In a welfare society like Denmark, deliberately downsizing on dwelling space is at odds with prevailing norms of good housing. Furthermore, the city is perceived as a place for youth or younger single adults, whereas family life is perceived as belonging to suburbia. Yet this paper explores the housing choice processes of urban compact living: middle-class households living in the city in much less space than conventionally. Existing research on this is lacking. Taking an explorative approach, the study is designed to allow this new empirical field to unfold and aims at grasping and understanding the themes and narratives at play. The study focusses on families with children living in Copenhagen, a city lauded for its liveability and high housing conditions, and in which urban compact living is thus very controversial. The paper identifies living in the city as a paramount part of imaginaries of home to an extent that dwellings are deprioritised. However, living in the city and compact living are both attributed features such as progressivity, social awareness, unruliness, and anti-materialism. Introducing a cultural and social understanding of spaciousness, the paper argues that in such narratives, the city and compact living are perceived as physically compact, yet socially spacious.

在丹麦这样的福利社会中，故意缩小居住空间的尺寸与现行的良好住房规范相矛盾。此外，城市被认为是青年或年轻单身成年人的地方，而家庭生活则被认为属于郊区。然而，本文探讨了城市紧凑型住房的住房选择过程：中产阶级家庭在城市中居住的空间比传统空间要少得多。缺乏对此的现有研究。该研究采用探索性方法，旨在使这一新的经验领域得以展开，并旨在掌握和理解所涉及的主题和叙述。这项研究的重点是居住在哥本哈根的有孩子的家庭，该城市因其宜居性和高住房条件而倍受赞誉，因此在城市中紧凑居住生活引起了很大争议。该论文将居住在城市中的想象力视为房屋假想的最重要部分，前提是房屋被剥夺了优先权。然而，城市生活和紧凑型生活都具有进步性，社会意识，不守规矩和反物质主义等特征。在介绍文化和社会对宽敞性的理解时，论文认为，在这样的叙述中，城市和紧凑型居住被认为是物理上紧凑的，但在社会上却是宽敞的。