SCHULTZ LARSEN, T., & DELICA, K. N. (2024), Fragmenting Cities: The State, Territorial Stigmatization and Urban Marginality. Edward Elgar Publishing.

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.

Fragmenting Cities. The State, Territorial Stigmatization and Urban Marginality

Today the 'ghetto' has become a key trope in both public and social science discourse on urban marginality in Germany – despite overwhelming empirical evidence that rejects the notion. The article traces the 'ghetto' as an imagined geographic space as well as social relation imbued with social meaning. It analyses the ghettoisation of residents in Berlin's marginalised zones in relation to the devaluation of educational capital attainable there. Centrally, it interrogates how the meaning young residents in these zones make of this on-going process, and their responses to it, are inherent to the neoliberal project of the New Berlin Republic.

“Neighborhood effects” research, which maintains that poverty concentration generates a variety of social problems, has been questioned for concealing the role of powerful institutions. As an alternative, we focus on external institutions’ practices in marginal neighborhoods and their impact on the emergence of social problems. Through a qualitative case-study of three neighborhoods in Santiago, we observed institutional practices and identified three distinct mechanisms. Through disinvestments, these neighborhoods have been turned into “Red Zones,” because of public, private, and civil institutions’ refusal to establish themselves and to deliver their services there. Through inaction and inefficacy, public intervention has been deeply intermittent, negligent, and uncoordinated. Finally, through territorial stigmatization, these neighborhoods have almost become no-go areas. Several material and symbolic consequences have resulted from these practices, including direct and indirect connections with social problems. These have implications for the debate on “neighborhood effects” and for social mix policies.

Sport Mega-Events (SMEs) have been widely used as opportunities to promote and (re)brand host cities to domestic and international audiences. Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, marginalized or stigmatized urban places do not feature heavily in urban representations during SME opening ceremonies despite the complex relationship between SMEs, redevelopment and urban marginality. However, the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro marked a departure from this trend. While the Brazilian Olympic Committee (BOC) aimed to present the city as vibrant, colorful and safe, they also incorporated marginalized urban spaces – the city’s favelas – into event-related promotions. We introduce the concept of deactivation to analyze the representations of favelas during the Rio 2016 Opening Ceremony. We suggest that the complexity of urban marginality and territorial stigmatization is erased through cultural representations that foreground empowerment and challenges to socio-spatial stigmas. In doing so, the favela is (re)imagined as a romanticized spectacle for external consumption that works to make them legible for capital accumulation, pacification, and the displacement of their inhabitants.

For more than a decade, studies and theoretical debates on deprived neighbourhoods and new forms of poverty and urban marginality have been marked by the notion of territorial stigmatization. In this specific field of research, the issue of response strategies to stigmatiza-tion implemented by those who suffer from it has been and still is one of the central issues. At the same time, there is less research focusing on the coping strategies of organized local actors (third sector, associations and local institutions) operating in stigmatized territories. In this contribution, we intend to discuss some possible theoretical implications that may arise if the relationship between territorial stigmatization and organized local actors is put at the centre of the analysis, based on the categorization of coping strategies proposed by Wacquant.

Review of Troels Schultz Larsen and Kristian Nagel Delica 2024: Fragmenting Cities: The State, Territorial Stigmatization and Urban Marginality. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar

Fragmenting cities: the state, territorial stigmatization and urban marginality

Loic Wacquant is currently Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He has written extensively on issues related to urban poverty, race and the expansion of imprisonment. Wacquant is heavily influenced by the work of the late Pierre Bourdieu. Specifically, Wacquant employs Bourdieu's theoretical tools of analysis to provide a critique of contemporary neo-liberal social and penal policy. This article considers the potential applications of Wacquant’s scholarship to contemporary social work practice. For the purposes of this analysis, Wacquant’s work is divided into three broad areas: the analysis of neo-liberalism and precarious forms of employment, the development of the penal state and his critical approach to doxa. Bourdieu uses the term doxa to refer to those views or opinions that are taken for granted within any society. They thus create the limits of, or provide a strong framework for, political and policy debates. It is argued that Wacquant’s theorisation provides an explanation of the forces that have led to the concentration of areas of poverty in the midst of relative affluence. In addition to facing long-standing problems of high unemployment, poor housing and a lack of social amenities, these areas - the banlieues in France, housing projects in the USA and estates in England - are stigmatized in public and media discourse. Wacquant’s work can be used to challenge the development of a form of social work that places emphasis on bureaucratic managerialism. In addition, it should encourage social work as a profession to re-engage with criminal justice issues. Finally, the critical approach to doxa provides a model for social work to challenge the limitations of current debates.

