Referring to the gap in research on the production of territorial stigmatisation (see Chapter 1), in this chapter I build an account of how social rental housing within the Finnish regime of housing provision has been rendered a tenure for the marginalised, become shorthand for social problems and finally contributed to the creation and maintenance of a blemish of place for the tenants of social housing neighbourhoods. I do this from a historical explanatory perspective, unearthing how and why the notion of “special groups” in state housing policy was adopted. Although I briefly illustrate how stigma works on a neighbourhood level at the end of the chapter, I am not focused here on its direct, experienced effects on the populations of the defamed and neglected neighbourhoods. To truly understand the symbolic contamination of urban areas, we must exit those areas and scrutinise the role of state and market institutions and actors in their production and reproduction (Larsen 2014).

Historical periods of housing policy

Nordic housing scholars have distinguished different historical periods of housing policy to help make sense of its development. Anneli Juntto's (1990) history of Finnish housing policy runs from 1858 to 1988 and she divides it into three periods. The first period she calls philanthropy (1850–1918), an era marked by subsistence agriculture and low housing standards in the rural areas, and the important role of employers in providing housing for labour in the cities. Juntto calls the second period in her analysis functionalism (1919–39), a time when Finnish architecture was renowned, when the ideals of the modern home developed and when private developers assumed a big role in urban housing markets.