Housing and stigma

This chapter examines the evolution of thinking about stigma in the social sciences and its application to research on dwellings, housing tenures and neighbourhoods. It opens by discussing the work of the most influential writer on this issue, Erving Goffman, whose 1963 book Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity remains enormously influential on conceptualizations of stigma in the sociological literature. Developments, critiques and applications of Goffman’s work to the field of housing are then examined with a particular focus on Loïc Wacquant’s influential work on ‘territorial stigmatization’ of poor and minority urban neighbourhoods in France and the US. This is followed by a review of the evidence on the forms, causes and implications of housing and neighbourhood-related stigmatization and of individual and community responses to this stigma. The closing part of the chapter focuses on social housing as a site of stigma and on government and social landlord’s efforts to combat the stigmatization of social housing neighbourhoods.