The production of territorial stigmatisation

Abstract

The concept of territorial stigmatisation has garnered increasing attention over the past decade. Studies from across six continents confirm and contribute to the concept’s growing relevance in explaining the social and symbolic dimensions of advanced and urban marginality. However, the debates remain fragmented, and most studies have focused more on confirming and expounding the impact of territorial stigmatisation than its production. Based on an inductive analysis of 119 peer-reviewed articles we provide an overview of this fragmented field of research and to bring structure to the debates, we identify six distinct yet broad and partly overlapping ‘areas of research’ on the production of territorial stigmatisation. Within these, we identify 16 different modalities of production of territorial stigmatisation. We argue that the concept, in practice, is highly composed with several modalities operating simultaneously depending on context and scale and that analysing this flexibility is key to better conceptualise territorial stigmatisation. Furthermore our analysis implies that the production of territorial stigmatisation in its different modalities is not merely an unforeseen consequence of a society trying to deal with a wicked problem, but integral to contemporary forms of neoliberal urban governance where territorial stigmatisation to an increasing extent has become a legitimation strategy of the current radical policy measures of demolition, gentrification and re-privatisation of stigmatised territories.

Key words:

• territorial stigmatisation
• literature review
• modalities of production
• production of territorial stigma
• stigma
• Wacquant

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their critical engagements and suggestions to improve our arguments and for the suggestion of related literature. The same goes for the participants of the Session B5 ‘Territorial stigmatization in a Scandinavian context’ at the Nordic Geographers Meeting 2017. Finally, we would especially like to thank Tatiana Fogelman, Roskilde University and Tom Slater, Edinburgh University, for their comments on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 McGregor 1977; Paugam 1986 were not part of our original literature review but were added during the review phase.

2 Due to our focus on presenting an overview of the literature on territorial stigmatisation, we do not go into a deeper discussion of the links between territorial stigmatisation and the wider field of race studies. However, it is important to note that Wacquant explicitly discusses the distinctions between race and ethnicity in relation to urban marginality and territorial stigmatisation (Wacquant 1993, 2002, 2008a, 2008b, 2014, 2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Troels Schultz Larsen

Troels Schultz Larsen is at the Department of Society and Business, Roskilde University, Denmark. Email: [email protected]

Kristian Nagel Delica

Kristian Nagel Delica is at the Department of People and Technology, Roskilde University, Denmark. Email: [email protected]