Grounded in qualitative research in Siliguri, a rapidly expanding city in eastern India, this paper examined how low‐income residents perceive and negotiate fear of crime after dark. Based on immersive, night‐time ethnographic methods—including narrative interviews, walk‐alongs and sensory observations—this study examines the lived geographies of crime and fear in the everyday urban margins. While extensive literature on fear of crime exists in Western contexts, Global South research remains uneven, with limited attention to how fear is shaped by infrastructural neglect and marginality. In developing countries like India, such place‐based, embodied studies remain limited, especially in low‐income residential contexts. Findings reveal that night‐time fear is deeply gendered, relational, and amplified by territorial stigma and infrastructural neglect. Women deploy everyday tactics—rerouted paths, bodily discipline, walking in groups—to manage insecurity. The paper contributes to scholarship on crime, marginality and emotional geographies by showing how fear is not only a response to threats but a force that reshapes urban life. It calls for a more grounded, context‐sensitive understanding of urban safety and affirms the right to move, dwell and be visible in the city after dark. By situating fear as a spatial force that (re)organises urban life after dark, this paper contributes to debates on emotional geographies, urban marginality and the nocturnal geographies of fear of crime in the Global South.

Loïc Wacquant has made a widely read and debated contribution to critical research on contemporary urban marginality. A central part of the theoretical framework is that residents of deprived areas internalize territorial stigmatization, which then has a range of negative effects. Based on empirical research this paper assesses Wacquant's conception of territorial stigmatization and suggests some points where urban sociology might go beyond or adjust Wacquant. The empirical research focuses on Aalborg East, a deprived area in the northern part of Denmark. Through media analysis it is documented that Aalborg East is subject to territorial stigmatization, and it is suggested that cultural racism plays an important role. Qualitative interview data suggest, however, that the residents do not internalize or resign to the stigma. They become sad or angry when confronted with the stigma, but they have an either positive or ambivalent view of the area and most of them are content to live there. This finding is validated by survey data. Wacquant's conception cannot be entirely rejected, though, as the construction of internal dividing lines in some interviews can be interpreted as a way of managing territorial stigmatization. Nevertheless, the data provide little support for a theory of clear-cut internalization of territorial stigmatization in the case of Aalborg East. This conclusion leads to three discussions: a confirmation of Wacquant's claim that the role of the state matters; a discussion of the specific political culture of Scandinavian societies; and a problematization of Wacquant's reliance on Bourdieu's conception of symbolic violence.

This theme issue of Environment and Planning A builds on the analytic framework elaborated by Wacquant in Urban Outcasts (Polity Press, 2008) and on the activities of the Leverhulme Network on Advanced Urban Marginality to synthesize and stimulate inquiries into the triadic nexus of symbolic space, social space, and physical space at the lower end of the urban spectrum. The concept of territorial stigmatization weds with Bourdieu's theory of ‘symbolic power’ Goffman's model of the management of ‘spoiled identity’ to capture how the blemish of place impacts the residents of disparaged districts, the surrounding denizens and commercial operators, street-level public bureaucracies, specialists in cultural production (such as journalists, scholars, and politicians), and state officials and policies. Spatial taint is a novel and distinctive phenomenon that crystallized at century's end along with the dissolution of the neighborhoods of relegation emblematic of the Fordist–Keynesian phase of industrial capitalism. It differs from the traditional topography of disrepute in the industrial city in that it has become autonomized, nationalized and democratized, equated with social disintegration, racialized through selective accentuation, and it elicits revulsion often leading to punitive corrective measures. The sociosymbolic strategies fashioned by the residents of defamed quarters to cope with spatial denigration span a panoply ranging from submission to defiance, and their adoption depends on position and trajectory in social and physical space. Territorial stigmatization is not a static condition or a neutral process, but a consequential and injurious form of action through collective representation fastened on place. By probing how it operates in different urban settings and political formations, the contributors to this issue advance our empirical understanding of the role of symbolic structures in the production of inequality and marginality in the city. They also suggest the need for public policies designed to reduce, not only the burden of material deprivation, but also the press of symbolic domination in the metropolis.

