I
n Urbanism Without Guarantees, Christian M. Anderson grapples with the implications of precarity for urban theory and praxis. His analysis is rooted in intensive ethnographic engagement with the Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen neighbourhood in the West Side of Midtown Manhattan, New York City, told through the everyday lives of seven residents and civic organisers. Through Anderson, we hear lifelong tenant organiser Bob Kalin’s refusal to see the neighbourhood’s gentrification as inevitable and his determination to continue to support tenants’ struggles for improved conditions and cooperative housing. Christian, like Bob, instead invites urban researchers to loosen their hold on the discipline’s grand narratives and theories, to get ‘down and dirty’ in neighbourhoods such as Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen, to understand hegemony and violence ‘from the ground up’ (Anderson 2020: 215). At stake is nothing less than the possibilities for urban life in profoundly precarious futures.
Anderson’s own ‘down and dirty’ engagement with Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen illuminates both the intensifying precarity of everyday life in the neighbourhood and the precarity of the hegemonic formations which sustain it. Within the great diversity of intellectual resources Anderson assembles to develop his analysis, Stuart Hall’s ([1983] 1986) work on ideology and consent plays a key role. From Hall, Anderson takes up a focus on how ideas become coupled with cooperative power to produce hegemonic domination, injecting it with vulnerability and contingency. He invites urban researchers to think with and within this dual precarity – of everyday life and of hegemony – to ‘remain unsettled’, to stick with ‘the mess’ and resist ‘desires for and narratives of synthesis and completion’ (2020: xxxiv; 15; 42). What emerges is grounded, sensitive yet radical urban research and theory—attuned to contingency, without guarantees—which directs attention towards sites and openings for transformative collective praxis.
One of the aspects of the book that I most appreciated was its gentle refusal to participate in urban studies’ internal theory wars. Early in the book, Anderson tells readers that he will develop a ‘parallax way of thinking’ about everyday urban life (2020: xix). Interestingly, Anderson offers no definition of the term, or justification of his use of it, prompting me to do a bit of digging of my own. I found that parallax refers to the apparent displacement of an object when viewed from different positions and can be used to measure the distance of that object. Astronomers use parallax to measure the distance of planets and stars from Earth; it is also how two-eyed living beings perceive depth, informing and enabling our interaction with the environments around us. Anderson uses the concept of parallax to decentre urban studies’ grand theories without denying them; via parallax, he establishes a position from which to develop his own minor urban theory without labelling its major others as ‘wrong’, or by claiming to know or explain everything. Rather, it is the difference between urban theories which Anderson makes use of in order to reveal new knowledge and possibilities for action. This use of parallax echos Kojin Karatani’s idea of transcritique, which Anderson also draws on, articulated by Žižek ‘not as a determinate position as opposed to another determinate position, but as the irreducible gap between the positions’ (2004: 121). These relational strategies of critique resonate with broader calls for dialogue across theoretical difference within urban studies (Davidson 2023) and will be useful for many urban researchers navigating this too-often polarised terrain.
In this case, the object of transcritique is the difference between major theories of urban political economy - in particular Neil Smith’s work on uneven development, gentrification and revanchism – and a constellation of other, minor perspectives including feminist, Black and postcolonial urban theories as well as Gibson-Graham’s diverse and community economies research. In so doing, Anderson makes a significant contribution to advancing as yet still nascent conversations between urban studies and diverse and community economies research (Huron 2015; Taylor 2024). Assembling these diverse resources helps Anderson to make visible the eviction of social reproduction and more-than-capitalist values as explanatory or determining factors from major urban political economy. Through a genealogical reading of Marx, Castells and Lefebvre, Anderson recovers and assembles anew various lost and discarded elements of their thought in order to frame ‘a renovated urban question with a focus on reproduction’ (2020: 41). His parallax urban theory takes an ex ante facto (before the event) perspective in order to remain open and engaged with the ways in which more-than-capitalist labour is or might become enrolled in ‘diverse potential value and broader structural formations’ (40). Through these manoeuvres, Anderson re-frames the urban question as more-than-capitalist, understanding hegemonic capitalist urbanisation – and all forms of economic organisation and cooperation in space - as overdetermined by and contingent on social reproduction.
From this starting point, Anderson develops new concepts with which to engage with more-than-capitalist urbanisation, specifically indeterminate spatial labor, performative infrastructures and precarious hegemony. Christian introduces the idea of indeterminate spatial labor via the everyday efforts of Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen civic organisers, Watty and Sara, to take care of and improve the neighbourhood by picking up empty bottles and broken glass (Watty), organising public events (Watty and Sara), planting trees and installing street lighting (Sara). Through Watty and Sara, we are invited to resist the too-easy identification of civic activism as revanchism serving property interests and urban growth coalitions. We are asked to engage instead with the complexities of their positions and interests, the resistance of urban space to total capture by capitalist value-making and the potential for Watty and Sara’s everyday civic labor to become enrolled in other forms of economic organisation and cooperation. Building on the idea of everyday indeterminate spatial labor, Anderson develops the concept of performative infrastructures, referring to the place-based structures, stories and attachments through which it becomes ‘hitched’ with hegemonic capitalist formations and, crucially, might be dislodged and enrolled in diverse other value formations. This idea allows Anderson to trace the marks of narrated histories of crime and disorder on contemporary civic activism oriented towards ‘cleaning up’ Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen, while also uncovering spectres of other ways of being still embedded in the neighbourhood: ‘real mixed uses, tolerance, heterogeneity and collective generosity’ (2020: 175). These ‘spectres of the common’ continue to make themselves felt in Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen; I especially enjoyed the story of the new and expensive residential building whose basement entrance stubbornly refused to be cleansed of unwanted night-time gatherings.
