Drawing on research carried out in the Parisian banlieue of La Courneuve, this article contributes to the sociological analysis of urban marginalisation in post-riot France. Beginning with a discussion of the broad relationship between society and space, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s relational understanding of social space and how these complexities are inscribed in the urban, it moves on to consider how this relates to Lefebvre’s production of space thesis. The main body of the article outlines some of the ways in which territorial stigmatisation is imposed and reproduced. Empirical material is treated here as ‘diagnostic’ of the symbolic domination that blights La Courneuve. Yet this material is also illuminative of the irregular and scattered forms that resistance to territorial stigma takes. It is suggested that the complex relationship between social and physical space is expressed through the construction of symbolic geographies of domination/resistance and negotiated through intricate ‘entanglements of power’.

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Tower Hamlets contains the largest concentration of Bangladeshis in the UK and they have been very successful in campaigning for resources in a borough which has high poverty levels in the north, while to the south it has been radically transformed by global capital and new white middle class "immigrants" employed in the service sector. A debate concerning poverty, social exclusion and the growing incidence of criminality among third generation Bangladeshis was dominated during the 1980s by secularists whose hegemony was challenged during the 1990s by Islamist groups. This struggle between secularist and Islamist leaders is not just a local phenomenon since it is shaped by ideological, political and social ties with Bangladesh and with other Muslim-majority countries. It raises the issue of how leaders seek to represent their "community"--variously defined--in a non-Muslim nation where state institutions (locally and nationally) attempt to co-opt community leaders through multiculturalist strategies. So far, the struggle has not been overshadowed by the kind of urban violence seen in other areas of substantial Bangladeshi population.

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