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Territorial Stigmatisation

Constanze Letsch · 2023

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Licence: CC BY 4.0 · repository export licence (OAPEN) · Letsch, Constanze (2023), Territorial Stigmatisation, transcript Verlag - licensed CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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About this book

Author
Constanze Letsch
Language
English
Published
2023
Length
145,429 words · about 10 h 11 min
Sections
18 reader sections
Text
Digital text
Rights
CC BY 4.0 · repository export licence (OAPEN)

 

Contents (18)

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Front matter

Constanze Letsch

Urban Renewal and Displacement in a Central Istanbul Neighbourhood

[ transcript | Culture and Social Practice

Chapter one: Looking for Resistance

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Acknowledgements

This book came into being due to the unwavering support of a large number of people over along period of time. I have been very fortunate to enjoy the guidance of two supervisors who provided their intellectual support during the conception, the fieldwork, and the writing of this thesis.

Werner Schiffauer has been generous with his time and unfailingly pulled me out of various theoretical rabbit holes that at times threatened to derail this thesis. His patience with my meandering analysis and various professional distractions throughout the course of this project has been invaluable. His advice helped me improve my academic rigour and my ethnographic voice and has been fundamental for the development of my personal intellectual life. Stephan Lanz has provided enthusiastic support for this thesis. He agreed to take it on without knowing me or my work, and his encouragement to stick with territorial stigmatisation as the framework to look at and analyse displacement and urban renewal helped me to see this project through.

Megan Clark has been an important mentor and wonderful friend who taught me to trust in and centre my ethnographic material, to write courageously and clearly, and not to give in to the urge to hide my analysis behind convoluted phrases and theory. Her detailed knowledge of Turkish history and society were hugely beneficial to my understanding of both, and thanks to both her kindness and her brilliance, this project was finally able to grow wings. Her ability to explain complicated anthropological concepts and apply them to my work shines through every page of this thesis, and it is not an exaggeration to say that without Write Club, this dissertation would have remained on crutches, if it had been written at all.

I was lucky enough to end up in the same city as Bahar Sakizlioglu, whose research on Tarlabaşı has provided crucial insight long before I met her. I benefited greatly from our conversations and joint library writing days, and I could always count on her earnest and excellent criticisms of my work. I could not have finished this thesis without her friendship, her continuous encouragement and support.

Tymen Peverelli, Aylin Kuryel, John Crofoot, Enno Maessen, Kris Ruygrok, Tamara Vojtechovsky, Yigit Aksakoglu and Gertjan Hoetjes agreed to read various versions and parts of this book, and I am grateful for their insightful comments, their time, and their generosity. Hanneke van der Heijden has been a supportive friend and a fellow Istanbul enthusiast. Her help with the translations of the finer points of Turkish names and idioms made me pay attention to the importance of linguistic detail.

Clara Rivas-Alonso, Elif Ince, Özlem Ünsal and Andrew Gardner generously shared their research and their notes on the Tarlabaşı Renewal Project and urban renewal in Turkey with me. I would also like to thank Jonathan Lewis, who let me use his beautiful photographs for this thesis. TMMOB librarian Selma Hanim helped me sort through mountains of the vast TMMOB archives and hunted down every last document I asked her for. Rifat Dogan kindly agreed to provide me with access to his detailed newspaper archives on Tarlabaşı, which was of invaluable help. Mücella Yapıcı patiently answered my many questions and showed me that anger can be a great motivator for research. Baris Kaşka and Can Atalay have been generous with their time and knowledge and provided me with legal and court documents that gave me a better understanding of the judicial background of the project. I hope that Mitcella, Can, and all the other political prisoners in Turkey will be free by the time this book is published.

This thesis also greatly benefited from the insights and observations of many interlocutors, colleagues, and friends in Istanbul. Special thanks go to Mehmet Konbat1, Koray Kesik and Bingöl Elmas who freely and repeatedly shared their views and personal experiences of Tarlabaşı with me. Emma Sinclair-Webb encouraged me to believe in the importance of my research, and it would be an understatement to say that having been able to work alongside her has been hugely inspiring. Reinhard Baumgarten convinced me that journalism can take on many forms, benefits from many different approaches, and that finishing this thesis would not be a decision against it.

