Social Housing Beyond the City: Migration and Remote Productions of Welfare on the Danish Island of Lolland

Urban housing markets are increasingly being criticized for pushing low-income families and individuals out of larger cities. This phenomenon, sometimes referred to as ‘social export’, is generally perceived to be a result of processes of gentrification, segregation, and inequality, also in social housing. This chapter addresses social housing through the migration of socioeconomically vulnerable people from larger cities to peripheral areas in Denmark – in this case, the island of Lolland. This chapter suggests attending to this migration not only as an expression of economically informed, market-driven motivations, but as a phenomenon which produces new forms of agency and spatial transformations that may inspire social housing. Informed by recent anthropological work on ‘remoteness’, this chapter encourages moving beyond the city to explore a capacity in social housing to produce different kinds of places and lifeforms, some disconnected from geography and some locally anchored. From this perspective, social housing constitutes a welfare space with an embedded proficiency to continuously question, (re)generate, model, and adapt welfare, not least through both tangible and imaginative productions of place.