Disassembled Cities: Social and Spatial Strategies to Reassemble Communities 2018042263, 9781138097988, 9781315104614, 9781351598613

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Disassembled Cities

This book explores the urban, political, and economic effects of contemporary capitalism as well being concerned with a collective analytic that addresses these processes through the lens of disassembling and reassembling dynamics. The processes of contemporary globalization have resulted in the commodification of various dimensions that were previously the domain of state action. This book evaluates the varying international responses from communities as they cope and confront the negative impacts of neoliberalism. In-depth case studies from scholars working in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia showcase how various cities are responding to the effects of neoliberalism. Chapters investigate and demonstrate how the neoliberal processes of dissembling are being countered by positive and engaged efforts of reassembly. From Colombia to Siberia, Chicago to Nigeria, contributions engage with key economic and urban questions surrounding the militarization of state, democracy, the rise of the global capital and the education of young people in slums. This book will have a broad appeal to academic researchers and urban planning professionals. It is recommended core reading for students in Urban Planning, Geography, Sociology, Anthropology, and Urban Studies. Elizabeth L. Sweet teaches at Temple University’s Department of Geography and Urban Studies. She engages in collaborative community/economic development activist research, focusing on links between economies, violence, and identities.

Global Urban Studies Series Editor: Laura Reese, Michigan State University, USA

Providing cutting edge interdisciplinary research on spatial, political, cultural and economic processes and issues in urban areas across the US and the world, volumes in this series examine the global processes that impact and unite urban areas. The organizing theme of the book series is the reality that behavior within and between cities and urban regions must be understood in a larger domestic and international context. An explicitly comparative approach to understanding urban issues and problems allows scholars and students to consider and analyse new ways in which urban areas across different societies and within the same society interact with each other and address a common set of challenges or issues. Books in the series cover topics which are common to urban areas globally, yet illustrate the similarities and differences in conditions, approaches, and solutions across the world, such as environment/brownfields, sustainability, health, economic development, culture, governance and national security. In short, the Global Urban Studies book series takes an interdisciplinary approach to emergent urban issues using a global or comparative perspective. Negative Neighbourhood Reputation and Place Attachment The Production and Contestation of Territorial Stigma Edited by Paul Kirkness and Andreas Tijé-Dra The Millennial City Trends, Implications, and Prospects for Urban Planning and Policy Edited by Markus Moos, Deirdre Pfeiffer and Tara Vinodrai Twin Cities Urban Communities, Borders and Relationships over Time Edited by John Garrard and Ekaterina Mikhailova Disassembled Cities Social and Spatial Strategies to Reassemble Communities Edited by Elizabeth L. Sweet For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Global-Urban-Studies/book-series/ASHSER-1385

Disassembled Cities

Social and Spatial Strategies to Reassemble Communities

Edited by Elizabeth L. Sweet

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Elizabeth L. Sweet; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Elizabeth L. Sweet to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sweet, Elizabeth L., editor. Title: Disassembled cities : social and spatial strategies to reassemble   communities / [edited by] Elizabeth L. Sweet. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. |   Series: Global urban studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018042263 | ISBN 9781138097988 (hbk : alk. paper) |   ISBN 9781315104614 (ebk) | ISBN 9781351598613 (mobi/kindle) Subjects: LCSH: Urbanization—Social aspects. | Urbanization—Political   aspects. | Community development | Communities. | Sociology, Urban. Classification: LCC HT151 .D537 2019 | DDC 307.76—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018042263 ISBN: 978-1-138-09798-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-10461-4 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of contributors Acknowledgments

vii xi

PART I

Introduction: the promises and perils of urban theory under the shadow of globalization 1

Disassembling cities: spatial, social, and conceptual trajectories across the urban globe

1 3

I V Á N A R E N A S AND E L I Z ABE T H L . S WE E T

2

A pragmatic view of valuation for theorizing spatial production in urban planning thought

15

T I M O T H Y O . I ME OKPARI A

PART II

Transformation of self and space 3

The organizing logics of predatory formations: individualism, identity, and the consumption of goods as the good life

23 25

I V Á N A R E N A S AND E L I Z ABE T H L . S WE E T

4

Trajectories, vectors and change: mapping late neoliberal assemblage

32

I A N M cG I M P S EY AND DE BORAH YOUDE L L

5

Rise of the synthetic city: Eko Atlantic and practices of dispossession and repossession in Nigeria

51

CHARISMA ACEY

6

Reassembling the city through intersectional feminism: subversive responses to the economic crisis in Barcelona B L A N C A VA L DI VI A AND S ARA ORT I Z E S CAL ANTE

62

vi Contents PART III

Militarization and the spectacle of the (in)security state 7

The organizing logics of predatory formations: militarization and the spectacle of the (in)security state

71 73

I V Á N A R E N A S AND E L I Z ABE T H L . S WE E T

8

Disassembling foundational fictions of democracy: the people and the plaza, militarization and mobilization in Oaxaca

83

IVÁN ARENAS

9

Dis/assembling Palestine

103

A N D Y C L A RNO

10 Urban assemblages and dis-assemblages: medellin’s hegemonic and counter-hegemonic forums

113

J O H N J . B E TANCUR AND CATAL I NA ORT I Z ARCIN IEG A S

PART IV

Disassembling democracy and urban planning

139

11 The organizing logics of predatory formations: disassembling democracy and urban planning

141

I V Á N A R E N A S AND E L I Z ABE T H L . S WE E T

12 Some thoughts and findings from the field: women and the illicit politics of slum redevelopment in globalizing Mumbai

149

TA R I N I B E D I

13 Disassembledge in the Siberian city of Ulan-Ude: how ethnic Buryats reconstruct through time and space

156

E L I Z A B E T H L . S WE E T AND ME L I S S A CHAKARS

14 How to take flight from menacing futures?: young people and education in the slums of the global south

171

S I LV I A G R I NBE RG AND ME RCE DE S MACHADO

15 Chronic and concentrated youth joblessness in disassembled neighborhoods in Chicago

188

T E R E S A L . CÓRDOVA AND MAT T HE W D. WI L SO N

Index

203

Contributors

Charisma Acey is Assistant Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning, at the University of California, Berkeley. Her background includes work, research, and travel to countries in West Africa, southern Africa, and Central America. Her work focuses on local and regional environmental sustainability, with a focus on poverty reduction, urban governance, and access to basic services. Her work relies on both quantitative and participatory, qualitative research approaches to understanding individual and household demand for improved infrastructure and environmental amenities. Iván Arenas is a Mexican-American anthropologist, architect, artist, activist, and parent. His research focuses on social movements’ creative and artistic practices to create solidarities beyond the state. He has curated exhibits at the Social Justice Initiative’s Pop Up Just Art Gallery Space and works with others to mitigate and end the harms of police violence. As the Associate Director for Community Partnerships at the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy, at the University of Illinois at Chicago, he connects faculty, students, and communities through research and programming on race, ethnicity, and public policy enabling greater understanding and collective action. Tarini Bedi is Assistant Professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has research and teaching interests in gender studies, cultural and critical geography, urban studies and urban theory, political anthropology, and mobilities. John J. Betancur is Professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Policy of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Holding degrees in public policy analysis, urban planning and policy, sociology and philosophy and letters, Dr. Betancur started his teaching career in Medellín, Colombia and has published principally on urban restructuring, racial dynamics, and gentrification. Melissa Chakars is Associate Professor at Saint Joseph’s University in the Department of History. She specializes in Eurasian history focusing on Russian Siberia. Specifically, she examines the lives of the Buryats, a Mongolian ethnic group, Siberia’s largest indigenous population. In addition to her book, The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia: Transformation in Buryatia (Central European

viii Contributors University Press, 2014), she has published articles on empire, media, and gender, and co-edited a volume Modernization, Nation-Building, and Television History (Routledge, 2015). She has lived in the Russian cities of Ulan-Ude and Vladivostok, and traveled widely in Mongolia, Russia, and Eastern Europe. Andy Clarno is Associate Professor of Sociology and African American Studies and the Acting Director of the Social Justice Initiative at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research examines racism, capitalism, colonialism, and empire in the early 21st century, with a focus on the relationship between marginalization and securitization. Andy teaches courses on globalization, race and ethnicity, policing, and urban sociology. Teresa L. Córdova is Director of the Great Cities Institute (GCI) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Professor of Urban Planning and Policy in the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs (CUPPA) and an affiliate faculty in the Departments of Sociology, Gender and Women Studies, and Latino and Latin American Studies. As an applied theorist, political economist, and communitybased planner, she approaches her work as a scholarship of engagement where research, pedagogy, and service are integrated. She is an expert in community/university partnerships. Her analysis of global/local dynamics, including impacts of globalization on Latino communities, informs her work. Silvia Grinberg is a researcher at the National Committee of Science and Technology in Argentina (CONICET), professor Sociology of Education and Director of the Centre for Inequalities, subjectivity and Institutions (National University of San Martín, UNSAM) and Professor at Universidad Nacional de Patagonia Austral (UNPA). Her research examines urban inequality, specifically processes of subjectivation related to the ways of operating, procedures and mechanisms by which certain local, regional, and global dynamics take shape in school life. She has been conducting research at the neighborhood school intersection in the slums of the Buenos Aires metropolitan region. Timothy O. Imeokparia is Director of Research and Planning at the Great Cities Institute (GCI) at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He earned his MCRP and Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from The Ohio State University. He was the Director of Planning for the Neighborhood Design Center, Columbus, Ohio. He was at the University of New Mexico to develop the physical planning component of the Community and Regional Planning Program. His research and pedagogy are focused on urban design/physical planning, psychological and social functions of urban planning and urban form, and the socio-economic and physical determinants of urban form. Mercedes Machado has her PhD in education (FyL-UBA, 2017), and degrees in sciences of education (UNLU, 2011). Currently, she is a postdoctoral fellow at the National Committee of Science and Technology in Argentina (CONICET, 2017– 2019), and is a member of the Center for Studies in Inequalities, Subjectivities, and Institutions CEDESI-EHU-UNSAM (National University of San Martín, UNSAM).

Contributors  ix Ian McGimpsey teaches at the University of Birmingham School of Education. His work focuses on the sociological analysis of youth and youth services. His research has taken place within youth service providers, and has examined how policy on education, youth and localism relates to the identities and practices of youth workers and related occupational groups. Central to his work is a concern with inequality and social justice, and the role youth services can play in working toward greater inclusion and equality. His work has a central conceptual focus on the politics of subjectivity, and engages with post-structural theories. Catalina Ortiz Arciniegas is an architect and urbanist. She is interested in the negotiated co-production of space in the Global South. She holds a PhD in Urban Planning and Policy from the University of Illinois at Chicago, as a Fulbright scholar, and also a Master’s in Urban and Regional Studies from Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Dr. Ortiz is a lecturer and co-director of the MSc in Building and Urban Design in Development in The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London. SaraOrtizEscalante is a feminist activist, planner, and researcher. She is a member of Col·lectiu Punt 6, a group of feminist planners, architects, and activists in Barcelona interested in rethinking cities, neighborhoods, and the built environment in order to eliminate discrimination and include an intersectional feminist perspective in urban planning. She is currently doing her PhD at the School of Community and Regional Planning – University of British Columbia on how urban planning affects women nightshift workers in the Barcelona Metropolitan Area. In the past, she has engaged in social planning, community development, and advocacy in Mexico, El Salvador, Spain and the United States. Elizabeth L. Sweet teaches at Temple University’s Department of Geography and Urban Studies. She engages in collaborative community/economic development activist research, focusing on links between economies, violence, and identities. Using feminist and anti-racist frameworks, her work in Latino communities in the U.S. and Latin America as well as with indigenous communities in Russia has led to inclusive projects that push the boundaries of planning theory and methods, while also providing practical intervention practices for planners. She promotes diversity and inclusion within university settings through organizing events, student recruitment, and publishing both research and teaching articles on the same. Blanca Valdivia has a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology by the Complutense University of Madrid, and a Master’s degree on Urban Valuation and Management at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. From 2008 to 2015 she was researcher of the Center of Land Use at the Superior Technical School of Architecture of Barcelona, where she developed research on migration, segregation, residential conditions, methodology, and the use of public space. Since 2009 she has been a member of Col·lectiu Punt 6, an urban planning cooperative that studies and applies a gender perspective in planning and architecture.

x Contributors Matthew D. Wilson is a Senior Research Specialist at the Great Cities Institute (GCI) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he works within GCI’s Employment and Economic Development, Local and Regional Governance, and Community Wellbeing research clusters. He has completed reports and research on youth employment, revitalization of the manufacturing sector, state budget social impact analysis, economic impact analysis, and program evaluation. He has also contributed to neighborhood plans in the areas of land use, housing, economic development, workforce development, education, and public safety and has designed and facilitated community charrettes and workshops for community planning processes. Deborah Youdell is Professor of Sociology of Education in the University of Birmingham School of Education. Her work is in the field of biosocial education, bringing knowledge in biological sciences together with sociological accounts of schooling and student subjectivities, generating new insights into learning and the learner. She examines relationships between policy, practice and inequalities, and how inequalities are connected to subjectivities, everyday practices, pedagogy, institutional processes and policy. Her research has spanned issues of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, social class, ability and disability framed by with post-structural thinking about power, the subject, space, and the political.

Acknowledgments

This book emerged out of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Great Cities Institute’s symposium on Cities Across the Globe in November of 2013. There was a synergy at the conference and participants were eager to work on this book together. While the final volume has several chapters from authors not at the symposium, the ideas generated at the symposium remain central to the theoretical and practical development of book. The initial work of creating a framework and structure were developed in collaborations with Teresa L. Córdova, Deborah Youdell, Iván Arenas, and Timothy O. Imeokparia. Iván Arenas and I worked to build a scaffold that would hold the chapters together, we hope it has indeed done that. Over Skype during the World Cup in 2014 with wine and pajamas, Deborah Youdell helped to formulate ideas of disassembly. Teresa L. Córdova and GCI have been constant supporters throughout the project! Timothy O. Imeokparia has kept us all honest and asked hard questions that strengthened our thinking and writing. All the contributors have also been key in finishing this work. Over five years they have been patient and persistent, which has resulted in what I think is a solid contribution to thinking about neoliberal economic impacts in cities across the globe. Elizabeth L. Sweet Philadelphia, PA July 30, 2018

Part I

Introduction The promises and perils of urban theory under the shadow of globalization

1

Disassembling cities Spatial, social, and conceptual trajectories across the urban globe Iván Arenas and Elizabeth L. Sweet

In his State of the Union address on January 20, 2015, President of the United States Barack Obama made tackling stagnant middle-class growth and increasing levels of income inequality in the United States a priority for his government. Five days later, Greek voters elected a government that campaigned on the promise of ending fiscal austerity measures and restructuring its loans with the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. On the face of it, the economic indicators of the United States and Greece would suggest that they were at radically opposite ends of the financial spectrum. The United States at the end of January 2015 had a stock market near record levels, a decreasing unemployment rate of 5.6%, and a Gross Domestic Product growth of around 4%. Meanwhile, Greece’s stock market had lost over 80% of its value since 2008, the country had an unemployment rate of 25.8%, and the economy had contracted by 20% from 2008 to 2012. Whether financially secure or in fiscal turmoil, and whether referring to the United States or Europe, the leaders of both nations brought attention to the role that economic policies have in producing troubling wealth disparities. Income inequality is a challenge around the world. Research by Oxfam points out that, at the start of 2015, the wealthiest 1% of individuals owned 48% of the planet’s wealth. In 2017, a Credit Suisse global wealth report put their share of global wealth at 50.1%. From Athens, Greece to Athens, Georgia, recent increases in wealth for a global minority and a decreasing or stagnant level of wealth for the planet’s majority unite people across the globe. The worldwide trend of increasing income inequality gained international attention during Occupy Wall Street movement protests that began in late 2011 as a response to worldwide calls for austerity measures. Mirroring the forcible repression of dissent by militarized police that many Occupy Wall Street participants faced, Greeks protesting austerity measures have similarly faced a heavily armed response by state security forces. If people’s lives and livelihoods in both the economically successful United States and in economically troubled Greece feel precarious and in crisis, threatened by both the rise in millionaires and militarization, what does this say about the success and sustainability of contemporary neoliberal economics? That 99% of the world’s population owns less than 50% of the world’s wealth is a dramatic statistical fact. While income inequality has received increasing media

4  Iván Arenas and Elizabeth L. Sweet and government attention, another recent global milestone has largely faded from attention, namely that as of mid-2007 over 50% of the world’s population lives in urban areas. Is the crisis of increasing income inequality also an urban crisis? What are the relationships between the rise in income inequality and growing urban spatiality? Do urban processes and spatial conditions foster income and other types of inequalities? Do the organizing logics of contemporary neoliberal capitalism generate divisive spatial dynamics? These and other questions assessing the relationships between economic, spatial, and social conditions animate this edited volume. Henri Lefebvre’s publication, The Production of Space (translated into English only in the 1990s), ushered in a broad spatial turn in academia, “every society – and hence every mode of production [. . .] produces a space, its own space” (1995a, p. 31). A critical implication of Lefebvre’s insistence that space is socially produced and critically formed by the political economy of the time is that current neoliberal capitalist formations are generating their own spatialities. Understanding and interrogating the space-making aspects of contemporary capitalism can therefore offer insights into the relationships between increasing inequality and the ascendance of urban living. A second and equally fundamental implication of Lefebvre’s argument that space is a social product is the insight that the production of space is “the locus of projects and actions deployed as part of specific strategies, and hence also the object of wagers on the future” (1995a, p. 142). Though the physical materiality and social organization of urban spaces is overdetermined and cannot ever be completely under the control of particular individuals, the city is a field of social struggle, whose dominant norms and resistances shape spatial and social forms. Given our present spatial struggles and economic dynamics, what specific strategies can be discerned within the mode of production of neoliberal capitalism and what can be gleaned about global urban futures by analyzing our current urban and economic conflicts? For Stuart Hall (1996) and Saskia Sassen (1991, 2014), much of the focus on economic and urban processes has centered on how neoliberalism has pulled all corners of the world into global markets. Its planetary reach suggests that we are all radically interconnected. At its most simple level, this means that what happens in a city like New York affects people thousands of miles away in cities in Norway and Nigeria, and vice versa. The seemingly simple notion of our global interrelatedness has deep implications, for, as Doreen Massey has written, “recognizing our interrelatedness enables us to examine our interrelations [. . .]. Recognizing our interrelations means recognizing that these relations are power relations” (1999, p. 289). There is increasing recognition that the dominant policies of state deregulation, privatization, extreme profit seeking, and financialization not only unites us but also deeply divides us. Although no one person, corporation, or nation controls the interconnected global financial system, rising income inequality makes it evident that there are nonetheless clear centers of power and beneficiaries as well as clear losers. Analyzing its systemic trends, Saskia Sassen has focused on “predatory formations.” These are “assemblages of powerful actors, markets, technologies, and

Disassembling cities  5 governments” (2014, p. 221) underpinned by dynamics of profit extraction that “all go in one direction – toward pushing people out” (2014, p. 77). The rising wealth of a few is tied to the impoverishment of many. Across the globe, the interrelated and rhizomatic strands of predatory economics are creating enduring assemblages. The largely unfettered freedom of these formations to permeate all aspects of life is transforming social relations at many levels, from the role of the state to people’s access to housing, healthcare, education, employment, and the place of politics in public space. Governed by an exclusive focus on profit maximization driven by expulsion, as multiple parts of the world are pulled into neoliberal assemblages, we contend that this has generated processes of disassembling at the local level that create spaces and societies in constant crisis. On the one hand, this edited volume documents and analyzes these processes of disassembling. On the other hand, as the disassembling of social and spatial relations in cities around the world has pushed people onto the margins and the periphery, we see that people have struggled not just to survive, but also to mend and craft new social and spatial strategies through the practices of everyday life. These processes also sometimes create new centers of possibility or challenges to power in a way that decolonizes spaces. Thus, chapters of this edited volume assess how, under constant crisis, people are reassembling lives, livelihoods, and locales. At times, for example, this reconstruction has meant mobilizing with others to protest against capitalist encroachments and the role of the police-state as the security apparatus of global capitalism. Whether in the slums of Mumbai, the walled enclaves of Palestine, or the violent streets of Chicago and Medellín, crisis has given rise to everyday insurgencies and different strategies reassembling the fractured jigsaw puzzle of contemporary urban life. In Russia, Mexico, and India, struggles over the commodification of heritage or the erasure of previous struggles through urban planning projects map out not only the precarious nature of alternative readings of the past, but also the challenges of radical imaginations for alternative presents and futures. While the tentacles of predatory capital reach into many locales, global cities today are characterized by the separation of people by physical walls, by police and surveillance practices, and by differentiated experiences of racism, sexism, and vast gaps in income and mobility. People in today’s global cities share spatial proximity but are fractured by the disassembling effects of contemporary economic practices. In addition to a study of these processes of disassembling, this book also documents and analyzes how, in cities across the globe, people have responded to and are resisting disassembling processes by proposing and practicing social and spatial alternatives. The interrelationship between predatory capitalism’s disassembling dynamics and local efforts to reassemble lives and livelihoods is at the center of our investigation. As urban scholars, moreover, the spatiality of this “double articulation” (Massey, 1994) between the global and the local is also front and center. The international focus and collaborative nature of this edited volume has also brought into focus the challenge of finding a theoretical language that could encompass the diverse ways in which the logics of predatory capitalism and its assemblages congeal, but are also contested in particular urban spaces around the world. In

6  Iván Arenas and Elizabeth L. Sweet each and every urban space there exist “an unlimited multiplicity or uncountable set of social spaces” (Lefebvre, 1995a, p. 86). Layered one over the other, with borders and boundaries between them that are porous, do the interrelationships of any urban space, let alone of the planet, ever crystalize into a coherent whole? If the predatory logics and practices of neoliberal capitalism are producing global assemblages and enduring formations, can we capture the specific disassembling spatialities they leave behind through any theoretical framework? Given these dynamics, what does it mean to speak of “the city”? Throughout, we thus ask in what ways the disassembling of cities also necessitates a disassembling of totalizing theories that promise to provide a grand synthesis of urban or economic processes, but whose necessary abstractions exclude or overlook the way in which local, insurgent knowledges offer their own important insights and solutions. Rather than an overarching theoretical framework, we therefore offer disassembling and assembling as a conceptual frame by which to engage with the diverse ways wherein the challenges of contemporary urban life are pulling people apart and yet also engendering new assemblages, practices, and bringing theories to life. Ultimately, as Michel de Certeau suggests, “If it is true that the grid of ‘discipline’ is everywhere becoming clearer and more extensive, it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society resists being reduced to it” (1984, p. xiv). To do so, in what follows we outline some of the critical features of neoliberal predatory capitalist formations and highlight their spatial relationships. While the themes of each section are analyzed in more detail in a review chapter before their respective case study chapters, we understand these themes as critical processes that undergird the disassembling of urban places. In each of the three sections of the book, we aim to highlight how the logic of neoliberal predatory formations are practiced as well as how they are struggled over and resisted. Subsequent chapters in each section drill down deeper to specify and unearth the formative tension between the disassembling processes of neoliberal capitalism and how communities are reassembling in response.

