The Making of Place and People in the Danish Metropolis

A Sociohistory of Copenhagen North West

Christian Sandbjerg Hansen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000371727
• Subtopic: Social Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

This book investigates the sociohistorical making of place and people in Copenhagen from around 1900 to the present day. Drawing inspiration from Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of social space and symbolic power, and from Loïc Wacquant's hypothesis of advanced marginality and territorial stigmatisation, the book explores the genesis and development of the notorious neighbourhood of Copenhagen North West. As an extraordinary place, the North West provides an illustrative case of Danish welfare and urban history that questions the epitome on inclusive Copenhagen. Through detailed empirical analysis, the book spotlights three angles and entanglements of the social history of this area of Copenhagen: the production of socio-spatial constructions and authoritative categorisations of the neighbourhood, especially by the state and the media; the local social pedagogical interventions and symbolic boundary drawings by welfare agencies in the neighbourhood; and the residents' subjective experiences of place, social divisions and (dis)honour. In this way, The Making of Place and People in the Danish Metropolis analyses how social, symbolical, and spatial structures dynamically intertwine and contribute to the fashioning of divisions of inequality and marginality in the city over the course of some 125 years. It will appeal to scholars of sociology, urban studies, and urban history, with interests in social welfare.

Part 1
Constructing the North West

1
Making a working-class neighbourhood

Between 1894 and 1898, the Municipality of Copenhagen bought grounds just outside the city borders in the so-called Utterslev Mark in the Brønshøj district.¹ This prepared the way for the 1901–1902 annexation of not only Brønshøj but also other grounds adjacent to the city border (Sundby, Valby). Brønshøj and the other outer districts were mainly rural areas with their population distributed in the small villages and the farms and farmhouses. As Copenhagen grew and better infrastructure helped connect the city with the small villages, the annexed districts absorbed a large proportion of the migration to the city as well as of the inner-city population who fled the cramped apartments of the slums and early working-class districts on the ‘bridge-neighbourhoods’ of Vesterbro and Nørrebro.²

During the first 50 years after annexation, the fields of Utterslev Mark transformed into the North West, an area known as a working-class neighbourhood and community. However, in the years around 1900 the social imagery revolved around the ‘new land’ being both a problem and a solution. On the one hand, it was a poor area and was associated with the so-called Lersø thugs. On the other hand, as vacant land, it had the potential of solving problems the politicians and bureaucrats identified in the increasing population and the inner-city slums.

Copenhagen’s Whitechapel

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the dominant imagery depicted Utterslev Mark as a poor and a somewhat dangerous area on the verge of the city. In 1892, the social-liberal newspaper, Politiken, stirred a fuss, when they reported of the ‘dark images beyond the Lantern Creek [Lygteåen], where the streets turn into roads, and poverty sinks even deeper than at the working-class districts in the bridge neighbourhoods. Here is Utterslev Mark, Copenhagen’s Whitechapel’. The article claimed the dark images from Utterslev Mark to be even worse than that of ‘tenements houses of San Francisco and New York’, ‘the human market of Moscow’, ‘the poverty of Paris and London’s Whitechapel’, and ‘the Lazzaroni of Naples’:

We have not only read of these cities, but also wandered through their caves of misery, and seen pauperism in its most dissuasive form, and we must admit that nowhere have we come to meet and nowhere made an impression on us, as it did last night during our visit to Utterslev Mark.³

Paying house visits to poor tenants, widows with many sick and starving children, ‘pale women prayerfully stretching out their hand for the help rendered to them by a merciful benefactor’, people suffering in pain caused by encephalitis and violent haemorrhage, the article portrayed the neighbourhood poor as stamped by an eerie misery and living in small and filthy apartments with plague-filled odours.

Then we are at Frederikssundsvej 56 in the attic flat. In a small room, whose windows are glued with paper, lives a widow whose only daughter, an 11-year-old girl, lies stretched out on a poorly equipped bed, which next to a table and chair makes up the entire room’s furniture. The girl has meningitis. She has been fighting death for 11 days, and she will die, the doctor said, but there is still life. The mother, who in her despair is the most poignant illustration to H. C. Andersen’s ‘A Mother’, covers her daughter with her shawl and clasps her hand as if to tear her out of the embrace of death. But there is no hope. Yellow sweat beads, the sweat of death, emerge from this girl’s forehead—but she breathes. And the mother, who does not pay attention to the money we have put on the table, shouts: ‘Pray to God! Pray to God!’ If a painter could reproduce this image: The attic room, the creepy and the mother bent over the daughter’s bed, then terrified bystanders would think the picture was lying. But go out there and you will see that reality is more horrific than the most gruesome painting, and the disgust even more poignant than in ‘The Uninvited’, Maurice Maeterlink’s uncanny imagination.⁴

