Territorial Stigmatization Research Articles

Green Neighbourhood Identity: How Residents Use Urban Nature Against Territorial Stigmatization in Finnish Housing Estates

ABSTRACT The 1960s housing estates are widely defamed in public discourse, including two neighbourhoods of focus in this research in the fast-growing “sustainable city” of Tampere, Finland. Based on a qualitative case study, this paper analyses how residents have used urban nature to counter territorial stigmatization. It views the relationship between territorial stigmatization and neighbourhood identity through urban nature, which has received minimal academic attention despite the increasing interest in green and climate-friendly sustainable cities. This paper argues that 1) the symbolic defamation of forest estates is a social process that has shadowed the housing estates; and 2) the residents of the housing estates constructed a “green neighbourhood identity” as a counter-narrative to shed the negative discourse regarding themselves and their neighbourhood. Urban nature has been an important source for constructing a positive neighbourhood identity but has not negated the historically produced territorial stigma.

The Effect of Territorial Stigma on Urban Crime: A Neighborhood Analysis in Seoul, Korea

While there has been increasing support for the theory that symbolic inequalities can influence urban crime, empirical evidence has been scarce. We examine how territorial stigma, the territorial accumulation of symbolic inequalities such as perceptions and prejudices, affects neighborhood-level urban crime using residents’ awareness and media reports. The analysis confirms that both indices considered subjective and objective evidence for territorial stigma had a significant relationship with urban crime. We suggest that it is necessary to examine symbolic inequality as one of the causes of urban crime, considering the process of forming the territorial stigma of crime.

Spatial othering in fragmented societies: different others or different housings?

ABSTRACT The sudden emergence of different housing types in a homogenous neighbourhood can cause social distance, negative perceptions, and housing stigmatization. In the Navvab area in Tehran, the social rift and refusal to accept different ones have been represented in the duality of the complex/neighbourhood. Such spatial othering can, in turn, manifest in obvious physical distance, which acts as a certain border area. Through a qualitative case study, based on grounded theory methodology, in the first phase of the Navvab residential complex and its adjacent neighbourhood on the west side of the Navvab highway in Tehran, Iran, this article shows the process of housing stigmatization: how the built environment associates with othering and negative social perceptions; how this othering manifests in urban public spaces; and how people take positions towards the established territorial stigma. Based on the characteristic features and attitudes, individuals were categorized into four categories: dualists, self-righteous, difference deniers, and antipathetics. We finish by suggesting that design and the built environment form can play a mediating role in activating challenging discourses in fragmented societies dealing with stigmatization.

Framing urban threats: A socio-spatial analysis of urban securitisation in Latin America and the Caribbean

In the context of growing concern with violence in Latin American and Caribbean cities this paper offers an analytical synthesis of urban securitisation which involves the construction of issues, spaces and populations as security threats. The synthesis contributes to debates on urban studies and critical security studies, which focus on neoliberalism as the driver of urban securitisation and militarisation as its main expression, by highlighting the embedded, contextualised and historically situated nature of securitisation and its multiple manifestations. The paper proposes a framework for the socio-spatial analysis of securitisation processes focusing on their causes, manifestations and consequences, while capturing their dialectic relation with cities’ spatial characteristics. Bringing together Lefebvre’s conceptualisation of the social production of space with Wacquant’s analysis of the penal-assistential state, and using secondary sources complemented by primary data from our research, the paper shows that urban securitisation in this region is contingent to four socio-spatial dimensions common to Latin American and Caribbean cities – segregation, territorial stigmatisation, overlapping insecurities and territorial struggles. Using a multidimensional framework, the paper illustrates how unaddressed legacies of colonialism and notions of state power in the context of struggles with criminal actors have driven urban securitisation and diversified its targets and techniques beyond militarisation. Under a securitising logic, programmes which often appear progressive are also shown to prejudice marginalised groups and undermine democratic values. The paper concludes with a call for further multidisciplinary analyses that account for the socio-spatial and historical particularities of contemporary forms of urban securitisation in this and other regions.

“You don't go there”: Spatial Strategies of Stigma Negotiation in a Post‐Industrial Town

AbstractThis paper draws on a multimethod ethnographic study, conducted between 2016 and 2017 in Shirebrook, Derbyshire, England—a small and relatively isolated deindustrialising colliery town—examining how residents negotiate living in stigmatised territory. In doing so, microspatial strategies of distancing, avoidance, and deflection are illustrated, revealing how residents reassign and deepen stigma in particular locations within a stigmatised territory. This highlights the relationship between social and physical space, and while spatial strategies of negotiation do not mitigate stigma, they do (re)produce internal social hierarchies within a place that is homogenised from the outside through disparaging narratives. A key contribution reveals the significance of the racialised production of space in shaping how territorial stigma is negotiated within this distinct socio‐spatial location. Residents use strategies to redirect the stigma toward those seen as out of place and draw attention away from sticky sites of racialised urban stigma towards symbols of unspoilt rural Englishness.

