Geography
Document Type
Article
Abstract
This paper considers how racialized youth in Denmark negotiate sustainability amid contexts marked by intersecting forms of economic restructuring, progressive neoliberalism, white ethno-nationalism, and green urban planning. Urbanplan is a low-income, notoriously “troubled” Copenhagen neighborhood where we conducted fieldwork for 7 months (2019-2020) with fifteen male youth, aged 17-21. Using ethnography, policy reviews, and interviews with city social workers, we explore how intimate experiences of nature, group-identity, and place attachment here relate to and depart from the structural forces actively reshaping the neighborhood. Our analysis combines Cindi Katz's intersectional political economy approach with recent work on green gentrification, Critical Utopian Action Research, and Danish identity politics. The resulting “topography” of youth experience identifies distinctive spatialities of belonging and exclusion, and a faltering sustainability discourse that offers diminishing local returns. While youth in Urbanplan refuse to “grow up sustainable,” they await opportunities to enact more empowering forms of socio-environmental belonging. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Publication Title
Urban Geography
Publication Date
2023
ISSN
0272-3638
DOI
10.1080/02723638.2023.2225930
Keywords
Copenhagen, Denmark, race, sustainability, youth
Repository Citation
Ritts, Max and Rutt, Rebecca, "Growing up sustainable? Politics of race and youth in Urbanplan, Copenhagen" (2023). Geography. 949.
https://commons.clarku.edu/faculty_geography/949
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.