The social and spatial effects of neoliberal predatory formations Economists point to Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher’s tenures in the 1980s as the moment when neoliberal economic models gained ascendancy. Neoliberal economic principles promoted in the United States and the United Kingdom stressed a reduction of social supports by the state as well as the deregulation of financial markets both in individual nations and between nations. Free-market principles calling for a retreat of state regulation emphasized competition between corporations and individuals as the drivers of both economic and social futures. Academics have pointed to this as a shift from Fordist to flexible accumulation models. Addressing long-term trends, Saskia Sassen (2014) points out that Fordist economics entailed dynamics that sought to incorporate people into the economic sector while today’s neoliberal dynamics have instead made people’s expulsion from economic and social spheres the source of hyper-profit making.

Disassembling cities  7 On the one hand, this is not new; the practice of garnering profits from exploitation has a long history that for many stretches back at least as far as Europe’s moment of industrial and commercial expansion when, “it was capitalism itself that became colonialist” (Sartre, 2001, p. 33). The colonial capitalist system not only shaped economic markets that began to connect the globe but fashioned people “who think, speak, and act according to the very principles of the colonial system” (Sartre, 2001, p. 44). Built upon deeply racist, sexist, and divisive thinking, it left lasting imprints upon its growing urban spaces. Thus, in cities of the United Kingdom during the Industrial Revolution, the drive for profits resulted in municipal policies, workplace conditions, and housing that disadvantaged workers, treating them as “mere material” to be warehoused in unsanitary and unsafe quarters and workplaces and discarded as they “became less useful” (Engels, 2009). Divided into neighborhoods of haves and have-nots, colonial capitalist economics generated global social and spatial conditions that produced segregated spaces and societies of the dominant and dominated. On the other hand, while the long shadow of the colonial capitalist system continues to shade our segregated urban and economic present, its forms and the ways profits function have changed. David Harvey once characterized the problematic exploitation of workers by the corporations that employ them, the landlords that rent to them, and the retail sector where they purchase as “accumulation by dispossession.” More recently, Harvey has noted that “reckless slash-and-burn is now openly the motto of the ruling classes pretty much everywhere” (2012, p. 157). Whereas having a monopoly on material goods such as land, the buildings on the land, or the products of industry were once the primary means of accumulating wealth and profits, today’s rise of financial capital has made speculation and the creation of financial instruments the most lucrative pathway toward profits. Despite the fact that the unbridled pursuit of profits often has tremendous social and material costs, the speculative character of financial capital has made profit seeking its primary goal and its proponents often describe profit seeking as the highest social good. The subprime mortgage crisis that started in 2007 in the United States is a good example of the shift from accumulation by dispossession to slash-and-burn capitalism. For the banks and investors holding the loans on the 900,000-plus homes foreclosed on between August 2007 and October 2008, possessing these properties resulted in deep financial losses and a high personal cost. While the dispossession of almost a million homeowners resulted in the near collapse of the entire economic system, the securitization of mortgages – whereby financiers pooled together mortgages into larger bundles that they then sold to others – was for many highly profitable. Given that these mortgage securitization packages were designed to be highly lucrative, but were therefore also highly risky, the resulting collapse of the housing market and dispossession of nearly a million homeowners cannot be said to be afterthoughts; these and other similar financial instruments are, rather, beholden to a speculation that accepts people and the planet as disposable elements in the calculus of extreme profits. Neoliberal capitalism has moved from strategies focused on accumulation by dispossession to scorched earth tactics where exponential

8  Iván Arenas and Elizabeth L. Sweet profits are produced by the disassembling of people and places in all corners of the globe. The crisis of vacant neighborhoods and crumbling, empty homes in Detroit, Michigan, and other communities across the United States stand as material witnesses to the brutal disassembling effects that neoliberal profits produce today. If disassembling dynamics are part of the functioning of the predatory capitalist system rather than its exception, how has this system managed to survive even as it undermines the lives of the majority of the planet’s inhabitants? In part, as Karl Marx (1992) long ago pointed out, capitalism moves forward through acts of creative destruction whereby existing wealth is wiped out to make space for new cycles of growth. When moments of creative destruction are labeled moments of crisis, however, they are thereby rendered not only exceptions to capitalism’s reasoning rather than the rule, but they also imply that the end of the crisis will bring greater prosperity for all. Of this notion of inevitable progress, Walter Benjamin observed that an individual “feels compelled to regard any state that dispossesses him as unstable. But stable conditions need by no means be pleasant conditions” (1996, p. 451). The pervasive discourse of increasing prosperity to come masks the fact that the disassembling effects of a crisis are part of the normal functioning of the capitalist system, not its breakdown. Thus, the resulting just-so story of political economy “substitutes myths of evolutionary development for the realities of violent confrontation and usurpation” (Shapiro, 1992, p. 483). The majority of people on the planet suffer from the violence of capitalist hyperprofit-maximization under the crushing waves of its economic crises, living “at least intermittently with a sense of insecurity, of uncertainty or trepidation about the future” (Pred, 2000, p. 9); however, accounts of these crises as temporary roadblocks on the way to individual and collective success make its violent effects more palatable. Allen Pred’s (2000) research in Sweden concludes that, rather than critique the capitalist system, this sense of powerlessness is “apt to be culturally and politically reworked into expressions of racism” (p. 10). In this way, the insecurity and crisis produced by neoliberal capitalism is deflected and made the fault of others. The resulting identities formed around such essentialisms further disassemble the frayed collective fabric of social life. In Europe, Ecuador, or Ethiopia, for the majority of people living under today’s large-scale economic schema, crisis is no longer cyclical, but is rather a constant fact of life. Yet, although the planetary reach of fiscal austerity measures such as those seen in Greece were “expected to increase to 6.3 billion, or 90 percent of people worldwide, by 2015” (2014, p. 24), Saskia Sassen pointed out that an optic of prosperity that focuses on macro-economic statistics such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or that takes the stock market and unemployment numbers as indicators of economic well-being misses the hardships and struggles of people. As she notes, behind strengthening global GDP growth rates “lies the making of extreme forms of wealth and poverty and the destruction of well-established middle classes” (2014, p. 140). The lived reality of stagnant wages, minimum-wage jobs, increased debt, and joblessness are not captured by our ways of measuring the economy. Focusing on the disassembling effects of our present economic system offers a way to step out of the shadow of economic indicators such as stock market

Disassembling cities  9 indexes or GDP that offer forms of mass-distraction from the daily hardships the majority of people across the globe are facing. Even if facing extreme hardships, many around the world are seduced by the swan-song of future progress that macro-economic indicators offer. Believing that tomorrow will be better, even if the promised riches and prosperity that are imagined to flower from hard work never materialize, many nonetheless continue to believe they someday will, framing their struggle as a sacrifice whose benefits are deferred to the next generation. Confronted with stark wealth inequalities and flooded by media messages highlighting stock values, “capital appears to have an innate property of self-expansion” (emphasis added) (Taussig, 1977, p. 139). Fetishizing goods and finance, we grant commodities and money powers they do not possess, thereby masking the production of profits generated by unequal social relations and exploitation (Marx, 1992). Rather than reify goods or imagine that money begets more money, the analysis of disassembling offers a conceptual grid that reconnects and articulates financial processes to people’s experiences, emphasizing not only their social interrelations but also their materiality. To emphasize disassembling dynamics, then, means digging beyond the statistics to analyze and discuss the implications of our global interrelationships. After all, the mere fact that we are all interconnected does not by itself tell us much. We need to be precise about the character of our relationality because “analysis is as much a matter of determining independencies as interconnections, gulfs as well as bridges” (Geertz, 2000, p. 407). Analyzing how capitalism’s neoliberal predatory formation both separates and connects us means recognizing that the rising power of urbanization is concentrated in a small set of cities that dominate our global cultural, economic, and political map. Moreover, it means recognizing that urban power is not only unevenly distributed across the planet, but also within cities. Thus, across the globe, “slums are set to become ‘normal’ urban neighborhoods, marked by high levels of poverty and deprivation but also high levels of employment in the informal and illegal economy” (Amin, 2013, p. 203). The rise of the city as the dominant space for social reproduction has meant an increasing institutionalization of global inequalities. Social scientists have not been as attentive to the implications as much as they have been attentive to charting out the numbers (Amin, 2013). The divisive spatiality produced by the disassembling dynamics of neoliberal predatory formations are both an effect of and further cause of global gulfs – as well as bridges. Studying disassembling means tracing the implications and effects of these gulfs and bridges both in terms of their historical development as well as in how they have changed over time. In terms of housing, for example, though the population of the planet living in slums continues to increase, this form of precarious, often informal housing has for a long time been a prime example of capitalism’s divisive spatiality. During the industrial era, housing for the working class became a matter of architects and planners finding “the lowest possible threshold of tolerability” (emphasis added) (Lefebvre, 1995a, p. 316). Worker’s housing was designed at the lowest threshold needed to sustain life. Valued as little more than cogs in the machine of production, habitable spaces for workers reduced them to bare-life.

10  Iván Arenas and Elizabeth L. Sweet For the working poor, capitalist profit logics have long produced precarious living spaces conducive to the maximum possible wealth extraction from weary worker’s bodies. At the same time as the industrial era was exploiting workers in its cities, the colonial policies and projects of Western countries similarly created zones of maximum wealth extraction from the bodies and bountiful places of the Global South. More recently, although countries in the Global South have expelled colonial overseers, because of high levels of debt many have found themselves beholden to the economic and political policies of the World Bank (WB), International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Trade Organization (WTO). The restructuring of their economies under WB, IMF, and WTO policies means that the resources and labor of these countries function as cheap surplus zones vulnerable to exploitation by foreign companies. “Restructuring programs and loans from the international system” in the 1980s and 1990s, as Saskia Sassen notes, “aimed at shaping a political economy and a repositioning of these countries as sites for extraction, ranging from natural resources to the consumption power of their populations” (2014, p. 90). Exploitation and extraction have historically been the norm in the Global South and for many of the working poor in Europe and the United States. Hundreds of millions of marginalized and impoverished individuals from the Global South have been forced to migrate to cities around the world, searching for better working and living conditions. But they often find that the neoliberal economic and political forces that evicted them from small towns and rural livelihoods are replicated if not intensified in the city. As Stuart Hall (2006) writes, one of the effects of a system of globalization “grounded in the massive disparities of wealth and power between world’s rich and poor” has been “to reproduce within the city the divisions which globalization in its contemporary forms assumes in the wider world” (p. 48). For the billions of people crowded into the inner city or warehoused in peripheral slums, the limited opportunities for reassembling their individual lives and livelihoods within the marketplace often mean a further replication of the disassembling and damaging dynamics of capitalism’s divisive nature. In the inner city of New York in the 1990s, many of its Latinx and African American residents turned to selling drugs as a way to survive the economic marginalization and racial segregation they faced. “They are seeking an alternative to their social marginalization. In the process, on a daily level, they become the actual agents administering their own destruction and the community’s suffering” (Bourgois, 2008, p. 143). The divisive spatiality of capitalism’s neoliberal predatory formations mean that global finance, transnational corporations, and cosmopolitan elites cross borders with ease, while political refugees and economic migrants find only segregated spaces and further barriers at the end of their forced migrations. The gleaming skyscraper skylines of our modern cities inspire the imagination and for many are a testament to our collective social and technical achievements. “We are accustomed to associate our highest values, both material and spiritual, with urban life,” wrote Claude Lévi-Strauss (1992, p. 134). Looking beyond the beaming glass towers and technological wonders of the city, however, he noted that cities are, at base, a crowding together of individuals for the purpose of survival

Disassembling cities  11 and found in urbanism “clinical symptoms of a life-and-death struggle” (1992, p. 135). For millions of people around the globe, the city offers the promise of and is a material manifestation of better futures. However, as James Wolfensohn (2006), former World Bank director, has noted, “taking up the opportunities for work that cities offer too often means having to bring up one’s children in the squalid surroundings of a slum or a shanty town and to endure the consequent effects of social injustice and division” (p. 116). The spatiality of capitalism’s neoliberal predatory formations produces slums and high rises, expendable and expensive housing. Yet, as David Harvey indicates, while the violence of slums (a result of inequality in economic, social, and political structures outside the slum) is often acknowledged – even by World Bank directors – the violence of skyscrapers and high rises is often invisible. This is so not only because the profits used to build skyscrapers come from the exploitation of people and places such as slums, but also because the violent processes that go into physically making and remaking the affluent zones of global cities “show no trace of the brutal processes of land clearance that permitted their construction” (Harvey, 2012, p. 19). They are produced on the back of and at the expense of people and are monuments of violence and domination. In this way, as in slavery, the opulent lifestyles of the hacendados are produced by the misery of the slaves. Divided cities are manufactured, produced through multiple violent forms of assemblage and disassemblage, including through the physical and social displacement of marginalized populations by bulldozers but also by laws of eminent domain, redlining, rents and gentrification, economic and social segregation, debt regimes, un- and under-employment, non-livable wages, exclusions from opportunity, and punitive policing practices, among other technologies guided by neoliberal predatory logics. Slum clearance to make way for exclusive gated communities and suburban enclaves are current spatial trends that most mark our urban landscape in the age of neoliberal capitalist materiality – evictions and enclosures. Slums in Western cities are warehouses of the poor, reserve spaces for future development, carceral spaces of contention. Buried under mountains of debt or debris, the precarious and fragile reality of people’s lives and livelihoods in slums and inner-cities around the planet overwhelm and disassemble people’s capacity to effectively transform their situation. As Zygmunt Bauman notes, “the state of permanent precarité – insecurity of social standing, uncertainty about the future of one’s livelihood and the overwhelming feeling of ‘no grip on the present’ – combine into an incapacity to make plans and act on them” (2008, p. 41). For the millions living on the edge of crisis, their seemingly permanent conditions of instability ensure that any capacity to mobilize and manifest their discontent is effectively disassembled. The demobilizing effects of everyday suffering and the precariousness of people’s struggles just to survive are not merely problems for political participation but have deadly effects. For Saskia Sassen (2014), moreover, this is “akin to a kind of economic version of ethnic cleansing in which elements considered troublesome are dealt with by simply eliminating them” (p. 36). Most importantly, however, increased attention to the deadly effects of austerity and inequality today have come not as a result of a revision of their legacies for historically marginalized populations and places, but

12  Iván Arenas and Elizabeth L. Sweet rather from the fact that the disassembling dynamics of current economic policy and practice have expanded and accelerated their scope, affecting the previously sheltered middle classes of the privileged Global North, producing vast spheres of precariousness and seemingly permanent instability. More and more the sphere of social reproduction (health care, education, nutrition, etc.) is being off-loaded to individuals who have to fend for themselves while at the same time subsidizing capitalism by alleviating both corporations and states from having to supply basic necessities or commodifying what was previously provided by the state or corporate entities. As the spatial reach of zones of instability expand beyond the impoverished classes in the inner city and slums to envelop the 99%, people have mobilized and assembled together to protest, some advocating for systemic change and others for inclusion in the marketplace. Many of the troublesome elements dissenting to neoliberalism’s “economic ethnic cleansing” have found, however, that protests are met with repression and violence by the state. The disassembling of people’s capacity to dissent has a spatial component for, as David Harvey (2001) remarks, “one of the principal tasks of the capitalist state is to locate power in the spaces which the bourgeoisie controls, and disempower those spaces which oppositional movements have the greatest potentiality to command” (p. 237). The violent repression of recent social movements such as Occupy Wall Street in the United States and APPO in Oaxaca, Mexico attest to the fact that the role of the state has been transformed by the logics of predatory neoliberalism. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2004) underscore, “[t]he enemy [. . .] is not a unitary sovereign nation-state but rather a network. The enemy, in other words, has a new form” and relies on a compact state-corporate world (emphasis added) (p. 54). Although many focus on transnational corporations as the most important links in this network, the state remains critically important for how current neoliberal assemblages have congealed into an enduring formation.

On alternatives and assemblages In using assemblage and disassemblage – or, rather, their active verb form (assembling/disassembling) – as analytical tools, we want to draw attention to the fact that neither capitalism nor the state (or their relationships with each other) are monolithic, coherent, or even stable entities, but are instead composed of myriad moving elements (discourses, practices, ways of thinking, and habits of acting) that combine to shape complex social formations. In documenting, mapping, and tracing some of the heterogeneous components that neoliberal discourses and practices have assembled together into neoliberal predatory formations, our object of study is the process of their becoming articulated together as well as the effects of this articulation. This includes examining how these heterogeneous elements interconnect and the contingent possibilities these interconnections produce as well as what is disassembled, taken apart and uncoupled through these processes. As the chapters in this book show, neoliberal predatory formations are assemblages with composite dynamic segments weaving in and out of a myriad of scales. People

Disassembling cities  13 are both implicated and responding to often untold practices and performances across not just the world, but in any particular city or community. Thus we find that people are mapping, mobilizing, informing, and transforming, surviving, challenging, and dissecting, but also succumbing and dying as they struggle to craft and fit together responses and alternatives to the effects of neoliberalism. We use assembling and disassembling to highlight the life and death consequences of predatory economic formations. We also use assembling and disassembling to underscore that, though an assemblage is complex and multi-dimensional, offering no center at which to strike at, and thus no one strategy by which to dismantle it, nonetheless we all participate daily in the process of both its production and its possible undoing.

