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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how ideals of social responsibility are appropriated by professionals in the Danish social housing sector and resisted by citizens in three housing estates. It argues for understanding such disputes as value conflicts and for making ethics a part of political anthropology.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how citizens in three social housing estates of Copenhagen, Denmark, mobilize around their politically ascribed role as key agents for obtaining values of a “mixed” and “sustainable” city. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among professionals and residents in a social housing organisation, it revolves around the relationship between recent neoliberal national policy, the organisation’s official strategy for enhancing “engagement” among residents in its estates, and the everyday political tactics through which residents in the “resident democracy” (beboerdemokrati) - an association-based structure formalizing tenants political influence over maintaining and developing their estate - resist proposed models for how to “engage” in developing their estate according to universalist ideals. While associational citizenship are discursively understood to foster a somewhat uniquely Danish trustful cohesion between state, institutions and convivial civil communities, my situational analysis of residents in three estate democracies illustrate how disagreement and conflict are integral to the citizenship of associational politics. Such conflicts are embedded in current neoliberal policy strategies aiming to enhance local democracies’ capacity to form partnerships with “the surrounding world” to solve social and technical issues previously financed by public welfare schemes. Fruitful understandings of resident’s resistance against such ascribed values, I argue, can be gained from recent anthropological debates on ethics and social movements and favours a substantivist view on values as the outcome of specific collective, political processes (Graeber 2013, Zigon 2021) rather than a formalistic cultural structure (e.g. Robbins 2017).