Site effects as state effects: The struggles over the reconfiguration of the state through the lens of the ghetto list.

The aim of the empirical analysis that follow is to dissect through the long history of the Danish ghettolist, how policy schizophrenia - as a new mode of governance of advanced urban marginality - has been thought, developed, tested and contested in the nexus between the political and the bureaucratic field. In more abstract terms, we focus on the relation between the state and the specific territories, that a wide range of state policies has targeted in different and increasingly dominating manners trough out the last 30 years and we focus on the central relation between the bureaucratic and the political field. Previous (2019; 2021) we have analyzed how the state in practice and at ground level deals with territorial (de)stigmatization. Combining a reading of different literatures on territorial stigmatization, destigmatization and studies of urban regeneration and area-based interventions at the institutional level with empirical data from our open-ended structured interviews with project managers from stigmatized housing estates in Denmark, we argued that what we see in effect is not just how destigmatization plays out in practice but the formation of a (new) problem of policy schizophrenia and territorial stigmatization. We argued that this should be seen as core problems of the state intimately linked to how it deals with urban politics and policies. This prompts us to ask; were does this phenomenon come from? How can we understand the concrete forging of policy schizophrenia at the forefront of and inside the state? To open this box of Pandora's we turn, our attention to outlining an neo-Bourdieus analysis of the state as bureaucratic field and political field while at the same time, as we acknowledge the need to center our approach in context of, and in dialogue with, a broad range of excisting research on the state.