Coping with Territorial Stigma and Devalued Identities: How Do Social Representations of an Environmentally Degraded Place Affect Identity and Agency?

This article examines people-place relationships in a carbon-intensive area—i.e., heavily dependent on the steel industry and marked by severe environmental degradation—involved in the EU Just Transition Mechanism (Taranto, Italy). Drawing upon a psychosocial perspective grounded on social representations theory, this article focuses on intertwining the sense of place, identity processes, and agency to understand the dynamics of place stigma and identity devaluation. In-depth semi-structured interviews with active residents were thematically and discursively analyzed. The results suggest both theoretical and applied insights. Overall, they highlight a widely shared negative representation of the place related to territorial stigmatization, ambivalent place attachments, and devaluation of place-based and social identities. To cope with such processes and dynamics, identity processes seem to act as self-protective mechanisms both at a personal and social level. The article concludes by inviting a more comprehensive conceptualization of just transition, harm restoration, and related territorial planning to include the psychosocial processes underlying the community’s well-being and identity.

Urban marginality and institutional effects: Disinvestment, inefficacy, and stigmatization in Santiago de Chile

ABSTRACT “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.

Identities in transition: Audit recruits and the German reunification

This paper studies the identity transitions of East German audit recruits during the fundamental ideological, economic, and societal change brought about by the reunification of Germany in 1990. Integrating the identity work literature with key concepts from Pierre Bourdieu and Erving Goffman, we build on semi-structured interviews with two groups of recruits—university graduates and former state auditors—to explore and theorize the marked differences observed in these recruits' transition processes. In line with wider processes of territorial stigmatization, we argue that the West German audit firms pragmatically instrumentalized their local personnel, seeking to deploy them without intending to integrate them into the profession. In turn, the audit recruits met with this exertion of symbolic violence by managing a ‘spoiled identity’. The university graduates found it easier to recognize and accumulate legitimate forms of capital, thereby submitting themselves to the inculcation of the profession's socialization process, which ultimately yielded their institution into the profession. In contrast, the former state auditors' local knowledge and access to client networks provided immediately useful capital to the West German firms, which, however, sought to retain a status differential vis-à-vis these recruits. As a result of such strategies of condescension, the former state auditors maintained key aspects of their identity as a salient part of their self-conception. We further highlight the role of the local audit offices in the recruits' transition processes, as they evolved from flexible spaces, which allowed for experimentation and improvisation, into more structured units. This process embedded professional values and practices, thereby creating localized office identities.

Debates Paper: COVID-19 and urban informality: Exploring the implications of the pandemic for the politics of planning and inequality.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted a major contradiction in contemporary urban planning. This is the relationship between the entrepreneurial modes of urban politics that shape contemporary planning practice and the interrelated dynamics of economic precarity and informalisation of low-income communities that exacerbate contagion, and therefore enable pandemic spread. Through a review of literature on the urban dimensions of COVID-19, and on the historical relationship between pandemics and urban planning, we develop a framework for analysing the debates that are emerging around planning approaches to addressing contemporary pandemic risk in low-income, informalised communities. We argue that post-pandemic debates about urban planning responses are likely to take shape around three discourses that have framed approaches to addressing informalised communities under entrepreneurial urbanism - a revanchist approach based on territorial stigmatisation of spaces of the poor, an incrementalist approach premised on addressing the most immediate drivers of contagion, and a reformist approach that seeks to address the structural conditions that have produced economic precarity and shelter informality. We further argue that any effort to assess the political outfall of the COVID-19 pandemic in a given context needs to take an inter-scalar approach, analysing how debates over informality take shape at the urban and national scales.

Territorial stigmatization and housing commodification under racial neoliberalism: The case of Denmark's ‘ghettos’

The relation between racialization and neoliberalism is relatively unexplored in urban geography, especially in the context of social democratic welfare regimes. This article aims to bridge this gap by applying the concept of racial neoliberalism, here referring to a co-constitutive relation between racialization and neoliberalism, to Denmark. Conceiving the country's so-called ‘ghetto’ politics as an expression of racial neoliberalism, the article retraces the development of this politics over the first two decades of the 21st century. I argue that territorial stigmatization and commodification of marginalized non-profit housing areas have been two co-constitutive expressions of racial neoliberalism that have intensified during this historical period. Examining three key policy moments through various grey literature, the article demonstrates how stigmatization has served to justify commodification, while the failure of the latter has been followed by intensified and bureaucratized stigmatization leading to new commodification efforts until culminating in the infamous 2018 ‘Ghetto Law’.

