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The purpose of this paper is to explore the relation between territorial stigmatization and community work in Denmark. In the paper, we firstly explore territorial stigmatization, relating it to the Danish context. We show how territorial stigmatization in Denmark happens via a complex amalgamation of bureaucratic practices which identify particular areas as problematic 'ghettos', and how this leads to top–down interventions upon many local residential areas, including local community work. Following this, we draw on participant observations in practices of local community work, and interviews with local community workers, to explore how they practically negotiate these particular political constructions of their work. We argue that local community workers come to take on interstitial roles—that is, they come to be in-between the state and authorities and the local communities themselves. This complex double role is what we call an interstitial position, meant to signify how Danish local community workers are both part of territorial stigmatization and simultaneously trying to escape from and undo this very role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Territorial capital is more than economy, business and socioeconomic status of residents. It is also the way residents of localities form social networks and how these are intertwined with the local political, institutional and administrative configurations. Sampson (2011) argues that while social networks foster the conditions under which collective efficacy may flourish, they are not sufficient for the exercise of social cohesion and social control. Networks have to be activated to be meaningful. Interaction is embedded in local traditions and social order is produced locally. Analysing interviews from a rural location in Denmark, we examine how referential features of group life (spatial areas, relations, shared pasts) generate action. We develop the concept of 'governance efficacy' to denote the capacity to mobilise collective efficacy in relation to territorial development. We argue that such a concept is an important element in explaining why and how a peripheral location is able to manage social challenges despite population decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is about how to understand community action and development of the commons can play a key role in societal integrative processes in increasingly segregated Scandinavian societies. More specifically it relates to the residents' integration of sixteen young adults with intellectual disabilities in Hjortshøj, what we might call a Danish intentional community. What might be learned from the example of Hjortshøj is, that it is not the segregation of residents in an ecological village, which alone accounts for the success of the experiment, nor is it solely due to the altruistic orientations of the existing residents. Rather, the integration process is dependent on inter-related affective practices of belonging, relating to the dimensions of local attachment, a common good, and normalization. Thus, integration is dependent on complex forms of relationality and how these affective practices form an affective subject characterized by emergence, flexibility, and diversity. By applying a conceptualization of Hjortshøj as a learning machine, the article provides insights to the complex assemblage of materiality, spatiality, and relationality in the local community of Hjortshøj, underlining how communities become machines for learning acts of citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]