References Amin, A. (2013). The urban condition: A challenge to social science. Public Culture, 25(2), 201–208. Bauman, Z. (2008 [2001]). Community: Seeking safety in an insecure world. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Benjamin, W. (1996 [1923–1926]). One-way street. In Selected writings (Vol. 1, pp. 1913– 1926). Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Bourgois, P. (2008 [1996]). In search of respect: Selling crack in El Barrio (2nd ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press. de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Engels, F. (2009 [1993]). The condition of the working class in England. New York: Oxford University Press. Geertz, C. (2000 [1966]). Person time and conduct in Bali: An essay in cultural analysis. In The interpretation of cultures (pp. 360–411). New York: Basic Books. Hall, S. (1996). The west and the rest: Discourse and power. In S. Hall, D. Held, D. Hubert, & K. Thompson (Eds.), Modernity: An introduction to modern societies (pp. 184–228). New York: Blackwell Publishing. Hall, S. (2006). Cosmopolitan promises, multicultural realities. In R. Scholar (Ed.), Divided cities: The Oxford Amnesty lectures 2003 (pp. 20–51). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2004). Multitude: War and democracy in the age of empire. New York: Penguin. Harvey, D. (2001 [1990]). The condition of postmodernity. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc. Harvey, D. (2012). Rebel cities: From the right to the city to the urban revolution. New York: Verso. Lefebvre, H. (1995a [1974]). The production of space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1992 [1955]). Tristes Tropiques (J. Wightman & D. Wightman, Trans.). New York: Penguin Books. Marx, K. (1992 [1867]). Capital: Volume 1: A critique of political economy. New York: International Publishers. Massey, D. (1994). Double articulation: A place in the world. In A. Bammer (Ed.), Displacements: Cultural identities in question (pp. 110–121). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

14  Iván Arenas and Elizabeth L. Sweet Massey, D. (1999). Spaces of politics. In D. Massey, J. Allen, & P. Sarre (Eds.), Human geography today (pp. 279–293). Oxford: Polity Press. Pred, A. (2000). Even in Sweden: Racisms, racialized spaces, and the popular geographical imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sartre, J. (2001 [1964]). Colonialism is a system. In A. Haddour (Trans.), Colonialism and neocolonialism (pp. 30–47). New York: Routledge. Sassen, S. (1991). The global city: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sassen, S. (2014). Expulsions: Brutality and complexity in the global economy. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Shapiro, M. (1992). Moral geographies and the ethics of post-sovereignty. Public Culture, 6(3), 479–502. Taussig, M. (1977). The genesis of capitalism amongst a South American Peasantry. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 19(2), 130–155. Wolfensohn, J. (2006). The undivided city. In R. Scholar (Ed.), Divided cities: The Oxford Amnesty lectures 2003 (pp. 109–128). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2

A pragmatic view of valuation for theorizing spatial production in urban planning thought Timothy O. Imeokparia

Introduction It is almost trivial to claim that “land and land-use are important in the economic organisation of societies” (Jauhiainen, 2007, p. 185) and that cities are characterized by a continually changing spatial-economic structure. The fact of the spatial contradictions inherent in modern capitalism is manifest in the ongoing deindustrialization of the historic urban core of capitalist societies (Adams, Baum, & MacGregor, 1985, p. 157). While this volume in large part examines the processes of neoliberal disassembly and in some cases bottom-up reassembly in cities across the globe, I point out that such dualism is artificial. In this chapter, I shed light on one manifestation of this artificiality. The narrow focus of the critique of neoliberalism conceals the important role the private sector has for stimulating property development and investment in urban communities. Marginalizing the role of the private sector by enveloping their role in a totalizing neoliberal critique, leaves (un)underdeveloped, disadvantaged neighborhoods will remain in a persistent state of “compromised use values (embodied in the paternalistic notion of ‘blight’)” and “diminished exchange values (embodied in the notion of ‘obsolescence’)” (Weber, 2002, p. 519). A useful clarification is suggested by Bowman & Ambrosine (2000, pp. 2–3) which draws on the distinction provided by classical economic theory of use value as “the specific qualities of the product perceived by customers in relation to their needs” that makes it a subjective judgement and exchange value which refers to “the monetary amount realized at a single point in time when the exchange of the good takes place.” I specifically focus on the forces that shape land-use patterns in industrialized capitalist societies in which the allocation of land is accomplished primarily through the private market. This requires an examination of the characteristics of land as a commodity in market economies (Pivo, 1984, p. 40). The failure to develop a sufficiently robust public policy and practice in response to uneven spatial development is due to the lack of a recognition of the centrality of the category of value for any radical critique of capitalist spatiality (Mann, 2016, p. 8). What is needed is an analysis of the process by which value in the built environment “[is] defined economically, culturally, and politically in the context of markets and commoditization” (Dannhaeuser & Werner, 2006, p. 1).

16  Timothy O. Imeokparia I advance a view of effective socio-economic change that recognizes the tangible, material world of capitalist society and the question of socio-spatial practice as contingent, context-specific and self-structuring. In the process I engage with the dilemmas of praxis involved in capitalist spatial production. This requires a new political imaginary that is united in principle against the exigencies of capitalism, but divergent in practice. While drawing attention to the political economy of urban planning, I argue for a conceptualization of spatial practices that transcends a too narrow view of the political economy – one that is too vague in conceptual specification and too reductionistic. I draw attention to the limits of focusing on the ideology of neoliberalism as a framework to explain socio-spatial relations because of its tendency toward a determinism, which is causative or teleological.

Spatial production under capitalism The spatial contradictions of capitalism are not unique to globalizing capitalism. Clearly, the production of space occurs within the broader social and economic structures. As a starting point, it is crucial to understand “that the desire for economic profit is a socially accepted goal in western capitalist societies” (Jauhiainen, 2007, pp. 179–180). The profit motive underlies many urban land-use decisions. While not all such decisions can be explained simply through economic rationalities, nevertheless, “market-based factors relating to return and risk are core influences” (Adair, Berry, McGreal, Deddis, & Hirst, 1999, p. 2031). In a reaction to declining rates of profit, businesses engage in the spatial shifting of investment. In other words, the circulation of capital is initiated when it is likely that reinvestment in a particular location in the city and its built environment will be make a profitable investment (Jauhiainen, 2007, pp. 190–191). The location decisions of firms have been the traditional methodology utilized in the analysis of change in urban systems. Under certain simplifying assumptions, the changing determinants of and the implications of the location dynamics of firms was used to rationalize urban land-use patterns (D’Arcy & Keogh, 1997, pp. 686–687). Thus, the creative destruction and restructuring of the built environment is the result of an unremitting spatial displacement of capital (see Harvey, 1982; Merrifield, 2002, pp. 104–105). There is a consistent process of investment, disinvestment and reinvestment that materializes in cities and to gain surplus value (Jauhiainen, 2007, p. 186). Still, development decisions are determined by the return on investment. It is the developer, not public policy, that determines what is an acceptable rate of return. In the end, the answer to the question of redevelopment lies in other factors related to neighborhood assets and local economies. While location alone may not account for the likelihood of redevelopment, the economic vitality of the local economy is often determinative. However, as (Jauhiainen, 2007, p. 190) notes, the “[b]roader political, social and cultural aspects and the role of various agents in land-use changes need to be considered.” Smith (2000) claims that capitalism reproduces itself by finding new places in cities and new locations in the built environment (p. 58) and in the process creates

Valuation for theorizing spatial production  17 differentiation. When capital is viewed as a “value in motion,” then the development of sites for specific uses can be understood more concretely by analyzing the flow of capital through different locations in the city (Smith, 2000, p. 58). Therefore, I address three related issues: “What is value? How is it created? And who captures it?” (Bowman & Ambrosini, 2000, p. 1). Bowman and Ambrosini (2000) make a “distinction between use value, which is subjectively assessed by customers, and exchange value, which is only realized at the point of sale” (Bowman & Ambrosini, 2000, p. 1). This is not, however, an equal relationship, as “value capture is determined by the perceived power relationships between buyers and sellers” (Bowman & Ambrosini, 2000, p. 1). Unequal development in urban areas can be explained in part by the “friction [created] when capital (ie ‘value in motion’) is trapped in steel beams and concrete” necessitating “elaborate and expensive schemes for offsetting risks.” (Weber, 2002, p. 519). Profits, the share of value captured by the developer, is reflected in the “struggles between use and exchange values” (Weber, 2002, p. 519). The concept of value is explained in neoclassical economics by the notion of land rent, which is crucial in understanding and explaining socio-economic phenomena in a city. Land or economic rent is any compensation to a land owner or factor of production that exceeds the costs needed to bring that factor into production. Central to standard neoclassical models of urban development is the idea that variations in the outcome of development processes can be explained by the concept of optimal allocation, the most precision for the least cost. However, what needs to be explained is the reluctance to convert underused and disused areas into other land-uses. The tendency is to explain this occurrence as the result of imperfect market conditions and market failures. In other words, “urban property markets are imperfect by nature and that market failures are a common characteristic of these markets” (van der Krabben & Lambooy, 1994, p. 4). But in reality, little is explained by the imperfect nature of markets, since patters of uneven development are just that, patters, not random imperfections. Ever since Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1991) was published, the notion that space is socially produced, or constructed, has developed into one of the theoretical underpinnings of contemporary urban planning thought. Without getting bogged down with the wider problems of its uses by urban planners, “there remain fundamental problems with such a conceptualization of space” (Unwin, 2000, p. 11). In contemporary planning thought, the tendency is to view urban change through the lens of the critique of what is claimed to be the neoliberal hegemony over the global economic system. This is too simplistic because it fails to even passably address everyday economic behavior by mystifying the structural dimensions of capitalism. The context for the issues discussed here is the totalizing conception of urban spatial development and capitalist economies implied in the critique of neoliberalism which posits a view of business domination over urban public policy. The claims of neoliberal formulation belie the substantial differences in the way that urban property markets operate. The problem is that the critiques of neoliberalism lack a serious conceptual foundation that can be operationalized

18  Timothy O. Imeokparia in such a way that the strategies of the actors in the development process can be explained (van der Krabben & Lambooy, 1994, p. 4). Much of the criticism of neoliberal spatial formation fails to offer or unpack the distinctive logic through which value is created in local economies. They fail to account for the processes required for the “transformations [required to] revalorize devalued landscapes” (Weber, 2002, pp. 520–521). Fraser (2017) claims that “[t]he construction of a pragmatic approach to value represents a novel perspective on capitalism, which” can suggest an alternative approach “to conceptualize, and indeed to distinguish, its disparate sectors and regimes” (p. 58). To avoid the confusion inherent in contemporary discussions of the labor theory of value – that calculates value based on the amount of labor needed to produce something – preferred by classical political economy, the notion of value is separated from efforts to delink the value inherent in things as being more essential than price or efforts to reduce value to market price. Following Boltanski and Esquerre (2016; see also Doganova & Muniesa, 2015), value is conceived pragmatically, as a “test for justifying and criticizing prices” (Fraser, 2017, pp. 59–60). Contemporary discourse on the shifting dynamics of the capitalist system in the planning and urban development literature, with its focus on the perceived hegemony of neoliberalism, has failed to interrogate the distinctive logic through which value is established in the economy (Fraser, 2017, p. 57). As mentioned earlier, part of the problem can be traced to Henri Lefebvre’s notion of the social production of space, which has led discussion of the issues of urban spatial structure in directions that ignores “the processes of production and construction, empowerment and value, and space and place” (Unwin, 2000, p. 11). The problem created by land left abandoned or underutilized should take into account the economic rationality of developers irrespective of its perceived explanatory limitations. This is not to argue that markets are not embedded in particular social and political relations nor is it meant to accept without critique “a market logic of capitalism to which urban policy at all levels must submit” (Logan & Swanstrom, 1990, pp. 3–4). Nevertheless, a broader analysis that “explores the dynamics of the property development process in relation to land rent theory in marginal development locations” is required (Bryson, 1997, p. 1439). In this chapter, I focus on the issue of valorization and draw on new work on the sociology of valuation to conceptualize and contextualize urban land development practices. It requires “an approach to valuation based on evaluation and valorization” (Vatin, 2013, p. 32), rather than engaging with the philosophical debate about value and values. Drawing on Dewey’s Theory of Valuation, Hutter and Stark (2015, pp. 5–7) note that, for Dewey, value is “a quality that has to be performed.” In the context of the concerns of this chapter, land development is considered a “concrete action and practice” and “a form of valuation” that “takes place in situations.” In other words, “[v]aluation is spatially and temporally localized.” While in following Vatin (2013) a distinction is made “between ‘assessment of value’ (évaluer) and ‘production of value’ (valoriser)”, it is not suggested that “evaluation and valorization [the creation of value]” should be disassociated (pp. 31–34). This concept has a number of dimensions: valuation as “what is desired, cared about, or held; valorization” as

Valuation for theorizing spatial production  19 the production of “economic value, namely, valuable transformations in the world that will be worth the price for others (asking ‘Is it worth something?’)” (Vatin, 2013, pp. 31–34). In this regard, the notion of worth is deployed as a broader idea of value to explain how value creation and capture can provide a more meaningful understanding of how large sections of (un)underdeveloped land often in urban communities of color can be revalorized.

The spatialization of social justice Trudeau and McMorran (2011) asks “[h]ow is space fashioned to privilege some groups and marginalize others? How does space contribute to the social exclusion of particular groups?” (pp. 437–438). Unfortunately, they note that in much of the scholarship, the emphasis is on “the socially constructed boundaries that contribute to the marginalization of minority groups, especially in advanced capitalist societies” (Trudeau & McMorran, 2011, pp. 437–438), as opposed to the structure of the local economy. The result is a focus on “the discursive and symbolic ways in which the material conditions of” economically disadvantaged neighborhoods “influence the social labels and that reproduce the marginalization of social groups.” (Trudeau & McMorran, 2011, pp. 437–438). As a consequence, it “precludes discussion of the possibility that characteristics and problems of the city are, in fact, manifestations of the structure of [the local] economy as a whole” (Ravallion, 1977, p. 533). It necessarily assumes away the role and motives of those who own landed property and determine their use (Ravallion, 1977, p. 533). The role of space in relation to society has always been the focus of urban planning as a practice. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (2014) defines “the concept of spatial justice as the desire of an individual or collective body to occupy the same space at the same time as another body” (pp. 7–8). In the context of urban development, there is a failure “to distinguish spatial justice from such received and frequently co-opted concepts such as social and distributive justice, or regional democracy” (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2014, pp. 9–10). Unfortunately, very few of the attempts at social justice have managed to offer a meaningful contribution to the discourse with regards to an economic understanding of the concept. For example, “[u]rban land rent theory which deals with social relations around urban space” considering “the quantitative/monetary logic of those relations is generally not applied to analyses” of spatial justice (Jäger, 2003, p. 234).

Outrage and righteous indignation: ideology and the imaginary of urban disinvestment Harvey (2003) claims that “[w]e must imagine a more inclusive, even if continuously fractious, city based not only upon a different ordering of rights but upon different political-economic practices. If our urban world has been imagined and made, then it can be re-imagined and re-made. The inalienable right to the city is worth fighting for” (p. 941). While this is a laudable radical project, these locations are “[f]rom the private-sector perspective, . . . commonly considered to present

20  Timothy O. Imeokparia high levels of risk” (Adair et al., 1999, p. 2031). They note further that based on “the need for financial prudence, decision-making may bypass the potential opportunities offered by urban regeneration locations” (Adair et al., 1999, p. 2031). One of the most noticeable and disheartening symbols of the decline in economically deprived areas of industrialized societies are the “vacant and abandoned property that sit and deteriorate, undermining the appearance and economic value of blocks, neighborhoods, and city districts” (Adair et al., 1999, pp. 2031–2032). Of particular concern are those parts of “the city where redevelopment needs are great, but where the probability of private investment and value extraction is slight” and public policy initiatives aimed at regeneration have failed to make a difference (Adair et al., 1999, pp. 2031–2032). Though not a necessary condition, “[s]uccessful regeneration requires a tangible outcome in the form of real estate development” (McGreal, Hearne, & Spiller, 2012, pp. 109–110). Central “to this process is the role performed by the private sector” particularly in terms of promoting “property development and investment, with the public sector operating in a facilitating capacity” (McGreal et al., 2012, pp. 109–110). The underlying critique of markets is the claim that the economists’ model of a “framed and abstracted market” is not supported by the empirical evidence that contemporary exchange “rarely if ever works according to the laws of the market.” The “frame is precisely a moral system of how exchange ought to be carried out” (Miller, 2002, p. 218). However, this criticism fails to engage in the constructive task of even sketching out, in any serious detail, what a new and improved urban development process would look like. There is a need to move discussions of the economic away from an unproductive moralizing.

Conclusion The discourse on neoliberalism and globalization has virtually monopolized the analysis of planning thought and practice in much contemporary planning and urban design literature, as illustrated in Chapter 1 in this volume. The critique of neoliberalism is situated in a radical and progressive position that claims to challenge hegemonic power relations (McCormack, 2010, p. 3). I have sought to demonstrate that any understanding of the development process requires a conceptualization and contextualization of value creation and value capture in urban property development and property markets and of their role in determining and buttressing contemporary urban spatial structure. It rejects as self-evident certain assumptions about the determining factors of urban spatial structure and its resulting problems. It attempts to make transparent the contingent conditions that seem necessary and inevitable in the critique of neoliberalism. My main argument “rests upon the recognition of important aspects of the urban development process which have perhaps been unduly neglected” (Clark, 1987, p. 263) because they fail to address the “structures of building provision.” This neglect is due to an over-emphasis on a Marxist urban analysis based on the notion of land rent, which is not necessarily required “because the analysis of structures of building provision does not require the type of critique” it implies (Clark, 1987,

Valuation for theorizing spatial production  21 p. 263). Therefore, I place “emphasis, on the economic interests of the various agents involved in housing provision and on how those interests interrelate” (Ball, 1981, pp. 145–146). Adair et al. (1999, p. 2031) claim that “[t]he financing of urban regeneration and levering of private-sector investment remains a major policy issue.” Of primary concern are those situations in which “economic, social and physical decay having reached the point where market forces alone will not suffice” (Adair et al., 1999, p. 2031). Clearly, the regeneration requires access to and the availability of finance. What is needed is a reconciliation of the political imperative to build and the capitalist demand for liquidity (Weber, 2002, p. 520). The question is how to, without relying on the public sector, make the private capital accessible to traditionally excluded groups and neighborhoods, since the private sector performs an integral role in terms of promoting property development and investment. At the risk of possible claims of political quietism, I argue that in the absence of any heroic fight that would transform capitalist society, what is required is a new political imaginary that is united in principle against the exigencies of capitalism, but divergent in practice.

References Adair, A., Berry, J., McGreal, S., Deddis, B., & Hirst, S. (1999). Evaluation of investor behaviour in urban regeneration. Urban Studies, 36(12), 2031–2045. Adams, C. D., Baum, A. E., & MacGregor, B. D. (1985). The influence of valuation practices upon the price of vacant inner city land. Land Development Studies, 2(3), 157–173. Ball, M. (1981). The development of capitalism in housing provision. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 5(2), 145–177. Boltanski, L., & Esquerre, A. (2016). The economic life of things. New Left Review, 98, 31–54. Bowman, C., & Ambrosini, V. (2000). Value creation versus value capture: Towards a coherent definition of value in strategy. British Journal of Management, 11(1), 1–15. Bryson, J. R. (1997). Obsolescence and the process of creative reconstruction. Urban Studies, 34(9), 1439–1458. Clark, E. (1987). A critical note on Ball’s reformulation of the role of urban land rent. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 19(2), 263–267. D’Arcy, E., & Keogh, G. (1997). Towards a property market paradigm of urban change. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 29(4), 685–706. Doganova, L., & Muniesa, F. (2015). Capitalization devices: Business models and the renewal of markets. In Making things valuable. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dannhaeuser, N., & Werner, C. (Eds.). (2006). Markets and market liberalization: Ethnographic reflections (Vol. 24). Amsterdam: Elsevier Ltd. Fraser, N. (2017). A new form of capitalism? A reply to Boltanski and Esquerre. New Left Review, 106, 57–65. Harvey, D. (1982). The limits to capital. Oxford: Blackwell. Harvey, D. (2003). The right to the city. International Journal for Urban and Regional Research, 27, 939–941. Jäger, J. (2003). Urban land rent theory: A regulationist perspective. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27(2), 233–249.

22  Timothy O. Imeokparia Jauhiainen, J. (2007). Urbanisation, capital and land-use in cities. Place and Location: Studies in Environmental Aesthetics and Semiotics, 5, 179–193. Hutter, M., & Stark, D. (2015). Pragmatist perspectives on valuation: An introduction. In A. Berthoin Antal, M. Hutter, & D. Stark (Eds.), Moments of valuation: Exploring sites of dissonance (pp. 4–16). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd. Logan, J. R., & Swanstrom, T. (1990). Urban restructuring: A critical view. In J. R. Logan & T. Swanstrom (Eds.), Beyond the city limits: Urban policy and economic restructuring in comparative perspective (pp. 3–24). Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Mann, G. (2016). Value and exploitation. New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry, 9(1), 8–14. McCormack, T. (2010). Critique, security and power: The political limits to emancipatory approaches. Oxford: Routledge. McGreal, E. P., Hearne, K., & Spiller, O. B. (2012). Off to a slow start: Under-development of the complement system in term newborns is more substantial following premature birth. Immunobiology, 217(2), 176–186. Merrifield, A. (2002). Dialectical urbanism: Social struggles in the capitalist city. New York: Monthly Review Press. Miller, D. (2002). Turning Callon the right way up. Economy and Society, 31(2), 218–233. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A. (2014). The movement of spatial justice. Mondi Migranti, 7–19. Pivo, G. E. (1984). Use value, exchange value, and the need for public land-use planning. Berkeley Planning Journal, 1(1), 40–50. Ravallion, M. (1977). Urban problems and urban policies, or merely urban assumptions?: A review of recent urban research in Australia. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 1(1–3), 531–538. Smith, N. (2000). Capitalism. In R. J. Johnston, D. Gregory, G. Pratt, & M. Watts (Eds.), The dictionary of human geography (pp. 56–59). Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers. Trudeau, D., & McMorran, C. (2011). The geographies of marginalization. In V. Del Casino, et al. (Eds.), A companion to social and cultural geography (pp. 437–453). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Unwin, T. (2000). A waste of space? Towards a critique of the social production of space. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 25(1), 11–29. Van der Krabben, E., & Lambooy, J. G. (1994). An institutional economic approach to land and property markets: Urban dynamics and institutional change. (Research Memorandum FEW). Tilburg: Faculteit der Economische Wetenschappen. Vatin, F. (2013). Valuation as evaluating and valorizing. Valuation Studies, 1(1), 31–50. Weber, R. (2002). Extracting value from the city: Neoliberalism and urban redevelopment. Antipode, 34(3), 519–540.

