Vulnerable residential area (Denmark)

The Danish government has published an official list of vulnerable residential areas annually since 2010, with changes in the definition and/or terminology in 2013, 2018 and 2021.

Denmark experienced considerable net immigration from the 1960s onwards due to a combination of various reasons, of which labour migration, granting of political asylum to refugees and family reunification were the major ones.

[2] These areas became characterized by various social problems like low income and high unemployment, and several government initiatives have been taken over the years to further integration and counter urban decay in these neighbourhoods.

[3][4] In 2010, an official list of vulnerable social housing residential areas meeting certain statistical criteria was introduced and accompanied by various measures concerning the neighbourhoods in question.

[5] During the 1990s and 2000s, the term "ghetto" was increasingly used informally in the Danish debate on neighbourhoods with a large proportion of refugees and other immigrants, in particular in the suburbs west of Copenhagen.

[11][12] After 2018, when the term was reserved exclusively for areas having a majority share of non-Western immigrants and their descendants, the designation has also been criticized as racially discriminatory as neighborhoods with similar social problems where the residents are not of foreign origin are not subjected to the same sanctions.

Hettie O’Brien, a writer and assistant opinion editor at the Guardian, has noted the example of Muhammad Aslam, a taxi driver in Denmark who is a Danish citizen born in Pakistan and whose children are Danish citizens born in Denmark, with the children being classified as "non-Western" due to Aslam's Pakistani birthplace.

In 2018 it was decided that the share of social housing in redevelopment areas (at the time designated as "hard ghettos") would be reduced to a maximum of 40%.

[24] In 2023, a plan was announced to demolish parts of Vejlby Parish [da] (close to Aarhus), to ensure that it didn't get classified as vulnerable.

[27][28] The laws concerning the so-called "parallel societies" (formerly classified as ghettos) have been met with widespread international condemnation and called racist and discriminatory by critics.