In Amsterdam, where I wrote the bulk of this thesis, I would like to thank the International Institute of Social History and the Amsterdam University Library at the PC Hoofthuis for providing welcoming workspaces and access to crucial parts of the literature. Both have dampened the culture shock and alleviated the grief for having to leave Istanbul. I also wish to thank the many academic colleagues who kindly send me their papers when paywalls proved insurmountable obstacles to the self-funded PhD student.

The Undocumented Migration Project agreed to let us mount the exhibition for the Hostile Terrain 94 project in Amsterdam, despite a raging pandemic and the many distractions that a new-born provided. Jason De Leén’s work has been such an important inspiration for me, demonstrating what unleashed-unto-the-world, engaged anthropology can do.

Ian Traynor was an important mentor, colleague and friend who taught me to trust my gut. I benefited greatly from his advice and our many conversations about Turkey and the fallacies of pre-conceived journalistic observation. He showed me that good journalism lives off careful ethnography. I would have loved for him to see this thesis in its final form.

I wish to thank my family and the many friends who rooted for me and this thesis throughout the years, never losing confidence that one day, it would get finished. Neske Baerwaldt, your kindness and smarts were so important during the last months of getting through this, alongside finding my footing as a new parent.

Tan and Ada Rosa, you are the loves of my life. Writing this thesis was hard, and it has put you two through a lot; I have no words to express how grateful I am for you both. Tan, thank you for always having my back.

Acknowledgements

Finally, none of this research and writing would exist if not for the many Tarlabas1 residents who agreed to open their homes to me, and who trusted me with their stories. I am eternally grateful for their generosity and their friendship, their humour, their patience, and their encouragement over the years, and I could never thank them enough. I hope that I managed to convey at least some of their experiences, their struggles, and their pain on these pages.

Barber Halil Usta’ loved his shop and entertained very strong and longstanding ties in his neighbourhood. Originally from the city of Kayseri in Central Anatolia, Halil obtained his Usta certificate in 1977, but had worked in the profession since 1969, and always in the central Istanbul neighbourhood of Tarlabaşı. While the gradual decline of the area over the years had led to him losing many of his former customers, a phenomenon that accelerated with the Tarlabaşı renewal project, he preferred to spend most of his time in his small shop in Tree Street. When he was not in his shop he could be found in the Kurdishowned teahouse down the street, where he indulged his one guilty pleasure: playing cards with his friends from the neighbourhood. However, Halil Usta did not live in Tarlabaşı. He had moved to a site” in the middle class neighbourhood in Bostancı, a district on the Asian side of Istanbul where he lived with his wife. While he often lauded his “modern apartment” and the area he lived in as “clean and quiet” and “good for a family to live in’, he admitted that he barely knew any of his neighbours by name, something he did miss in comparison to Tarlabaşı. He was proud that he had put both his children through good schools and university with the help of his shop, and that they both worked in respected white-collar jobs: his daughter at a big international bank and his son as a lawyer.

The Usta had an excellent reputation as a barber and was famed for his “close shaves and smooth hands”. A number of patrons, those who had moved away from the neighbourhood but did not want to miss out on Halil Ustas grooming and the local gossip, came from other parts of the city to enjoy his services. In short, Halil Usta was both very respected and very well integrated in Tarlabaşı, and yet, or so he told me on several occasions, he had preferred not to disclose the location of his small business at the parentteacher meetings in the school of his children in Bostancı. He had feared the “bad reputation’ that Tarlabaşı generally had amongst Istanbul residents, and the subsequent im-

1 In Turkey, the honorific “Usta” [Master] is used for craftsmen and artisans who have reached the highest level of competence and craftsmanship. It is used with the bearer’s first name and used to address a master craftsman as a sign of respect in daily interactions. In the traditional Turkish apprenticeship system, the title is awarded at the discretion of an apprentice’s mentor, who is an Usta himself, and not tied to an independent exam, as is the case for example in Germany. | will refer to all master craftsmen as Usta, as | did in every daily interaction with them during my fieldwork.

2 A group of apartment buildings often managed like a gated community.

pact it might have had on how teachers and fellow students would treat his children. This worry did not disappear as they went on to university, and later on started their professional lives. In front of their friends and colleagues, Halil Usta always remained rather vague, and preferred to say that he had a barber shop in Beyoğlu, the larger administrative district to which Tarlabaşı also belongs. In the end he simply stated that he was retired, which was factually true, and did not work anymore at all, a white lie that was meant to foreclose all further questions.

