Introduction: Infrastructural stigma and urban vulnerability

Abstract

In this introduction to the Special Issue ‘Infrastructural Stigma and Urban Vulnerability’, we outline the need to join up debates on infrastructural exclusion on the one hand and urban stigma on the other. We argue that doing so will allow us to develop a better understanding of the co-constitutive relationship between the material and the symbolic structures of the city shaping urban exclusion and vulnerability. Positing that stigma is not merely a symbolic force but has significant material effects, we show how urban dwellers often experience it in deeply embodied ways, including through impacts on their physical health. Furthermore, stigma is not only imposed on the built environment through discourse, it also emanates from the materiality of the city; this agentic role of the city is often disregarded in sociologically-informed approaches to urban stigma. When infrastructures become sites of contestation about urban inclusion, stigma can be utilised by stigmatised residents to demand connection to public networks, and the wider symbolic inclusion this entails. Through examining the issue of infrastructural stigma in cities and urban territories across the Global North and Global South, as well as the places in between, the nine articles in this Special Issue pay attention to the global relationalities of infrastructural stigma. Ultimately, our focus on the infrastructural origins of stigma draws attention to the structural causes of urban inequality – a reality which is often occluded by both stigma itself and by prevalent academic approaches to understanding it.

LIVING ON THE MARGINS: The Socio‐spatial Representation of Urban Internally Displaced Persons in Ethiopia

“…Social marginality involves injustice and exclusion related to ethnicity, gender, religion, culture and social hierarchy, whereas spatial marginality involves exclusion related to location, distance and segregation (Gatzweiler and Baumüller, 2014 ). These dimensions constantly interact and infl uence one another (Baumann and Yacobi, 2021 ). Central to these forms of marginality is power asymmetry, in which specifi c groups of people, such as IDPs, experience disadvantages (Aru et al ., 2017 ;Gibbons, 2017 ).…”

“…Elderly people mentioned serious health problems (for example, paralysis) related to poor housing and cold weather. The poor housing conditions and related eff ects illustrate how infrastructural neglect advances or justifi es the exclusion of those deemed not to be full urban citizens (Baumann and Yacobi, 2021 ).…”

“…Moreover, a growing strand of urban scholarship builds on the work of Wacquant and highlights the production of stigma, or negative representations and stereotypes, perpetuating and justifying exclusion—for instance, through infrastructural neglect and poor housing (Baumann and Yacobi, 2021; Sisson, 2021). We argue that these insights are crucial for understanding how cities reproduce IDPs’ marginality, although this subject has attracted little scholarly attention in urban studies or forced migration studies.…”

The long shadow of territorial stigma: Upward social mobility and the symbolic baggage of the old neighbourhood

“…Alongside a growing corpus of literature on the historical production and political activation of the stigma of place (Baumann and Yacobi, 2022; Larsen and Delica, 2019; Slater, 2018; Tyler and Slater, 2018), a major strand of empirical research has been concerned with the lived experience of territorial stigmatisation (Garbin and Millington, 2012; Pinkster, 2014; Pinkster et al, 2020; Slater and Anderson, 2012). In recent years, this literature has been expanded by a differentiated picture of how individuals respond to or even oppose neighbourhood representations.…”

Lockdown and the intimate: Entanglements of terror, virus, and militarism

“…Public health and its knowledge mechanisms are not exclusively and neutrally biological as health is the embodied outcome of specific political choices (King, 2017), as well as of wider (and often unequal) infrastructures and socio-technical systems (Baumann and Yacobi, 2022). Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought forcefully to the fore the tight connections between public health and geopolitics (Cole and Dodds, 2021; Diaz and Mountz, 2020), via the virus’ implications for questions of sovereignty at multiple scales (Bialasiewicz and Eckes, 2021), border management (Fall, 2020; Sturm et al, 2021) and global inequalities (Alemanno and Bialasiewicz, 2021; Sparke and Williams, 2022).…”