Participatory Urban Art and Workplace Democracy: A Conversational Teaser

Consider the following: the neighbourhood where you live is derided in the public debate. Newspapers write about violent incidents occurring in the area, its grey architecture, and the tight living conditions of many of your neighbours. They ignore writing about the neighbourhood’s varied and rich cultural traditions, the ambitious youth, and the active associational life. The negative image of your neighbourhood builds on selected facts. And although you do not recognise your neighbourhood in the dominant image of it, although you know there is more talent and capacity in the neighbourhood than what the general gaze seems to acknowledge, you see that decisions concerning the area are based on that limited, and limiting, knowledge—limited because it excludes residents’ knowledge of their place; limiting because, through the decisions dominant actors make concerning the neighbourhood, dominant knowledge shapes the lives and future of the people living in it. The limited gaze so limits residents’ life possibilities that, for fear of dismissive reactions, you do not include your home address in your CV, nor do you say where you live at party introductions. This is what sociologist Loïc Wacquant (2007) calls “territorial stigmatisation”: the tainted collective and dominant representation fastened on a particular place. Territorial stigma not only conveys negative stories of a place and its residents; it often also has adverse consequences on the social and economic possibilities of the people looked upon through the stigmatising gaze. AsWacquant puts it, “whether or not these areas are in fact dilapidated and dangerous, and their population composed essentially of poor people, minorities and foreigners, matters little in the end: the prejudicial belief that they are suffices to set off socially noxious consequences” (68). Acknowledging the effects of a place’s general image on the social dynamics of the place highlights three dimensions of space: first, physical space, the geographical area describable through directional vectors and cartographic coordinates; second, symbolic space, the images and stories associated to a given geography and those who inhabit it and the general representation in the public debate of a place and its residents; and third, social space, the status or social position inscribed in sites and reproduced through stories. As the spatial turn in the social sciences has shown, the