Part II

Transformation of self and space

3

The organizing logics of predatory formations Individualism, identity, and the consumption of goods as the good life Iván Arenas and Elizabeth L. Sweet

Life in urban spaces would be impossible except for the help of others. Whether in an apartment or suburban home, every day each and every individual relies on others for food, shelter, transportation, and more as “the division of labor and the specialization of occupations” result in an “extreme degree of interdependence and the unstable equilibrium of urban life” (Wirth, 1938, p. 13). Intense job specialization under capitalism means that people’s interactions with one another tend to be “impersonal, superficial, transitory, and segmental” (Wirth, 1938, p. 12), capable of fulfilling needs but not suited to building relationships. This acute specialization increases our interrelationships, but paradoxically also results in our individual isolation. The sociality of urbanism is one where we are all radically articulated, but also deeply alienated from each other. By building up and bolstering the larger-than-life mythology of self-authoring individualism, however, the discourse of neoliberalism transforms both this interrelationship and isolation into heroic self-congratulation. Neoliberalism and individualism emphasize the primacy of the individual and her or his right to freely pursue their interests unencumbered from interference by external institutional forces such as the state or society. Discourses and ideologies of individualism propagate “modern Western ideas of the genius of the individual as the prime mover of history” (Drew, 2007, p. 97). Rather than see technological or artistic feats and historical achievements as collective products, individualism casts these as triumphs of grand personalities and sees shortcomings similarly as the product of individual failings. Much as during the era of colonialism, “[c]elebrations of such heroic personalities” help to sustain “a sense that their privilege was deserved and their profits well-earned and that both were based on hardy, good character – not race or class” or gender (Stoler, 2002, p. 27). Ideologies of individualism continue this historical misrecognition of the systemic and social roots of privilege, supporting the belief that people deserve what they have (or do not have) and that what they have has been personally earned solely through individual hard work, ingenuity, and personal character. For processes of disassembling, the ideology of individualism has proved particularly important. David Harvey has pointed out that “[t]he difficulty under capitalism, given its penchant for fragmentation and ephemerality [. . .], is to find a stable mythology expressive of its inherent values and meanings” (2001, p. 217).

26  Iván Arenas and Elizabeth L. Sweet Individualism offers not only a regime of economic, moral, and social values that have shaped global practices and ideologies, but it has also become a dominant and stable mythology under neoliberalism. It has effectively resulted in the hegemonic notion that “[s]elf-seeking and the pursuit of profit are now seen as the natural characteristics of [hu]man[s], not as part of an historical process” (Gablik, 1997, p. 30). Neoliberal practices not only promote an individual’s freedom to pursue profits as an inalienable right but have also popularized the notion that the pursuit of self-interest is ultimately in the collective’s best interest. Social organization based on individualism means that, as our imagination of the good life has shifted from virtue to instrumental relations, “security and prosperity” have become the primary ends of “organized society, which itself can come to be seen as something in the nature of a profitable exchange among its constituent members. The ideal social order is one in which our purposes mesh, and each in furthering himself helps others” (Taylor, 2007, p. 13). Thus, rather than see individualism as the displacement of community and collectivism by a disarticulated assemblage of atomized persons, individualism gives rise to “a new understanding of sociality, the society of mutual benefit, whose functional differentiations are ultimately contingent and whose members are fundamentally equal” (Taylor, 2007, pp. 17–18). Given capitalism’s uneven history of racial, gendered, and ethnic dispossession from its colonial roots to the disassembling effects of neoliberalism today, the fundamental equality that the social imaginary of neoliberal individualism projects is ultimately a theoretical abstraction and mirage. Aside from recognized obligations to kin members, individualism appears to free us from responsibilities to others. While we take the individual as the starting point for mapping the identity and location of the self, however, individuals are embedded in a series of social relations that produce us as much as we produce them. Gift economies or other non-monetary exchanges, for example, establish cycles of reciprocal obligations that shape the rules and practices of social systems and unite people in solidarity to each other and to their networks (Mauss, 1990; Gibson-Graham, 2006). Feeling the painful effects of the alienation produced by economic specialization and the impersonal characteristic of social relations in urban life, individuals have sought and found this and other ways to craft connections to others. We do not engage in economic activity or exchange simply to satisfy wants or to maximize utility but do so as well to gain prestige, honor, and as an expression of the values of our society (Mauss, 1990). Fashioning connections to others and a sense of community and belonging in a world where neoliberal and individualistic values are the global norm is a challenge. Capitalism has responded to this challenge by offering the collectivism of consumption as the dominant sociality of the day. The daily purchase and ceremony of buying and reading newspaper, for example, allows individuals to make a connection to millions of other imagined, but personally unknown others (Anderson, 1996). Private consumption has the power to create “that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity, which is the hallmark of modern nations” (Anderson, 1996, p. 35). As the commodification of news under capitalism has made the media and its consumption a 24-hour a day spectacle, however, this

Organizing logics of predatory formations  27 “transformation of the public sphere has resulted in the replacement of a culturedebating sphere with a culture-consuming society” (Kapferer, 2008, p. 81). The collectivism of consumption produces the imagined community united by shared rituals of consumption rather than by collective dialogue and debate. The rising use of social media may yet transform this equation, yet at the start of 2018 the 330 million people that actively used Twitter (Newbery, 2018) only accounted for about 4.45% of the planet’s population. Rituals surrounding commodities were critical to the social and spatial development of the modern capitalist city. Profits from the production, distribution, and consumption of goods clearly shaped the materiality of cities and spaces around the world. More importantly, however, for the people crowded around department store windows or World’s Fair exhibits, the spectacle of the commodity promoted and produced not only material dreams, but also the image and imagination of belonging. “Everything desirable could be transformed into commodities as fetishes-on-display that held the crowd enthralled even when personal possession was far beyond their reach” (Buck-Morss, 1995, p. 81). Whether or not purchase was possible, individuals in nineteenth century cities stood around the commodity as they once did around the national flag. Blinded by the spectacles on display, individuals did not see that what was produced was not so much community as the imagination and effect of belonging. Brought together and identifying themselves through the purchase of similar items, the collective assembled together by consumption produces a rather weak level of solidarity amongst its members – what Zygmunt Bauman refers to as an aesthetic community (2008). Aesthetic communities are centered on individual consumption choices that fluctuate rapidly; they generally offer weak and superficial bonds and little sustained interaction. Principally culture-consuming rather than culture-debating, “[o]ne thing which the aesthetic community emphatically does not do is to weave between its adherents a web of ethical responsibilities, and so of long-term commitments” (emphasis added) (Bauman, 2008, p. 71). Even if adhering around fads or following style cultures, however, aesthetic communities are nonetheless important. On the one hand, they offer some relief from the alienation produced by urban life. On the other hand, the growth of cities and the global population have also led to the “standardization of processes and products” (Wirth, 1938, p. 17) and with the advent of mass production, a greater number of these standardized goods have become available to more people at a lower cost. With more goods available globally at cheaper prices, the capitalist system cannot depend solely on the gap between cheap manufacturing costs and the price of goods to generate vast profits, but must continually push people to new levels of consumption. The result is the proliferation of new products, the “continual manufacture of new needs and the consequent restructuring of the network of relations in which such products would be consumed” (Crary, 2000, p. 33). The intersection of capitalist consumption practices and neoliberal individualism has restructured not just the network of relations that determine how products fit into our lives, but also the very nature of desire and social relations themselves. The right for an individual to freely pursue her or his interests – a critical tenet of both

28  Iván Arenas and Elizabeth L. Sweet the discourse of individualism and neoliberalism – has been equated under capitalism with the freedom of an individual to purchase what their heart desires, even if these desires are more often than not manufactured by media trends, advertising campaigns, and by the latest fashion fad. Under the push for hyper-profits at any cost, moreover, neoliberal predatory assemblages have also found ways to ensure that, even if individuals cannot afford the newest product necessary to satisfy the latest manufactured need, they can utilize credit mechanisms to acquire it; in this case, though, the price for ownership comes with a debt burden whose standard interest rates typically ensure both a lucrative profit for banks and that individuals will be paying the debt for years to come. Consumption may thus be understood at once as an expression and affirmation of the freedom of individualism as well as of our social need to establish community belonging. In this way, the continual manufacturing of new products and needs articulates happiness to the pursuit and purchase of material possessions. Individualism suggests that each of us is ultimately responsible for our own lives and, given the precariousness of lives and livelihoods under neoliberal predatory capitalism, today’s consumer-driven society promotes the idea that our agency and a measure of control over this world are exercised most strongly via the power of consumption. Imagining that power is in our hands, the power to choose to consume well for our health and for the community and planet’s wellness, we see in more ways than one the pursuit and purchase of material goods as the good life. For individuals, the consumption of things is an opportunity to express their individuality as well as to locate themselves socially. If commodities connect aesthetic communities together, however, the vast majority of individuals rarely consider how commodities connect them to social, spatial, and ecological realities beyond themselves. In part, this is due to the fact that we live in a world inundated by media messages and corporate advertising campaigns and shaped by discourses of individualism that put the focus principally on the self; this is also due to the fact that for the vast majority of people who are living precarious lives and struggling to survive and feed themselves if not their families, worrying over the production of the cheap goods they can already barely afford is a luxury. Individualism comes with the claim of personal responsibility. It attributes failure to people’s individual action, criticizes their actions of survival, and blames them for the ills of society, displacing structural or systemic responsibilities. There are many concerned individuals who do consider the abusive exploitation of people as well as of the planet’s material resources in processes of production, the distribution of goods, and cycles of consumption. For these socially conscious consumers, purchasing has itself become a way to support alternative social and economic relations. In the context of food, for example, consumers have an array of choices, including products designated and labeled as fair trade, organic, locally sourced, sustainable, or farmer friendly. For individuals who recognize that capitalist social relations are inherently unequal, damaging to people and the planet, acts of consumption such as these offer them a way to gain redemption (both for their purchase and privilege) through the very act of consumption (Zizek, 2009).

Organizing logics of predatory formations  29 While this form of “caring consumption” (Zizek, 2009) may alleviate consumer guilt, it does very little to change the structural conditions and the predatory profitmaximizing neoliberal capitalist system that creates exploitative social relations in the first place. Connecting not just personal, but also social and planetary happiness to purchase, this form of caring consumption may prevent systemic change by allowing individuals to feel satisfied that through their conscious consumerism they have done their part and therefore do not need to do more. The global consumption economy not only alienates us from each other and disassembles possibilities for transformative work, it also changes people’s lived relationship to the city. Fighting for attention in a world where individuals are daily bombarded by stimuli encouraging them to shop, the spectacle of consumption produces the city as spectacle. Cities competing on a global stage have sought to distinguish themselves through marketing and branding campaigns highlighting the cultural attractions for tourists and economic opportunities for businesses that set them apart. The idea is to construct a sanitary (and sanitized) metropolitan citizenship through “technocratic urban cleansing” (McDonogh, 2002, p. 370) in order to ensure the erasure of any vestige of otherness – whether of the homeless or abandoned homes – that may be troubling to tourists and elite city dwellers alike. The effect of creating and conceptualizing city spaces to be “user-friendly” in this way effectively means that “all the potentially problematic and complicated choices have been worked out for the users” (Rutheiser, 1999, p. 327). Designed to be immediately legible and non-threatening, the city of consumption is reconsidered and reconfigured less as a site of encounter, dialogue, and interpersonal exchange than as a site for the consumptive gaze and purchasing power of the urban tourist. McDonogh suggests that since the 1990s, in effect we have moved “from a city of process to a city of events, indeed, of spectacle” (2002, p. 373). Walking the streets and sidewalks of spectacular cities of consumption, as “the boundaries between advertisement, entertainment, and education were effaced” (Rutheiser, 1999, p. 334), urban dwellers faced with such “edutainments” went from being inhabitants to becoming entertained visitors. With goods and experiences preassembled into commodified packages, individuals “don’t have to ‘risk themselves.’ They do not have to think about even the smallest things;” a situation that “hinder[s] their capacity for critical thinking” (Freire 1970, p. 63). The good urban citizen has come to be defined as one who keeps to the script, passively and repetitively passing from one entertainment and commodified distraction to the next, and spending money while doing so. Much as the spectacle of militarization channels our attention away from the disastrous effects of disassembling processes (as we discuss in the next section) all around us, spectacles of consumption likewise offer us weapons of mass-distraction. Packaged to be easily digestible, commodified edutainments minimize and disassemble our capacity to think about the economic, social, and political production of our world. Whether via city billboards or television and computer screens, individuals are inundated and overwhelmed by the spectacle of consumption and city life; thus, “in order to protect both the body from the trauma of accident and

30  Iván Arenas and Elizabeth L. Sweet the psyche from the trauma of perceptual shock,” the typical role of our body’s synaesthetic system is reversed and instead of generating sensations as a response to outward stimuli, “its goal is to numb the organism, to deaden the senses, to repress memory” (Buck-Morss, 1993, p. 131). The spectacle of commodification and urban stimuli have transformed our physiological and psychological responsiveness and, coupled with individualism’s focus on the self, have eroded our sense of responsibility to each other. More importantly, however, as world expositions, museums, department stores, and a whole host of spectacular entertainments and advertising developed during the Industrial Revolution taught individuals “the sensual pleasures of consumption” (Williams, 1991, p. 199), they not only manufactured needs and produced consumers, but they also effectively colonized desire. There are very real consequences of imagining that the good life is capable of being fulfilled in and through the consumption of things or of representations that substitute for reality. Whether wandering through a shopping mall or staring at movies on the silver screen, the spectacle of consumption “captivates the imagination of the viewer without engaging [her or] his mind” (Williams, 1991, p. 214). The result is the dream world of the consumer, a sociability of intellectual passivity and emotional hyperactivity offering us the illusion of lived experience and fantasy of personal transformation through purchase. The implication of desire and well-being having been channeled and chained to commodities is that “dreams lose their liberating possibilities” (Williams, 1991, p. 203). Alienated from each other and from the world, we consume in a state of mass-distraction with numb bodies that have shut down to shield themselves from excessive stimuli, thereby diminishing our capacity not just to react to the realities around us, but also to imagine and act otherwise. Sheltered in urban apartments and sealed off in suburban silos, we are blinded by the discourse of individualism and spectacular neoliberal consumption practices from analyzing their wasteful effects and divisive social and spatial realities. What would it mean to try to decolonize our desires and take seriously Gaston Bachelard’s invitation “to consider the imagination as a major power of human nature” and his observation that “if we cannot imagine, we cannot foresee” (1994, p. xxxiv)? What might we understand differently if we take off the blinders of individualism and consumerism and seek social and spatial alternatives to neoliberal predatory formations? Perhaps we might come to see, alongside Dolores Hayden, how the typical United States suburban block where “thirteen driveways are used by twenty-six cars; ten garden sheds, ten swings, thirteen lawn mowers, thirteen outdoor dining tables, begin to suggest the wasteful duplication of existing amenities” (1980, p. 184). Consumerist individualism produces a spatiality. And this consumptive, individualizing spatiality also promotes particular politics. The search for enclaves in the suburbs or in gated communities where difference is both policed and expelled is built on an exclusive sense of citizenship and belonging that has created urban archipelagoes and apartheids in our cities; sites with differential access to power, to resources, and to the hazards of life and death.

Organizing logics of predatory formations  31

References Anderson, B. (1996 [1983]). Imagined communities. New York: Verso. Bachelard, G. (1994 [1964]). The poetics of space: The classic look at how we experience intimate places. Boston: Beacon Press. Bauman, Z. (2008 [2001]). Community: Seeking safety in an insecure world. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Buck-Morss, S. (1993). Aesthetics and anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s artwork essay reconsidered. New Formations, 20, 123–143. Buck-Morss, S. (1995 [1989]). The dialectics of seeing: Walter Benjamin and the arcades project. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Crary, J. (2000). Suspensions of perception: Attention, spectacle, and modern culture. Cambridge: MIT Press. Drew, J. (2007). The collective camcorder in art and activism. In B. Stimson & G. Scholette (Eds.), Collectivism after modernism: The art of social imagination after 1945 (pp. 94–113). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Freire, P. (1970). Cultural action and conscientization. Harvard Educational Review, 40(3), 52–77. Gablik, S. (1997 [1984]). Has modernism failed? New York: Thames and Hudson. Gibson-Graham, J. K. (2006). The end of capitalism (As we knew it): A feminist critique of political economy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Harvey, D. (2001 [1990]). The condition of postmodernity. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc. Hayden, D. (1980). What would a non-sexist city be like? Speculations on housing, urban design, and human work. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 5(S3), S170–S187. Kapferer, J. (2008). Urban design and state power: City spaces and the public sphere. In J. Kapferer (Ed.), The state and the arts: Articulating power and subversion (pp. 70–87). New York: Berghahn Books. Mauss, M. (1990 [1950]). The gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies (W. D. Halls, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. McDonogh, G. (2002). Discourses of the city: Policy and response in post-transitional Barcelona. In S. M. Low (Ed.), Theorizing the city: The new urban anthropology reader (pp. 342–376). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Newbery, C. (2018). 28 Twitter statistics all marketers need to know in 2018. Hootsuite Blog, Retrieved October 14, 2018 from https://blog.hootsuite.com/twitter-statistics/ Rutheiser, C. (1999). Making place in the nonplace urban realm. In S. M. Low (Ed.), Theorizing the city: The new urban anthropology reader (pp. 317–341). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Stoler, A. L. (2002). Carnal knowledge and imperial power: Race and the intimate in colonial rule. Berkeley: University of California Press. Taylor, C. (2007). A secular age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Williams, R. (1991 [1982]). The dream world of mass consumption. In C. Mukerji & M. Schudson (Eds.), Rethinking popular culture (pp. 198–235). Berkeley: University of California Press. Wirth, L. (1938). Urbanism as a way of life. The American Journal of Sociology, 44(1), 1–24. Zizek, S. (2009). First as tragedy, then as farce. New York: Verso.

4

Trajectories, vectors and change Mapping late neoliberal assemblage Ian McGimpsey and Deborah Youdell

Introduction At the time of writing, a decade has passed since the rising level of defaults on mortgages in the United States precipitated a liquidity crisis in international investment markets, threatening the existence of several major global banks. The reduced levels of capital investment that followed produced a major global recession. The debts of many nations grew rapidly due to expanding structural deficits and the provision of liquidity to banks. Concerns grew about some governments’ ability to service national debts, particularly within Europe. Iceland’s banking system collapsed in 2008 and its government fell in 2009. Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Cyprus all required support from international and supranational institutions to remain solvent. In the UK, public policy-making since the crash has, according to official accounts, been based on an ‘austerity’ strategy of tightening fiscal expenditure on public services as a means of reducing structural deficits. The administrations of cities, which run many public services, have been forced to reduce levels of provision in the face of rising demand. The intensification of social and economic antagonisms of class, race, gender, sexuality, generation and region have produced significant political volatility in formal political processes and on the streets. In 2011, one of us sat across a table from a youth worker as she cried over the loss of her job running arts-based programmes for young people of colour in a city in the Northeast of England. Six months later the same author read a newspaper report about the arrest of another of the participants in his study, for protesting about the closure of the city’s crime prevention programme. In 2013, one of us spoke to a community police officer in another major city in the UK about his struggle to deal with new demands to bid for money for youth projects, to organise youth soccer matches on Saturday morning and to explain to the young people he met that he would still have to arrest them if they broke the law. In 2015 one of us stood outside a branch of a large chain of bakeries in a city in the Midlands of England, offering to buy food for a young woman who had just been told her benefits had been withdrawn. She was unemployed and eligible for support but was being punished because she had been late to a meeting intended to support her into work. The young person says she can’t take our money.

