[Linking image: West Forty-Sixth Street, Manhattan, New York City]

Diverse Economies

Urbanism without Guarantees is the fourth volume in the Diverse Economies and Livable Worlds series at the University of Minnesota Press, and indeed many of the ideas associated with the diverse economies tradition are at the heart of the book’s arguments. The Diverse Economies series is edited by members of the Community Economies Collective (CEC). Emerging especially from the foundational work of J.K Gibson-Graham and infusing Marxist political-economic analysis with insights from feminist, post-structuralist, and post-colonial and post-development theory, the CEC is driven by the idea that non- and more-than-capitalist practices make up the vast majority of economic activity on earth, but that many current ways of understanding “the economy” often strongly center capitalism and capitalist activities in ways make it difficult to imagine, sense, and embrace the full diversity of activities and transformative possibilities which surround us. The argument I make in the book takes these ideas points of departure for theorizing the relationships among capitalism, everyday life, and the kinds of lived, place-based social infrastructures that have been a focus of my work. Specifically, I question if, when, and how ordinary people’s everyday habits, practices, and forms of “spatial labor” and “performative infrastructure” may or may not become “enrolled” within formations of dominance, including regimes of capitalist exchange-value making associated with gentrification, as well as instances of social violence such as racialized order-maintenance and policing. From this shifted or “parallax” perspective, it becomes clear that dynamics of urban transformation playing out in urban space are never guaranteed by capital/class or any other structural determination alone—even in a heartland of ostensible “neoliberalism” like Manhattan, where capitalism may seem thoroughly hegemonic. Instead, outcomes like gentrification can be seen as contingent on a whole array of factors including entrenched forms of common sense, ideology, and social reproductive labor, as well as narratives about particular spaces and people themselves, all of which are and could further be subject to intense struggle, contestation, and renovation through concerted practice. What all of this theoretical re-working ultimately—hopefully!—does is open up and sensitize urban political economy and urban ethnography to a much wider array of concerns than has been typical, including considerations of how common sensibilities about notions such as improvement, quality of life, safety, and liberty are deeply bound up with practices that reproduce racialized, classed, gendered, and other forms of inequity and oppression in place.

My arguments here extend but also address current gaps within diverse economies literatures themselves. Indeed, many of the ideas that have informed diverse economies or “post-capitalist” approaches have emerged from instances—such as disinvested post-industrial mining towns in Australia, post-socialist spaces in the former USSR, or cooperatives and alternative economies in Europe and North America—where people have been experimenting with different ways of surviving and living well together in common, often in absence or rejection of strong state-capital alliances. Partly because they have been situated in such contexts, diverse and community economies frameworks have tended to focus on formations of class, gender, and more-than-capitalist labor while perhaps under-examining questions related to racial formation (particularly whiteness) and racial capitalism, urban political economy, and the significance and potential enclosure of commoning and use-value generative labor where capitalist value regimes are dominant. Urbanism without Guarantees attempts to address these issues head-on, especially by putting diverse economies thinking into closer conversation with majority world urban, Black diasporic, and other previously un-integrated critical traditions to outline a theory of place-based urban value-formation and structural transformation which takes seriously the fraught cultural and ideological dimensions outlined above. Along these lines, I hope the book will help to expand the theoretical and methodological grounds upon which future diverse economies work might further substantively engage these issues.