Good and Bad Nature: Slum Clearance and Metabolic Poverty in Mid-Twentieth Century Copenhagen

In 1939, the Danish parliament passed the first national act for slum clearance. By adopting the term “slum” as the official label for housing deemed unfit for human habitation, the act formalized slum as a distinct type of urban space in mid-twentieth century Denmark. Although the concept of slum was in many ways conceived as a construct to classify and thus eradicate urban spaces of poverty, it was also closely tied to the techno-natural fabric and bio-social conditions of the modern city. Dysfunctional infrastructures, sanitary shortcomings, and pervasive nature in the form of animals, pests, rain, and dampness were all central not only for the public perception of slum as spaces of ‘bad nature’ but also for how these spaces interacted with the broader urban system of Copenhagen. In this study, I take such socio-natural entanglements as my empirical and analytical starting point to explore the material and cultural significance of nature in the production of urban space in mid-twentieth century Copenhagen. In doing so, I seek to demonstrate that conceptualisation of urban slums on the one hand rested upon a discursive separation of what Maria Kaika has termed ‘good nature’ and ‘bad nature’ that also guided the governmental regulation of these spaces, they were at the same time materially enrolled in socio-ecological networks that produced Copenhagen’s urban metabolic system. Exhibiting the multifaceted character of urban poverty in twentieth century Denmark, urban slums thus illustrate how poverty was not just socioeconomically structured but also a highly enviro-technical phenomenon. Urban slums spatialized poverty but not simply as distinctly delineated zones or ‘islands’ of impoverishment. Rather, their impoverishment stemmed from their disadvantaged localisation in the urban metabolism.