The temporal dimensions of territorial stigma: a 35-year analysis of the Bijlmer’s representation in Dutch newspapers using computational methods

The role of media in producing territorial stigma is a central concern for urban researchers. This study investigates how one of the most stigmatised areas in the Netherlands, the Bijlmer, has been portrayed in newspaper media over a period of 35 years, and how this portrayal relates to structural changes in the district. The concepts of core and event stigma are employed to understand the temporal dimensions of stigma production. The corpus includes 22,934 articles from the five largest Dutch newspapers that referenced the Bijlmer since 1990. Hierarchical topic modelling and sentiment analysis are used to detect topical representations of the Bijlmer. The findings indicate that in the 1990s two news peaks regarding the Bijlmer crash have been important in raising its (inter)national status, whereas the Bijlmer has also suffered from core stigmatisation on various crime and social issues. In addition, the findings suggest an intricate relation between structural changes in the Bijlmer and media attention. This study contributes to the literature by demonstrating the relevance of core and event stigma, employing novel techniques in research on territorial stigma, and investigating the relation between structural neighbourhood conditions and media representation.