The creation of a “troubled neighborhood”: Media discourses, political interventions, policing and interactive definitions of situations

Abstract

Based on qualitative ethnographic research and following a symbolic-interactionist perspective, this paper examines both the relational process in which negative images of neighborhoods and police interventions reinforce each other and the way this affects the everyday life of residents. Focussing on Altendorf, a district treated as a disadvantaged area by the city government of Essen for decades, we show how images of “dangerous” or “troubled” neighborhoods are (re-)produced through interactions between media reporting, police interventions and situational interpretations by individual actors. These interactions create amplifying circuits that foster further, mostly restrictive policing and legitimize urban policy interventions. Such policies, however, do not only permanently reproduce the “territorial stigmatization” (Wacquant) of a district and its inhabitants but also evoke competing definitions of situations, perceptions of problems and counter-narratives, which then are selectively perceived and evaluated by the public. Yet, as they interpret situations unfolding in the district, residents draw on quite different discourses and experiences. As is shown, perspectives that contradict the dominant “troubled-area-discourse”, e.g. by mentioning repressive policing and racist controls or by explicitly rejecting Altendorf’s image as a “dangerous” area, remain mostly marginalized in the public discourse.