Anderson’s parallax urban theorising culminates in the concept of precarious hegemony. We hear how capitalist value-making in Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen is precarious, in that it depends upon the everyday indeterminate spatial labour of residents and civic organisers who are only partially, if at all, aligned with and committed to it. Anderson finds there the co-presence of historical memories of unrest and disquiet, contemporary uncertainty and precarity and ‘ossified’ performative infrastructures based on narrow historical notions of individual property, progress and liberty that close off ‘broader aspirations for more open-ended and experimental forms of collective being’ (2020: 203). From this located conjuncture, he postulates precarious hegemony as ‘an open condition of possibility and an incitement to different kinds of thought and action’ (ibid).
Towards the end of the book, Anderson elaborates the implications of his more-than-capitalist urban theorising for political strategy and praxis. Here, he introduces Judith Butler’s (2011) understanding of individual vulnerability and precarity as reminders of our mutual dependency, signalling that solutions are to be sought in strengthening and developing structures that support it. In Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen, this is most powerfully illustrated in Anderson’s rendering of the neighbourhood’s resurging and intensifying bed bug infestations, a problem which resists individual solution, exposes collective weaknesses and points to a need to cultivate cooperative capacities. In such moments of intense precarity and vulnerability, Anderson urges those impacted to resist narrow attempts at repair and recuperation, to critically evaluate place-based performative infrastructures and to examine where they might need to be disrupted and re-orientated. We are reminded that gentrification and dispossession are not yet over but still ongoing and subject to contestation and struggle. We are invited to dwell precisely in those moments of greatest apparent precarity and vulnerability which hold the potential for transformative collective praxis.
At this point, I was hoping to hear again from Bob and some of Christian’s other Clinton/Hell’s Kitchin interlocutors. What did Bob think of Christian’s parallax, more-than-capitalist urban theory? Was it any more useful in informing his civic activism than the foreclosed theories of gentrification that Bob expressed such frustration with (via Christian) earlier in the book? And how might researchers like Christian and organisers like Bob work together to explore and advance some of the possibilities it opens up? In this book at least, Anderson offers no answers to these questions, having been clear from the start that his was a detached, ethnographic study not a collaborative or activist research project. But, with the study completed and the theories developed, what new possibilities might (or might not) there be for collaborative enquiry in Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen, and what resources would need to be put in place to support such an initiative?
We hear early on that while organisers like Bob are intellectual thinkers, they are also consumed by the demands of immediate needs and struggles, restricting opportunities for reflection and analysis. How, then, might university-based researchers mobilise resources to support the kinds of critical reflection and cooperative action Anderson’s ideas imply, in Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen and other intensely precarious urban neighbourhoods? Here, collaborative and activist researchers have key insights to offer into how community and activist labour, knowledge and authorship can be resourced and valued through embedded, mutually useful and generative research collaborations that build power and publics with capacity to act (Benson and Nagar 2006; Derickson and Routledge 2015; Gibson-Graham 2008; Harney et al 2016; Katz 1994; Taylor 2024). Exploring these issues will be crucial if more-than-capitalist urban theories such as Anderson’s are to play a role in bringing into being the radical transformations necessary to support our mutual flourishing.
References
Anderson, C. M. 2020. Urbanism without guarantees: the everyday life of a gentrifying West Side neighbourhood. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Benson, K. and R. Nagar. 2006. Collaboration as Resistance? Reconsidering the processes, products and possibilities of feminist oral history and ethnography. Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 13(5), pp581-592.
Butler, J. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Davidson, M. 2023. Editorial: Dialogues, Urban Research and Times of War. Dialogues in Urban Research 1(1):3-10.
Derickson, K. D. and P. Routledge. 2015. Resourcing Scholar-Activism: Collaboration, Transformation, and the Production of Knowledge. The Professional Geographer 67(1), pp1-7.
Gibson-Graham, J. K. 2008. Diverse economies: performative practices for ‘other worlds’. Progress in Human Geography 32(5), pp613.632.
Hall, S. (1983) 1986. The problem of ideology: Marxism without guarantees. Journal of Communication Inquiry 10:28-44.
Harney, L., J. McCurry, J. Scott and J. Wills. 2016. Developing ‘process pragmatism’ to underpin engaged research in human geography. Progress in Human Geography 40(3), pp316-333.
Huron A (2018) Carving out the Commons: Tenant Organizing and Housing Cooperatives in Washington, D.C. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Katz, C. 1994. Playing the field: questions of fieldwork in geography. The Professional Geographer 46(1), pp67–72
Taylor, M. 2014. ‘Being useful’ after the Ivory Tower: combining research and activism with the Brixton Pound. Area 46(3), pp305-312.
Taylor, M. 2024. The economic politics of anti-displacement struggle: connecting diverse and community economies research with critical urban studies on the Carpenters Estate, London. Antipode 56(2), pp672-693.
Žižek, S. 2004. The parallax view. New Left Review 25:121-34.
Myfanwy Taylor is Lecturer (Teaching) in Urban Economies and Planning at the Bartlett School of Planning. She is a community- and policy-engaged academic interested in questions of value, power and democracy in local, urban and regional economies and their implications for planning policy.