The article made the chairs of the Parish Council, the Civic Association, and the Home Owners’ Association call for an assembly protest against the article, claiming it to be insulting and defamatory. At the protest meeting, however, which several newspapers covered, they found no widespread support for their objections to Politiken having ‘portrayed the residents as being worse than the worse of London’s and Paris’ scum’, that ‘many things are done for the poor’, that ‘you cannot trust the poor, they walk lying from door to door’, and that the use of Whitechapel as a comparative reference made ‘us’, the residents, into ‘cage-residing vagrants living off prey and theft’.⁵ Instead, several meeting participants objected to the associations being representatives of the poor and the workers of Utterslev Mark, and others even laid forth evidence that the reality was even worse than Politiken’s depictions. The settlement came from the chair of the Parish Council:

Since nobody disagrees with the fact that the area has many poor souls, we should cherish the attention and compassion, which the area has received because of the article, and instead take initiative to establish an office of The Samaritan in the neighbourhood.

A few years later, another social-liberal newspaper, København, made a trip to Utterslev Mark, describing the neighbourhood in no less than eight articles. Once again, the press painted dark images of Utterslev Mark, confirming that it indeed was akin to Whitechapel as both were the ‘big city’s poorest and most secluded quarters’: ‘And this is true for Utterslev Mark where poverty ravages street by street, where almost every house is chemically cleansed of everything called prosperity’.⁶ In this trip, the reporters focus on the Lantern Creek [Lygteåen], an open sewer which they describe as a ‘plague-smelling stream’ into which cow-stables, glue and varnish cookeries, intestine scrapers and slaughterhouses, and factories of all sort pour ‘every kind of dirt, muck, and fluids’.

‘On hot summer days, the air must be unbearable for the people who live nearby’,

‘It is an insult and a shame upon the municipality’,

‘It is a scandal that this sort of plague-trench exist in a dense area no matter if the residents are poor or rich’.⁷

The reporters also highlighted the many sausage factories, the bodega, the grocery store, the ‘sad fire department’, the school, and the renovation company in the Lersø. However, they also paid attention to the residents. Of wealthy people, they claim only to find the big merchant, two factory owners, and a ‘potter with potential’ to upwards mobility; otherwise ‘plunging down to the population’ indicates a large downward step as the main population are ‘workers, horse-traders, and widows with lots of children’.

What immediately pops into your eyes when you go around out here are the more than poor-looking little boulders of stone or wood with brick or thatch roofs that stand along the roads. And if you look at the low windows in the living room or in the attic—tall houses do not exist—and you see the moldy, covered curtains or a bunch of rug-rats standing high up in the windowsill, then you do not need to have any knowledge of the poor man’s dwelling in order to imagine that one stands in a city where all prosperity is shut out. It is unnecessary to cast a glance on the streets of the slain children, women, and men in order to reach that result.⁸

While the Municipality of Copenhagen worried about the tax-base that the people of Utterslev Mark would prevail and the expenditures accompanying the high numbers of children and poor people, the ‘thugs, vagrants and jailhouse candidates’ who lived in the willow shrubs in Lersøen⁹ also contributed to the public and political denigration of the territory upon annexation. In the first years of the new century, several violent clashes between ‘thugs and police’ drew media and political attention to the ‘thieves’, ‘violators’, ‘loose existences’, ‘free souls’, and ‘other kinds of riff-raff’ who lived hidden in the willows and who roamed the streets of Copenhagen’s periphery. Stories of assaults and robberies had been connected to the ‘outlaws just beyond the city border’ in the late 1800s, but these events gave national media fame to especially Ferdinand Eriksen, who was declared the leader of the Lersø-gang and his girlfriend Karen Spidsmus. Some newspapers highlighted the fierce romance between the two—Ferdinand’s violent protection of ‘his girl’ and their jailhouse escapes. Others emphasised Lersøen’s ‘wilderness’ and the vagrant huts as ‘Indian-like wigwams’, and the conservative paper Nationaltidende described Lersøen as a ‘jungle in the big city’, which ‘any decent man would pray before entering’. Despite these exoticising categories reminiscent of colonial travellers’ descriptions of the Other,¹⁰ the dominant categorisations of the Lersø-thugs made them brutes, ‘dregs of society’, parasites, rogue and shady existences, ‘dubious people for whom idleness is a virtue’, cunning, thieves, bandits, violent men who draw weapons against the police and terrorise decent folks. In the same vein, the emotionality embedded in the imagery had little of the ‘dreadful delight’ characteristic of Victorian-age bourgeoisie. Lersøen and its people may have been exotic, but primarily they were dangerous and frightening; it was a space of ‘ever-restless wrestling between old and new’.¹¹

In 1903, the City Council discussed whether the police force in the annexed districts needed more men and bicycles to ‘help clean out the vagrants and thugs’, and they prohibited unauthorised access to the willows. As mentioned by the Council Member Niels R. Møller from the conservativ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of illustrations
• Introduction
• Part 1 Constructing the North West
• Part 2 Pedagogisation of urban marginality
• Part 3 Lived experiences
• Conclusion: the intricate history of place and people
• Appendix
• Index