U
rbanism without Guarantees is a most welcome invitation to engage the tensions between good sense and common sense that we encounter in our own lives and those of our fellow inhabitants. In a book that adapts the title of an influential article (“Marxism without Guarantees”) written by the most famous English-language Gramscian, Stuart Hall, Christian Anderson works with these Gramscian terms on his daily rounds in New York City’s Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen district. Discussing everyday routines and aspirations with informants, a diversity of local inhabitants, Anderson makes it clear that the distinction between good and common sense is not sharp but porous and malleable. In fact, what emerges in chapters 6 and 7 of the book (where these conversations are analysed in concentrated form) is that in these parts of the world, good and common sense are articulated so as to generate a particularly thick form of hegemony, where one or the other conformism – an undigested fragment borrowed from supply-side economics, a capitalist-colonial nugget on economic improvement, or a trope taken from a dusty manual of broken-windows policing – surrounds and neutralizes the irruptions generated by flashes of critical consciousness shortly after these make an appearance in everyday conversations (see for example pages 196 and 197).
In these crucial sections of the book, Anderson’s analyses yield an image of hegemony as a rubbery substance elastic enough to prevent brittle parts from breaking and stop fissures from pulling apart the integrity of the material (with which the political order is built). Of course, Anderson is fundamentally right to underline that hegemony is always unfinished, always uncertain. In reflections informed by Judith Butler, among others, Anderson does so by paying particular attention to the lines of social precarity that connect production and reproduction at the level of everyday life. But the ethnographic evidence Anderson marshals tells us that while crises of social reproduction (which are even more evident today than they were when the book was published, in 2020) help us understand the shifting sands that make hegemonic practices necessary in the first place, these crises do not automatically lead to political crises (let alone organic crises of rule). In fact, Anderson concludes that the very sense of precarity that informs inhabitants’ desire “for maintenance and repair” can convince them to “fall back on consolidated means of getting their needs met rather than experimenting with non-repair, rupture and new modes of existence, because all of that seems too risky and messy” (p. 212). With the help of a witty turn of phrase, we thus learn that “precarious hegemony” can itself be a “drag” on (subaltern or oppositional) hegemonic projects of transformation (ibid.).
Urbanism Without Guarantees offers the important methodological insight that the strands of good and common sense one encounters in daily exchanges may in fact be borrowed from ‘performative infrastructures’, the patterns of daily practices and ideas through which various historical situations become layered and sedimented over time, offering a thick repertoire from which inhabitants can draw spontaneously when confronted with the need to intervene in the here and now (pp. 84-90). Anderson redeploys Lauren Berlant’s insights – and the parallel idea of ‘people as infrastructure’ developed by AbdouMaliq Simone –to analyze spatial practices and imaginaries condensed at the neighbourhood scale. Anderson suggests that these practices represent not only potential sources for a different, emancipatory common future. They may also be understood as collective ways of subtending the existing social order politically. Anderson develops this insight by following the routines of local inhabitants and analyzing their ‘horizontal’ social interactions and observations over protracted periods of time, in the apartments, parks, streets or meeting halls of this part of the West Side of Manhattan.
Urbanism pays less attention to the ‘vertical‘ aspects of daily interactions, that is, the ways in which inhabitants relate to each other also as a function of how they are positioned within class-based, gendered and racialized relations of subordination – exploitation, oppression, domination – both within and beyond the neighbourhood scale. In Urbanism Without Guarantees, we do learn about socially differentiated personal contexts – inhabitants’ family background, household forms, paid jobs, housing tenure, and political history. But these contexts are not analysed systematically, nor are they connected to an analysis of the relations of political forces permeating the neighbourhood. For example, the readers do not learn much about the broader political and socio-economic significance of two institutions that feature centrally in the study but cannot be understood merely in their local contexts: Block Associations and Housing Coops. As a result, readers are left with an incomplete sense of the relations of rule within which daily interactions are embedded – and through which bourgeois hegemony may be generated or countered. I am raising this point not to critique Urbanism Without Guarantees for what it did not set out to do but as a suggestion (to anyone) to build on Anderson’s insights by asking a question that inevitably follows from Urbanism, at least in my Gramscian estimation: what is the relationship between localized performative infrastructures (and the articulations of common and good sense they engender) and wider relations of state/civil society, from New York City to Imperial U.S.A. by way of the tri-state area? How would one extend Anderson’s ethnographic method to develop answers to this question?
There is a second reason to ask these follow-up questions: Anderson’s own ambition to do what the book criticizes others for having failed to do: attend to the mediations that exist between the complex messiness of daily life and the (no less complex) general tendencies of capitalist development and their manifold human and non-human conditions of existence (p. 19). Anderson rightly highlights the difficulty of arriving at a nuanced sense of how life is reproduced from a capitalo-centric approach to studying the metamorphoses of capital (although one should say that David Harvey’s version of Marxist geography, which is being scrutinized in these parts of the book, did come a considerable distance in this regard if Harvey’s own book on Haussmann’s Paris is any indication). However, the same difficulties of articulating different levels of analysis exist if one decides to take the opposite path, the one proposed by J.K. Gibson-Graham and Kōjin Karatani, who inspired Anderson with their work on local economies (pp. xxiv-xxxi; 16-20). It is not easy at all to arrive at conclusions about capitalist political economies and their alternatives in and through an analysis of micro-level economic and social practices (on Karatani in this regard, see Goonewardena, 2016). A great merit of Urbanism Without Guarantees is to have demonstrated in a political register that drawing lessons from localized social interaction is both fruitful and challenging, that is, without guarantees. To unearth the promises – indeed, the dangers - that inhere in micro-practices of (re)production and exchange forces one to unravel the many ways in which daily routines and aspirations are entangled, stretched, and recast through and across broader relations, contradictions and processes. In other words, the journey between concrete and abstract (and back) can follow various paths, go in multiple directions and has no fixed schedule. But it must be taken.
