New PhD fellow at the Danish Centre for Urban Histroy

On the 1st of February Kristian Buhl Thomsen began working on his PhD-project about the Danish slum clearance policy and urban renewal policy from 1939 to 1990.

Kristian Buhl Thomsen is MA of history and museology and was earlier working as a research- and web employee at the centre. As a PhD Fellow he will make an anlysis of the strategies and ideologies of the slum clearance policy and urban renewal policy of Denmark from 1939 to 1990.

The hypothesis in his project is that slum clearance and urban renewal during theese years were created as a public political topic through a fight between two main ideologies. On one side stood the modernists, who from the adoption of the first Danish slum clearance law in 1939 believed in total clearance of town quarters as a way to remove bad and inhumane housing conditions. On the other side stood the romanticists, who believed in housing improvements and preservation of quarters with a cultural and architectural value as a way to create better living and housing conditions.

With Copenhagen, Aarhus, Viborg and Elsinore as cases the project will follow the development, where the modernists’ point of view slowly disappered when the romanticists’ point of view became more dominant. This development became really evident in 1983, when a new law introduced the term ‘urban renewal’.

See description of the project here (Danish).

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