Trajectories, vectors and change  33 Tears, shouting, locked doors to a youth centre, confusion, arrest, jobs, absence, solidarity, shame, the smell of food, pride, resentment . . . these are and are not the impossibly complicated effects of this financial crisis. In this chapter, we reflect on our research on the provision of education and welfare services for young people during a period of dramatic change for young people themselves, for the adults providing services and the apparatus of service provision in cities in the UK. We aim to describe how we have tried to make sense of and write about (we hesitate to say represent) these changes; how we have attempted to adapt, to move with a mobile field. Our prior work has used the conceptual and methodological approaches of critical policy sociology to explore the relations of policy discourse to the subjectivities and practices of youth and education. Broadly speaking, this field has explored the constitution of young bodies as a population through their subjection to government in and through the institutional spaces of youth (Kelly, 2000) – the family, the school, the youth centre, the job centre, the street and so on. The concerns of policy sociological work have centred on the constitution of ‘those places where the body and the population meet’ (Ball, 2013, loc. 800), and so are methodologically oriented to a particular sense of youth as a category in constitutive relation not only to policy but to a particular ‘post-welfare’ neoliberal institutional territory and modality of capture and regulation. Our focus here is on the need we felt to move on from the established methodological and conceptual approaches of critical policy sociology, as post-welfare institutional territories were subjected to rapid dis- and reassembly. This was an exploratory kind of moving on, which we undertook through at times excitable and at times ambivalent engagements with ‘new’ materialism. New materialism has emerged as a loosely organised, diverse field of research interested in exploring the social as constituted in the productive material relations of diverse elements. A new materialist analysis would tend to understand production as the effect of arrangements of discourse, bodies, practices and the non-human material (an inevitably incomplete list). In its exploration of the knotty and dynamic relations of elements of different kinds, new materialism is distinguished by its refusal of prior or primary orderings of production (of history, of rationality, of human will, of discourse), or to index any level to the different components of these arrangements (a level of the symbolic and a level of the material for example). Components are only knowable in the contingencies of these relations, and not by some prior categorisation, organisation or territory. This perhaps explains our engagements in this field – that in a territory that was rapidly disassembling, becoming unbounded and in which points of orientation were losing their significance, here was an approach that moved with a sense of the field as non-unitary, that could allow for a micropolitical, not totalised or bound in advance by policy or large scale social formations. Youth service provision in its macropolitical aspect The international financial crisis has brought change to the lives of young people in the UK, and to young people’s education and welfare services. Since 2008, young people have experienced changing patterns of employment, including greater job

34  Ian McGimpsey and Deborah Youdell insecurity, higher costs for education and housing, the reassertion of majoritarian national and class identities that are exclusionary for many and the popularisation of pejorative uses of the ‘millennial’ generational label. At the same time that young people in the UK have fared badly economically and culturally, public policy-making has rapidly disassembled the extant apparatus of youth service provision (Youdell & McGimpsey, 2015). However, we argue that this disassembly is one movement in the assemblage of a new late neoliberal apparatus of local social investment with distinct regulatory effects. In common with other phases of neoliberalism, we argue that late neoliberalism involves the formation of a distinctive means of capture and investment of capital, bodies and affect (McGimpsey, 2017).This late neoliberal public service assemblage consists in the conjunction of discourses of austerity, localism, national citizenship and social investment, and distinctive technologies for the calculation of the return on investment from public funds (Harlock, 2013). The late neoliberal regime operates with something more like a finance capital imaginary, reconstituting value and knowledge in the public sector through ‘investment’, ‘impact’ and ‘returns’. This has produced significant reforms of local government that had previously been required to constitute local markets from which it could purchase services from private providers in order to fulfil their statutory duties (Bovaird, 2014). Under late neoliberalism these administrations have been reconstituted with ‘the same capacity to act as an [entrepreneurial] individual’ (Communities and Local Government, 2011, p. 1) and expected to maximise the impact from its investments (Bagwell, 2012; Newman & McKee, 2005; Rocyn Jones, 2013). Neoliberalism has consistently grown private supplier capacity to provide public services. However, under late neoliberalism capital is consistently distributed to for-profit organisations, larger charities and emerging hybrid ‘social enterprises’. Smaller not-for-profit and community providers that had previously competed successfully for contracts on the basis of their localised knowledge and networks are now losing out (Birtwistle & O’Brien, 2015, pp. 10–11, 15). Moreover, central government has diverted capital flows away from city administrations and local government altogether and formed direct relationships with providers. Notable examples include the rapid expansion of academy and free school programmes that have accelerated the privatisation of schooling in England (Higham, 2013; Higham, 2014; West & Bailey, 2013), and the formation of the National Citizen Service to which the UK government plans to distribute £1billion through a recently established ‘social enterprise’ organisation called the National Citizen Service Trust (Offord, 2016). In writing about these shifts, we have made use of concepts and methodological approaches established in education policy sociology during the 1990s when far-reaching marketising reforms of education and youth services were being implemented. Foundational research on these processes of policy formation, circulation and influence argued for a rejection of rationalist models of state-controlled top-down policy production and implementation (Bowe, Ball, & Gold, 1992). Policy-making was reconceived as a non-linear, continuous process taking place simultaneously in contexts of policy text production, private political influence

Trajectories, vectors and change  35 and local practice, with wider social justice effects. Central to this rejection was an application of notions of ‘discourse’, ‘governmentality’ and ‘subjectivation’ (Ball, 1994a, 1994b), terms that have since been widely used for the analysis of neoliberalism as a modality of governance. From this perspective, neoliberal government involves the establishment of a whole series of mechanisms (not simply bureaucratic organisational forms, but markets, contracts, managerialist audit, networks and so on) by which knowledges, logics, performance demands, notions of value, ways of interpreting and judging the self and others, records of performance are circulated, and spaces are created for the inclusion and exclusion, confinement and discipline of young people. These processes are material in the sense that they constitute the objects they describe, the power relations among those objects, and the territories in which these objects and their interactions belong. This is a form of governance in which knowledge is central to a regulatory ordering of local production (Patton, 2006), and whereby the relations of the individual to the state are constituted through a decentralised, distributed and increasingly global system (Ball, 2013). The late neoliberal regime constitutes its own territory in which its apparatus of capture develops and functions, distinct from both the bureaucratic welfare state and the quasi-market of prior neoliberal phases. However, this is not a simple, temporally linear transition between states of the order of (1) post-WW2 welfare state to (2) neoliberal market state circa 1979–2007 to (3) the late neoliberal social investment state post-2007. To ‘represent’ the (dis)assemblage of public services and its subjects in such a way risks a textual ordering of neoliberalism as a spatiotemporal unity (Lapping & Glynos, 2017, p. 3), or series of unities that can each be explained according to their difference from the others. Such an approach would set our empirical data in an internal relation to the idea of ‘neoliberalism’. Our analytic approach would then become an effort to show how empirical data at the micropolitical level can be ‘explained’ by neoliberalism as an example of the subjectivation of young people. Alternatively, where such explanations broke down and risked a disordering of our idea of the macropolitical, this would be used to claim the emergence of a new successor state, a new unity capable of bearing the burden of explanation. Such a representational approach would tend to favour an idea of the social in terms of ‘stability and hierarchy’ (Patton, 2006, pp. 23–24). Though clearly not the intent of the original Foucaultian theory (Lazzarato, 2006), in its application neoliberalism understood as the exercise of power via discipline and biopolitics can seem to establish its own horizons, and constitute a certain terrain on which ‘contemporary disciplinary technologies [appear] as uni-directional in their effects, squeezing the breath out of pockets of resistance’ (Lapping & Glynos, 2017, p. 4), denying the possibility of the new. This was far from the ‘change’ we encountered during this period. This period did involve accelerations of neoliberal processes already in motion, such as the scaling up of services through diverting public capital to a privately owned institutional infrastructure for service provision, and the application of technologies of performativity to regulate the subjects to that provision. At the same time, to the degree that ‘austerity’ signifies a politically

36  Ian McGimpsey and Deborah Youdell driven project to reduce the scale of the apparatus of public sector provision that had been expanded during a prior neoliberal phase, recent change involved discontinuity. Though such discontinuity at times seemed like a re-emergence of a longer (neo)liberal continuity (Ball, 2012b), at other moments change would appear to involve greater novelty in the emergence of new technologies for the allocation of capital to provision via social investment, and new representations of the subject of policy through the application of new scientific knowledges of the human capacity for decision-making, our networked behaviours, or our bodies (McGimpsey, Bradbury, & Santori, 2016; Youdell, 2016). That continuity and discontinuity are each features of the emergence of late neoliberalism suggests why we have been ambivalent in our moving on from established policy sociological approaches. We are convinced that the (dis)assemblage that has accelerated since 2008 requires us to broaden what is sayable and researchable in our work, to establish different research terrains (that no doubt risk their own horizons). And yet some established policy sociological conventions continue to speak powerfully to inequity in the distribution of social goods, identity and the practices of inclusion and exclusion in everyday life, and the technological and discursive means by which relations of power between bodies and the state are constituted (for example, Ball, 2001, 2009, 2012a; Bowe et al., 1992; Gerwitz, 1997; Levin & Belfield, 2003; Youdell, 2004). As late neoliberalism’s subjects, young people are still entered into spaces of enclosure for quantified periods of time, set as individuals in relation to the mass, and so on, and simultaneously the crisis of these familiar territories intensifies (Deleuze, 1992a). Rather than overstate the novelty of late neoliberalism, what happens when it is understood as an open series, as a mobile terrain, as not singular, as sustained contingently, far from stably through constant adaptation, not in a planned way but in the manner of a productive conjunctions of parts. Furthermore, (late) neoliberalism is not the only territory, and is vulnerable not simply to internal weakness, to ‘contradiction’, but to external effects. To that end, we sought to ask how our encounters with young people in these overdetermined city spaces did not only take place on a policy field in which almost all developments are more or less secretly ‘neoliberal’; that there were possible encounters in which subjects of sociological representations are not always trapped in relations of domination and resistance, whether they know it or not; and in which hope is experienced in creativity within the concrete realities of everyday life rather than either technocratic moderations of the extremes of inequalities or the abstraction of an unlooked for utopia. Machinic assemblage To confront these questions, we used Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the machinic assemblage as a means to depart from representations of the spatio-temporal unity of neoliberalism. The term machinic centres a view of production as taking place through a connective synthesis that is ‘at work everywhere’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004a, p. 1), a synthesis in which material elements or parts connect with flows of energy to produce machines that in turn drive other machines. What is centred in

Trajectories, vectors and change  37 this view of production is the machine in this sense (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004a, pp. 21–22), not a thing but a connective synthesis that operates without any necessary reference to a unity or a cause. Those unities – the subject, the state, an ideology, a history – that would capture the field of representation, reconfiguring its elements in fixed relation to itself, are instead all always decentred. It is this decentring effort that enables assemblage ethnography to attempt a series of departures from representations in terms of neoliberalism, even a neoliberalism that is dynamic, to consider instead a series of productive dynamics – quasi-marketisation, social investment, bureaucracy. ‘Series’ here carries the sense not of a linear order of succession or hierarchy, but of open-endedness, of coextension, overlap, running in parallel and in conjunction, with the ellipsis a reminder that such a list inexhaustible (an exhausting thought). Neoliberalism is a means of thinking about the power that consists in a regulatory relation between the practice of everyday life and the state, whereby the local functioning of affinities, desire and habit are constituted and invested through technologies of marketisation, audit and performance management. To the degree that neoliberalism totalises the field, the everyday practices of neoliberal subjects come to be represented in terms of the antagonisms and identifications of the macropolitical (Patton, 2006, pp. 28–30). Neoliberalism becomes the state of our affairs, whereby the tears of the unemployed young woman and her refusal of help are an identification with neoliberalism’s responsibilised, individualised subject – perhaps the effect of embodying an affect of frustration as misguided self-reliance is thwarted, or alternatively the symptom of a melancholia that results from repressed solidarity and the ungrieved loss of a resistant community. Similarly, the closed youth centre doors symbolise the retreating limits of the state and the expansion of the private space for neoliberalism’s form of government through investment of individual autonomy. The police officer applying for funding for work with young people figures the entrepreneur prepared to pragmatically cut across institutional lines, the angry and arrested youth workers protesting about the loss of provision engaged in an act of anti-neoliberal resistance and so on. Meaning is fixed and flattened by the primacy of a certain politics, as other ways of knowing these cityscapes fall away (Britzman, 1998). The machinic assemblage does nothing to disallow such an analysis, but it does trouble it, disrupt it, cut across it, lose interest in it only to bring it back into view at another point. It insists that the arrangements of bodies and their productivities are multiplicitous, realising different productive capacities outwith their relation to a whole, in movements, flows and directions that fall back on the arrangements that produced them, and that irrupt in others. As Deleuze and Guattari note: An arrangement in its multiplicity necessarily works at once on semiotic, material and social flows [. . .] There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world), a field of representation (a book) and a field of subjectivity (the author). Rather an arrangement connects together certain multiplicities caught up in each of these orders. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 52)

38  Ian McGimpsey and Deborah Youdell Late neoliberal assemblage is conceptualised, then, as a series of complex, transscalar arrays of components and flows; it does not only describe some emergent effect of complexity at the scale of city, nation or trans-nation, but distinct productive dynamics at multiple levels of scale. Further, such arrangements are not material realities in the modernist sense of determinate material objects that we observe (a separate subjective level of reality) and then symbolically inscribe (representation as a third reality). Instead, assemblages are mobile material/subjective/ symbolic conjunctions that might always be arranged otherwise; and where assemblage does not so much describe the arrangements themselves, but the dynamics of order (abstract machines) in operation by which, for example, a youth service apparatus is dis- and reassembled, and the specific quality of balance between these dynamics and their tendency to break down (Patton, 2006). The late neoliberal public service assemblage should be understood, then, as a mobile arrangement of components and flows that includes economy, money, legislation, policy, institutions, organisations, social and cultural forms, discourse, representation, subjectivities and affectivities. We can acknowledge the molar lines of this assemblage in our ability to distinguish a ‘unifiable, totalisable and organisable’ (Patton, 2006, p. 28) public service apparatus, or perhaps apparatuses, identifiable as the effect of distinct regulatory means – bureaucracy, quasi-markets, social investments. When things proceed as they ‘should’, when the sense of the molar assemblage as a determinate arrangement is strengthened through its articulations, change may be everywhere but as a kind of un-change. In other parts of the public service assemblage, different qualities of productive force are at play that affect different qualities (as distinct from quantities) of change. ‘Austerity’ has disrupted continuities in the public service assemblage, ‘social investment’ has undermined a sense of value. The quality of change is one in which there seem to be losses of meaning, disconnections between words and their referents as things seem no longer to exist as they once did. Institutional spaces are dissolved as services are closed and not replaced, leaving what feel like voids not as spaces to be refilled but as a loss of territory, a loss of space itself, a deterritorialisation that is experienced even as alternative territories emerge in relation to other productive dynamics (reterritorialisation). Austerity is, in a sense, a negative term signifying a withdrawal of capital, a shrinking of the apparatus. It foregrounds losses, breaks with welfarist values, closures of welfare institutions, the erasure of public service roles. Austerity seems to refer to deterritorialisations as it consigns to history while providing no means of saying what is coming to be. Social investment, on the other hand, seems to reterritorialise, creating different spaces, subjects, meanings and value; while at the micropolitical there is an ongoing dynamic of departure from these spaces of old and new, of externality, of not belonging to either the old or newly emergent youth service apparatuses. And alongside change in the sense of loss of what was and the emergence of what is to come, there has been a sense of un-change felt when we travel off local high streets, out of community centres, away from local authority offices and into schools and job centres. That is, in exploring the late neoliberal assemblage we travel among spaces being disassembled as organisations disappear, buildings close and sometimes lie empty, staff lose jobs and are

Trajectories, vectors and change  39 not replaced, young people go elsewhere, and among the recently opened offices of the new and growing private social enterprises. And alongside these voids and new places we also travel to recognisable places that look much as they always did. However, being in the school or job centre is not to experience a time of ‘no change’; rather teachers or job coaches feel the anxiety of the pace of change in their work as new performance measures replace old, inspection regimes are altered, curriculums reformed, professional development training provided, new demands made regarding client compliance, data recording and management, healthy eating, emotional well-being, sexual health . . . the time of un-change involves a certain kind of mania, a freezing of a moment of crisis, in which subjects seem haunted by the very real losses elsewhere in the assemblage, and where huge energy is invested in keeping still, in ‘the fixing of presents, and the assignation of subjects’ (Deleuze, 2004). Doing assemblage ethnography There is a growing body of work that puts assemblage theory to work in interrogating a range of substantive contemporary social phenomena. In the field of education, assemblage theory has been used to conceptualise and research areas of education practice and curriculum, notably Maria Tamboukou’s (Tamboukou, 2008, 2010) ‘art education assemblage’, Deana Leahy’s ‘pedagogical assemblage’ (Leahy, 2009), as well as Webb’s ‘teacher assemblage’ (2009). Our contribution (McGimpsey, 2013; Youdell, 2011, 2014) has been to suggest a methodology of ‘assemblage ethnography’ as a means to investigate together economic, structural, spatial, temporal, representational, discursive, relational, subjective and affective orders as these play out at macro, meso, and micro scales. In terms of method, assemblage ethnography builds on existing assemblage mapping (DeLanda, 2006; Tamboukou, 2009; Webb, 2009) as well as developments in social science research that work across orders and scales (Jessop, Brenner, & Jones, 2008; Sheppard, 2002) and the material and representational (MacLure, 2010) and that ethnographically map policy networks (Ball & Junemann, 2012; Howard, 2002) and civil society organisations (SoteriProctor, 2011). In a sense, then, assemblage ethnography is a kind of pragmatism, itself a multiplicity actualised in relation to the formation it engages with. ‘Assemblage ethnography’ anticipates mapping the arrangement and effectivity of productive forces of specific assemblages in these orders, where ‘mapping’ takes on a particular meaning with respect to the dynamics of machinic assemblage. Education sociological engagements with post-structural theory have typically examined the regulatory production of the modernist dimension of being (Ball, 2003, 2013; Davies, 2006; Laws & Davies, 2000; Ringrose, 2011), and often sought to explore the limits of being, reconceptualising (‘revealing’) seemingly abiding subjects and spaces as ‘events’, persistent ‘becomings’ to which difference and change are inherent. However, at this juncture we have felt pressed to take seriously the reforming force of austerity policy which foregrounds the contingencies of being in the violence of its decodings and deterritorialisations. The public service assemblage is undergoing a conversion that we mark symbolically

40  Ian McGimpsey and Deborah Youdell as ‘late neoliberalism’, with new productive dynamics emerging through and from changing conjunctions, producing new arrangements, reconstituting micropolitical externalities. Researching this conversion involves mapping the action of specific productive forces, charting the changing articulations of components and flows of the public service assemblage: fiscal tightening married to financialised notions of social investment; the widespread application of impact and outcome measures through service contracts and evaluation toolkits; networked technologies of control including the quantification of ‘dividualised’ (Deleuze, 1992a) subjects; the reconstitution of the civic as ‘investment ready’ through hybrid organisational forms such as social enterprise and so on. In other words, this is a mapping of the productive dynamics by which an arrangement is constituted, by which that arrangement constitutes a departure from something that no longer quite exists and a movement towards something not yet actualised, and by which its own breakdowns emerge. This is a mapping that proceeds from the demands of a significant change of phase, or rather a ‘phasing’, of the public service assemblage effected by a change in the quality of governance within it. Our aim in using assemblage ethnography, then, is to reach across government and policy networks; institutional and professional forms, practices and subjectivities; and the civic and social practice of people engaged in their everyday lives. A mutation of the ethnographic study, we seek to use assemblage ethnography to analyse, interpret and represent the production of public services in the transcalar application and effects of the productive forces listed above. That is, we do not move in a linear way from macro scales of organisation, to meso, to micro, but anticipate transcalar relations, for example, forces of policy that are active in local subjectivations. As such, assemblage ethnography aims to account for the detail of the components of assemblages, the nuances of the productive relations between these components, the multiple conjunctions that take place in different arrangements, and the far-reaching assemblages that these relations produce. Crucially, in these accounts we seek to make possible the production of accounts not of deterministic relations of cause and effect, but of productive dynamics based on the patterns of variability in the effects of productive forces. It is these productive dynamics and their relative co-extensions and varying im/balances that ultimately enable the exploration of territories, the apparatuses of capture, and the micropolitical practices of externality to these territories. Central to our use of ethnography is the importance of the micropolitical in driving the ongoing dynamic of change; ethnography is a term that anticipates the researcher as plugging into the assemblage, and is implicated in the intersubjective processes of being and becoming of the assemblage. Synthesis In researching and representing assemblage, Deleuze argues that we must work both ‘analytically’ and ‘diagnostically’ to: Distinguish what we are (what we are already no longer), and what we are in the process of becoming: the historical part and the current part . . . [To do so we

Trajectories, vectors and change  41 must] untangle the lines of the recent past and those of the near future . . . that which belongs to history and that which belongs to the process of becoming. (Deleuze, 1992b, p. 164) This is a careful job of drawing what we are ceasing to be, and a creative task of sketching what is emergent in the changing process of assemblage, the patterned mobility of its articulations. The key here is not to describe what is, but to trace the diagram by which the process of becoming is/will be taking place. In the change by which a different dynamic of productivity, different multiplicities, becomes operative, ‘Nothing happens, yet everything changes because becoming continues to pass through its components’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 158). We cannot look at what is, look to understand the essences of objects on the basis of what they have done or to understand the relations of parts to understand a whole; we must attempt to read the trajectory of changing relations, the competence of parts and the productivity of breaks. The challenge is to engage in an interpretive, not predictive, task of mapping a terrain in motion, tracing productive movements not as causal interactions of bodies but as trajectories and accelerations. The plane on which these movements take place is not flat. Rather there are planes of organisation, strata on which desire is channelled, movements regularised and directed, their productivity captured and invested in the reproduction of the apparatus of organisation. There is also a plane of immanence, of intensities, desire, affect, of synthesis in the conjunction of parts. Production might be understood as a dynamic of movement between these planes (Fuglsang & Sørensen, 2006, pp. 2–5); a dynamic of ordering and the breakdown of order. Assemblage ethnography seeks to understand territorialisation as such a dynamic, to discuss how populations, subjects, institutions come to be, on the understanding that multiple dynamics of order exist, and that the dynamics of desiring production, of that which remains external to the territory, cut across striations, destabilising its apparatus. We take up a Deleuzian language of ‘lines’ in the representation of assemblage on the understanding that components and flows in machinic production (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004a) are not fixed in purpose or singular in their connections and productive potential, but variables in the actualisation of productive possibility in multiple and temporally non-linear relations. Further, lines in this sense describe movement – direction, velocity – that may evade the extant striations and in their extension articulate a future in the present; the actual produced in the distance between what we have already left behind and what we are not yet (Deleuze, 1992b). Lines are a means of referring to specific components and flows of particular assemblages, and conveying the temporal without recourse to list-like arrangements of components seemingly frozen in a present moment. Yet immediately there is a danger. Lines might be understood as straight, hierarchised, moving up and down, connecting point A to point B and fixing both points and the shape of the whole. That is, they might be understood in terms of deterministic relations of past cause and present effect, or a form of ‘tracing’ from ‘deep structure’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004b, pp. 13–15) (of discourse, of economic logic, of principle of government) to their effects. In other words, lines are not straightforwardly a means to circumvent

42  Ian McGimpsey and Deborah Youdell the conventions of modernist assumptions about ‘society’. Our sense of ‘lines’ is as trajectories of variance rather than the outline of a shape (Deleuze, 1992b). The idea of the rhizome, which posits social formations as multi-directional and never ending, is useful for thinking about movements of assemblage: ‘[t]here are no points or positions in a rhizome, as one finds in a structure, tree or root. There are only lines’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004b, p. 9). An assemblage is not hierarchically organised with ‘macro’ elements such as the state, economy or policy at the ‘top’, dominating productive forces and bearing down on the ‘micro’ elements below. Instead, productive forces and the productivities of the relationships between them are undecided and mobile – an assemblage in particular temporal and spatial arrangements may successfully repress other potentials, but given the machinic quality of material production breakdown and creativity seem inevitable and perhaps ‘escape’ is also possible, though it may well not be an escape to somewhere but a departure whereby that which ‘escapes’ is reconstituted in its movement. We follow named ‘lines’ as ‘ways in’ to the map of the assemblage, to see what happens, what changes, what hits a dead end, what might be, and what sense of the assemblage emerges not from a centre but from multiple positions. Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the ‘line’ helps us to think about the ways that assemblages move. By drawing on their work in the construction of a methodology, we suggest three functions a line can describe: • •

•

the molar lines that convey the outline of a social formation, as relatively rigid striations working as a ‘plane of organization’ (Deleuze & Parnet, 1983, p. 80); they trace the sensible order of being; flows that convey a potentiality within a particular named order, which in their interaction with the components of the assemblage are engaged in processes of machinic production (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004a); that is, flows relate to actualizations that always carry the potential to be otherwise or multiple according to the articulation of the assemblage; and variables which are curves that describe distributions of those actualizations; that convey populations and the variations among them; this function concerns the patterned nature of productions in the light of potential for variance and multiplicity.

