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

Abstract

Ghetto area’ has become an official categorisation in Danish housing policy. This article investigates how this stigmatising spatialisation of politics and policy has emerged through evolving storylines for particular housing estates, which gradually have come to structure political debate and become institutionalised in official policy. While political actors can draw on different storylines, it is argued that a range of storylines and associated quantifiable criteria combine to produce a generic ‘ghetto place’ in Danish politics. This scale-framing and objectification have enabled a politics of the exception, making it possible to apply extraordinary measures to particular places. This has significant effects for inhabitants in these places and the cities in which they are located, and it is proposed that, in the longer term, the politics of the exception could also become a battering ram against the collectively owned non-profit housing sector in Denmark.