Territorial Stigmatization in Action

This theme issue of Environment and Planning A builds on the analytic framework elaborated by Wacquant in Urban Outcasts (Polity Press, 2008) and on the activities of the Leverhulme Network on Advanced Urban Marginality to synthesize and stimulate inquiries into the triadic nexus of symbolic space, social space, and physical space at the lower end of the urban spectrum. The concept of territorial stigmatization weds with Bourdieu's theory of ‘symbolic power’ Goffman's model of the management of ‘spoiled identity’ to capture how the blemish of place impacts the residents of disparaged districts, the surrounding denizens and commercial operators, street-level public bureaucracies, specialists in cultural…