Non-profit housing associations play a significant role in the Danish housing market, and have done so for at least the last 80 years. In this dissertation, I locate the waxing and waning of the non-profit housing sector, and more specifically its role in urban governance, in relation to changing political trends. Specifically, I identify and problematizes the (variegated) consequences of the neoliberal zeitgeist on the sector. 

This is achieved through studying four cases of housing associations at various stages of an urban redevelopment project. These cases represent a new form of ‘entrepreneurial urban governance’ practice for housing associations, which I conceptualize as resulting from an increasingly prominent neoliberal discourse. This approach, or new role, is problematized as inherently reliant on certain conditions external to the housing associations, and thus necessarily limited by, and manifesting differently across, time and space. While the entrepreneurial approach seems to have been successfully adopted to carry out urban redevelopment projects in some of the cases, there remain questions about the overall justice of this approach, the ability of all housing associations to play this new role, and the potential implications for some of the foundational principles of the sector. 

The dissertation is a compilation with one book chapter and three academic journal articles embedded in a thesis. 

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