CPENHGEN: : Political leaders refer to these areas as “holes in Denmark’s map,” where Danish language and values are lost to generation after generation of residents.
Currently, there are 25 ghettos in Denmark, scattered throughout the country. Of the 60,000 people living in these areas, two-thirds are from non-Western countries including Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan and Somalia.
Because these neighborhoods are dominated by apartment buildings with cheap rents, refugees on “integration support” have often been placed there by public authorities. But many immigrants choose to live there on their own.
Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen says that while the number of first- and second-generation, non-Western immigrants has grown from 50,000 in 1980 to almost 500,000 today, “people with the same problems have clumped together, [and] we have let it go, perhaps with the naïve idea that integration would happen on its own over time, because this is such a great country with so many possibilities… But it hasn’t happened. The problem has grown.”
It’s not the first time the government has launched a strategy to abolish ghettos. In fact, there have been several in the last two decades. But rather than issuing broad-brush decrees, as has been tried in the past, this time 13 of the plan’s 22 initiatives apply only to ghettos or similarly defined “vulnerable areas,” and the people who live there.
The strategy includes four areas of focus: physical redevelopment, control over who is allowed to live in these neighborhoods, crime abatement and education. The overarching goal is for these areas to become more attractive to ethnic Danes, while non-Western immigrants will disperse into other, more mixed neighborhoods.
