[Linking image: Eighth Avenue north from West Forty-Sixth Street, Manhattan, New York City]

Urbanism without Guarantees

How are ordinary urban resident’s everyday lives, experiences, and place-based activities interwoven with—perhaps even generative of—formations of sociality, economy, culture, and power such as those that dominate in contemporary North American cities? Using everyday life in the Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of New York City as a point of entry, Urbanism without Guarantees: The Everyday Life of a Gentrifying West Side Neighborhood—my first book, published in 2020 by the University of Minnesota Press—works to systematically answer this question in one fascinating setting.

The core of the book is an ethnographic study of daily life on a few blocks of a single street—West 46th between 8th Avenue and the Hudson River, on the far West Side of Midtown Manhattan.

Emerging from a hard-scrabble industrial past and a recent history punctuated by multiple crises, this space has long been a laboratory for a diverse array of influential experiments in urban living and urban policy. These include early forms of public-private partnership, vigilante citizen patrols, and order-maintenance policing as well as tenant-protective restrictive zoning initiatives and cooperatively owned limited-equity housing. In these and other ways, the gentrification of the neighborhood today is connected to far deeper legacies and dynamics of urban transformation. So how do residents themselves experience and figure into these legacies and dynamics?

I spent several years intimately embedded in the everyday practices and place-based routines of ordinary residents in this space, working to understand how their lives and actions were connected to epochal issues like urban crisis, gentrification, racialized policing, among other concerns. I spent hundreds of hours observing, recording interviews, attending community meetings and events, and embedding with people simply going about their daily lives. The resulting book interweaves a wide range of social, cultural, and urban theory with textured ethnographic story-telling to explicate an unconventional way of understanding how everyday life is intimately connected to some of the most consequential economic and cultural dynamics shaping urban space today. The book shows how residents attempt to realize their ideals and values in place, pursuing routines, undertaking concerted actions, and enacting practices and forms of labor that further factor into broader structural forces, with decidedly mixed results. Ultimately, Urbanism without Guarantees presents a fresh urban scholarly analysis and sketches out urgent possibilities for critical place-based thought, action, and transformation.

Readers might note that the book is written in two distinct parts, which consider and represent the matters outlined above in different ways. Part one is steadfastly scholarly, slowly building up a detailed analysis of place-based urban political economy, sociality, and cultural formation from the standpoint of everyday life. It is written primarily for readers who are invested in specialized academic debates related to these topics. If you like to delve deeply into urban, social, and cultural theory, part one is for you! Part two of the book is written in a style that will appeal to all kinds of readers interested in critical urban and social issues. It interweaves an array of historical and ethnographic stories to give a layered sense for everyday life in this particular urban space while illustrating many of the analytical threads detailed in part one, now in a less specialized and more narrative mode. If you like evocative writing about people, places, and cities intertwined with critical provocation, part two should entice!

A review of the book from Antipode: A Journal of Radical Geography is available here. A New Books Network interview in which I discuss the book is available here.

More details about the central ideas and arguments of the book are available by clicking on the thematic blocks below.