When the Beyoğlu Municipality officially announced the Tarlabas1 renewal project in 2008, Halil Usta was torn. He believed that the neighbourhood was in dire need of an upgrade, and that the government as he knew it would likely do what was best for inhabitants. He also voiced the opinion that in fact, Tarlabaşı residents had only themselves to blame for the bad state of the area, and, since they were largely squatters anyway, they should not complain about looming evictions. However, as the project progressed, Halil Usta felt increasingly uneasy. Neighbours and friends he had known for decades started to leave, making him feel “like an orphan’. His already lagging business trickled to a halt. His landlord insisted on full rent while locked in a court case over the sales price of his property with project stakeholders. As a tenant, Halil Usta had no right to any compensation despite his progressing income loss. He felt increasingly unseen and unheard. Despite initial promises by the municipality, the project made his life, and that of many of his neighbours, not better, but worse. However, Halil Usta never engaged in any kind of organised resistance against the demolition of his neighbourhood. He did not join the Tarlabaşı Solidarity Association’ that had been founded with the aim to help residents. Despite his lack of engagement, Halil Usta regularly challenged the negative narrative and the stigmatising discourse about Tarlabaşı. In conversations, he would underline what he thought was good about his neighbourhood and should be preserved. Halil Usta clearly valued Tarlabaşı, his life and his position there very much — so why did he go to such lengths to obscure this significant aspect of his life, his accomplishments, his social world, from others? What were the consequences Halil Usta was trying to avoid by distancing himself from Tarlabaşı? Why did he feel the need to blame his neighbours, many of whom he had an excellent and deep relationship with, for the bad state of the neighbourhood? And how to explain his ambivalent stance towards the renewal project? The simplest answer is this: Tarlabaşı suffered, and still suffers, from a bad reputation.

In this book I interrogate these questions further. True, Tarlabaşı does have a bad reputation, but there are micro-social processes and macro-political dynamics involved that structure the way that neighbourhood reputation sticks to particular residents in particular ways. These processes and dynamics also structure the diversity of tactics meant to manage or negotiate social life in a deeply stigmatised neighbourhood. This place-based stigma also has a profound impact on solidarity ties and trust networks, and therefore impacts the way a community is able — or not — to organise around collective action and resistance. Importantly, the various attempts to challenge the bad reputation of Tarlabaşı

3 The “Tarlabaşı Association of Property Owners and Tenants for Progress and Solidarity”, founded in 2008. | will expand on the association, further referred to as “Tarlabas Association” or “Solidarity Association’, in a later chapter of the book.

deserve attention, as they can provide insight into how residents tried to oppose the negative frame the renewal project trapped their neighbourhood in.

Aims

Building on Loic Wacquant’s theory of territorial stigmatisation, I focus on the questions of how territorial stigmatisation was produced, and how it was exploited by project stakeholders during the state-led renewal project in the central Istanbul neighbourhood of Tarlabaşı. However, I do not only explore the manufacture of place-based stigma in the dominant discourse, by the municipality and the media. I also analyse how residents ina low-income neighbourhood reacted to this stigmatisation, how they managed and occasionally opposed it through everyday practices. While Wacquant did not dedicate much of his writing to how territorial stigma might be contested, research has shown that residents use a variety of strategic responses to appropriate, reject, ignore, or rescript spatial taints. Furthermore, opposition against stigma can also be found in the way residents express belonging. Paul Kirkness and Andreas Tijé-Dra point out that “the fact that some people are capable of feeling place attachments to areas that are deemed to be threatening by anybody outside the neighbourhood is an important step towards the negation of the power of stigma” (Kirkness and Tijé-Dra 20174: 3). This, too, is a phenomenon that I will explore. I want to assess the scope and methods of territorial stigmatisation in Tarlabagi and examine if Wacquant’s theoretical understanding of the concept applies in the context of this central Istanbul neighbourhood. Furthermore, I want to investigate how territorial stigmatisation impacted residents in the run-up to and during evictions for the renewal project.

The internalisation of stigma in Tarlabaşı was by no means uniform and did not manifest itself as evenly as Wacquant suggests. While a number of people expressed negative opinions and ambivalence towards their area of residence, very few thought that it was all bad. The internalisation was also not consistent: people who would harshly criticise the neighbourhood and their neighbours one day, defended both on another, depending on the context and the audience. Furthermore, taking into account recent research on intersectionality, this work aims to fill a gap in the research on how the experience of stigma in a low-income neighbourhood in Turkey heavily depended on the socio-demographic and gender identity of residents. People who were part of a strong solidarity or trust network, such as Kurds, with awareness of and/or connection to longstanding organised political resistance in Turkey, managed stigma in a different way than those who could not fall back on the experience of a political struggle. My fieldwork suggests a more interactionist understanding of stigma than Wacquant applies in his work on urban marginality, a thought on which I would like to elaborate.

