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cholars and practitioners of urban planning need to rethink the field’s futures at this important historical juncture: some might call it a moment of truth when there is little left to hide. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed many cracks, contradictions, and inequalities that have always existed but are now more visible. This also includes the global vaccine apartheid that is ongoing as I write these words. Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
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Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
- Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed.
- Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real.
- They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining.
- I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
What’s a Rich Text element?
Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
- Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed.
- Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real.
- They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
What’s a Rich Text element?
Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
What’s a Rich Text element?
Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
What’s a Rich Text element?
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hat is the urban everyday and what is at stake in attending to it? And how can such attention push us to think all the more critically about the urbanisms we desire, the tensions between Gramsican good and common sense, formations of value and place-based political economy, and different possible futures even in the face of ever more financialized and often precarious social reproduction?
Christian Anderson addresses these and other questions, starting by asking what everyday practices “buoy” gentrification, and ending with an appeal to renovate place-based everyday urban praxis. Along the way, he poses thick ethnographic engagements in conversation with equally thick theory—thinking with the likes of Stuart Hall, Sylvia Wynter, Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, AbdouMaliq Simone, , Cindi Katz, , Henri Lefebvre, Neil Smith, and Kōjin Karatani, among others—to pry open insights from a three-year study of everyday life among residents of a few blocks of a single street (West 46th between 8th Avenue and the Hudson River in Manhattan).
Urbanism without Guarantees was published in the Diverse Economies and Livable Worlds series at the University of Minnesota press—a series which features studies deeply influenced by the diverse and community economies perspective most famously articulated by J.K. Gibson Graham. As anyone familiar with the tensions between community economies and Marxist urban historical-geographical approaches might guess, this is a book featuring some incongruent bedfellows. As the commentaries assembled here attest, however, these tensions and incongruities are precisely central to the analytical approach.
This is a book that leverages the differences, tensions, and gaps between theories in order to shift the perspective from which questions might be asked and reveal contradictions and possibilities that may otherwise have remained obscured. This approach also yields fresh critical concepts—“spatial labor,” “performative infrastructure,” and “precarious hegemony”—meant to generate continued questioning and renovated urban spatial practice. With reviews from Stefan Kipfer, Myfawny Taylor, and myself (Jack Jen Gieseking), Urbanism without Guarantees represents a key contribution in our theories of urbanism, gentrification, everyday life, and social reproduction in the city.
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).
