There's a time and a place: temporal aspects of place-based stigma

This paper provides an overview of current debates and themes in literature relating to place-based stigma, including a reflection on terminology use. Generally, we rely on Loïc Wacquant's framing of territorial stigma as a feature of advanced marginality. In this paper, drawing on my own research in Toxteth, Liverpool, I offer a critique of the Wacquantian approach, highlighting the limits of the advanced marginality framing of place-based stigma. The paper considers the global reach of placed-based stigma and the temporal aspect of stigma that must be taken into consideration when we consider how stigma is currently applied to communities. A key feature of this paper is the foregrounding of the concepts of 'core' and 'event' stigma, which have generally been a feature of literature in business and management. I argue that our understanding of how communities become stigmatized can be enhanced by framing place-based stigma in this temporal sense. Understanding how stigma becomes adhered to particular spaces, places and landscapes is necessary if we want to comprehend how this stigma transfers to the communities inhabiting these geographies. This paper suggests that we must look to the past, and to the voices who shape the past, in order to understand the present and to plan for the future.