F
oremost, emphatic thanks and gratitude—to Myfanwy, Stefan, and Jack for your exceedingly thoughtful and generous commentaries, and Jack for organizing and coordinating; and to readers engaging this exchange, if not the book under discussion. After countless imaginary conversations had while writing the book, to now be in tangible correspondence is deeply gratifying. I appreciate this more than I can express here, truly.
Relatedly, after reading the commentaries assembled here I’m reminded of Walter Benjamin’s notion that, at their best, commentary and critique do not merely reflect or relay, approve or disapprove of the content of a particular work; much more, they actively engage, animate, extend, even intervene in and alter the life of that work in ways that exceed and change it (Benjamin 2005: 372; 407-408). In the process, the energies and oeuvres of the commentators become connected to and fused with the work, yielding something further and greater. You’ve done Urbanism without Guarantees a great service by giving it such attention and care, and I’m humbled, (re?!)inspired even, by the ways you have distilled, refracted, and indeed reframed core aspects of the book—including some of its shortcomings, but also its invitations—on your own intellectual terms. All now fused into the life of the work, a tremendous gift and an honor.
I appreciate your commentaries even more because I know the book I’ve written is probably no easy thing to pin down or distill. The book attempts many conceptual moves while demurring from secure conclusions. ‘Gentrification’ is in the subtitle, but I never imagined it as book about the workings of gentrification so much as one questioning the everyday spatial-social relations that buoy gentrification among other hegemonic urban dynamics (also including forms of order maintenance and policing). The book features a great deal of ethnographic writing showing people and everyday life in close detail, but thick engagements with theory are needed to get the full shape of arguments that are quite constructivist (rather than realist) in underlying epistemology. All in all, the book interweaves many threads, all (as you very rightly note, Myfanwy!) in an analytical mode that aims not to settle but to shift and question from a ‘parallax’ perspective—to explicate, think within, and even mobilize the gaps between different concepts and theoretical framings. Given all of this, I loved how your commentaries each engaged different elements and arguments from the book. You each highlighted different inferences and lingering questions, and yet your comments resonate with one another in intriguing ways.
Jack, your introduction and commentary (echoing your framing of the AAG Author Meets Reader panel that you also organized!) does the unenviable but foundational work of summarizing the scope of the whole book, and you’ve done this with an efficiency and grace that I’d be wise to learn to emulate! You note especially the book’s ethnographic and descriptive aspects, the attention to everyday life, and with that the intersections with (and, I concede, interlocutions into) the thinking of Henri Lefebvre. Here I appreciate especially the way you describe the book’s attempts to direct urban theory and social philosophy toward possibilities for “re-thought” humanism and to situate these matters in relation to malleable everyday practices. To me, the most urgent aspects of the book—and the ones I find myself continuing to think most about—fully emerge in Chapter 4 and concern precisely these possibilities, drawing on the work of Stuart Hall in conversation with Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, for re-thinking human praxis in relation to what I conceptualize as “performative infrastructures” (possibilities—necessities?!—I revisit below). In any case, I’m impressed by how well your summary encapsulates so much of what I imagined I was trying to do when I wrote this book: explicate where and how structures of feeling and formations of narrative and culture intersect with political economy and formations of value in and through everyday life; open up questions and possibilities in a way that is perhaps contrarian, but only in the spirit of imagining how different relations and ways of being might emerge even under conditions where we might not wonder after or pursue them.
Meanwhile, Stefan, I’m grateful for and humbled by the way you’ve generatively crystallized (and soberly critiqued) the book’s attempts to show how hegemonic relations and practices apparent in everyday life among residents—including articulations of common sense and good sense—connect to broader questions of urban political economy and especially place-embedded processes of value formation and social reproduction. You evocatively describe the viscous, “thick” substance of hegemony that coheres within everyday life and which channels urban life in ways conducive to capitalist value formation even (perhaps especially) in moments of possible rupture. You’ve put very precise words on what I was trying to figure and contour yet not naturalize and pose as an (always spatially and historically specific) open question, and you’ve added additional dimension and depth to that questioning in ways that cogently push beyond my own formulation. On these and other points, Stefan, it was thought-provoking to read your commentary in conversation with Myfanwy’s.
Myfanwy, as one of the foremost scholars injecting community economies thinking into urban planning, your perspective (and your sense for the parallax!) are invaluable here. While Stefan focused firmly on the aspects of the book that show how hegemonic relations remain durable, you have held focus on the potential for some of the gaps and tensions which were so apparent in the book to be pried toward different (possibly counter-hegemonic and/or more than capitalist) practices and modes of living.
Across all three of your commentaries, I feel seen (in both the positive and the critical senses) and compelled to keep refining my thinking. A central premise of the book is that there are forms of everyday living and “spatial labor”—themselves further connected to and contingent upon place-embedded forms of culture, narrative, and “performative infrastructure”—which warrant critical attention and which are part and parcel of place-based urban political economy. And each of your commentaries echo and add additional dimensions and stakes within that formulation. I read you further pointing out: ‘that is a critical piece of what capital itself cannot furnish but must enclose from urban living’; ‘that is a potent but malleable practical force’ (possibly in a viscous way that backfills against rupture but also possibly in a way that could be made critical and otherwise). And indeed, the way that is structured in and across different locations, in relation to institutions, and in relation to nested political economic formations seems a pressing question in the present historical moment.
