ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relationship between place marketing and territorial stigmatisation, arguing that boosterism and spatial defamation often work alongside each other – if sometimes rather uneasily – as part of a city's broader redevelopment efforts. It argues that territorial stigmatisation is an intrinsic feature of urban policy and that it has, in some guise or another, long been implicated in a 'deficit model' approach to urban policy whereby policy officials and academics have been fixated with finding and constructing urban 'problems'. The chapter provides an overview of the Housing Market Renewal (HMR) programme and an analysis of the spatial discourses that were constructed and invoked by those who were involved in the development and implementation of the programme. It concludes by offering some suggestions for how academics might take greater responsibility for challenging territorial stigma in their own research and teaching.
