Territorial destigmatisation in an era of policy schizophrenia

While territorial destigmatisation has long been central to urban policies, academic interest is only very recent. Using the figure of the triangle, we outline an analytical approach for studying territorial destigmatisation connecting Territory, Destigmatisation and Institutions, and by building on an open-ended qualitative survey with 47 project managers from stigmatised housing estates in Denmark, we cast light on territorial destigmatisation work in practice. The many accounts of the project managers allow us to make explicit the implicit nonverbalised logics – doxa – that inform the fuzzy logic of practice in territorial destigmatisation work. We identify four such generative institutional logics which, brought together, constitute a novel regime of territorial destigmatisation which in turn underpins the contemporary policy schizophrenia which simultaneously promotes territorial destigmatisation at the local level and the production of territorial stigmatisation at the national level. This casts light on efforts to deal with the stickiness of territorial stigma implying that the Sisyphean character of these efforts are not unforeseen policy consequences of dealing with a wicked problem, but integral to the institutional logic. In fact, this has become a legitimisation of the current radical policy measures of demolition, gentrification and re-privatisation of the stigmatised territories.