Here I might propose a bit of a reframe—call it a complementary parallax—to Stefan’s insistence that we further ask how the relations of hegemony in locations like the one I studied articulate with vertical alignments and institutional forms. In the years since the fieldwork for Urbanism without Guarantees was completed, and even more so since it was published in March 2020 (inauspicious timing!), interruptions to the status quo have occurred, and now seem likely to keep occurring, with increasing frequency. In relation, I’ve increasingly wondered about the degree to which articulations between local, perhaps especially urban, and broader state-institutional formations have also become disrupted and less stable. We see this as alignments between the lives and desires of people in localities and the operations of the dominant state-institutional apparatus seem to be under increasing stress; as the capacity of that apparatus to deliver the conditions for continued status quo reproduction (or functioning democracy, let alone climate adaptation or anything resembling a “just transition”) seems increasingly gridlocked if not severely corroded. Perhaps this is an especially US-specific situation, perhaps not. In any case, “precarious hegemony” still feels like a useful concept here.
Meanwhile, in the above contexts, it seems to me that cities, municipalities, and even regions are—because of disruptions, by necessity, and because of vertical misalignments; for better and for worse—initiating a remarkable volume of heterogeneous localist experimentation related to everything from legal systems and civil rights, to social and material provisioning, to climate policy, and more. It further seems that much of what’s at stake and liminal in these undertakings is about strikingly divergent possibilities for different subjectivities, ideas, forms of social organization, and modes of living (precisely the things I hope, as a concept, “performative infrastructures” invites us to consider) to emerge and become durable. All that in mind, the question may not only be one of diagraming existing alignments, but also of which hegemony will emerge, and through what means and dynamics. Further, the question may also be one of what kinds of institutional and extra-local alignments—and indeed what kinds of performative infrastructures—might, in these contexts of ongoing disruption and necessitated experimentation, be adequate for staving of the worst of what’s already been furnished (the worst of viscous self-repair) and holding space for good sense (and an emancipated process for surfacing and consolidating it) to prevail even in the face of increasing real and imagined instabilities and threats.
These questions are not so different from those I try to raise in the conclusion of the book. And I’ve continued to try and refine and specify them (and indeed said at least something more with respect to vertical alignments and institutional forms both in New York and my current home in Seattle) in more recent work (Anderson and Huron, 2023; Anderson and Jung 2023). One thing that’s new in this more recent work connects directly to the questions Myfanwy’s raises about public engagement and what universities can do to support more durable, longer-standing kinds of engaged research that resonate differently and work in connection with communities to build different alignments and possible future. Alas, I was never able to discuss the conclusions of Urbanism Without Guarantees with Bob, the tenant organizer who influenced the framing of the book (he died suddenly and tragically not long before I finished writing up). But I suspect that if he had been able to read it, he might have had a mixed reaction. He might have rightly called me out on in some ways being party to the kind of academic enclosure and obfuscation that is all too common—on extracting and theorizing from things that are already going on in communities; on producing knowledge in forms perhaps too abstract, jargonized, and bibliofied to be legible, useful, or accessible to those communities. But Bob also might have recognized that good sense pokes through in some aspects of such endeavors, and that this might be made critical, perhaps resulting in radically renovated research practices, were more of us to eschew research-as-academic-publication and pursue slower and more open-ended forms of relation-building, translation, knowledge circulation, co-thinking and co-research in and about places, etc., with people at the front lines of the issues and struggles we yearn to understand and engage. Following this advice would also seem a good possible point of entry for more substantively engaging situated contexts of race and racial capitalism, settler-coloniality, gender and sexuality, ableism, and more, such as Jack suggests in his thoughtful critique.
In relation to those issues and struggles—and the questions raised in this forum—the latent potential is already out there for different alignments to emerge (as they inevitably will, one way or another). Just the small matter of what, in whose interests, in relation to the emplacement and enactment of which performative infrastructures. I deeply appreciate the way each interlocuter in this forum has helped to sharpen my thinking around these questions and potentials, and I hope anyone out there reading will get in touch if you’d like to join the conversation. The stakes seem likely only to intensify.
References
Anderson, C. and Huron, A. (2023) The mixed potential of salvage commoning: Crisis and civic labor in Washington D.C. and New York City. Antipode: A Journal of Radical Geography. 55 1004-1023.
Anderson C. and Jung, J.K. (2023) For a Cooperative “Smart” City Yet to Come: Place-Based Knowledge, Commons, and Prospects for Inclusive Municipal Processes From Seattle, Washington. Urban Planning. 8 6-16.
Benjamin, W. Selected Writings, Volume 2, part 1: 1927–1934. Eds. Jennings, M., Eiland, H., and G. Smith. Cambridge, Harvard University Press (2005).
Christian Anderson is Associate Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, University of Washington Bothell, and author of Urbanism Without Guarantees.
