The Politics of Territorial Stigmatization

This paper analyses how social symbolic and material struggles over the city and especially the neglected and stigmatized territories are tightly linked to struggles over the reconfiguration of the state. The object is to draw up a preliminary construction of a field of urban politics –here in the case of Denmark: This construction offer an analysis of how different power and knowledge hierarchies play a pivotal role in the continual transformations, which the different solutions to urban stigmatization have affected –both in terms of professional categorizations and in terms of drawing and redrawing the social and symbolic boundaries in the city but also in terms of new moralities-and forms of local belonging and citizenship. As such focus is neither on the city nor on the state par se but on how the city and the state and their post-crisis transformation are intimately linked. On this backdrop, it is possible to outline a new socio-spatial configuration that reforms Harveys (1989) entrepreneurialism by combining it with new forms of authoritarianism both in the city and at the level of the state. Theoretically and methodological this study is inspired by Bourdieus reflexive sociology highlighting relations of symbolic power and its inscription in the city (Bourdieu 1991; 1999; Wacquant2008; 2009; 2016). Empirically we combination a macro analysis of policy documents and a microanalysis of structured relational biographic interviews with 47 projectmanagers engaged in territorial de-stigmatization work in practice. Based on this we fleshout the contours of the new authoritarian governance of urban marginality as politics and practice.