Summary The National Museum's Research Center for Social Urban Modeling has launched five separate research projects on associational life (foreningsliv - both formal and informal) in eleven different social housing estates documenting that although "hobby associations" remain robust in the housing estates, residents are withdrawing in significant numbers from civic organizations concerned with self-governance and rights to residences. The scale of this qualitative research on urban associational life in Denmark is unprecedented but the datasets that each project is producing are not coordinated. With the proposed digital research database, researchers will be able to analyze and generalize about the civic decline and assess its consequences for socially sustainable urban development.