Drawing on research carried out in the Parisian banlieue of La Courneuve, this article contributes to the sociological analysis of urban marginalisation in post-riot France. Beginning with a discussion of the broad relationship between society and space, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s relational understanding of social space and how these complexities are inscribed in the urban, it moves on to consider how this relates to Lefebvre’s production of space thesis. The main body of the article outlines some of the ways in which territorial stigmatisation is imposed and reproduced. Empirical material is treated here as ‘diagnostic’ of the symbolic domination that blights La Courneuve. Yet this material is also illuminative of the irregular and scattered forms that resistance to territorial stigma takes. It is suggested that the complex relationship between social and physical space is expressed through the construction of symbolic geographies of domination/resistance and negotiated through intricate ‘entanglements of power’.

This chapter draws an analytic map of the research programme pursued across my three books Urban Outcasts (2008), Punishing the Poor (2009) and Deadly Symbiosis (forthcoming). In this trilogy, I disentangle the triangular nexus of class fragmentation, ethnic division and state-crafting in the polarizing city at the century’s turn to explain the political production, socio-spatial distribution and punitive management of marginality through the wedding of disciplinary social policy and neutralizing criminal justice. I signpost how I deployed key notions from Pierre Bourdieu to clarify categories left hazy and to forge new concepts (territorial stigmatization and advanced marginality, punitive containment and liberal paternalism, hyperincarceration and negative sociodicy) as tools for the comparative sociology of the unfinished genesis of the post-industrial precariat, the penal regulation of poverty in the age of diffusing social insecurity and the building of the neo-liberal Leviathan. Bringing the study of the contemporary permutations of class, race and immigration, and the state, into a single framework shows how the racialization, penalization and depoliticization of the urban turbulences associated with advanced marginality reinforce one another in Western Europe as in the United States.

This article presents the thematic issue of the Environment and Planning A journal, which builds on the analytic framework elaborated by Wacquant in Urban Outcasts (2008) and on the activities of the Leverhulme Network on Advanced Urban Marginality to synthesize and stimulate inquiries into the triadic nexus of space, social space, and physical space at the lower end of the urban spectrum. The concept of territorial stigmatization weds Goffman’s model of the management of spoiled identity with Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power to capture how the blemish of place impacts the residents of disparaged districts, the surrounding denizens and commercial operators, street-level public bureaucracies, specialists in cultural production (such as journalists, scholars, and politicians), and state officials and policies. Spatial taint is a novel and distinctive phenomenon that crystallized at century’s end along with the dissolution of the neighborhoods of relegation emblematic of the Fordist-Keynesian phase of industrial capitalism. It differs from the traditional topography of disrepute in the industrial city in that it has become autonomized, nationalized and democratized, equated with social disintegration, racialized through selective accentuation, and it elicits revulsion often leading to punitive corrective measures. The sociosymbolic strategies fashioned by the residents of defamed quarters to cope with spatial denigration span a panoply ranging from submission to defiance, and their adoption depends on position and trajectory in social and physical space. Territorial stigmatization is not a static condition or a neutral process, but a consequential and injurious form of action through collective representation fastened on place. By probing how it operates in different urban settings and political formations, the contributors to the Environment and Planning A’s issue advance our empirical understanding of the role of structures in the production of inequality and marginality in the city. They also suggest the need for public policies designed to reduce, not only the burden of material deprivation, but also the press of domination in the metropolis.