Dealing with sticky stigma: Institutional strategies of territorial destigmatization

The blooming research on territorial stigmatization has so far not shown much interest in territorial destigmatization and studies focusing on the institutional level and how different institutional agents seek to counter and engage different strategies of de-stigmatization forms a curious eclipse (Marwell 2016; Schultz Larsen 2016; 2018, Schultz Larsen & Delica 2017, 2018). Both of these gaps in the knowledge is addressed in this study, in which we deploy an open ended qualitative survey targeting experts from the field of social housing in Denmark to cast light on what is actually done at the local/area level in Denmark in regards to countering area-based stigmatization. Based on the survey, we carve out four analytical aspects and logics of territorial stigmatization and destigmatization. These are; (1) The socio-spatial configuration of ‘the area’, as the primary terrain for institutional strategies of destigmatizationt (2) The scales of territorial stigmatization and destigmatization, (3) The ambiguous temporalities of territorial destigmatizations strategies (4) The relations of power-knowledge in the production and evaluation of institutional strategies of territorial destigmatization. Brought together these four logics, which permeates area-based destigmatization strategies, points toward a number of contradictory characteristics of the strategies in practice. Together these logics, which mainly exist as an implicit nonverbalized doxa, limits the possible strategies to address local and localized problems. They do so predominantly at the level of individual outcomes and the conditions for countering the political production of territorial stigmatization and the national media driven stigmatization becomes almost impossible. In this perspective, most of the area-based strategies take on a Sisyphean character, which in turn has become a legitimation of new and radical policy measures of demolition, gentrification and reprivatization of the stigmatized territories