Territorial stigmatisation, gentrification and class struggle

This chapter presents an interview with Tom Slater about territorial stigmatisation, gentrification and class struggle. A raft of studies has revealed that state agents fashion and fasten territorial disrepute onto neighbourhoods and then invoke that very disrepute to justify gentrification strategies of varying intensities. Geographers have actually been rather slow to embrace territorial stigmatisation as a concept, probably because they would prefer to start by thinking through what is actually meant by 'territorial', and because it's impossible to be a geographer without considering questions of scale. By contrast, sociologists, who have done the vast majority of work on territorial stigmatisation, prefer to think through what is meant by 'stigmatisation', and tend to use 'territory' as a synonym for whatever scale at which the stigmatisation is happening. Tom Slater's conceptualisation of territorial stigmatisation is therefore a crucial point of departure for empirical research.