Crime, Disorder, and Territorial Stigmatization: Older Adults Living in Deprived Neighborhoods.

The existence of social problems, crime, and a diminishing sense of community are acknowledged challenges to residents of deprived neighborhoods. In research on deprived neighborhoods in Sweden, the perspectives of young residents and adults of working age dominate. This study explores how older adults in deprived neighborhoods in Sweden experience crime and disorder, and how they adapt and respond to these problems and the neighborhood's poor reputation. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 22 older adults who had lived 5 years or more in deprived areas of two cities in Sweden. Data were analyzed using Hirschman's theory of exit, voice, and loyalty with a thematic analysis. Most residents had positive things to say about their homes and neighborhoods, even if criminal acts such as shootings, drug dealing, arson, burglary, and knife attacks were part of everyday life. The residents attempted to manage these events with various strategies. Exit strategies included relocation and forms of adaptation and detachment. They used several voice strategies to actively try to solve the problems and engage with the community. Loyalty strategies-and relativizing-were used to defend their neighborhood reputation. The findings show we should move on from generalized notions of older adults as passive victims of their environment and highlight that some older adults are active agents in building communities in deprived neighborhoods. City improvement programs should extend support to older adults who wish to engage. Approaches are identified which may strengthen older adults' contributions in such neighborhoods.

“If I had power, I would stop injustices in the world”: Photovoice’s experiences with young people from disadvantaged urban communities

ABSTRACT Based on participatory research with a group of young people of 13 to 17 years old from a socially vulnerable community of Porto (Portugal), this article proposes a reflection and debate about what conditions these young people find for citizen participation in the relationship with their communities. Faced with a fragmented urban landscape, constituted by socially marginalized communities, which often instigate asymmetrical power relations and situations of territorial stigmatization and social exclusion, young people come across constant social challenges. Through the photovoice method, the youngsters were encouraged to research the community reality that surrounds them; to carefully observe and analyze the contexts and express them visually. This article presents results produced by this research experience, and how it facilitated debates and interaction with young people, allowing us to understand better their reality and the ways they see it and act in it.

Place attachment in stigmatized settings: a study based on community experience in Costa Rica (Apego al lugar en contextos estigmatizados: un estudio desde la experiencia comunitaria en Costa Rica)

ABSTRACT Research into place attachment theory has traditionally focused on the positive values associated with territories, leaving to one side the analysis of phenomena where the construction of socio-physical bonds is marked by ambivalence, as in the case of territorial stigma. With a view to contributing further information to existing knowledge on this topic, the research presented here aims to explore the dimensions involved in place attachment in relation to stigmatized urban communities in Costa Rica. This study applies a qualitative approach, carrying out interviews and applying participatory mapping. The results have been grouped into five dimensions and three maps, which show that place attachment in the communities studied here is marked by socio-affective bonds, the socio-demographic characteristics of their residents, urban centrality, territorial management and criminality. Based on the information generated, we conclude that place attachment is a complex phenomenon and is shaped by socio-political attributes that require more in-depth exploration.

Public housing and territorial stigma: towards a symbolic and political economy

This article illustrates how the stigmatization of public housing in Australia has been co-constituted by material and symbolic forces over several decades. Drawing on discourse analysis in conjunction with historical-institutional analysis of housing policy trajectories and the place of housing within political-economic change, it shows how territorial stigmatization can be understood as the product of media, policy and social scientific discourses which problematize public housing as well as histories of policy reform and political-economic restructuring which shape its social, material and institutional conditions. The discursive problematization of public housing estates in particular works to obscure the role of restructuring and reform and thus present demolition and redevelopment as a ‘common sense’ response, even as a form of destigmatization. The understanding of stigmatisation that this article advances—as a recursively symbolic and political-economic process—is therefore conceptually significant and important for critically evaluating government interventions in the context of stigma, including claims of destigmatization.

The long shadow of territorial stigma: Upward social mobility and the symbolic baggage of the old neighbourhood

In recent years, a burgeoning number of studies have shed light on the lived experience of territorial stigma. However, the vibrant academic discourse on the stigma of place focuses almost exclusively on residents living in marginalised neighbourhoods: it either overlooks or simplifies the lived experience of ‘moving out’ and ‘up’. Building upon 43 biographical interviews with individuals who experienced upward social mobility and were raised in stigmatised neighbourhoods in Germany, this article argues that the experience of exiting from the symbolic bottom of the urban structure is a more complex and conflictual one. In particular, this work sheds light on how former residents learn to relate to the symbolic baggage of having once lived in a notorious neighbourhood. By analysing the three prevailing coping strategies they engage in, the article shifts attention to the prolonged and lasting impact of territorial stigmatisation.

