The Nexus of Urbanizing and Educating in Danish Post-WWII Planning Practices
When: Thursday, 5 September
Where: Kwong Lee Dow Building, 234 Queensberry Street Parkville, VIC 3053 Australia
Suburban Socialist Behavioral Architectures: The Nexus of Urbanizing and Educating in Danish Post-WWII Planning Practices
Mette Buchardt, Professor, Aalborg University, Aalborg & Copenhagen, Denmark
The suburban public school Strandgårdskolen in the new city of Ishøj, south of the capital Copenhagen, became famous and infamous in the Danish media from the late 1970s for its high percentage of what was then called “foreign language pupils.” Similarly, the surrounding social housing project, the Ishøj-Plan, of which the school was a part, became a notorious example of an area at risk of developing into “a concrete ghetto” in Danish public political debate and still functions as such today. However, the risk narratives originated from Social Democrat municipal politicians and bureaucrats—central agents in envisioning the new city—in their quest to solve the economic problems created by the modernist socialist plan when it was practiced.
The lecture explores the suburban space that developed from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s—designed for and aiming at making welfare state citizens— as an arena for creating social politics from below, zooming in on the visions and conflicts in the process. It argues that the questions and projects of urbanization and education should be understood in tandem, and that brutalist architects, municipal real estate agents, and school leaders have served as welfare state crafters and pedagogues of Nordic socialist modernism.
Mette Buchardt is a Professor and Head of the Centre for Education Policy Research (CfU) at Aalborg University, Aalborg and Copenhagen, Denmark. Her research encompasses the interdisciplinary fields of educational policy history and welfare state history, focusing on education– and social reforms within the European states, considering their continually shifting borders and structures. She has extensively explored topics such as socialist modernisms, secularization reforms, and the historical impact of migration on welfare state development.
NB. participants of Doctoral Colloquium for the History and Epistemology of Education do not have to book for this event.