ABSTRACT
This book is about the sociohistorical making and remaking of place and people in the Danish metropolis from around 1900 through today. The introduction uses personal testimonies to illustrate how the official symbolism, welfare initiatives, and everyday experiences of life combine to constitute the historical production of that marginalised place in Copenhagen called the North West. I introduce Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of social space and symbolic power and Loïc Wacquant’s thesis of advanced urban marginality to explore how social, symbolical, and spatial structures dynamically intertwine through the course of time and contribute to the fashioning of divisions of inequality and marginality in the Danish metropolis.
The main objective is to study the social differences and symbolic structures relating to this place as a physical location and social position at the bottom of the social space constituted by the Danish metropolis. I focus on the struggles in the nether regions of the urban hierarchy as these unfold through history and across the three dimensions of official classification struggles, pedagogical interventions, and residential experiences.
