U

rbanism Without Guarantees is based on a three-year ethnography of everyday life on three and a half blocks in Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen NYC—a rich and vibrant space once a testing ground for policies to manage urban crisis and subsequently a hotbed of struggles over gentrification. On the first page we meet Bob. A housing organizer since the 1970s, the collectives that Bob coalesced once worked to stem the tide of abandonment and now fight for the right to stay put. Bob challenged Anderson to do what Stuart Hall called “practical theorizing.” Anderson’s microactions consolidate theoretically in the form of new thinking around diverse economies and theories of the urban. The book is divided into two halves, one more theoretical, and the other that leans more heavily into his rich and ground-breaking ethnographic work, although both aspects appear in all chapters. We touch on key contributions throughout.

While much urban political economy is now typically explained via David Harvey’s ideas about capital accumulation and Neil Smith’s theories of revanchism and rent gaps, Anderson does something exciting and new even in his first chapter: pointing out how much the work of the “big boys” of urban theory (Smith and Harvey, as well as Henri Lefebvre and others) opens up our thinking as much as it forecloses. He innovates by drawing on Kojin Karatani’s (2003) concept of transcritique in writing: “Namely, what vanishes is the presence and specter of more-than-capitalist forms” that “may be bound up with hegemonic value and other formations, are not ultimately reducible to them” (15). Rather than frame civic actions and dominant forms of political economy “in binary terms, striving to be definitive, or centering resolution or closure” (16), Anderson begins his text by making room for a “parallax conceptualization” of how culture, affect, creativity, potentiality, value, and social reproduction can infuse urban space and urban life in ways that are not—as many accounts of urban political economy imply—always already or necessarily capitalist (or pre-capitalist) (16). 

Perhaps the one significant weakness of the book is to give more credence to some of the big boys that he critiques (especially Lefebvre) rather than touting his own contributions. Anderson takes us to Lefebvre in Chapter 2, “Unsettling the Urban Question,” but not the Lefevbre of the “Big Boys” but rather—and with our collective appreciation—the Lefevbre who holds out “out an intense, nondogmatically radical hope that [the very real formations of dominance, structural inequality, and social violence, capitalist and otherwise] could be undone through organizing and struggle on the terrain of people’s already existing ordinary activities and creative abilities in the context of latent cooperative potentials.” Perhaps Lefebvre’s Urban Revolution (2003) was written to “describe, contribute to, and advance… proces[es] of amplification and spatial-social transformation” (33), and as an 
‍

"incitement to critique, refuse, and rework existing relationships among everyday life, subjectivity formation and ideology, production and reproduction, creative praxis and value in urban space and time, toward the virtual horizon of a transformed humanity (36)."

We read this claim as Anderson’s own formation more than anything Lefebvre pulls off, which makes the book essential reading for anyone interested in these questions and debates.

In examining the contingent qualities of civic actions, Anderson then theorizes “indeterminate spatial labor and use value” through two West 46th Street characters. He tells us about Watty who lives in an affordable limited-equity cooperative, volunteers as a tenant organizer, and has for decades been engaged in the life of these few blocks. In comparison, Sara is a newcomer, a professional who bought a $1.5 million condo and jumped into neighborhood affairs. They appear differently invested: any work they do that leads to an increase in property values helps Sara but not Watty, as his home is equity limited. Yet they seem to converge on what betterment looks like. Watty picks up broken bottles; Sara gets streetlights installed. Anderson theorizes their work as “indeterminate spatial labor”—labor that improves urban space and creates possibilities for different value formations. What the “big boys” of urban theory ignore, Anderson notes, channeling Lefebvre’s attunement to the complexities of everyday life, is a sphere of neighborhood-level activity which contributes to the production of space  in ways that are messy, often more-than-capitalist, and closely bound up with the rhythms of everyday life. 

In “The Hitch, or Performative Infrastructures” (Chapter 4), Anderson highlights tensions between, on one hand, the improvisations carried out in this sphere of everyday activity and, on the other, the mechanisms through which activities that are more-than-capitalist and even resistant may be  “stunted, squashed, and structured in dominance” (88). The author makes this argument by weaving his thick ethnography through the work of Hall’s (1983) “Marxism without Guarantees,” AbdouMaliq Simone’s (2004) theorization of “people as infrastructure,” Lauren Berlant’s (2016) theories of intimacy and infrastructure, and Sylvia Wynter’s (2003) work on knowledge, narrative, and human(e) futures. In doing so, he shows not only how urban practices-as-infrastructures open up contingencies and opportunities for collective life, resilience, and resistance, but also often fall into patterns that reproduce ossified structures of social life and value relations. 

Anderson’s final chapters show readers that the residents in the study are neither motivated by a sense of investment growth nor by revenge against people that might undermine investment growth. Rather, they are motivated by everyday use and experience of place: a sense of home, neighborhood, community, city. This is significantly different than desiring revanchist urbanism. Precarity in genre, of everyday routine, and of one’s sense of place (rather than precarity in the financial sense), except in the renegade moments, too often leads to actions which align with the needs of exchange value. He ends by asserting these spatial practices aren’t inevitable, immutable or incongruent with other spatial/social tactics understood as more radical. But there remains a deep sense of inertia here concerning patterns and affects embedded in place and needing to be dislodged. 

Anderson’s book doesn’t focus explicitly on race, gender, sexuality, or disability, but he does write that his “arguments would not be thinkable without postcolonial, decolonial, Black, feminist, and other ‘gaze from below’ perspectives” (xxix, citing Wynter and McKittrick 2015, 11, 22, 42). While sort of “baked in” approach may be true—and I am glad for Anderson’s pushing up against the “big boys” of urban theory (Katz 2017) and their incongruities—I wish the book would have returned with even one chapter to reveal the Black, Indigenous, and queer frameworks that made his analysis possible. Anderson prioritized not explicitly making his book about Black, brown, Indigenous, and queer bodies—which I agree with—but I’d really love to see him contend with such Katzian “minor theory” in future endeavors. That said, I read Urbanism without Guarantees, particularly in its theories of social reproduction, as an explicitly feminist text which is a relief and delight given many of the theorists he contends with.

Following Berlant, Anderson wants the reader to see an emergent futurity in living urban life without guarantees. He wants us to respond to damaged lives and spaces not with a sense that there’s a right genre of action (or Berlant’s “straight face”)—and at least not thinking we have pre-furnished answers via existing “normative” behaviors, actions, and practices. In Urbanism without Guarantees, there is a different and queer genre of life worth living without knowing its outcome.

‍

References

Berlant, L. 2016. “The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34:393–419.

Hall, S. 1983. “For a Marxism without Guarantees.” Australian Left Review 1:38–43.

Lefebvre, H. 2003. The Urban Revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 

Karatani, K. 2003. Transcritique: On Kant and Marx. Translated by S. Kohso. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 

Katz, C. 2017. “Revisiting Minor Theory.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 35:596–99.

Simone, A. 2004. “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg.” Public Culture 16:407–29.

Wynter, S. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3:257–337.

Wynter, S., and K. McKittrick. 2015. “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? or, To Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations.” In Being Human as Praxis, edited by K. McKittrick, 9–89. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Jack Jen Gieseking is a cultural geographer and environmental psychologist and member of the Public Science Project, CUNY Graduate Center. His is author of A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers (NYU Press, 2020).