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Place-based community events fulfil important functions, internally and externally. They provide opportunities for people from diverse communities and cultures to encounter each other, to participate in pleasurable activities in convivial settings and to develop mutual understanding. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the value of such events as a means of resisting or challenging the deleterious effects of territorial stigmatisation.

The authors explore two place-based community events in areas that have been subject to territorial stigmatisation: Govanhill in Glasgow, Scotland, and South Dunedin, New Zealand. They draw on in-depth case study methods including observation and interviews with key local actors and employ inductive analysis to identify themes across the datasets.

The demonstrate how neighbourhood events in both Glasgow and Dunedin actively seek to address some of the deleterious outcomes of territorial stigmatisation by emphasising strength and asset-based discourses about the areas they reflect and represent. In their planning and organisation, both events play an important mediating role in building and empowering community, fostering intercultural encounters with difference and strengthening mutuality within their defined places. They make use of public and semi-public spaces to attract diverse groups while also increasing the visibility of marginalised populations through larger showcase events.

The empirical element focuses only on two events, one in Glasgow, Scotland (UK), and the other in South Dunedin (New Zealand). Data generated were wholly qualitative and do not provide quantitative evidence of “change” to material circumstances in either case study community.

Helps organisers think about how they need to better understand their communities if they are to attract diverse participation, including how they programme public and semi-public spaces.

Place-based community events have significant value to neighbourhoods, and they need to be resourced effectively if they are to sustain the benefits they produce. These events provide an opportunity for diverse communities to encounter each other and celebrate what they share rather than what divides them.

This paper is the first to examine how place-based community events help resist narratives of territorial stigmatisation, which produce negative representations about people and their environments. The paper draws on ethnographic insights generated over time rather than a one-off snapshot which undermines some events research.

In this chapter, I focus on stigmatization exercised and experienced by local residents, comparing two socially-diverse areas in very different contexts: the Cabrini Green-Near North area in Chicago and the La Loma-La Florida area in Santiago de Chile.

Data for this study were drawn from 1 year of qualitative research, using interviews with residents and institutional actors, field notes from observation sessions of several inter-group spaces, and “spatial inventories” in which I located the traces of the symbolic presence of each group.

Despite contextual differences of type of social differentiation, type of social mix, type of housing tenure for the poor, and public visibility, I argue that there are important common problems: first, symbolic differences are stressed by identity changes; second, distrust against “the other” is spatially crystallized in any type and scale of social housing; third, stigmatization changes in form and scale; and fourth, there are persisting prejudiced depictions and patterns of avoidance.

Socially-mixed neighborhoods, as areas where at least two different social groups live in proximity, offer an interesting context for observing territorial stigmatization. They are strange creatures of urban development, due to the powerful symbolism of desegregation in contexts of growing inequalities.

The chapter contributes to a cross-national perspective with a comparison of global-north and global-south cities. And it also springs from a study of socially-mixed areas, in which the debate on concentrated/deconcentrated poverty is central, and in which the problem of “clearing places” appears in both material (e.g., displacement) and symbolic (e.g., stigmatization) terms.

This study aims to analyze and assess 21 years of media coverage (2000–2020) of Flix, a small industrial village located in an rural area on north-eastern Spain, which has endured in these years a severe environmental and industrial crisis, with a strong potential for stigmatization of the place.

The research is conceptualized under the Social Amplification of Risk Framework, a theoretical/conceptual approach aimed at accounting for the huge gaps that often arise between public perception of technological or environmental risks of some technologies, products and places and the expert estimations of these risks. The authors studied the coverage on Flix by a local, a regional and a national newspaper through a content analysis where the corpus (1,524 news pieces) was coded for several variables, including tone, genre and thematic area.

The studied coverage was in general overwhelmingly negative and strongly focused on “bad news” relating to pollution and deindustrialization, although this was much less the case in the local newspaper than in the regional and, in particular, the national newspaper. Thus, a territorially escalated pattern clearly emerges from our research concerning the stigmatization potential of news media coverage for the specific case under scrutiny.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time such a longitudinal study of media coverage and its potential for place stigmatization is performed with this specific territorial perspective.

