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AbstractThis article explores the relations between everyday life, materiality and urban modernity on two Danish mass housing estates, the Gellerup Plan and Vollsmose, in the 1970s. Specifically, the article examines a series of conflicts concerning the residents' use and misuse of seemingly mundane material devices, including shopping trolleys, waste disposal and laundry facilities. In doing so, the article argues that the residents' daily engagements with everyday materialities and technologies constitute a privileged, yet overlooked, point of entry into the shifting relations between modernity, materiality and agency in the Danish welfare city in the 1970s.

This article investigates how governmental power in the emerging Danish welfare system operated through transformations to the urban geography. The focus is on two concrete cases, namely two regional plans for the Greater Aarhus Area published in 1954 and 1966. By functionally dividing the city into spaces for work, housing, consumption, transportation and recreation, these plans aimed to knit certain behavioural patterns into the everyday life of the urban dwellers and thereby promote the becoming of a particular social order and subjects. This demonstrates how the emerging welfare state worked proactively in these decades, reconfiguring urban space in the nexus between welfare, modernism and affluence. Moreover, the article addresses the outcome of the plans, seeking to explain their unsuccessful trajectory by approaching them at the intersection of the local, national and transnational. In order to approach the complex relationship between welfare and urban space, the article proposes 'welfare geography' as the primary analytical category. Bridging perspectives from governmentality-studies and critical human geography, this category is designed to study how welfare as a 'dispositif' is geographically assembled from multiple perspectives, comprising planned, imagined, material as well as lived dimensions.

Introduction -- 1) Mikkel Høghøj and Mikkel Thelle: "Unravelling Urban Technonatures" -- Part I: Themes and concepts -- 2) Chris Otter: "Planetary Agglomeration" -- 3) Mikkel Thelle: "Phronologies of Urban Water: Copenhagen" -- 4) "Hybrid Cities: Agency, scale and power. A conversation between Matthew Gandy, Dorethee Brantz, Chris Otter and Mikkel Thelle" -- Part II: Agency of flow, matter and technology -- 5) Friedrich Hauer, Christina Spitzbart-Glasl, Severin Hohensinner and Verena Winiwarter: "A Techno-River in the Making: Three transformations of the Wien River from the Middle Ages until the present" -- 6) Sam Grinsell: "River Lines and Railway Lines: "Colonial military technonatures in the making of Sudan's capital region, 1880s-1920s" -- 7) Uwe Lübken: "Concrete History: Floodwalls on the Ohio River" -- Part III: Governing mobility, waste and urban subjects -- 8) Marjolein Schepers: "Closed Gates and Dart Streets: Spaces and infrastructures of transit in the Low Countries, eighteenth-nineteenth century" -- 9) Nina Toudal Jessen: "At the Intersection of Expertise and Landscaping: How technical advisors created new nature" -- 10) Mikkel Høghøj: "Good and Bad Nature: Slum clearance and metabolic poverty in mid-twentieth century Copenhagen".

AbstractTaking its cue from the 'material turn' of recent years, this survey examines the connections between infrastructure, welfare and citizenship in north European cities in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It argues that connections between these different constructs were fundamental not only to how cities functioned but how citizens themselves were imagined. As such, the survey critiques histories of welfare and citizenship that foreground the national and neglect the urban origins of the modern state. It does so by examining infrastructure, welfare and citizenship in smaller European nation-states such as Belgium, Denmark and Ireland rather than in the more familiar cases of Germany, France and Britain. Asking questions about the inter-relationship of infrastructure, welfare and citizenship, the survey suggests, offers an important way to reinterpret what the 'modern city' meant in twentieth-century northern Europe.