DENIGRATING BY NUMBERS: Quantification, Statistics and Territorial Stigma

Abstract

A vibrant literature on territorial stigma has emerged over the past decade, detailing how particular neighbourhoods or districts have been discursively constructed as dangerous, depraved, deprived, dilapidated, and so on. Amidst this focus on the discursive, the role of numbers has been largely overlooked. In this article I argue that quantitative practices and statistical representations are central to the production of territory and to territorial stigmatization. I demonstrate how problem territories are produced through quantitative practices that reproduce forms of denigration and how statistical representations obfuscate the culpability of markets and the state and legitimize unjust interventions. I elaborate these arguments via three recent examples from public housing policy, governance and discourse in Sydney. Statistics have been deployed to portray tenants as undeserving of either the real estate they inhabit or any assistance whatsoever, and estates as pathological territories that cause disadvantage. Such representations have obscured how neoliberalization has caused such so-called problems, and have thus legitimated privatization, displacement and a punitive policy turn. I call for greater attention to the role of quantification and statistics among scholars of stigma--not only through deconstruction and critique, but also through strategic deployment in aid of struggles against stigma.

Understanding the drivers and outcomes of public housing tenant relocation

“…Public housing estates in Australian have been portrayed as 'sites of disorder and crime' (Arthurson 2011), which has shaped a representation of those who live there. This has been part of larger debates around social mix, concentration of disadvantage, and the stigma of social housing (Arthurson 2011;MacDonald 2017;Sisson 2021). Media representations can be varied, including print media, television news broadcasts, and fictional portrayals of those living in public housing (Arthurson 2011;MacDonald 2017;Sisson 2021).…”

Territorial stigmatization and housing commodification under racial neoliberalism: The case of Denmark's ‘ghettos’

“…This list included 29 larger non-profit housing areas that met at least two of three criteria regarding ethnicity, employment or educational enrolment, and crime (Regeringen, 2010). The ‘ghetto’ discourse, then, was supplemented with quantifiable criteria and geographic demarcations – a political move that exemplifies how territorial stigmatization might be produced not only through language but also through ‘objective’ statistical and geospatial data (Crookes, 2017; Sisson, 2021; Uitermark et al, 2017). The result was a ‘scientification’ or, what Schultz Larsen (2018: 1144) calls, ‘an extensive bureaucratization of territorial stigmatization’ that helped empower the government to bring the ‘ghetto’ into being (see also Birk and Elmholdt, 2020; Fallov and Birk, 2022).…”

State-led stigmatisation of place and the politics of the exception

“…Policy papers, parliamentary debates and laws are our primary sources, and relating to emerging work on statistics in the production of spatial stigma (e.g. Sisson, 2021; Uitermark et al, 2017), we pay particular attention to the evolving criteria for identifying what were eventually designated as ‘ghetto areas’. Finally, while this article mainly focuses on the production of discursive representations, we discuss how these representations enable a politics of the exception, linking up with a key concern in research on spatial stigmatisation (e.g.…”