The Matter of Relations: A Critical Materialist Perspective on Place Attachment and Regeneration through a Danish Social Housing Estate

Abstract: Recently, ‘place attachment’ has become relevant in understanding social and socio-spatial disruptions in the wake of increased urban regeneration programs following the European transition to neoliberalist policies. Taking seriously the profound social disruptions that regeneration projects may cause, regenerative policies are problematic because they imply that spatial transformations will have only positive effects on social life. Applying a critical materialist perspective, we unfold how residents of a Danish social housing estate relate to one another through the material and spatial properties of specific architectural elements. We demonstrate how the physical environment is profoundly intertwined with the social, both relationally and ontologically, producing particular understandings of the world and enabling specific social relations and social orderings to form. Scrutinizing residents’ sentiments of place attachment in light of spatial regeneration, we show how changes to key elements in the built environment may have non-resolvable consequences for local social lives and render regeneration projects devastating to residents’ attachments to their neighborhood.