By identifying, following, mapping and finally overlaying these lines of differing function, we seek to interpret late neoliberal assemblage. Any map is a snapshot of a dynamic, mobile situation. To mitigate against such limitations, we further seek to interpret and represent the sense in which these lines intersect and fold together. We deploy a further three kinds of intersection, that collectively produce: • • •

traces of the existing ‘molar’ structure, reinscribing and deepening striations, segmenting territory; the ‘molecular’, supple and creating thresholds, flows and flux; and the ‘line of flight’, described as a line of ‘becoming’. (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004b, p. 305; Deleuze & Parnet, 1983, p. 80)

Trajectories, vectors and change  43 The notion of a pattern of intersection, of folding, is of course one of continuing movement. The attempt is not to measure the object of public service, but to map public service assemblage, here drawing on one city-region in the UK in which the late neoliberal regime is active as a force of reform. Thus, we are invited to remain aware of the immediacy and indeterminacy of the movements of these lines. Lines of late neoliberalism Assemblages defy easy description. They are simultaneously arrangements of heterogeneous elements that only exist in as far as they actualise something, but only actualise in as far as these arrangements are mobile, articulating and changing. Assemblages are ‘effervescent, disappearing in years, decades’ (Rabinow quoted in Marcus & Saka, 2006, p. 104); our task is to convey them as processes by which arrangements come to be stabilised or transformed (ibid., p. 4). Representation of an assemblage is difficult, and we would not suggest any single way to do it. Here we suggest visual expression as an analytic tool that could demonstrate the heterogeneous combinations of elements, their proximity and potential for multiple conjunction, without losing a sense of the openness of the field, or leaving it flat, that is conveying the sense of overlapping territories, and of the macro and micro as embedded in each other. We are aware of both the potential of a diagram to give an appearance of fixity, to lack movement and to flatten the rich materiality of elements, and we would note the limited nodal language of network diagrams as an indication of these difficulties (Latour, 2010). Nevertheless, here we try a map of the late neoliberal assemblage composed of an overlaying of three sets of lines – of molar inscriptions, of flows and those that describe the distribution of variables. We include below a sketch of each of these sets of lines as an invitation to the reader to imagine an analytic in which these contours are overlaid, and perhaps animated, as a representation of the emergence of the public service assemblage in a regime of austerity. This invitation is explicitly given in light of the history of use of diagrams in the social sciences to reduce productive interactions to fixed categories and simple linear causation; purporting to describe the properties of objects and how they relate in bounded spaces to produce patterned social action. Our goal is not to compose a bounded field of problematisation over which we have achieved an impossible social scientific mastery (de Freitas, 2012; Latour, 1990). Rather this mapping ‘is an experiment, inventing lines of flight . . . [operating] through potentiality and possibility’ (de Freitas, 2012, p. 563) and it is intended to fuel rather than foreclose experimentation. We seek to express the sense of the dynamic between strata and immanent desire; to potentially expand readers’ senses of how conjunctions of heterogeneous elements are located, concrete productions and simultaneously accelerations, foldings, conjunctions creating new possible movements. These sets of lines have not been produced through quantification or systematic analysis of data sets pertaining to productive forces. Rather they have been produced by one of us experimentally, and somewhat intuitively, in response to and informed by the Deleuzian framing we set out here and as an effort to give some

44  Ian McGimpsey and Deborah Youdell form to the complexities of assemblage that we have been describing. The diagrams were sketched initially in pencil and children’s coloured pens as drafts attempting to name components and map connections in machinic assemblage in ways that would convey at once non-unitary systematicity, movement and force and fit onto the page. As they were rendered digitally the decision was made to not edit or alter the original drafts. Diagram 1 was suggested by roots, routes, paths, threads, strings, grass. Diagram 2 was suggested by the spyrograph. Diagram 3 was suggested by nail and thread art. Each was imagined as overlaid, three dimensional, animated and vital. This expression flows from the diverse methods of our ethnographic work. This diagram, its labels, its distinctions of layers that overlay and fold into each other, are traced movements (backwards and forwards) from participant observation of educational spaces in the city, of bureaucratic meetings in city administration offices, of interviews with practitioners, with mangers and service auditors, policy texts, contracts and demographic data regarding service users and their outcomes. This tracing backwards and forwards is a means of exploring and expressing how ‘becoming continues to pass through its components’. Diagram 1. Molar inscriptions This set of lines represents the organisation of public services as it has been but no longer quite is (Deleuze, 1992b). Such molar lines act to guide flows and hold components in their place, but also provide the reference points from which departures and innovations become obvious.

Figure 4.1  Diagram 1: Molar inscriptions

Trajectories, vectors and change  45

Figure 4.2  Diagram 2: Flows

Diagram 2. Flows These lines describe inputs of energy, potentialities in various orders that interact with components to animate machinic production, and which work multiply according to those interactions. For example, ‘money’ is a flow that changes its form and its effects according to the contractual components through which it is distributed, according to organisational apparatus in and between which it circulates, the timing of its circulation and so on. And indeed, we see such arrangements change in the emergent public service assemblage of austerity. Diagram 3. Distributions These distributions refer to the actually existing components of the assemblage; not the shape of the assemblage, but the populations of its components in articulation with each other. Thus we see, for example, the assemblage incorporate, sustain and reproduce ‘social enterprise’ entities in greater numbers in their associations with money (for example as investment capital), expert knowledges and service areas. These three sets of lines, overlaid, describe a methodological experiment in the representation of the always emergent public service assemblage in late neoliberalism. It is offered tentatively as an expression of intent, rather than a developed analysis. As far as it goes at this stage, it suggests economic, political, legislative

46  Ian McGimpsey and Deborah Youdell

Figure 4.3  Diagram 3: Distributions

and policy tendencies that embed the national, and more tenuously the local, state as an investor in service supply, and as securer of a market for investment. As flows of monetary capital are reconstituted and an array of new and existing organisations take over delivery of those welfare services that will remain, the public and voluntary (or ‘third’) sectors are remade and, perhaps, rendered unrecognisable. The primacy and responsibility of the citizen-subject is foregrounded, addressed (subjectivated) in addition or even as an alternative to the (indebted) state or the consumer-subject. Such a subjectivating move shifts the social and economic, and ultimately governmental, focus from sites of consumption (public service supply) to life in local neighbourhoods and communities.

Conclusion The event of the financial crash of 2008 continues to powerfully condition reform of the public service assemblage, including education and youth services. ‘Austerity’ has involved a programmatic, sustained divestment of public services. Spaces of care and support for young people have closed, and voids opened up. Based on our research in English cities since 2008, neoliberalism and austerity are not analytically sufficient to express the changes by which the ‘disassembled city’ has emerged. Late neoliberalism describes a conversion of the public service assemblage through the conjunction of heterogeneous discourses of national citizenship,

Trajectories, vectors and change  47 financial capital imaginaries by which value is reconstituted, and techniques and mechanisms for the distribution of capital as investment and return. Thus, we have sought to develop a means of analysis, of diagnosis, of late neoliberal assemblage as the dual movement of dis- and reassembly. We take up the Deleuzian language of ‘lines’ and suggest the lines may be understood to have three functions – tracing molar forms, the injection of flows, and the curve of variables – and three types of pattern – inscribed striation, differentiation from recognisable patterns and more radical departure and disruption of the assemblage. These are intended as something like a heuristic tool, a means of reading a movement, interpreting the moment of a distance between a past we are already no longer and that which we are becoming. In doing so, we hope to make more possible understandings of the specific reforming operations of power that include but are not limited to austerity, and to experiment with these arrangements, to understand how young people’s lives are productive in the voids and escape emerging planes of organisation.

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Trajectories, vectors and change  49 Lazzarato, M. (2006). The concept of life and the living in the societies of control. In M. Fuglsang & B. M. Sørensen (Eds.), Deleuze and the social (pp. 169–171). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Leahy, D. (2009). Disgusting pedagogies. In J. Wright & V. Harwood (Eds.), Biopolitics and the obesity epidemic. New York: Routledge. Levin, H. M., & Belfield, C. R. (2003). The marketplace in education. In H. Lauder, P. Brown, J.-A. Dillabough, & A. H. Halsey (Eds.), Education, globalization and social change (pp. 620–641). Oxford: Oxford University Press. MacLure, M. (2010). The offence of theory. Journal of Education Policy, 25(2), 277–286. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02680930903462316 Marcus, G. E., & Saka, E. (2006). Assemblage. Theory, Culture & Society, 23(2–3), 101–109. McGimpsey, I. (2013). Youth service assemblage: Youth work subjectivity and practice in the context of changing youth policy. (Sociology of Education), London: Institute of Education. McGimpsey, I. (2017). Late neoliberalism: Delineating a policy regime. Critical Social Policy, 37(1), 64–84. McGimpsey, I., Bradbury, A., & Santori, D. (2016). Revisions to rationality: The translation of “new knowledges” into policy under the coalition government. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 38(6), 908–925. Newman, J., & McKee, B. (2005). Beyond the new public management? Public services and the social investment state. Policy & Politics, 33(4), 657–674. Offord, A. (2016, April 28). Youth minister calls for NCS expansion across entire UK. Retrieved April 14, 2017 from www.cypnow.co.uk/cyp/news/1157033/youth-ministercalls-for-ncs-expansion-across-entire-uk Patton, P. (2006). Order, exteriority and flat multiplicities in the social. In M. Fuglsang & B. M. Sørensen (Eds.), Deleuze and the social (pp. 21–28). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ringrose, J. (2011). Beyond discourse? Using Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis to explore affective assemblages, heterosexually striated space, and lines of flight online and at school. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 43(6), 598–618. Rocyn Jones, G. (2013). Social investment: An introduction for voluntary youth sector organisations. Retrieved January 8, 2015 from http://youngfoundation.org/publications/ social-investment-an-introduction-for-voluntary-youth-sector-organisations/ Sheppard, E. (2002). The spaces and times of globalization: Space, scale, network and positionality. Economic Geography, 78(3), 307–330. Soteri-Proctor, A. (2011). Little big societies: Micro mapping of organisations operating below the radar. Birmingham: Report for Third Sector Research Centre. Tamboukou, M. (2008). Machinic assemblages: Women, art education and space. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 29(3), 359–375. Tamboukou, M. (2009). Leaving the self: Nomadic passages in the memoir of a woman artist. Australian Feminist Studies, 24(61), 307–324. Tamboukou, M. (2010). Charting cartographies of resistance: Lines of flight in women artists’ narrartives. Gender and Education, 22(6), 679–696. Webb, T. (2009). Teacher assemblage. Rotterdam: Sense. West, A., & Bailey, E. (2013). The development of the academies programme: “Privatising” school-based education in England 1986–2013. British Journal of Educational Studies, 61(2), 137–159.

50  Ian McGimpsey and Deborah Youdell Youdell, D. (2004). Engineering school markets, constituting schools and subjectivating students: The bureaucratic, institutional and classroom dimensions of educational triage. Journal of Education Policy, 19(4), 407–431. Youdell, D. (2011). School trouble: Identity, power and politics in education. London: Routledge. Youdell, D. (2014). From policy sociology to assemblage ethnography. In K. Gulson, A. Metcalfe, & M. Clarke (Eds.), Post-structural theory and educational policy. London: Routledge. Youdell, D. (2016). A biosocial education future? Research in Education, 96(1), 52–61. Youdell, D., & McGimpsey, I. (2015). Assembling, disassembling and reassembling “youth services” in Austerity Britain. Critical Studies in Education, 56(1), 116–130.

5

Rise of the synthetic city Eko Atlantic and practices of dispossession and repossession in Nigeria Charisma Acey I’m high above the hassles of Lagos Landlords. Nobody bothers me here about rent, or water bill or NEPA bill. There’s no threat of ejection, no okada [motorcycle] and molue [bus] noises, no local government people. . . . Lagos resident in makeshift shelter by Bar Beach, Victoria Island1

Introduction Every day, millions of Lagosians undeterred by the difficult logistics of daily life fight to live in the city. The resident quoted above lives in an informal settlement of residents, including white collar workers, who are unable to afford the high rents of Lagos, where landlords often demand up to two years of rent up front. The tenacity of urban Lagosians is evident across the region, where one can find university graduates ten deep in rooms, taking shifts to sleep, and where impoverished families in Shomolu and Makoko continue to rebuild, even as their homes continue to be torn down, a pattern echoing the “slum clearance” schemes started in the colonial period (Nwanna, 2015; Morka, 2007). Yet against the backdrop of the daily fight for the right to remain in the city, a new 21st century skyline is emerging in Eko Atlantic, a grand land reclamation project off the eroded coastline of Victoria Island in Lagos, Nigeria. Since 2007, 10 square kilometers of new land (roughly half the size of Manhattan) have been reclaimed from the sea and 24/7 infrastructural services like water, sewerage, and energy are being installed to accommodate a quarter of a million residents and expected 150,000 daily workers. By 2015, the skyline of office and residential towers for Africa’s newest city began to emerge. Exxon Mobil was the first to buy a plot of land; now all plots are sold out. The project’s backers (a public private partnership between the Lagos State Government and international investors) predict this audacious new planned development will become the “financial epicenter” of West Africa (Solés, 2014). Depending on who you ask, the project either heralds the arrival of the new Nigerian ecological city, as described by its investors, or symbolizes an extreme case of climate adaptation apartheid (describing how the world’s poor, particularly in Africa, are bearing the brunt of climate change – see Bond, 2016 and Hall & Weiss, 2012), as claimed by its detractors (Lukacs, 2014; Oduntan, n.d.; Murray, 2015; Grant, 2015b; Watson, 2014; Ajibade & McBean, 2014).

52  Charisma Acey The grandiose project does little to ameliorate the acute housing and infrastructure crisis facing its more than 13 million residents. Contemporary challenges facing Lagos as the fastest growing city in Nigeria and Africa has captivated the attention of urban scholars (Arabindoo 2011; Fourchard, 2011; Gandy, 2006, 2005; Koolhaas, 2002; Lawanson, 2015; Aina, 1989). Its transformation into a metropolitan region has gone hand in hand with spatial inequities in access to basic services such as water and the intractable legacy of colonial segregation (Acey, 2007, 2012; Gandy, 2006; Myers, 2003; Olukoju, 2003, 2004). The situation has given rise to self-governing organizations that provide water and other essential services that have emerged since the 1980s (Acey, 2010; Osaghae, 1999). The stories of urban dwellers coping with crumbling infrastructure and fighting for their piece of the city versus elite investment priorities in Lagos speaks to larger debates animating urban theory about the nature and role of the state and the interface between global flows of capital, technology, information, and local resistance (Castells, 1999; Harvey, 2001; Fourchard, 2011; Lawanson, 2015). Among the dozens of large scale urban developments (often billed as eco-city projects) in Africa, Nigeria’s Eko Atlantic is the largest by scale (Joss, Cowley, & Tomozeiu, 2013; Bulkeley & Castán Broto, 2013; Grant, 2015a). Scholars who have looked at the rise of eco-cities as a response to the ills of urban growth have critiqued an apparently unholy alliance between environmental concerns, capital, and urban development that leads to disassembling processes described as the greenwashing of spatial segregation, green neoliberalism, or environmental gentrification, where the provision of environmental amenities to make places more livable and attractive is promoted as sustainable, yet serves the interests of high-end developers and displaces the poor (Caprotti, 2014; Cugurullo, 2016; Munshi & Kurian, 2005; Checker, 2011; Wolch, Byrne, & Newell, 2014). The ecological vision driving the construction of Eko Atlantic is apparently less about environmental sustainability and more about an aesthetic of sustainability, meant to dramatically break with the popular specter of an apocalyptic landscape of endless African slums described hauntingly by Mike Davis (2006, 2004). Yet the rise of skyscrapers on reclaimed land in Lagos obscures parallel processes of disassemblage. Here, the eroded historic coastline, which was once public land with a prior history of land clearance and dispossession under colonialism, is now being ecologically restored for the gated use of local and international elites. The expanded urban footprint is also accelerating slum clearance in long-standing neighborhoods around Lagos Lagoon, as nearby areas become more valuable given their proximity to the new city off of a city (Nwanna, 2015). Too few analyses of Lagos and other African cities examine the human scale of resistance against displacement (Angotti, 2006) or “people as infrastructure” (Simone, 2001, 2004), the hybrid ways that people survive by merging formality and informality in the city (Myers, 2011; Perlman, 1979; Acey, 2017), much less document the way people continue to resist totalizing forces in the daily struggle of life. Remarkably, people are continuously reassembling alternative ways of living that are at once fragile and resilient in the face of capitalist disassemblage. This chapter takes on that challenge, considering the exclusionary vision of Eko Atlantic against historical and contemporary ways that capital has been channeled into specific projects and spaces across Nigeria that set off processes of

Rise of the synthetic city  53

Figure 5.1 

Figure 5.2 

dispossession and repossession. It concludes with a discussion that puts responses to Eko Atlantic in context with projects across Nigeria, the continent and the world.