In the context of Tarlabaşı and the renewal project, I understand territorial stigmatisation to “include a wide range of subjective experiences, namely, incidents in which respondents experienced disrespect and their dignity, honor, relative status, or sense of self was challenged” (Lamont et al. 2016: 6). This was the case when residents were treated rudely by municipal representatives or employees of the private developer GAP

Insaat*, when crucial information was withheld from them, when they were excluded from decisions that would deeply impact their lives, when they and their neighbours received poor services, when they were the victim of threats or violence- sometimes symbolic, sometimes physical-and when they were stereotyped as criminal, destitute, uneducated or dangerous. Stigmatisation in Tarlabaşı was always also an “assault on worth” (ibid: 7). Imogen Tyler and Tom Slater (2018: 727) show that “‘stigmatisation is intimately linked with neoliberal governance’, that is with attempts to manage and/or change the

“a behaviour of populations through deliberate stigma strategies which inculcate humiliation and shame” The symbolic stigmatisation that people in Tarlabaşı faced justified and facilitated material marginalisation. During the planning and the execution of the renewal project, stigma became more entrenched. It was an integral part of the promotional material published by the municipality and the developer, a tool to legitimise and disregard residents as well as their concerns and their rights. For residents, reacting and opposing this project meant to an important extent interacting, challenging, managing, and deflecting this stigma. This work fills particular gaps in the literature on territorial stigma by focussing on the impact of spatial stigma not only during the planning phase of a large state-led urban renewal project, but during its execution and the evictions.

What do we mean when we talk about a neighbourhood’s “bad reputation’? In his extensive body of work on urban marginality, Loic Wacquant describes territorial stigmatisation as the profound stigma that attaches to a geographical location, to a physical place, the proverbial stain on a map often portrayed as the “bad part” of a town, neighbourhood, or any other location generally assumed to be “dangerous”, “dirty”, “sketchy”, or simply “unsavoury” (Wacquant 2007). Wacquant forged the concept of territorial stigmatisation based on a methodological comparison between an American “black ghetto” of Chicago's South Side with a French working-class banlieue in the Paris periphery (Wacquant 2008). His theoretical framework draws upon the seminal sociological work of Erving Goffman and Pierre Bourdieu, by adding “place” to both Goffman's three categories of stigma’ and to Bourdieu's theory of symbolic power.® This makes it possible to better dissect and understand how urban marginality affects individuals as well as communities, and how it

4 GAP Inşaat is a subsidiary of Çalık Holding, a company with close ties to the AKP government.

5 Goffman distinguishes three different ways, all three of them described in relation to what is considered “normal”, in which individuals can become first “discredited”, and then “disqualified” from society: “abominations of the body” (e.g. disability), “blemishes of individual character” (e.g. addiction, homosexuality, unemployment, imprisonment), and “tribal stigma of race, nation and religion” that can be handed down through lineages and taint several generations and family members through symbolic guilt by association. For all three forms of social stigma, Goffman attests “an undesired differentness from what we had anticipated” that results in the stigmatized being ostracised and discriminated against by “those who do not depart negatively from the particular expectations” of society, those that generally have access to political, economic and social capital and power (Goffman 1963: 3—4).

6 Bourdieu’s notion of “symbolic power” is useful in considering the actual social processes through which stigma attaches to social actors. In that sense, symbolic power is the capability to construct is produced and used by those who exercise power against those who submit to it, as well as how and by whom stigma and marginalisation are reproduced and perpetuated. Wacquant identifies a location-related and pervasive form of discrimination he links to a “blemish of place” (Wacquant 2007: 67), a stain attached to “isolated and bounded territories increasingly perceived by both outsiders and insiders as social purgatories, leprous Badlands at the heart of the postindustrial metropolis where only the refuse of society would accept to dwell” (ibid).

