Gigantic welfare landscapes and the ground beneath Høje Gladsaxe

This article conceptualises welfare landscapes 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, the article turns to the work of architectural historian and Lefebvre scholar Lukasz Stanek and his application of Foucauldian concepts of instrumentalisation and biopolitics in relation to post-war social housing. The article takes as its case study the Høje Gladsaxe estate, one of Denmark’s best-known modernist projects from the mid-1960s. The article analyses how the estate is portrayed in two fictional works: the animated film Bennys badekar (Benny’s bathtub) from 1970, and the novel Jorden under Høje Gladsaxe (The earth beneath Høje Gladsaxe) from 2002.