The Structural Origins of Territorial Stigma: Water and Racial Politics in Metropolitan Detroit, 1950s–2010s

Abstract

This article develops the concept of territorial stigma by analyzing how it can be cultivated at the level of political institutions across administrative divides. I consider the case of Detroit's regional water department, which until 2016 was owned and operated by the city and served over 120 suburban regional municipalities. I start by examining the cooperative city–suburban water system expansion in the 1950s and then analyze the rise of Detroit's first black‐led administration in 1974, after which the water authority became a key regional institution that provided an opportunity for white suburban leaders to organize against the city. I find that suburban leaders advanced their immediate goal of mitigating rate hikes by declaring the city to be greedy and inept, instead of acknowledging structural conditions that increased operational costs. This had the effect of reproducing racialized stereotypes at the political level, which had enduring effects. The argument builds on the existing literature on territorial stigma by (1) identifying state institutions as sites for the propagation of stigma and (2) considering stigmatized places in relation to their non‐stigmatized neighbors. The analysis integrates material‐structural and cultural‐symbolic factors in order to understand the perpetuation of regional urban inequalities.

When Democracy Disappears: Emergency Management in Benton Harbor

“…The process of "territorial stigma," which Kornberg (2016) has fruitfully applied to the municipal level in a study of Detroit, has relational effects, as is true for the construction of racial hierarchies more generally. Not only does stigmatizing a black neighborhood or city as undeserving, undesirable, or threatening justify the deprivation of resources from that area, the process of stigmatization reciprocally frames white spaces and white governance as deserving and desirable, to the degree they are seen at all.…”

Territorial Stigmatization and Territorial Destigmatization: A Cultural Sociology of Symbolic Strategy in the Gentrification of Parkdale (Toronto)

“…Today, ‘multisided political manipulation of territorial taint … supplies the symbolic springboard for and political target of state‐led gentrification’ (Wacquant et al ., : 1278‐79). Recent refinements of the concept elaborate this explicitly political production of territorial stigma (Cohen, ; Kornberg, ), demonstrating how territorial stigmatization provides a political pretext for justifying gentrification‐led displacement (Kallin and Slater, ; Sakizlioglu and Uitermark, ). Here, territorial stigmatization is an effect of spatial sequestration emboldened by the dovetailing of state‐facilitated material deprivation and gentrification.…”

What does it mean when people call a place a shithole? Understanding a discourse of denigration in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland

“…In line with Slater's categorisation of the literature according to four themes (), we also note two distinct focuses that divide the literature. The first includes work that focuses on the role of the powerful producers and users of stigma, including the state, policy and media whose dominant voices construct stigmatised locations (see Devereux, Haynes, & Power, , ; Gray & Mooney, ; Kallin & Slater, ; Kornberg, ; Schultz Larsen, ; Wacquant, , , , ). The second strand of literature has a primary focus on the lived experience of residence in a stigmatised location (see Gourlay, ; Holt & Wilkins, ; Keene & Padilla, ; Morris, ; Rhodes, ; Slater & Anderson, ).…”