The idea of a “topography of disrepute” (Wacquant et al. 2014: 1273). is not a novel concept. Poor, derelict urban areas have attracted writers, researchers, and a both worried and titillated urban elite for more than a century, when, with the onset of industrialisation and rapid urbanisation, the idea of debauched, criminal and destitute slums began to take hold (ibid).” However, Wacquant, Pereira and Slater (2014: 1273-1275) point out that contemporary areas of spatial stigma differ from the description of these earlier slums in at least five ways: Firstly, territorial stigma has become “partially” independent from the stigma of class, ethnicity, “questionable” morality, street crime and degraded housing stock, thus both superseding and transcending negative stereotypes typically used to describe these attributes. This means that the taint associated with a certain neighbourhood has gained enough traction to exert its own real and devastating effects, attaching its own powerful stigma to people associated with it via stereotyping and a negative discourse, independently of and in addition to other types of discrimination. Secondly, the negative image attached to a stigmatised borough of the post-industrial metropolis is no longer only upheld amongst members of the social and cultural elites, but amongst the general populace and residents of the tainted neighbourhood as well. It has become so all-pervasive, that in some cases, stigmatised neighbourhoods have become synonymous with urban hellholes in international marketing and pop culture.’ Thirdly, the stigmatised districts of today are being portrayed as places of disorder, chaos, and utter disintegration, whereas the working-class districts of the past were depicted as a “powerful and hierarchized counter-society” (ibid: 1274), where the so-called “criminal underworld” was a highly organised club with a strict pecking order, and where the working class successfully set up organised labour struggles, unions, and stringent political representation. The fourth difference is a “racialisation” of stigmatised districts through selective attention or fictive projection. This often happens via sensationalist reports of crime and violent incidents in the media that frame cultural differences as divergent from, or even hostile to, the dominant national norm and as dangerous, “branding” residents “as outcasts” (ibid: 1274). The mainstream media have regularly described clashes between the police and residents in French banlieues or British boroughs as “race riots” using martial and colonial language (Tyler 2013). More recently, several German media outlets claimed that “failed integration of migrants” and “cultural differences” were to blame for attacks on ambulances and firefighters on New Year’s Eve in Berlin-Neukélln.

reality and to turn representations into unassailable social truths, whether or not the prescribed characteristics of that ‘truth’ correspond with reality (Bourdieu 1991).

7 See for example Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England, or the works of English writers Charles Dickens, Henry Mayhew, or Arthur Morrison.

8 Wacquant, Slater and Pereira name The Bronx as one such example.

And lastly, the relationship of non-residents with the stigmatised neighbourhoods of today is one of largely negative emotions, of unambiguous revulsion and fear in opposition to times past, when the cultural and social elite made them “playgrounds for excitement, mysterious sites of social voyeurism, moral transgression, sexual fantasy, and artistic inspiration (ibid: 1275).” In Victorian London, “slumming” was a popular pastime of local urban elites who would take tours in destitute neighbourhoods in East London (Koven 2004). A phenomenon that is difficult to imagine now. This change cultivates and glorifies a punitive state approach to urban marginality, embodied by a zero-tolerance attitude, the so-called “broken windows theory” (Wilson and Kelling: 1982) of policing, corrective reactions, and efforts to “cleanse”, “punish”, and “restore order” in stigmatised neighbourhoods (see also Clear 2007; Wacquant 2009b; Beckett and Herbert 2011; Camp and Heatherton 2016; Müller 2016; Vitale 2017). One memorable example are the words of French politician and then interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy who, after violent clashes in the Parisian housing project Quatre Mille, said that he wanted to “clean out the scum” by using “a high-powered sandblaster” (Wacquant et al. 2014: 6) This change of policy makers’ attitudes towards low-income neighbourhoods ran parallel to the change in attitude to poverty in general, to the switch from the “war on poverty” to the “war on welfare” (Katz 1989).

