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How are we to understand the spread of the notion of capacity building in neighbourhood regeneration and policies to fight social exclusion? In this article, capacity building is understood as central to the mode of contemporary governance and the strategies of 'the third way' in England and Denmark. The article explores the concept of community capacity building and its relations to social capital. It argues that the Foucaultian concept of 'management of possibilities' is a useful 'grid of intelligibility' for a mode of government that works by constructing particular subjectivities of inclusion. It argues further that Bourdieu's notion of 'habitus' enables analysis of how processes of capacity building are embodied and how the capacity building approach is legitimized. Using local experiences of neighbourhood regeneration, it discusses how community capacity building depends on particular forms of social capital and involves the naturalization of particular capacities. The advantage of this perspective lies in disclosing how inclusion becomes dependent on acquiring a particular curriculum of capacities relating to the area and its inhabitants.

AbstractThe 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.

The purpose of this article is to explore how practices of translation shape particular paths of inclusion for people living in marginalized residential areas in Denmark. Inclusion, we argue, is not an end-state but rather something that must be constantly performed. Active citizenship, today, is not merely a question of participation but also learning to become active in all spheres of life. The article draws on empirical examples from a multisite fieldwork in six different sites of local community work in Denmark, to demonstrate how different dimensions of translation are involved in shaping active citizenship. We propose the following different dimensions of translation: translating authority, translating language, and translating social problems. The article takes its theoretical point of departure from assemblage urbanism, arguing that cities are heterogeneous assemblages of sociomaterial interactions. Through the practices of translation, local community work both transforms the possibilities for residents and disrupts the compositions of urban assemblages. Through this, we argue, local community work creates new opportunities for residents.