The symbolic (re)production of marginality: Social construction, internalization, and concrete consequences of territorial stigmatization in a poor neighborhood of Santiago de Chile

Territorial stigmatization is a socially-constructed, symbolic representation of a place created and manipulated by external agents, which, once established, becomes decisive for the future of that place and its residents. This discredit is wide and perdurable and operates ‘from above,’ in the media, public officials, and part of academia, and ‘from below,’ in everyday interactions. Through a qualitative case-study in Santiago de Chile, mainly based on interviews and participant observations, this article shows the entire process of stigmatization: how these symbolic representations are socially constructed by different actors; how they are assumed in the discourses of residents, with a variety of reactions that include submissive internalization, naturalization, and a politicized challenge; and how these representations trigger the abandonment from several actors, which is conceptualized by residents as living in ‘Red Zones’ of chronic institutional abandonment. We finish suggesting that stigmatization operates as an institutional mechanism that intervenes in the relationship between poverty concentration and the emergence of social problems.

ESTRATEGIAS DE ENFRENTAMIENTO DE LA ESTIGMATIZACIÓN TERRITORIAL ETNOGRAFÍA EN UNA POBLACIÓN DE SANTIAGO DE CHILE

This article discusses the results of an ethnography carried out in a disadvantaged neighborhood located in Santiago, Chile. The purpose of the research was to know the strategies used by its residents to address territorial stigma. The results reveal that they respond to the stigma by building symbolic differences that allow them to distinguish themselves from the rest, by applying to others the stigmas they receive from the outside. This strategy is used in the comparison with people from the same neighborhood and when comparing with similar quarters, being noteworthy that it is not carried out with people or neighborhoods from other socio-economic groups. It is concluded that the force of phenomenon like stigmatization and socioeconomical segregations makes it difficult for them to build an image of themselves that values them, without resorting to devaluating similar others.

Examining ‘dirty work’ using an analysis of place and territorial stigma: low-income communities and the home credit sector

Based on data from over 70 interviews with people working in the home credit industry, this article makes a unique contribution to knowledge about work in sub-prime financial services. The article demonstrates how extant positions constructing home credit agents as ‘dirty workers’ are to some extent misleading, omitting analysis of the place(s) in which such work is enacted. Home credit has been established in disadvantaged, stigmatised communities for decades and is central to the history and geography of many working-class territories. Drawing on theory surrounding place and territorial stigma, this article considers the complicated relationship between the conflicting feelings of taint and value held by home credit workers, thus contributing to a more nuanced and contextually aware understanding of ‘dirty work’. Moreover, by exploring the value of home credit agents to their borrowers, it is possible to gain insights as to how to better structure financial support in low-income communities.

Social Bonding in Unsafe Areas and Territorial Stigmatization: The Case of Ghaba and Laslki Shelters in Ain el-Sira

Social Bonding in Unsafe Areas and Territorial Stigmatization: The Case of Ghaba and Laslki Shelters in Ain el-Sira

Territorial stigmatisation beyond the city: Habitus, affordances and landscapes of industrial ruination

Loїc Wacquant's concept of territorial stigmatisation has resonated widely across the social sciences and is increasingly called upon in analyses and critiques of contemporary modes of governing marginality. It forms a key part of his broader theorisation of the polarised city and urban scholars have responded to his call for comparative analyses of neoliberal state-crafting in applying it to other urban contexts. This paper focuses on non-urban deindustrialised and peripheral spaces in discussing the ways in which the shifting interdependencies, differing historical trajectories, geographies (including terrain), and social relations of such spaces mark them out as outliers within, but not necessarily incompatible with, Wacquant's schema. It focuses on the former coalfield communities of the Welsh Valleys in the UK as one such example of a peripheral, deindustrialised ‘area of relegation’ distinct from urban locales. We bring together a rich body of UK scholarship that articulates the coalfields as ‘laboratories of deindustrialisation’ with Wacquant's framework. In doing so, we offer a critique of Wacquant's integration of social, physical and symbolic space. We argue that terrain and landscape are weakly incorporated within Wacquant's theorising, and those influenced by his writings, and discuss the potential of the theory of affordances as a useful complement in more fully integrating physical space in accounts of territorial stigmatisation.