Wacquant (2008: 169) argues that territorial stigmatisation is “arguably the single most protrusive feature of the lived experience of those trapped in these sulphurous zones.” He describes a symbolic defamation of place reinforced from “below” through social interactions in daily life and the effects of stigma management, and from “above” in the form of symbolical power through stigmatising representations in sensationalist media coverage, in political and public discourse. Such reinforcement makes the socially and politically constructed blemish permanent and unshakable, whether or not a tainted area is really dangerous or “spoiled” (Wacquant 2007: 68). In the same way, works of fiction such as literature, films, TV shows, or online content contribute to a collective imagination of certain ‘dangerous’ areas and produce a public common-sense “knowledge” about certain neighbourhoods, even if those consuming such works of fiction in fact know little or nothing about the places that are being depicted. It follows that the stigma that is being attached to certain neighbourhoods, and sometimes entire cities, turn these places into “no-go zones” and areas to be derided, avoided, and looked down upon; also worth noting is the way this transcends the stigmatisers, the stigmatised, and all individuals who come in contact with an urban place so tainted. Wacquant (2007: 68) underlines that it does not matter if an area is “in fact dilapidated and dangerous, and their population composed essentially of poor people, minorities and foreigners” and that “the prejudicial belief that they are suffices to set off socially noxious consequences.” Another important finding in Wacquant’s (ibid: 5) research is that territorial stigma, by extension, also attaches to the people who occupy that space or are in any other way affiliated with it, such as Halil Usta and his barber shop: a location-based ‘guilt-byassociation’. He argues that residents of such stigmatised places are “tagged with [...] an ‘undesired differentness’ whose ‘discrediting effect is very extensive”, a fact that Halil Usta was clearly aware of when he decided to withhold the address of a business he was otherwise very proud of.

Territorial stigma, therefore, has a profound impact on the people who live in a stigmatised area. The negative individual and personal consequences that flow from such stigma, sometimes subsumed under the insufficient term of “address discrimination’, can include limited access to employment, discrimination in schools and differential treatment by the police, by the court system, and in other public offices, such as welfare services (Sernhede 2011; Mckenzie 2012). A social worker at the Tarlabaşı Toplum Merkezi [Tarlabaşı Community Centre] told journalists that residents struggle with prospective employers, for example, whose “faces change when they hear that [applicants] live in Tarlabas1” (Açıkgöz 2007). The specifics of how territorial stigma is justified in public discourse varies from context to context, and the ‘reasons’ particular neighbourhoods come to be stigmatised are also historical and context-specific. Territorial stigmatisation is not a static quality, but an ongoing process of continuous symbolic defilement in need of constant nourishment, work, and renewal (Horgan 2018).

Exploiting stigma

While territorial stigma has material effects on the people it attaches to, it is also “put to work” as a tool, to be used judicially and extrajudicially. Powerful actors, such as state representatives (Sakizlioglu and Uitermark 2014; Kornberg 2016; Paton et al. 2016; Yardımcı 2020), private businesses (Kudla and Courey 2019), the media (Devereux et al. 2011; Hancock and Mooney 2013; Kearns et al. 2013; Liu and Blomley 2013; Arthurson et al. 2014; Sisson and Maginn 2018; Butler 2020), or think tanks (Hancock and Mooney 2013; Slater 2.014, 2018; Sisson 2020) put this tool to use as they reproduce relations of domination and subservience in capitalist societies. In her study of social abjection in neoliberal Great Britain, Imogen Tyler (Tyler 2013: 8) has shown that “stigmatisation [is] a form of governance which legitimizes the reproduction and entrenchment of inequalities and injustices”. This offers profitable business opportunities to a variety of agents, such as eviction agencies, the news media, or social impact bonds (Sisson, 2020: 5). Kirsteen Paton (Paton 2018: 921) writes that stigma functions as a “soft power’ which is integral to governing” and “central to moral and economic class projects”. Therefore, stigma is activated to “shame those who do not or cannot become more productive neoliberal consumer citizens” (ibid: 923). Graham Scambler (2018) even speaks of weaponization of stigma in the neoliberal era.

Alistair Sisson (2020: 5) underlines that territorial stigmatisation has been exploited “to obfuscate the structural causes and conditions of poverty and inequality, making poverty, marginality and deprivation seen and treated as the responsibility of the poor, marginalised, and deprived themselves, or the spaces they are purportedly concentrated within’ (see also Dike 2002; Kipfer and Petrunia 2009; Slater and Anderson 2012; Hancock and Mooney 2013; Loyd and Bonds 2018, Tyler and Slater 2018). In other words, stigma “veils over a whole host of more fundamental cultural, political and economic questions regarding the distribution of distress in society” (Tyler and Slater 2018: 723). Behind such smoke screens, territorial stigmatisation provides powerful actors, such as the state, with the opportunity to enforce discriminatory housing laws, banking policies and to provide unequal access to public services which in turn propagates the disenfranchisement of people and the seizure of private property (Wacquant 2008; Loyd and Bonds 2018; Tyler and Slater 2018; Sisson 2020).

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