Planned displacement in the Nigerian context The creation of Eko Atlantic mirrors the assemblage, disassemblage, and reassemblage created by mid-20th century planned cities such as Gaborone in Botswana, Tema in Ghana, and Yamoussoukro in Ivory Coast. Such new cities were created by African leaders emerging from colonialism (Murray, 2015). In Nigeria, this includes the national capital in Abuja, a completely planned city designed by teams of American and Japanese planning and architecture firms in the 1970s and 1980s. Abuja was deliberately located at the geographic and political center of the country on what was considered to be politically neutral ground inhabited by a small ethnic minority population. Although planned for the government and diplomatic elite, the

54  Charisma Acey area was actually inhabited by hundreds of thousands of Gabiya, whose neighborhoods were either relocated or built around (not integrated in) the planned city. In subsequent years, as population grew, the lack of planned and affordable housing for workers and others seeking opportunity has meant the rise of so-called slums, filled with people providing services to Abuja’s residents and otherwise engaged in trade and other economic activities in and around the capital. In this way, the creation of elite housing has gone hand in hand with the rise of informal urbanism. A brief and selected tour through the era of colonial governance in Lagos reveals how forms of African resistance to colonial rule affected the spatial logic of the city, which confounds easy measurements of distributional inequity. As a consequence of this history, many neighborhoods in Lagos are the legacy of previous slum clearance and resettlement schemes, driven by the imperatives of extraction, industrialization, and governance. For example, although the Lagos Executive Development Board took over housing administration in Lagos from 1955, it had only built 4,500 houses by 1972, despite population growth to 3 million by that time. Outrage over the destruction of indigenous areas to create privileged areas for civil servants, such as the government’s decision to destroy Isale Eko, the original and oldest part of Lagos Island, galvanized indigenous cultural nationalism and was instrumental in the resistance movements that spurred the formation of Lagos State in 1967 (Aworawo, 2004; Peil, 1991). In a pattern that characterizes much of Lagos history, the first planning authority was established in response to crisis. Overcrowded houses with no sanitation led to outbreaks of bubonic plague and influenza epidemics between 1924 and 1930, leading to the emergence of the first planning authority, the Lagos Executive Development Board (LEDB) in 1928. Formation of the LEDB also marks the beginning of a series of slum clearance schemes that would displace the indigenous population. Despite the reasons for the establishment of the LEDB, for most of its existence it was focused on housing for expatriate and indigenous staff who worked in the commercial and policing sectors and government workers via designated Government Residential Areas. This urban renewal was responsible for the creation of all of the residential estates of the expatriate community and government and commercial workers in the Government Residential Area at Ikoyi, marketed as “safe from crowded, unsanitary conditions of Lagos Island.” Housing estates were created for senior government staff in Apapa, east Marina, and Victoria Island. Slum clearance proceeded with a vengeance in central Lagos when the 1955 Slum Clearance Scheme opened up Apapa, Victoria Island and created the Surulere temporary housing scheme (which became permanent as land in central Lagos was turned over to commercial interests instead of being rehabilitated for the original residents). The slum clearance solutions razed indigenous areas while making little or no provisions for the newly homeless. Moreover, if concern for public health inspired slum clearance, then the project certainly failed; in 1967, an evaluation of the central part of Lagos revealed the persistence of congestion without sanitation, leaving the population susceptible to epidemics (Aina, 1990). After Nigeria became independent from Britain in 1960, restrictions in the Government Residential Areas remained in place, although instead of race, they were

Rise of the synthetic city  55 based on “standards of living.” In Ikoyi, for instance, leases were adopted specifying the maximum number that could inhabit residences (Olukoju, 2003). In this way, previous symbols of racial segregation became “symbols of social status among the new [postcolonial] African elite” (Olukoju, 2003, p. 284). Indeed, this concern for “standards of living” motivated the LEDB to use slum clearance, resettlement, and swamp reclamation programs to clear out indigenous African parts of the city. Until 1968, the LEDB remained the premier planning authority in Lagos, responsible for slum clearance schemes in the continued reclamation of land to meet the housing needs of elite and those connected to government, commercial, and financial sectors. This shows the contrast between the promises of slum clearance and the reality, as the LEDB never served the needs of the poor. Lagos was also subject to fractured governance during the early part of the 20th century, with basic services such as water supply managed by either Federal government or regional authority, and urban planning a function of the LEDB, other parts of the city, and the metropolitan areas that fell outside of either in the Western Region. Fractured governance was a mixed blessing for the urban poor. While the LEDB had been responsible for housing renewal since 1928, the Lagos City Council, Public Works, and Electricity departments were technically in charge of water and sanitation. However, there was unclear jurisdiction between these entities and the isolated residents who had moved to Surulere organized themselves to lobby the Lagos City Council, which successfully blocked full execution of slum clearance through 1962. The relocation of Lagos residents to Surulere was the first and only experiment with public housing in Lagos and is largely viewed as a failure. Of the 30,000 originally to be resettled in Surulere before it was ready with water, roads, or transport, nearly 10,000 lost their land and ended up doubling up in Lagos or moving to poorer parts of the city after selling off their claims to public housing property. The Minister of Lagos Affairs later took over the management scheme and gave the cleared land to political supporters, which, for an outraged public, ended both public housing and urban renewal in Lagos temporarily. The LEDB and the Ministry of Physical Planning merged to become the Lagos State Planning Development Corporation in 1968. With severe housing shortages as the city continued to grow, urban renewal returned in 1985, when the Lagos state government enacted the Town and Country Planning Edict to establish a planning commission and authority to oversee urban renewal and control development. This renewed the practice of slum clearance, allowing the government to declare structures illegal that had existed before this edict. Areas such as Ebute Metta, on the mainland, was a site for indigenous Yoruba resettlement; people were also moved to Maroko in 1958, to make way for low density housing for Europeans and wealthier Africans on Victoria Island and Ikoyi (Peil, 1991). Maroko was later infamously destroyed as part of an ultra-violent slum clearance scheme by military governor Raji Rasaki in 1990 during a previous era of military rule in Nigeria. Impoverished parts of the metropolitan area include the oldest areas near Lagos Island and the rapidly expanding periphery, such as the Lekki Corridor on the eastern side of Victoria Island, where formal infrastructure is nonexistent and housing is haphazard and overcrowded. The problem of basic services becomes acute for the urban and peri-urban poor, who have historically been disregarded by a public

56  Charisma Acey governance structure that regards their living spaces as temporary, illegitimate, and subject to slum clearance. Looking at the development of urban form and basic services such as water supply in Lagos illustrates how a history of racially based segregation and social divisions within society become visible in the form of uneven service delivery (Acey, 2007). Historian Patrick Dele Cole describes the “real Lagos” as culturally heterogeneous, with traditional forms of authority defying the “thin veneer of ‘westernisation’” (Cole, 1975, p. 28). Such structures facilitated the planning of traditional Yoruba cities in the period preceding formal colonialism. Yet the spatial logic of these cities and even the materials used in their creation “were later condemned by both Anglo and Franco colonial regimes, using building regulations as a tool for imposing capitalist economy and residential segregation on a racial basis” (Adelusi-Adeluyi & Bigon, 2016, p. 4). This segregation formed the basis of subsequent waves of uneven urban development after independence. In this context, what do we make of Eko Atlantic, the land reclamation project started in 2007 to restore the coastline of Lagos State to early 20th century levels? Its backers say that it is not displacing anyone, as the land itself is new, relative to the current coastal footprint. Of course, we could ask who was on that original land? If the project is restoring land that once was, is that land not public? Or even indigenous land belonging to the original Àwórì Yoruba inhabitants? How did formerly public land suddenly become privatized? Assemblage in the present moment builds off previous cycles of disassemblage and reassemblage.

Eko Atlantic in the contemporary context As the last several decades have seen urbanization emerge as the dominant pattern of human settlement, 10 percent of the world’s population now lives within 5 kilometers of coastlines, where real estate remains highly valued and subject to high demand and population pressures, all threatened by climate change. Eko Atlantic epitomizes the current, unprecedented wave of capital flows into Africa, a new wave of exclusionary urban development and modernizing projects since the millennium that are specifically being marketed as “eco-cities” on the continent and elsewhere (Caprotti, 2014; Grant, 2015b; Cugurullo, 2016). Formally, Eko Atlantic is a Public Private Partnership (PPP) between Lagos state and South EnergyX Nigeria, a subsidiary of the Chagoury Group. The project restores a land mass half the size of Manhattan on reclaimed land from the Gulf of Guinea, subdivided into ten districts. It was awarded the Clinton Global Initiative certificate for green development in 2009. Yet an environmental impact assessment for the development was not completed until 2011, a year before a deadly tragedy at Bar Beach on Victoria Island claimed the lives of 16 people, blamed on the rough waters created by poor project design (Akoni, Adegboye, Usman, Sessou, & Olowoopejo, 2012). Along with rampant land speculation driving up prices and rents, Lagosians’ need for affordable housing is beyond the breaking point. With more than 70 percent of Nigerians living in substandard housing, the most vulnerable are crowded into visible areas lacking integrated services like water, sewerage, and electricity. While the homes of the visible concentrations of poor households are prime targets

Rise of the synthetic city  57 for removal, Eko Atlantic extends the land mass of the urban extent with more surface area of unaffordability and inaccessibility. Despite the apparent progressive rhetoric of the last two Lagos State government administrations, there is a case to be made that the state, in its effort to remake the metropolis into a “world class city” is engaged in a war on the poor versus a war on poverty. Long established neighborhoods designated as blighted (slum) areas and environmental nuisances undermining the “mega-city status” of Lagos have been demolished with less than three days’ notice (Nwanna, 2015; Lukacs, 2014; Stein, 2017; Akinwotu, 2015). The primary, if problematic, transportation mode of the poor, the okada (motorcycles), have been banned within the city, leaving large parts of the urban area inaccessible. In 2015, searching for popular outdoor markets to take my students to in a break from our fieldwork, we learned that some had been transformed into multistory indoor markets restricted to vendors that could pay much higher rents. This appearance of high-end retail marks the tell-tale sign of gentrification all over the world (Lees, Bang Shin, & López-Morales, 2015; Atkinson & Bridge, 2004). Other outdoor markets have been closed to “make way for development” (Onyewuchi, 2015). Petty street trading is actively being banned, along with other retaliatory efforts undertaken in an attempt to drive people back to towns and the countryside, which earlier logics of disinvestment in agriculture have left bereft of opportunity (Morka, 2007). Some argue that because Eko is a privately funded reclamation project, a humanmade artificial peninsula, it does not represent an act of gentrification or displacement. In public documents, the project is described as being solely funded by private investors. It can be argued, however, that the concentration of extreme wealth as an offshoot of the currently wealthiest part of the urban footprint, an area that has increasingly experienced incursions of urban poor in the Lekki corridor, is part of this same process. It is pre-emptive displacement or advanced exclusion, in essence, creating a new zone of privilege from which the vast majority of Lagos’ inhabitants will be excluded. Indeed, missing from these promotional materials are the state subsidies, favorable regulatory changes, tax concessions and the selling price of the land itself, amid other public subsidy or involvement in the project. Here, the “public” is both used to justify exclusionary development and to subsidize its creation. Also missing in the commercial propaganda encouraging investment and public support are the impacts of the project on other parts of the state, revealing another dimension of disassemblage, created by capital assemblage elsewhere. Originally designed in 2003 to solve the problem of erosion and climate-induced sea level rise at Bar Beach in Victoria Island, recent studies have shown the Eko Atlantic project is pushing erosion further down the coast to unprotected and low income areas, which will be subject of more flooding, storm surges, and erosion (Aderiye & Awosemo, 2013; Idowu & Home, 2015; Adelekan, 2013; Obiefuna, Omojola, Adeaga, & Uduma-Olugu, 2017, 2013).

Practices of dispossession and repossession In 1951, just one-tenth of African populations lived in urban areas. Now that fraction is approaching 50 percent, a 5.8 percent growth rate through 2010. Although rates are slowing down, the region is currently experiencing the fastest rates of urban

58  Charisma Acey transformation in the world. According to the UN, the population of Africa’s cities will triple by 2050. However, just as this book seeks to question totalizing narratives of global urban capital, such broad trends fail to capture the unique forms of urbanization happening on the ground. Much of this growth, if current trends continue, will be unplanned, informal growth out of compliance with physical planning and development controls or in peri-urban regions at the frontier of the rural interface where land use regulation is weak and informality of the elite is upheld and informality of the poor is vulnerable. Moreover, as this case shows, formal planning itself has been captured by the elite as a tool to reap profit from reclaimed land that was once public, and therefore provides no solution for the poor. This means a large portion of this new urban population is vulnerable to competing interests in land. Intriguingly, careful analysis of remote sensing data, census records, gazettes, and new global remote sensing mapping projects such as Africapolis and e-Geopolis show great variation in the modes and patterns of African urbanization, very much driven by livelihood strategies that link urban, peri-urban, and rural in diverse ways (Potts, 2012b, 2012a). If the Eko Atlantic City project adds a new case to the process of disassemblage by global capital in the form of biophysical changes to the landscape and new spaces of exclusion, it also represents another site of the long-standing struggle between those who belong to the “modern” planned city and those deliberately left out, which began in earnest during the colonial period (an earlier epoch of capital disassemblage) and has continued unabated. This contestation has played out in nearly every region, from the oil company towns in the east operating as enclaves amid oil extraction-caused environmental devastation in the Niger Delta, to the construction of the national capital of Abuja as a planned city where no city had existed before in the north, to the continued slum clearance schemes in Lagos, originally designed to distance African from European and now poor from wealthy. In all these instances, people resist in multiple ways to transform the policies and spatial logics of places not designed for them, from persistent occupation to creating black market, parallel systems of service delivery and engaging in what has been called “weapons of the weak,” sabotaging the best laid plans of the state aligned with private capital in opposition to the needs of those least well off (Scott, 2008). Beyond resistance of last resort, earlier waves of urban organizing in resistance to elite plans and visions in Lagos and other parts of Nigeria also indicate how “[c]ities make it easier for grassroots movements to organize in opposition to oppression in all its forms.” (Angotti, 2006, p. 966). Complicating factors is the symbol of Eko Atlantic itself. While its name seems to be a stylized shorthand for ecological, Eko was actually the precolonial indigenous name for Lagos. The project engenders a mix of pride and rage at such a bold vision to remake Lagos as a destination. As this chapter has illustrated, it is not the first time that a grand scheme of outsiders has attempted to shape Lagos. Whether in the name of public health or modernization, Lagos has always been the subject of someone’s imagination (Gandy, 2014) and that imagination now is dominated by global investors. In the face of alternating indifference and persecution by the state, history points to the possibilities for the repossession of Eko Atlantic by the people. In this way, the project offers a compelling case to watch as continuous

Rise of the synthetic city  59 processes of assemblage and disassemblage unfold at the intersection of sustainability, poverty, climate justice, and global capital in the early 21st century.

Note 1 Emmanuel, M. (2004, October 30). In the bowel of Lagos civilization, a primitive colony emerges under the rocks by the Bar Beach. Daily Sun.

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60  Charisma Acey Bond, P. (2016). Who wins from “climate apartheid”?: African climate justice narratives about the Paris COP21. New Politics: New York, 15(4), 83–90. Bulkeley, H., & Castán Broto, V. (2013). Government by experiment? Global cities and the governing of climate change. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38(3), 361–375. Caprotti, F. (2014). Eco-urbanism and the eco-city, or, denying the right to the city? Antipode, 46(5), 1285–1303. Castells, M. (1999). Grassrooting the space of flows. Urban Geography, 20(4), 294–302. Checker, M. (2011). Wiped out by the “Greenwave”: Environmental gentrification and the paradoxical politics of urban sustainability. City & Society, 23(2), 210–229. Cole, P. (1975). Modern and traditional elites in the politics of Lagos. (African Studies Series: 12). London and New York: Cambridge University Press. Cugurullo, F. (2016). Urban eco-modernisation and the policy context of new eco-city projects: Where Masdar City fails and why. Urban Studies, 53(11), 2417–2433. Davis, M. (2004). Planet of slums. New Left Review, 26, 5–34. Davis, M. (2006). Planet of slums. London and New York: Verso. Fourchard, L. (2011). Between world history and state formation: New perspectives on Africa’s cities. The Journal of African History, 52(2), 223–248. Gandy, M. (2005). Learning from Lagos. New Left Review, 33, 37. Gandy, M. (2006). Planning, anti-planning and the infrastructure crisis facing Metropolitan Lagos. Urban Studies, 43(2), 371–396. Gandy, M. (2014). The fabric of space: Water, modernity, and the urban imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Grant, R. (2015a). Africa: Geographies of change. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grant, R. (2015b). Sustainable African urban futures: Stocktaking and critical reflection on proposed urban projects. American Behavioral Scientist, 59(3), 294–310. Hall, M. J., & Weiss, D. C. (2012). Avoiding adaptation apartheid: Climate change adaptation and human rights law. Yale Journal of International Law, 37, 309–366. Harvey, D. (2001). Spaces of capital: Towards a critical geography. London: Routledge. Idowu, T. E., & Home, P. (2015). Probable effects of sea level rise and land reclamation activities on coastlines and wetlands of Lagos Nigeria. Nairobi, Kenya: Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, pp. 207–220. Joss, S., Cowley, R., & Tomozeiu, D. (2013). Towards the “Ubiquitous eco-city”: An analysis of the internationalisation of eco-city policy and practice. Urban Research & Practice, 6(1), 54–74. Koolhaas, R. (2002). Fragments of a lecture on Lagos. Documenta 11_Platform, 4, 173–184. Lawanson, T. (2015). 7 potentials of the urban poor in shaping a sustainable Lagos Metropolis. Untamed Urbanisms, 6, 108. Lees, L., Bang Shin, H., & López-Morales, E. (2015). Global gentrifications: Uneven development and displacement. Bristol, UK: Policy Press. Lukacs, M. (2014, January 21). New privatized city Herald’s climate apartheid. The Guardian. Morka, F. C. (2007). A place to live: A case study of the Ijora-Badia community in Lagos, Nigeria. Unpublished case study prepared for global report on human settlements. (https://unhabitat.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/GRHS.2007.CaseStudy.Tenure. Nigeria.pdf) Munshi, D., & Kurian, P. (2005). Imperializing spin cycles: A postcolonial look at public relations, greenwashing, and the separation of publics. Public Relations Review, 31(4), 513–520. Murray, M. J. (2015). Re-urbanism in Africa. In F. Miraftab, D. Wilson, & K. Salo (Eds.), Cities and inequalities in a global and neoliberal world (p. 92). London, NY: Routledge.

Rise of the synthetic city  61 Myers, G. A. (2003). Verandahs of power: Colonialism and space in urban Africa. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Myers, G. A. (2011). African cities: Alternative visions of urban theory and practice. London, NY: Zed Books Limited. Nwanna, C. (2015). Gentrification in Nigeria: The case of two housing estates in Lagos. In Lees, L., Bang Shin, H., & López-Morales, E (Eds), Global gentrification: Uneven development and displacement (pp. 311–326). Bristol, UK: policy press. Obiefuna, J. N., Nwilo, P. C., Atagbaza, A. O., & Okolie, C. J. (2013). Spatial changes in the wetlands of Lagos/Lekki Lagoons of Lagos, Nigeria. Journal of Sustainable Development, 6(7), 123–133. Obiefuna, J. N., Omojola, A., Adeaga, O., & Uduma-Olugu, N. (2017). Groins or not: Some environmental challenges to urban development on a Lagos coastal barrier island of Lekki Peninsula. Journal of Construction Business and Management, 1(1), 14–28. Oduntan, G. (n.d.). Why Nigeria’s plans for a dream Eldorado city are not radical enough: The conversation. Retrieved June 20, 2017 from http://theconversation.com/whynigerias-plans-for-a-dream-eldorado-city-are-not-radical-enough-44874 Olukoju, A. (2003). The segregation of Europeans and Africans in colonial Nigeria. In Fourchard, L., & Albert, I. O. (Eds.), Security, Crime and Segregation in West African Cities since the 19th Century, (pp. 263–286). Paris: Karthala Editions. Olukoju, A. (2004). Nigerian cities in historical perspective. In Nigerian cities (pp. 11–46). Eritrea: African World Press. Onyewuchi, I. (2015). Anxiety, tears, as Lagos shuts Ladipo Market. Retrieved from https:// guardian.ng/news/anxiety-tears-as-lagos-shuts-ladipo-market/ Osaghae, E. E. (1999). Exiting from the state in Nigeria. Journal of African Political Science, 4(1), 83–98. Peil, M. (1991). Lagos: The city is the people. Boston: G. K. Hall. Perlman, J. E. (1979). The myth of marginality: Urban poverty and politics in Rio de Janeiro. Berkeley: University of California Press. Potts, D. (2012a). Challenging the myths of urban dynamics in sub-Saharan Africa: The evidence from Nigeria. World Development, 40(7), 1382–1393. Potts, D. (2012b). Viewpoint: What do we know about urbanisation in sub-Saharan Africa and does it matter? International Development Planning Review, 34(1), v–xxii. Scott, J. C. (2008). Weapons of the weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Simone, A. (2001). Straddling the divides: Remaking associational life in the informal African city. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 25(1), 102–117. Simone, A. (2004). People as infrastructure: Intersecting fragments in Johannesburg. Public Culture, 16(3), 407–429. Solés, G. (2014). Walling in the one percent: Eko Atlantic. UrbanAfrica.Net (blog). Retrieved September 25, 2014 from www.urbanafrica.net/urban-voices/walling-onepercent-eko-atlantic/ Stein, C. (2017, January 13). Lagos slum was razed for its waterfront, residents say. The New York Times, sec. Africa. Watson, V. (2014). African urban fantasies: Dreams or nightmares? Environment and Urbanization, 26(1), 215–231. Wolch, J. R., Byrne, J., & Newell, J. P. (2014). Urban green space, public health, and environmental justice: The challenge of making cities “just green enough”. Landscape and Urban Planning, 125, 234–244.

6

Reassembling the city through intersectional feminism Subversive responses to the economic crisis in Barcelona Blanca Valdivia and Sara Ortiz Escalante

Introduction This chapter focuses on how social movements, and particularly the feminist movement in the city of Barcelona, have generated reassembling strategies in response to the process of disassemblage produced by capitalism and patriarchy in the period from the start of the economic crisis of 2008 until today. We understand disassemblage as the process through which capitalist practices destroy at multiple scales social and spatial relations in cities, pushing people onto the margins, producing inequalities and concentrating wealth in few hands, to the detriment of social and spatial people-centered policies. Barcelona is a city with a long trajectory of social struggles. In different historical moments, social movements have been at the center of the physical configuration of the city, struggling for public space, transportation and public facilities such as childcare or health centers that the city enjoys today. The economic recession beginning in 2008 was central to increasing social unrest, in which massive protests in the street coincided (the Indignados movement) with nascent initiatives proposing alternatives to the current economic and administrative system. While struggles in the street often blamed the political and financial system for the precarious life conditions people suffer, it is important to recognize how capitalism and patriarchy feed each other (Federici, 2004). In moments of economic austerity women suffer the impact of cuts in public services and the reductions in income to a much greater degree than men do. Making visible the interdependence and disassembling dynamics of these oppressive systems, the collective struggles of feminist groups in Barcelona are also building transformative and liberating initiatives. This chapter highlights the experience of some feminist collectives that have opened new pathways, such as the Vaga de totes – the Women’s strike, the Kellys, self-organized groups of shared childrearing and Col·lectiu Punt 6, a feminist urban planning cooperative.

