Mellem murene og kroppen: urban marginalisering gennem stigma, fragmentering og sundhedsulighed

This article explores how elderly residents with multiple chronic conditions experience and cope with urban marginalization in a Danish public housing estate. Drawing on 24 months of qualitative fieldwork in the VORES project, the analysis combines vignettes from participant observation, interviews and co-created activities with theoretical perspectives on urban marginalization and inequality in health. Findings demonstrate how intersections of urban marginalization and health inequality are structured and produced across three interwoven levels: materially, through neglected housing conditions and long-term delays in renovations; socially, through fragmentation, symbolic splintering and lateral denigration; and politically, through reforms and reclassifications that underprioritize elderly residents’ needs in favor of “investable” groups. These dynamics illustrate the ambivalences captured by policy schizophrenia and the symbolic violence of territorial stigma, but also how embodied experiences of illness and neglect may generate health capital and local solidarities within social and material spaces of community-based participatory research. The article contributes to understanding how place, stigma and inequality in health intersect in welfare-state contexts