Abstract

Private property became a cornerstone of the post-war welfare state. In Denmark, the owner-occupied single-family home was not only a widely promoted ideal but also a material infrastructure through which welfare was distributed, experienced, and reproduced. Enabled by modernist design, technological efficiency, and evolving capitalist finance models, homeownership expanded rapidly after 1959’s financial liberalization. The project explores how these homes came to embody more than just domestic ideals; acting as channels for consumption of energy, consumer goods, and cultural life. Through this lens, the home emerges as a key site for understanding how welfare was negotiated and consumed, how progress was felt, and how the promise of individual prosperity became central to the collective welfare imaginary.

At the same time, this embeddedness of welfare in high-consumption domestic life poses a structural challenge in the context of the climate crisis and the Anthropocene. The very spaces that once materialized social progress were always imbedded in the welfare state's massive ecological overshoot, with the political and cultural idea of progress through comfort, domestic freedom and experience of progress apriori tied to intensive resource use. As climate imperatives force a rethinking of consumption and equity, the owner-occupied home stands as both an achievement of the past and a profound obstacle for imagining sustainable forms of welfare in the future

Bio

My name is Mikkel Bang Maesen, and I’m a PhD student at Aarhus University, Department of History. My project focuses on the intersections of architecture, welfare politics, and material culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. With a particular interest in owner-occupied housing — especially the Danish parcelhus — I explore how the built environment has shaped, and been shaped by, ideas of progress and consumption in everyday life.

Coffee/tea, cake and fruit will be served @ 2pm.