IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/envira/v46y2014i6p1281-1296.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Cités Strike Back: Restive Responses to Territorial Taint in the French Banlieues

Author

Listed:
  • Paul Kirkness

    (The Institute of Geography, The University of Edinburgh, Drummond Street, Edinburgh EH8 9XP, Scotland)

Abstract

Territorial stigmatisation in France is produced and enacted through a wide range of agencies: the media, political and policy discourses, academic debates on the alleged ‘ghettoisation’ of French outer city, and the official ‘urban policy’ of the central government. This paper departs from research seeking to analyse the production and diffusion of these disparaging images by focusing on the perspective and reactions of the bearers of the stigma. Drawing on 18 months of field observation in two defamed housing estates in Nîmes, in Southern France, I question the thesis of the wholesale internalisation of negative representations by residents of the banlieues. I propose instead that their perceptions of stigma are deeply ambivalent, as evidenced by their abiding attachment to place. Mindful of the danger of romanticising the subaltern, I argue that many transgressions of the norms of dominant society are ways of deflecting and displacing the language of spatial stigma.

Suggested Citation

  • Paul Kirkness, 2014. "The Cités Strike Back: Restive Responses to Territorial Taint in the French Banlieues," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 46(6), pages 1281-1296, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:envira:v:46:y:2014:i:6:p:1281-1296
    DOI: 10.1068/a45636
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/a45636
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1068/a45636?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Zwiers, Merle & Bolt, Gideon & van Ham, Maarten & van Kempen, Ronald, 2014. "Neighborhood Decline and the Economic Crisis," IZA Discussion Papers 8749, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:envira:v:46:y:2014:i:6:p:1281-1296. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.