ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 sums up the historical process of making place and people as a classification struggle among agents and institutions endowed with the power to apply performative discourses. The categorisations imposed on the North West and the emotionalities they elicit change over time as an effect of the symbolic struggles and their sociohistorical conditions of production and circulation. The chapter argues that the territorial stigmatisation is not a static and everlasting stain, but a changing and relational characteristic, dependant on the structure of the socio-geographical space. As words wage war in the struggle for the monopoly of the symbolic power of (legitimate and authorised) naming of the neighbourhood, producing boundaries as well as identities no less than symbolic and material profits of place, the vision of divisions contribute to the sociohistorical making of place and people through processes of definition and justification. However, arguing that the symbolic acts of classification exert very real social effects, the chapter also reminds us that the social mechanisms of this symbolic engine are not the power of words in themselves, nor are the causes of the insecurity growing in the North West to be found inside the neighbourhood, but at the heart of the state.
