Territorial stigmatisation beyond the city: Habitus, affordances and landscapes of industrial ruination

Abstract

Loїc Wacquant's concept of territorial stigmatisation has resonated widely across the social sciences and is increasingly called upon in analyses and critiques of contemporary modes of governing marginality. It forms a key part of his broader theorisation of the polarised city and urban scholars have responded to his call for comparative analyses of neoliberal state-crafting in applying it to other urban contexts. This paper focuses on non-urban deindustrialised and peripheral spaces in discussing the ways in which the shifting interdependencies, differing historical trajectories, geographies (including terrain), and social relations of such spaces mark them out as outliers within, but not necessarily incompatible with, Wacquant's schema. It focuses on the former coalfield communities of the Welsh Valleys in the UK as one such example of a peripheral, deindustrialised ‘area of relegation’ distinct from urban locales. We bring together a rich body of UK scholarship that articulates the coalfields as ‘laboratories of deindustrialisation’ with Wacquant's framework. In doing so, we offer a critique of Wacquant's integration of social, physical and symbolic space. We argue that terrain and landscape are weakly incorporated within Wacquant's theorising, and those influenced by his writings, and discuss the potential of the theory of affordances as a useful complement in more fully integrating physical space in accounts of territorial stigmatisation.