Urbanism Without Guarantees
The Everyday Life of a Gentrifying West Side Neighborhood
Published on 24. March 2020
Book
Hardback
312 pages
978-1-5179-0741-9 (ISBN)
Description
A unique more-than-capitalist take on urban dynamics
Vigilante action. Renegades. Human intrigue and the future at stake in New York City. In Urbanism without Guarantees, Christian M. Anderson offers a new perspective on urban dynamics and urban structural inequality based on an intimate ethnography of on-the-ground gentrification.
The book is centered on ethnographic work undertaken on a single street in Clinton/Hell's Kitchen in New York City-once a site of disinvestment, but now rapidly gentrifying. Anderson examines the everyday strategies of residents to preserve the quality of life of their neighborhood and to define and maintain their values of urban living-from picking up litter and reporting minor concerns on the 311 hotline to hiring a private security firm to monitor the local public park. Anderson demonstrates how processes such as investment and gentrification are constructed out of the collective actions of ordinary people, and challenges prevalent understandings of how place-based civic actions connect with dominant forms of political economy and repressive governance in urban space.
Examining how residents are pulled into these systems of gentrification, Anderson proposes new ways to think and act critically and organize for transformation of a place-in actions that local residents can start to do wherever they are.
Vigilante action. Renegades. Human intrigue and the future at stake in New York City. In Urbanism without Guarantees, Christian M. Anderson offers a new perspective on urban dynamics and urban structural inequality based on an intimate ethnography of on-the-ground gentrification.
The book is centered on ethnographic work undertaken on a single street in Clinton/Hell's Kitchen in New York City-once a site of disinvestment, but now rapidly gentrifying. Anderson examines the everyday strategies of residents to preserve the quality of life of their neighborhood and to define and maintain their values of urban living-from picking up litter and reporting minor concerns on the 311 hotline to hiring a private security firm to monitor the local public park. Anderson demonstrates how processes such as investment and gentrification are constructed out of the collective actions of ordinary people, and challenges prevalent understandings of how place-based civic actions connect with dominant forms of political economy and repressive governance in urban space.
Examining how residents are pulled into these systems of gentrification, Anderson proposes new ways to think and act critically and organize for transformation of a place-in actions that local residents can start to do wherever they are.
Reviews / Votes
"From a long-term immersion on an (extra)ordinary block on the Westside of NYC, Christian M. Anderson demonstrates how the blunt powers of urban restructuring are intricately nestled in the jostling of everyday compositions of things through which collectives are made-collectives stitched and woven by the everyday efforts to keep social violence at bay, which can both support and undermine new forms of living, and which then demand a new politics of those spaces in-between."-AbdouMaliq Simone, The Urban Institute, University of Sheffield"Conceptually rich, artfully crafted, and with a striking immediacy, Urbanism without Guarantees offers a compelling analysis of the meanings of urban change from the perspective of ordinary residents."-Christine Hentschel, Hamburg University
"A fascinating new book."-Viewing NYC
"Christian Anderson's Urbanism without Guarantees takes its name from Stuart Hall's 'Marxism without Guarantees' (1983) and lives up to its name by delivering a critical Marxist analysis of everyday life."-Myung In Ji, ANTIPODE
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Minnesota
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
10
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 38 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-5179-0741-9 (9781517907419)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Christian M. Anderson is associate professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington at Bothell.
Content
Contents
Introduction: Situating a Struggle
I. Renovating and Making the Urban Question Critical: Toward a Parallax Urbanism
1. Fateful Leaps: Flipping the Script on Rent Gaps and Revanchism
2. Unsettling the Urban Question
3. The Contingencies of Civic Action, Revisited
4. The Hitch, or, Performative Infrastructure
II. Place-Embedded Stories and Other Incitements to Parallax Urbanism
5. A Brief (Infrastructural?) History of West Forty-Sixth Street
6. Specters, Traditions, and the Dominance of Common Sense
7. Battles, Contradictions, and Good Sense
Conclusion: This Hegemony Is a Drag
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Introduction: Situating a Struggle
I. Renovating and Making the Urban Question Critical: Toward a Parallax Urbanism
1. Fateful Leaps: Flipping the Script on Rent Gaps and Revanchism
2. Unsettling the Urban Question
3. The Contingencies of Civic Action, Revisited
4. The Hitch, or, Performative Infrastructure
II. Place-Embedded Stories and Other Incitements to Parallax Urbanism
5. A Brief (Infrastructural?) History of West Forty-Sixth Street
6. Specters, Traditions, and the Dominance of Common Sense
7. Battles, Contradictions, and Good Sense
Conclusion: This Hegemony Is a Drag
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index