News media helps legitimise Denmark's potentially illegal zoning lists

HØRGÅRDEN • COPENHAGEN • Denmark's infamous yearly vulnerable society lists, put a label on any neighbourhood in Denmark with a non-western population above than 30%. This “ghetto law,” as it was referred to up until 2022, might not only be discriminating, but it also helps media frame such zones as “small islands of crime,” says Martin Bak Jørgensen, immigration professor at Aalborg university.

Hørgården is a social housing complex that has been on the Preventative Residential Areas list since the list’s conception in 2013. Last December the EU court stated that this label and the legal framework around it was possibly violating EU anti-discrimination laws because of its ethnic origins.

Marie Bredager Nielsen is a project leader at Hørgården's social housing provider. She says that news outlets often reports on neighbourhoods like Hørgården by saying: “this neighbourhood is on the black list and we went there.”

"Reporting like this exotifies the area by assuming that there’s crime, addiction and other problems, but this neighbourhood is no different from where you live."

Professor Jørgensen shares a similar thought.

“I think most of the mainstream media has played a role by legitimising and confirming the need for these frameworks. I'm not saying that there are no problems in these neighbourhoods, for example, public schools can be very low quality because they can't attract good teachers. But simply depicting them as kind of small islands of crime has definitely not done anything good."

This is a story for a European audience and could be posted in the Swedish national newspaper Svenska Dagbladet or by the Dutch outlet NRC