Outline of a model of responses to territorial stigma: a conceptual discussion

The last ten years has seen a steep increase in academic publications on territorial stigmatization and its consequences. However, there is a rather peculiar gap in the literature concerning how people react towards their neighbourhood being territorially stigmatized, what their responses are and what strategies they employ to counteract, cope, hide or simply move away from it. Research dealing with these questions tend to rely on analytical simplifications reducing the different groups living in the neglected housing estates simply to ‘the residents’ or by applying Hirschman’s EVLN model (Hirschman 1970,1978) or even more simplified ‘exit–voice’, ‘conformity–rejection’ or ‘normalisers- pathologisers’ dichotomies. Notable exceptions are Krase 1977, Hastings 2003; Castro 2004; Wacquant 2011, Pereira and Queirós 2014; Wacquant, Slater and Pereira 2014. Against such analytical simplifications, we outline a model based on Bourdieu’s conceptualization of social agent’s relations to places based on their mode of and ability to appropriate the given space. In this way the model is a two dimensional model which charts different responses to territorial stigmatization based on the social agents position in social space, on the vertical axis, operationalized as volume of capital (Bourdieu 1984) and, their appropriation of local space (Bourdieu 1999) operationalized as investment in the given territory on the horizontal axis. On this basis, we demonstrate how the social parameters of the different groups inhabiting neglected neighbourhoods inform their reactions to the symbolic boundaries and hierarchies, their relations to the place they inhabit and the strategies with which they react towards the territorial stigma. Further, we demonstrate that it is possible to chart the distribution of different sets of strategies designed to cope with territorial stigma according to the relevance and efficacy of the inherently different groups living in territorially stigmatized places based on their specific position in the model. By doing so we can also critically examine Wacquants central claim, that residents living in stigmatized areas internalize the surroundings degrading view on them and discuss the newness of his thesis on that account (Wacquant 2008: 183-4, 197, 239-40).