Understanding the world as a highly mediated reality also matters in light of the overarching theme broached by Anderson: the relationship between use-value and exchange-value in the gentrification process. Anderson positions Urbanism as an alternative to Neil Smith’s rent gap theory, which famously recast Harvey’s Marxist geography to propose that we study gentrification as a ‘supply-side’ process above all driven by capital investment. Anderson argues that an investigation of inhabitant’s use value claims offer what Smith cannot because he is one-sidedly focused on exchange value, assumes that the circulation of capital is a seamless process, and proposes that real-estate investments will be both forthcoming and successful in closing rent gaps (pp. 9-14). All too sweeping, this critique misses a crucial point. Harvey’s version of Marxist geography is oriented to identifying not the completion but the Limits to Capital. In a different language, at a different level and with distinct purposes, Anderson’s Urbanism does what others have also done: pinpoint the use-value side of capital as one of its achilles heels. Seen in this light, Urbanism is less hostile to its theoretical antagonists than it appears. After all, the inevitable and immanent contradiction between use-value and exchange value in commodity production, the reproduction of labour power, and the reduction of land to real-estate, is also a fundamental starting point of many crisis theories in the Marxian tradition. Harvey’s and Smith’s particular take on the matter has been to suggest that the emergence of investment flows searching for rent gaps is rendered possible precisely because the reproduction of capital cannot be seamless as it is prone to tendencies of overaccumulation. Of course, read only at an abstract level, neither Harvey’s Limits of Capital nor Smith’s Uneven Development can tell us what exact form these crises will take, whether they will be resolved temporarily and what role land rent will play in generating or displacing them.
Answering these questions requires investigation at lower levels of abstraction, in relation to particular periods or specific historico-geographical situations (like mid-town Manhattan today). In this regard, it is true (and I signal partial agreement with Anderson here) that capitalo-centric approaches risk deductive or functional(ist) overshoot when moving across levels of abstraction. But Smith’s own work on gentrification and research that has pushed beyond its limitations offer crucial insights into ways of studying real estate investment flows empirically, in relationship to other ‘supply -side’ forces (state intervention, say), social movements struggles, and ‘demand-side’ dimensions (the practices of gentrifiers, residential or commercial) (Clerval, 2012; Lees, Shin, López-Morales, 2016; Van Gent and Boterman, 2018; Kern, 2022). Not engaging these debates, Anderson does not give us a definite answer about the relative weight West Side inhabitants have had in gentrification except to indicate that they remain part of a precariously hegemonic process of urban transformation (which may still include dreams and aspirations powerful enough to permit conversations about the benefits of a future “use-value society” (Hermann, 2021)). This important insight deserves to be re-connected to existing strands of gentrification research. Among these, studies that were too quickly positioned at the time against Smith’s approach even though they can be seen to complement it, showing that gentrifiers’ desires may help shape the gentrification process because, not despite their seeming, self-declared emancipatory dimensions (Caulfield, 1989). Why? They may deliver what the suppliers of capital cannot produce and must appropriate to succeed: the use-value side of the commodity called gentrified living, or, to put it in terms that exceed gentrification research, the process of commodifying the urban itself (Kipfer, Schmid, Goonewardena, Milgrom 2008, 293-294). Appropriating use values for purposes of commodifying land and urban life is not guaranteed to happen successfully. As Anderson’s study shows, neither is the opposite: translating use-value claims into lasting (re-)productive alternatives, projects of decommodification and strategies of opposition.
References
Caulfield, Jon (1989) “Gentrification and Desire” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 26: 617-632.
Clerval, Anne (2012) Paris sans le peuple (Paris : La Découverte)
Goonewardena, Kanishka (2016) “Theory and Politics in Karatani Kōjin’s The Structure of World History” Journal of Japanese Philosophy 4: 77-105.
Hermann, Christoph (2021) The Critique of Commodification (New York City: Oxford)
Kern, Leslie (2022) Gentrification is Inevitable and Other Lies (Toronto: Between The Lines)
Kipfer, Stefan, Christian Schmid, Kanishka Goonewardena, Richard Milgrom (2008) „Globalizing Lefebvre?“ in Goonewardena, Kipfer, Milgrom, Schmid eds. Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre (New York: Routledge) 285-305.
Lees, Loretta, Hyun Bang Shin, Ernesto López-Morales (2016) Planetary Gentrification (Cambridge: Polity)
Van Gent, Wouter and Willem Boterman (2018) “Gentrification of the Changing State.” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 110.1: 35-46
Stefan Kipfer is Professor on the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University, Toronto. He is the author of Urban Revolutions: Urbanisation and (Neo-)Colonialism in Transatlantic Context (Haymarket Books, 2023)
