[Linking image: Composite from intersection of Ninth Avenue and West Forty-Sixth Street, Manhattan, New York City]

 . . . without guarantees

“. . . without guarantees”: this phrase connotes a set of overarching sensibilities that permeate the book, from its ethnographic and theoretical foundations through to its arguments. As is discussed in more detail in chapter four of the book, the phrasing is a direct nod to cultural theorist Stuart Hall and his incitements for a “Marxism without Guarantees”. In the midst of creeping conservatism and rising nationalist, racist populisms in the UK and US in the 1970s and 80s, Hall argued for a modified form of Marxist thought that might grapple with and confront these emerging formations in ways that traditional, largely class-focused left-analysis had failed to do. This must start, Hall argued, with a rejection of any notion that purely economic or class-based interests somehow explain, let alone determine or “guarantee” the outcomes of political or social struggles—working class voters seemingly acting against their own interests by electing conservative, deeply pro-capitalist, anti-labor governments being a primary case in point. In the face of such epochal political shifts, Hall outlined a basis for critical analysis that would be more attuned to linkages between of popular sentiment, ideology, and consent; lived culture, economy, and power; and the circumstances within which the balance of forces among and across these might shift in often unpredictable ways at different historical moments. At its center, such a form of analysis would remain steadfastly trained on questioning how particular iterations of popular common sense and ideology may or may not become “hitched” to particular political and economic formations, resulting in different structurings of domination under different historical conditions. Rather than imagining such linkages and structurings as inevitable or intractable, Hall argued, they need to be treated as deeply contingent and always up for grabs, further implying that the outcomes are always being shaped, without guarantees, by struggles and dynamics of which different theoretical and practical conceptions are no small part. Hence the need to ‘go on theorizing’, and to strive to do so in ways that grapple seriously with contingency and with messy possibilities for different futures to emerge even from conditions of dominance.

Hall’s provocations directly inform my own arguments about performative infrastructure and precarious hegemony, and lie at the heart of what “urbanism without guarantees” is intended to conceptually convey. Indeed, the notion of an urbanism without guarantees features throughout the book in at least three distinctive ways. First—most clearly following Hall’s original arguments, in line with my engagements with diverse economies theorizing, and counter to many narratives of urbanization and gentrification within predominant accounts from urban political economy and urban geography—my arguments clearly uphold that dynamics of everyday life, value formation, and place-based transformation in urban space are not explainable or determined strictly in relation to economic structures and processes of capitalist value-making, as typically and narrowly understood. Rather, drawing directly on Hall, I argue that a whole range of often open-ended and messy experiential, lived, affective, ideological, cultural, and popular forces need to be factored into understanding these matters. Second, and by extension, I show how the outcomes of ordinary people’s deliberative place-based actions and struggles are not “expressive”—not expressions of any essential or fixed structures, especially class—but deeply contingent and malleable in many potential directions. Third, and amplifying the first two senses of an urbanism without guarantees, I show how all of these potential linkages and formations of dominance and/or counter-dominance must be understood in the context of precarious hegemony--of people’s living and acting in place under conditions of real and perceived precarity, wherein the continuity of their ordinary lives and the conditions for their thriving constantly feel, and in the long run may well turn out to be, profoundly, threatened and eroding. The ultimate provocation of Urbanism without Guarantees is thus: Can people turn their formidable, generative collective capacities toward mitigating against socially produced, profoundly unevenly distributed precarity, figuring out ways to live well and thrive together under such conditions, especially given the mounting challenges of a deeply troubled present and future? Hopefully the answer is yes, but this is likely only possible if enough people engage critical, deliberate, and concerted practices in order to make it so. These are the ends I hope to continue working toward in and through critical, collective place-based experimentation and praxis in urban space.