jannik Hastrup and Flemming Quist Møller: Bennys badekar, Fiasko Film, 1971, 41 min.
Lukasz Stanek: ‘Biopolitics of scale: Architecture, urbanism, the welfare state and after’, in The politics of life: Michel Foucault and the biopolitics of modernity, ed. by S.-O. Wallenstein & J. Nilsson (Iaspis, 2013), pp. 106–120.

Henriette Steiner and Kristin Veel: Tower to Tower: Gigantism in Architectural and Digital Culture (Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press, 2020)

Henriette Steiner is Associate Professor at the Section for Landscape Architecture and Planning at the University of Copenhagen. She holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of Cambridge, UK, and was Research Associate in the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich in Switzerland for five years. In 2018, she was visiting Associate Professor at the Department for Urban Studies and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for six months.