This article examines the interventions from municipality, state and other actors in the Gellerup estate, a Danish “ghetto” by focusing on the youth problem and its construction, by examining a cross-disciplinary academic workshop intending to “solve the youth problem” of the estate.

The article is based on the two authors' participation in the academic workshop, as well as their continued engagement with the Gellerup estate through separate project employments and ethnographic research projects in the estate, consisting of both participant observation and interviews.

In the article the authors suggest that the 2015 workshop reproduced particularly the category of idle urban young men as problematic. The authors analyze this as a form of “moral urban citizenship”. The article also analyzes some of the proposed solutions to the problem, particularly architectural transformations, and connects the Danish approach to the problems of the “ghetto” to urban developments historically and on a global scale.

Cross-disciplinary academic attempts to solve real-world problems are rarely incorporated as ethnographic data. In this article the authors attempt to include part of their own practice as academics as valuable data that opens up new perspectives on a field and their own involvement and analysis of it.

To explore the way in which responses to urban disorder have become part of the anti-social behaviour (ASB herein) toolkit following the 2011 disorders in England. In particular, the purpose of this paper is to unpack the government’s response to the riots through the use of eviction. It is argued that the boundaries of what constitutes ASB, and the geographical scope of the new powers, are being expanded resulting in a more pronounced unevenness of behaviour-control mechanisms being deployed across the housing tenures.

Using a qualitative research design, 30 in-depth interviews were undertaken with housing, ASB, and local police officers alongside a number of other practitioners working in related fields. These practitioners were based in communities across east London, the West Midlands and Greater Manchester. This was augmented with a desk-based analysis of key responses and reports from significant official bodies, third sector and housing organisations.

Findings from the research show that responses to the 2011 riots through housing and ASB-related mechanisms were disproportionate, resulting in a rarely occurring phenomenon being unnecessarily overinflated. This paper demonstrates, through the lens of the 2011 riots specifically, how the definition of ASB continues to be expanded, rather than concentrated, causing noticeable conflicts within governmental approaches to ASB post-2011.

This research was undertaken as part of a PhD study and therefore constrained by financial and time implications. Another limitation is that the “riot-clause” being considered here has not yet been adopted in practice. Despite an element of supposition, understanding how the relevant authorities may use this power in the future is important nonetheless.

Much effort was expended by scholars to analyse the causes of the 2011 riots in an attempt to understand why people rioted and what this says about today’s society more broadly. Yet very little attention has been focused on particular legislative responses, such as the additional riot clause enacted through the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014. This paper focuses on this particular response to explore more recent ways in which people face being criminalised through an expansion of behaviour defined as ASB.

This chapter is based on 68 interviews in 12 mobile home parks that were part of a larger ethnographic study, conducted in 2005–2010 in West-Central Florida. Data analysis revealed diverse patterns of perception, sentiment, and interaction among neighbours, here understood as ‘neighbour culture’, both across and within communities. American mobile home communities are characterised by a high propinquity of residents and exposure to cultural housing stigma; however, these conditions alone did not determine local neighbour culture. In the analysis, I illustrate prominent patterns of neighbouring, ranging from perceptions and treatments of neighbours as (imagined) ‘family’ in senior communities to, partially, ‘trailer trash’ in suburban family communities. Going beyond description, I argue that the identified supportive, minimalist, and antagonistic forms of neighbour culture are linked to broader spatial and social structural contexts, as well as personal identities. This chapter’s findings have the potential to strengthen the theoretical framing and research of neighbouring in local and global perspectives in the future.

In 2009, the Liberal government of Ontario released their first “streamlined” poverty reduction strategy to end child poverty in the province. The strategy was renewed in 2014, and an updated strategy was released in 2021 by the Conservative government of Ontario. Based on ongoing research, this chapter explores how these Poverty reduction strategies mobilize a historical conception of low-income urban environments as threats to child development. I show that, rather than end poverty, these conceptions are used to justify community revitalization efforts that displace low-income populations while prioritizing and benefiting private market investment. Central to these strategies is the figure of the child, who is constructed as innocent and vulnerable, requiring protection and saving from the perils of poverty by middle- and upper-class interventions. The chapter concludes by examining the neoliberal logic that continues to inform the 2021 strategy.