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

Spatial Labor, Performative Infrastructures, and Precarious Hegemony

If—as is one of the foundational ideas of the book—broad, epochal political-economic and cultural formations are negotiated in everyday life and place-based practice, how does this occur, and how are such interlinkages structured?

In Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen, place-embedded legacies of the longer, crisis-ridden history of the neighborhood were still very much being actively negotiated at the time I arrived. This is a place that has historically been residence to sizable, racially and ethnically diverse working-class populations (for instance, the neighborhood featured prominently and was portrayed negatively in Jacob Riis’s notorious 1890 expose How the Other Half Lives and later, in the mid-20th century, the ethnic conflict-driven West Side Story). In more recent decades, the neighborhood emerged from the organized disinvestment, institutional abandonment, and associated urban crises of the 1970s and 80s—which were very acutely experienced here—into intensifying gentrification by the 1990s. As a result of zoning protections demanded by activist residents in the 1970s, the space has maintained much of the material character of previous eras, with diverse and relatively low-rise land-uses. These include warehouses, light industrial, and varied retail spaces interspersed among a housing mix (largely comprised of former tenement buildings) of predominantly market-rate rental apartment buildings, a smaller number of relatively new private condos and co-ops, and a small but politically significant number of limited-equity cooperatives (buildings held and maintained through a collective ownership structure, often with capped max-income guidelines meant to keep them permanently affordable for low-income residents—another legacy of 1970s municipal activism and organizing).

When I arrived there, I found there was a robust group of residents—haling from across these fairly different domains—who prided themselves on their civic diligence. They viewed this diligence as well in keeping with traditions and practices which, in their view, had shepherded the neighborhood well in previous times. And they enacted this by, for example, routinely picking up litter on the street; removing posters pasted or taped to surfaces and deemed discordant with the surroundings; keeping “eyes on the street” and calling 311 to report signs of disorder and disrepair; and participating in a better block association that organized public events (free performances or yoga classes in the local playground, offered in the interests of “reclaiming” that space, for instance), undertook frequent neighborhood beautification and aesthetic improvement projects, and coordinated with the police and other municipal institutions to mobilize against perceived threats to safety and the public good. Through activities such as these, residents routinely produced concrete as well as symbolic trappings of community, safety, and security amid what they touted as a still “authentic”, “diverse”, and “edgy” neighborhood.

I argue that activities such as these can be understood to constitute some of the “externalities” to which the value of place is closely tethered. In this context, I assert that the activities of residents here amount to a particular kind of potentially value-generative “spatial labor”—a corpus of creative activity that, though undertaken outside of employment or wage relations, produces space and conditions the qualities of place in ways that could (potentially, but not necessarily) buoy circuits of urbanized capital accumulation in the form of property values, possibilities for extractive rents, and so on, abetting gentrification in the process. This kind of spatial labor can be understood as necessary to the capitalist production of urban space as it is framed in much contemporary urban theory. Yet I show that it takes place in ways that are, to different degrees, semi-autonomous from and not strictly determined by the narrower processes of capitalist exchange value making which are typically centered and predominant in urban political-economic scholarship. I argue that there are place-based value relays at play here that are contingent on many different factors and are not necessarily determined or fixed by any essential structure. Such contingencies are especially acute, I maintain, in relation to ordinary people’s efforts to shape place as a use value—efforts to shape how space is inhabited and used, in which all sorts of varied and often clashing desires, activities, needs, and ways of being produce space and condition possibilities for value formation in ways that are not reducible to narrower forms of capitalist exchange and surplus value making. The question then becomes one of the ordinary sensibilities which are connected to people’s place-based actions—the feelings, notions, conceptions of the world, and forms of common sense and good sense which accrue over the course of everyday life in a place like this, and which underlie the kinds activities and contingencies just described.

After years of ethnographic work, I came to understand that the predominant ordinary sensibilities among residents of West 46th Street were deeply rooted in a particular folk-genealogy of place-based feeling and practice that had been carried over from previous eras and embedded here. That is, most residents of the neighborhood, including those from disparate subject positions with quite differing experiences in the space, tended to rehearse narratives about how bad the place used to be. And the corollary attitude in the present was that civic vigilance, such as was perceived to have been effective here in the past, was still necessary to guard against longstanding threats of disorder, structural disinvestment, and potentially eviscerating redevelopment, alongside newer and emerging threats of crisis and terror. All of these affective currents were deeply embedded in the lived fabric of the place itself. Many residents felt these things at a very mundane level, such that they were lodged in common sense as a set of disquieting, if often vague, uncertainties needing to be actively warded against. And given that episodes of harmful indifference and structural violence had been plainly evident even within many peoples’ relatively recent experiences here, perhaps these feelings were understandable, even as many of the actions people subsequently undertook in response warrant deep scrutiny.

