Between Prefiguration and Normalisation: Danish Non-Profit Housing Models and the Green Transition

Welcome to the planning seminar of PhD student Edgar Sarmulis

Discussant:

Anders Lund Hansen, Department of Human Geography, Lund University

Abstract:

This thesis examines how non-profit housing and energy provision function in Denmark today, and how they are being reshaped under current political, economic and ecological pressures. It focuses on two cases, namely, Christiania, a self-managed community, and the non-profit rental housing sector in Copenhagen (Almene Boliger), to explore how non-profit (non-public / non-normative) housing models have evolved and what challenges they face in the context of the green transition.

The study investigates how processes of normalisation and stigmatisation influence these housing models, while also tracing how prefigurative practices of self-governance, tenant democracy and decentralised energy provision persist. By looking at Christiania and Almene Boliger, the thesis asks what these models reveal about each other, how they relate within the broader landscape of non-profit housing, and how welfare-state ideals of universal and standardised provision intersect with decentralised/non-public or community-driven alternatives.

The green transition also serves as an important analytical lens, revealing how sustainability agendas can serve as openings for new forms of state (and other external) influence, particularly through energy policies and renovation schemes, as well as scale-dependent infrastructure choices. These dynamics are explored in relation to how they can both support and constrain non-profit housing models.

Through interviews and policy analysis the thesis situates housing and energy provision within broader conceptual debates on prefiguration, normalisation, territorial stigmatisation and infrastructural politics. It seeks to demonstrate how non-profit housing in Denmark remains a contested field, shaped by pressures of marketisation and integration/normalisation, yet continually producing practices that challenge and reimagine what the Danish housing and energy regime is, (re)asserting the role of non-profit housing models in the Danish housing provision and the ongoing green transition.

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