Spatial aspect of social exclusion and its interpretation on the level of everyday political practice.
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| Year of publication | 2010 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Citation | |
| Description | Drawing on results of a qualitative study conducted in twelve Czech cities, we discuss how the so called “problematic localities” are represented within the narratives of local politicians and administrative workers. We analyse the ways in which are these localities categorized, and how these categorizations are used to legitimise the specific treatments of these places and their inhabitants. The city governance and administration is considered a part of a modern tradition of urban planning and city management, which is analysed in the first part of our study. The second empirical part of our text presents how the essentialist “common sense“ ethnicised attributes are activated and applied to the localities and their inhabitants in the nar-ratives of politicians and administrative workers. These attributes are associated with the im-age of impurity that leads to the need of surveillance, disciplination or purification. The ex-treme form of purification is represented by the displacement of the inhabitants and by the demolition of “contaminated” places. In analysing these narrative practices, we suggest that the borders of entitlement and the borders of responsibility are constructed. The borders of entitlement define who deserves the care provided by a state or a city; the borders of respon-sibility then delimit a symbolic space, in which a state or a city is perceived, by their represen-tatives, as being responsible for the situation of their inhabitants and citizens. Within the process of border formation, a crucial role is played by 1) the application of ethnicised catego-ries and inconsistent definitions of the objects of municipal and state care, as well as by 2) the forms of ownership of the housing stocks, where these objects, ergo people, live. |
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