Doing and undoing communities: Opposing municipal narratives and spatial politics in a diverse neighbourhood of Budapest

This chapter provides an analysis of governing an urban area historically characterized by high levels of ethnic, racial, religious, and social diversity and related urban marginality, yet stigmatized as an ethnic "ghetto" by mainstream society for several decades. We applied Wacquant's conceptual framework "ghetto" and "anti-ghetto" as a relational, theoretical, and historicized concept to explore the interconnected mechanism of invisibilization and racialization of different local groups. In the chapter we analyse how a socially and ethnically diverse neighbourhood had been constructed as a "ghetto" and how different municipalities contested or endorsed the criminal and racial stigma attached to the place. To do so, we connect Waquantian concepts with Cohen's notion of moral panic to reveal key elements in the construction of the imaginary of unwanted populations and how these are adapted to the political needs of the governing actors.