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

Everyday Life

Urbanism without Guarantees began as a critical ethnography of everyday life in a tightly delimited urban space. The project was initially framed as a place-based ethnographic effort to understand the contours of the countless invisible connections—abstract and material, across space and time—which collide in daily life; to question that which structures the everyday in a particular urban space, and which the everyday sediments and structures in turn. Everyday life is often taken for granted even as it constantly twists and shifts in chaotic but subtle ways, leavening the extra-ordinary moments that may punctuate it and to which we tend to pay more attention. The everyday is often treated uncritically and under-scrutinized in scholarly debates as well as popular common sense. But even the most entrenched social conditions and abstractions can ultimately only be reproduced via practical activity in daily life—can only survive and persist as collective creations, socially enacted and continually kept alive via practice. This is perhaps most clear in moments when everyday life is suddenly interrupted, suspended, or irrevocably changed. In such moments, it can be painfully clear that everyday life was—is always—the substance of its structures and times, and that ordinary people and lives are, inextricably, part and parcel of that substance, albeit in deeply uneven ways across difference and location. This substance, these inextricable interlinkages, offer grounds for understanding and potentially transforming social, cultural, and political-economic formations big and small. To the degree that all of this must be further understood as spatial and geographical as well as temporal and social, place-based urban research offers opportunities for deep insights into these dynamics. This was the framework that I had in 2007 when I began the research that informed Urbanism without Guarantees. Additional insights—about linkages between daily practice, common sensibilities, and value(s); about different ways of understanding urban political economy; and about broader cultural formations legible from these perspectives—opened up from there.