Fragmenting Cities: The State, Territorial Stigmatization and Urban Marginality

In 2010, Denmark introduced a controversial policy innovation 'the ghetto list,' marking specific housing estates as ghettos. Fragmenting Cities explores how this highly stigmatizing list became normalized and accepted in a country hitherto renowned for its humanistic values. Through a socio-historical analysis Fragmenting Cities demonstrate how the marked urban and political changes over the past four decades, constituted a symbolic revolution, turning the fundamental conception of not-for-profit housing upside-down. Paving the way of hitherto unseen forms of discrimination and stigmatization based on place and the fragmentation of cities. Key feature of this process is forms of policy schizophrenia. Instances where the state simultaneously stigmatizes people from the top while engaging in urban renewal at the bottom deepening the fragmentation of the city. Finally Fragmenting Cities introduces a novel neo-Bourdieusian model of the state which recasts Max Webers original definition of the state, gearing it for empirical confrontation and comparative analysis.

A conceptionally innovative and empirically detailed rigorous analysis of the surprising acceptance and normalization of state based stigmatization and discrimination based on pla