ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the city Zwickau in Germany as a subject of mediated stigmatisation and develops a critical understanding for ways of dealing with right-wing terrorism and extremism through local identities, following psychoanalytic theories. Assuming that imaginary politics usually seek to draw very clear, simple and memorable portraits of the city, the chapter focuses on the details of the city's image. According to imaginary politics, it is a distortion that reveals the problem of territorial stigmatization. The concept of territorial stigmatisation is associated with Loic Wacquant who presents one of the most influential frameworks to combine spatial and sociological perspectives on stigmatisation. Following a topological view of the city, local politics – as long as it seeks to draw a unique and distinctive portrait of the city – will never find image-building objects to finally 'fulfill' its own task without running into possible objects of stigmatisation.