To the degree that the kinds of sensibilities and common sense currents just described, in turn, inform routine practices and the forms of spatial labor I identify, I further argue that we can conceptualize what is going on here in terms of place-embedded “performative infrastructures,” or predominant feelings, popular sentiments, and common sensibilities that are yoked to bodies of habit and practice in ways that aggregate and articulate to durable material and structural forms. Case in point, the predominant sensibility which saturated everyday life in Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen was a feeling that the present state of things was relatively insecure, unstable, and precarious. In turn, the dominant practical responses often involved attempting to entice and partner with liberal state-institutional powers—including police and municipal authorities, but also civic associations, development regimes, and other related entities—in the hope that this might yield security. And here there were continuities with much deeper genealogies of place-based liberalism—in relation to notions of security, and especially to civic compulsions toward improvement and the greater good of an imagined but exclusive public predicated on a selective and discriminating liberty underwritten by law, institutional power, and, as necessary, state force. In Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen, these genealogies stretch way back through historical experiences of Robert Moses-style slum clearance and urban renewal, through the settlement house movement and the progressive era, and perhaps all to way back to settler colonial experiences which valorized a kind of self-fashioning and liberty-seeking through assertive occupation and industrious improvement of land and place. Those are deep and deeply fraught legacies. Not that people here were explicitly ideologically committed to these kinds of dispositions or that they even necessarily consciously considered these legacies at all—rather, I argue that they were enacting a set of performative infrastructures that largely seem to have been uncritically inherited as ostensibly noble place-based traditions.

In that same vein, though the kinds of inheritances I have just described were definitely the dominant place-embedded performative infrastructures here in ways that are important to name, critique, and unsettle, the book also emphasizes that there were others, situated in tension with this dominance (and sometimes being enacted in different and contradictory ways by the same individuals who participated in many of the fraught activities already outlined). For instance, there were residents who rejected predominant historicized narratives of disorder, crisis, and scarcity and sought instead to carry forward traditions of redistributive abundance, protest, dialectical theatrics, and unflappable resilience, which were themselves ascribed as having been born and carried over from the struggles and necessities of earlier eras in this place. There were also many residents who were committed to cooperative forms of property-holding and structural harm-mitigation, who were engaged in deep networks of care and kinship, and who were actively working to transform laws and institutions through cooperative organizing—especially around issues related to housing, eldercare, and migrant rights.

The ultimate take-away here is that—at least in this place, and counter to narratives of capital-driven “revanchism” that are prevalent in scholarship by urban geographers—many of the ordinary people contributing to pernicious processes like gentrification and racialized policing in and through their spatial labors and place-based activities are not doing so because they are ideologues, capitalists, or even because they are necessarily committed to any of these things. Rather, they are often acting upon common sense feelings and beliefs about civic duty and community that are themselves bound up with anxieties about the present and the future in a historical moment which people in this place very legitimately perceive as punctuated by omnipresent threats to their thriving. In this sense, I argue people are not wedded to or even necessarily in favor of many of the dominant, often harmful formations that their own actions may help reproduce. Instead, I show that they are often acting as they do in response to pervasive, place-specific common sense structures of precarious feeling. I use the term “precarious hegemony” to characterize this situation, where hegemonic or dominant formations seem to depend on the activities of people who are not necessarily even committed to them, and who may only be acting as they do out of a deeply unsettled perception of their own relative precarity within these formations. The conclusion here is that the liberatory transformation of urban spatial-social relations may not be so far off, and might be immediately approached through experimentation with place-based collective practices—many of which already exist—that explicitly seek to reduce situated forms of socially produced precarity through deliberate, critical place-based action in common. It is those possibilities—perhaps increasingly urgent given the multitude of mounting challenges darkening the horizon even as I write these words—that the book attempts to elucidate and leave open.