Capitalist and sexist disassembling processes in Barcelona In Barcelona, like in many other cities around the world, capitalist and neoliberal dynamics1 have shaped political decisions and city projects through many political mandates. Examples include: the open doors without conditions to international

Intersectional feminism  63 real estate investment funds, touristification lobbies (hotel guilds, vacation rental platforms, AirBnB) and multinational retail chains, all of which damage the social fabric of neighborhoods by displacing local long-time residents and local retail stores, increasing housing and job insecurity and exploitation, fracturing people’s everyday life and eliminating neighborhood physical support of care and mutual support networks. The economic crisis of 2008 was a turning point because it made more visible and worsened some of the issues that the city, as well as other parts of the country were experiencing. These problems were specifically related to the housing and mortgage crisis. However, local politicians and the private sector used the crisis to advance a corporate development model in the city, that privileges tourism and a “smart city” strategy as a response to the economic recession. In Barcelona, smart city tactics equipped different spaces and elements with technology that benefited the private market, most notably CCTV as well as other technologies that do not directly respond to people’s everyday life needs. These technologies, however, do support global corporate trends forcing the creation of new needs: mobile chargers in the street, car and motorcycle electric chargers and online access to information through cell phones. Our critique is focused on the efforts the city has put in developing a smart city without first responding to everyday life needs. For example, city officials invested in mobility technology that can only be accessed through the internet, instead of spreading analog information systems in bus stations that are universally accessible. Additionally, the city is investing in electric car chargers, when the demand for them is extremely low in comparison with the high demand of public toilets or benches, both essential elements of everyday life trips. Between 1998 and 2007, the profit-driven interests of banks and private corporations supported and subsidized by the different levels of governments fed a housing bubble in the country. At that time, real estate represented 18% of the country’s GDP and the construction and real estate sectors employed 13% of the population, in comparison to 7% in Germany and 8% in the UK (Colau & Alemany, 2013). More housing was built than could be absorbed, due to credit liberalization and low interest rates mortgages. Just before the bubble burst, the average household income dedicated to pay a mortgage was 51% (Colau & Alemany, 2013). However, the Spanish dream collapsed in 2008. With one of the toughest mortgage laws in the world, more than 400,000 foreclosures left hundreds of thousands of families in the street and with debt for the rest of their lives. Under the Spanish mortgage law, people must continue to pay off their mortgages, complete with interest and penalty charges, even after they have been evicted and their home has been repossessed. The greatest contradiction is that in a time in which foreclosure and evictions affected 2 million people, Spain had a massive housing surplus of around 6 million units (Colau & Alemany, 2013). In Barcelona, governments under the Partit Socialista de Catalunya (PSC, social democrats), the party that ruled the city since the early 1980s, and later the conservative nationalist party of Convergència i Unió (CiU) from 2011 to 2015, have promoted, through their policies, a capitalist city model. Under CiU, many public

64  Blanca Valdivia and Sara Ortiz Escalante services and facilities were privatized and constituted the worst period for local residents. Despite being two different political parties, there has been a continuity in their urban planning policies, because they both have embraced neoliberal logics. They had very similar approaches to urban policies in their political programs, responding to the pressures of lobbies such as the hotel guild and the Port publicprivate consortium, and ignored the needs of community residents, above all in the city center neighborhoods. Thus, these governments have explicitly supported gentrification and touristification in the city. They have also embraced a “smart city” model for urban development, as mentioned earlier, which in addition to its claim of connecting people in the city, also focuses on the control and surveillance of people through CCTV, and other tracking technologies that benefit the private sector. Recently, a city survey showed tourism is the second highest concern for Barcelona residents. The city is experiencing a second real estate boom, this time affecting the rental market. Rent rates have increased 17%2 in the last year, and established residents are being displaced from their homes. This is due to international investments funds that are difficult to control and identify. These investment companies buy buildings in gentrifying areas to renovate them, evicting current renters, increasing the rent exponentially to attract the international market, and displacing the locals. The increase of tourist flats, AirBnB and similar platforms of vacation rentals have made the problem difficult to manage. In addition to the housing problems, there is a dramatic change in the visible configuration of the neighborhoods due to constant gentrification processes. For example, stores that serve tourists and economic elites have replaced local retail stores. Streets and public transportation are also overcrowded in the city as a result of increased tourism. The system cannot sustain the population flows without an increase of services. To counter these impacts, the new Barcelona government with Mayor Ada Colau, elected in 2015, instituted a new Tourism Plan. Its aim is to better manage the displacement and other negative impacts on local community, primarily by halting any new licenses to hotel construction or tourist flats.3 As Silvia Federici (2004) documents, capitalism and patriarchy are wholly interconnected. In particular, the often invisible unpaid domestic and reproductive work undertaken in its vast majority by women is an essential element for the organization of capitalist productive work. In fact, Federici (2004) argues that domestic work is a social construction of capitalism. In the following section, we examine how the negative consequences of the capitalist system, its patriarchal links and perverse logics are disproportionally felt by women.

The impact of the crisis on women’s shoulders Since the economic recession of 2008, the crisis particularly impacted women, and the central conservative government has been oblivious to women’s needs and rights. Using the justification of the economic downturn, the government developed austerity employment policies focused on maintaining jobs in

Intersectional feminism  65 male dominated industries – especially construction and banking, while budget cuts in the public sector affected mostly feminized sectors such as education, health and social services, which especially impacted women’s lives (Castro, 2013). Simultaneously, the government eliminated policies that provided support to care work, such as programs for elderly, sick or other dependents. These services were privatized, meaning these care responsibilities have been returned to the “family,” and therefore women. Families have worked as shock absorbers, mitigating the impact of the crisis and keeping some people from the extremes of marginality. Households, and women in particular, have seen an increase in their care work and the need to find alternatives to products that households cannot afford anymore (e.g. clothes, more involvement in food preparation). There have been several response strategies to the crisis, including: young adults returning to live with their parents; seniors moving from elder homes to live with their children; collective assumption of the debt of a family member; or transfer of care work to grandparents. This increases the gender discrimination that women suffer in the family, because the times, tasks and responsibilities are not shared among all household members equally, which aggravates the already existent gendered asymmetries (Vicent, 2013). Carmen Castro (2013) warns that austerity policies have elicited a re-privatization of care services toward the family, reinforcing a familiarist model that expects the family to cover the care and attention needs of all household members. In practice, women assume these tasks that previously were considered a public responsibility. Therefore, in the economic context of crisis, women suffered more of the consequences. This is because the anti-crisis measures of European governments (cuts of social spending, the privatization of public services, the freezing of pensions or the raising of retirement age) sharpen the care crisis, which reinforces the capitalist market and the patriarchal power (Grupo de Ecofeminismo, Ecologistas en Acción, 2011). Although the reduction of services in elder care homes, childcare or the public health sector affect all the final users of these services, there is a direct repercussion on the time women will have to invest in response to the cut of State services (Bosch, Carrasco, & Grau, 2005). Agenjo Calderón (2013) finds the bankruptcy of the social organization model of care in the Global North has been reinforced by: urban growth and the destruction of public spaces; the loss of networks of social support that leads to a more individualistic resolution of everyday activities; the precariousness of life that forces people to follow the rhythms and times that companies impose; and the progressive dismantling of the welfare state. This has provoked serious consequences for the overall population, but especially for women who continue to be the main caretakers. In economic terms, women are more adversely affected by unemployment, have lower incomes and work more often in part-time and temporary jobs. In particular, Spain has the highest female unemployment rate, 26.7%, in the EU. The wage gap between women and men is 17% (Vicent et al., 2013); this means that in order for women to have the same salary than men, they would have to work 59 additional days per year. Youth, seniors and migrant women, as well as women who are single-heads of households are the most impacted by poverty. For instance, in

66  Blanca Valdivia and Sara Ortiz Escalante Spain, 84% of widows live in poverty. More than a million and a half widowed women live with less than 450 euros per month, and 80 thousand with 150 euros per month. Income fundamentally shapes women’s urban experience, as it impacts, where and how they move through the city, in what neighborhoods they live in and what services they can access. Within this precarious economic situation, women still do 70% of the unpaid domestic and reproductive work (Ortiz Escalante & Gutiérrez Valdivia, 2015). In 2001, feminist researchers calculated the economic value of the unpaid domestic and reproductive work in the region of Catalonia, in Spain, and concluded that it would represent 40% of the GDP of the region (Carrasco & Serrano in Muxí Martínez, 2013). In response to these policies and the devastating economic crisis, grassroots feminist organizing has increased, advocating for systemic changes to eliminate the patriarchal structures engrained in all aspects of everyday life.

Grassroots responses to the crisis In response to the economic recession and social crisis, on May 15, 2011, a month before regional elections, people took the streets, and the Indignados movement occupied public spaces and squares of major cities throughout the country for weeks, in particular in Madrid and Barcelona. The movement was a collective response to protest against high unemployment rates, welfare cuts, a suffocating and predatory capitalist and banking model supported by Spain’s two-party system and Spanish political corruption. These social movements did not arise out of nowhere, as there was already a “breeding ground” of urban social movements that strongly criticized the capitalist movement and political organizations. What is new is that this movement engaged a larger group of the population who had never been mobilized before. Different social movements were represented demanding reforms in the political system to address the privatization of housing, health, education and social services. Among these movements, the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH, Platform of People Affected by Mortgage Loans) created in February 2009, gained popularity and visibility. The PAH is a grassroots organization comprised of those affected by foreclosures and evictions that take direct action to stop evictions and campaigns for housing rights. Since their creation, they have stopped more than 1,600 evictions, rehoused 2,500 people and renegotiated hundreds of mortgage payments.4

Responses from the feminist movement During this phase of crisis and society’s politicization, the feminist movement has continued working to make feminist claims part of the political agenda of social movements. This has been accomplished through a constant pedagogical work, but also through the creation of new strategies to confront everyday life problems. During these years, there have been multiple activities representing a diversity of experiences with different objectives.

Intersectional feminism  67 The Vaga de Totes (Women’s Strike) was developed in Barcelona and other areas of the Catalan region through different actions between 2014 and 2015, and two strikes under the slogan “Women move the world, and now we will stop it.” This movement redefined the concept of strike. It was filtered through a feminist lens and criticizing the lack of relevance given to the reproduction of life in the labor movement. The goal of the Vaga de Totes was to organize a strike that made women’s inequality specifically visible. It was organized by women, and women’s demands were the central focus. The strike highlighted that women are still responsible for most care work and that their daily lives had been overloaded with care work, which has been privatized due to governmental budget cuts for it. It also made visible the essential nature of this work to sustain life and the functioning of society, despite the lack of social acknowledgment that this work receives. The Vaga de Totes was not a traditional worker strike since it advocated in addition to stopping care work both a political and a consumption strike. This strategy enabled everybody to participate, even care takers who could not abandon their responsibilities. The strike used other strategies to highlight the reproductive tasks with interventions in different neighborhoods, in addition to demonstrations where male partners were invited to take care of dependent people to enable women go to the demonstrations. The Vaga de Totes was the precedent for the historical 2018 Vaga Feminista – Feminist Strike, which was followed by 6 million women workers and students in the country, and supported by several labor unions. The Kellys is a recently created group with representation in seven cities where tourism is a key sector of the economy. The organization fights for the rights of women hotel maids who perform subcontracted work in hotels to clean rooms for a very low salary and without legal labor regulation to protect them. The subcontract work severely limits their job security and economic stability. Many of these workers are also migrant workers, which exacerbates their oppression, as a result of an anti-immigrant climate across Europe and racial discrimination. The Kellys represents a break from classical union structures, since they have been available to workers in a sector where precariousness and temporary contracts are a big challenge to workers organizing. They challenge the patriarchal and organizing schemes of the traditional union movement and foster others practices of affective care among members. The Kellys have publicly reported on multiple occasions their precarious labor conditions, making visible how hotels outsource many job positions to obtain a higher economic benefit. In addition, they also denounce the health conditions of women hotel workers. They argue that companies’ prevention of occupational hazards responds mostly to male sectors such as factories and construction jobs and focuses on a male body. However, they are not responding to the occupational hazards of feminized and precarious jobs such as domestic workers or hotel maids. Recently, in Barcelona and other places in the country, several groups of shared childrearing have been created, coinciding with the years of the highest impact of the economic recession, and in response to the lack of public subsidized childcare. These groups are self-managed grassroots initiatives with the goal of collectivizing the care of children outside the home, and without depending on the public

68  Blanca Valdivia and Sara Ortiz Escalante and market sector. The informal networks that have always played a key role in women’s organization of care with the extended family, neighbors and friends, are formalized in these groups to cover the care of children in their first years of life. Parents, but above all mothers, get organized to manage these spaces, participating actively and regularly in the development of free education (Keller, 2015). These groups are a collective response to needs of everyday life, articulated through new models of socialization, education and childrearing from the community, and often with strong feminist roots. Lastly, we want to mention the work we do at Col·lectiu Punt 6 as feminist urban planners. We are a cooperative of planners and architects based in Barcelona that started to advocate for including an intersectional feminist perspective in urban planning in 2005. During these years, we have worked to document how cities are sites of multilayered inequalities and provide alternatives to urban planning paradigms that promote capitalist and patriarchal policies, which tend to homogenize city’s inhabitants. Feminist urban planning reveals how privileges and oppression are reproduced in the city depending on your gender, race, ethnicity, age, capabilities and other intersecting identities. We have used feminist methodologies and participatory tools to place people’s everyday lives at the center of planning and decision-making; and in particular, we try to make visible the unpaid domestic and care work that still is carried out mostly by women, highlighting the importance of care to sustain life. At the same time, we promote transformative participatory processes that include the diversity of people’s experiences and needs, and enable women’s participation, often overlooked in many planning processes. Over these years we have published books to guide the reader through feminist urban planning methodology and tools for feminist practice. These publications are open access, which makes them broadly available and promotes the sharing of knowledge on feminist urban planning. We believe that the use and widespread of these methods has been an empowerment tool for women, by raising awareness of the expertise they have about their communities and promoting their active participation in urban planning processes. Also, our work has contributed to the increasing interest from local governments across the country as well as women’s groups and neighborhood organizations to implement a feminist perspective in urban planning internationally. We have conducted capacity building trainings with several city planning departments, delivered courses with university students as well as implemented training workshops with women’s groups. We do this work through our small cooperative and as members of the solidarity and social economy regional network, proposing alternative economic models to capitalism, and prioritizing the self-care and the work in coherence with our ideas. We work in five areas: architecture and urban planning projects, community engagement and participation, research, capacity building and awareness raising. Examples of the projects in the city of Barcelona are a participatory process to define the use of space for the community members around the new Sant Antoni Market; a participatory assessment with elders in the Example District to create a network of benches that accompany their everyday life mobility; a participatory everyday life assessment with women in the Gràcia District; exploratory walks

Intersectional feminism  69 to improve women’s safety in several neighborhoods of the city; and advising and writing of the city of Barcelona bylaw on “Urban Planning from a Gender Perspective” approved in March 2017. In the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona, we have also conducted participatory action research with women nightshift workers to assess mobility and safety issues. We have also advised feminist organizations in Manacor, Mallorca as well as local governments in other parts of the country to include a gender perspective in their Urban Strategic Plan. We have conducted safety audits in Madrid and Cali, Colombia.5

Conclusion In this chapter, we have shown how capitalism is linked with patriarchy in the process of disassembling cities, social policies, and urban social fabric. We have documented some organizing strategies that in a crisis context met the needs in subversive and empowering ways, showing the system’s cracks and the capacity we have to build collective strategies of struggle from the feminist movement. Our goal has been demonstrating that reassembling efforts from a feminist perspective are essential in the current local context of Barcelona, Catalonia and Spain. Male power structures continue dominating economic and political crisis responses, ignoring the consequences on people’s everyday lives, and especially on women in their diversity. In contrast, the feminist movement has been one key actor in providing responses, alternatives and reassembling strategies for the society’s survival. The goal now should be to make sure feminist reassembling strategies permeate all the layers of society and really shake the reproduction of the capitalist model.

Notes 1 As stated in other chapters of this book, we understand neoliberalism as the reduction of state supports for the population in favor of the capitalist markets, favoring free trade, market deregulation and decreased union membership. 2 Institut Català del Sòl – INCASOL (Catalan Land Institute) http://incasol.gencat.cat/ca 3 Tourist Strategic Plan 2010, Ajuntament de Barcelona (City Council of Barcelona) http:// ajuntament.barcelona.cat/turisme/en/strategic-plan 4 Campaña Stop Desahucios, Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (Campaign Stop Evictions. Platform of people affected by mortgages.) http://afectadosporlahipoteca.com/ category/propuestas-pah/stop-desahucios/ 5 Col·lectiu Punt 6. www.punt6.org/en/our-projects/

References Agenjo Calderón, A. (2013). Sostener la vida: respuestas feministas en torno a la organización social de los cuidados. In L. Vicent, C. Castro, A. Agenjo, & Y. Herrero (Eds.), El desigual impacto de la crisis sobre las mujeres (pp. 22–28). Madrid: Dossier FUHEM ecosocial. Bosch, A., Carrasco, C., & Grau, E. (2005). Verde que te quiero violeta. Encuentros y desencuentros entre feminismo y ecologismo. In T. Enric (Ed.), La historia cuenta (pp. 321–346). Vilassar de Dalt: Editorial El Viejo Topo.

70  Blanca Valdivia and Sara Ortiz Escalante Castro, C. (2013). ¿Cómo afecta la crisis y las políticas de austeridad a los derechos de las mujeres y a la igualdad? In L. Vicent, C. Castro, A. Agenjo, & Y. Herrero (Eds.), El desigual impacto de la crisis sobre las mujeres (pp. 13–21). Madrid: Dossier FUHEM ecosocial. Colau, A., & Alemany, A. (2013). Vidas hipotecadas: de la burbuja immobiliaria al derecho a la vivienda. Barcelona: Cuadrilátero de libros. Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the witch. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia. Grupo de Ecofeminismo, Ecologistas en Acción, 2011. Menos para vivir mejor. Ecofeminismos, anticapitalismo y mundo urbano. Retrieved from http://www.mundubat.org/wpcontent/uploads/archivos/201303/menos-vivir-mejor-final_grupo-ecofeminismo.pdf Keller, C. (2015). Grupos de Crianza Compartida Experiencias de organización comunitaria del cuidado. Trabajo Final de Máster: Estudios de Mujeres, Género y Ciudadanía Instituto Interuniversitario de Estudios de Género. Muxí Martínez, Z. (2013). POSTsuburbia. Rehabilitación de urbanizaciones residenciales monofuncionales de baja densidad. Barcelona: Ed. Comanegra. Ortiz Escalante, S., & Gutiérrez Valdivia, B. (2015). Planning from below: Using feminist participatory methods to increase women’s participation in urban planning. Gender & Development, 23(1), 113–126. Vicent, L. (2013). Familia: ¿amortiguador o amortiguadoras? In L. Vicent, C. Castro, A. Agenjo, & Y. Herrero (Eds.), El desigual impacto de la crisis sobre las mujeres (pp. 5–12). Madrid: Dossier FUHEM ecosocial. Vicent, L., Castro, C., Agenjo, A. & Herrero, Y. (Eds.) (2013). El desigual impacto de la crisis sobre las mujeres. Madrid: Dossier FUHEM ecosocial. http://www.fuhem.es/ media/cdv/file/biblioteca/Dossier/dossier_El-desigual-impacto-de-la-crisis-sobre-lasmujeres.pdf

Part III

Militarization and the spectacle of the (in)security state

7

The organizing logics of predatory formations Militarization and the spectacle of the (in)security state Iván Arenas and Elizabeth L. Sweet

The deregulation of markets, the privatization of public assets, and diminishing social service provisions by the state have meant that governing has moved from managing and improving the welfare of the population (Foucault, 2000) to the management of networks as a way to shape outcomes. For Bruce Braun and Stephanie Wakefield, “Government, from this view, is as much about managing circulation and modulating flows as it is about molding individuals” (2014, p. 5). Shaping dispositions has become less of a concern for state agencies and actors than shaping the systems through which people and things flow. Thus, while “the essential element of modernity was centralization” (Rabinow, 1995, p. 246) – and at the apex of centralization stood the state – today’s networked assemblage lacks a central point. Although the state has become part of the neoliberal assemblage, as opposed to its puppeteer, the image and imagination of the state as the peak of a vertical pyramid of hierarchical power remains dominant. The state is the effect produced by misrecognizing the disciplinary processes and structural frameworks generated by social practices as an enduring institution standing apart from the very practices that make it up (Mitchell, 1991). Part of the magic of the state is not only that we continue to grant it a power and coherence that it does not have, but also that the state’s “tendency towards totalization,” as Henri Lefebvre wrote, “prevents us from seeing how disjointed everything is becoming” (1995b, p. 121). The illusion of the endurance of the institution of the state as a central source of stability, coherence, and order blurs the fragmenting disassembling at hand all around us. While the reasoning and practices of neoliberal predatory formations have disassembled the traditional role of the modern state as caretaker of the welfare of the population, as well as its central sovereign location, “how power is construed and located remains fundamentally unchallenged, and the centrality of the state and its ability to harness legitimacy, together with the notion that power is rooted in particular institutions, remain largely unquestioned assumptions” (Sharp, Routledge, Philo, & Paddison, 2000, p. 4). The political imaginaries of liberal conceptions of power – and hence of resistance to power – continue to conceive of political traction through the lens of “state-based thinking” (Warner, 2005, p. 124), where agency is acquired in relation to the state and the state remains the means of political self-realization for groups struggling for social transformation. Displacing the

74  Iván Arenas and Elizabeth L. Sweet mirage of state-based thinking is difficult precisely because it necessitates accepting that contemporary forms of power operate as a network and therefore lack a central institution or individual whose take over or toppling would guarantee victory. Recognizing that the state may be a nodal point, and thus an important part of the global system, yet that it is ultimately only one of many components that make up this neoliberal assemblage means reconceptualizing not only the role of the state, but also what governing means. This assemblage is composed of myriad moving parts that follow neoliberal logics, but which nonetheless come together in complex ways, giving rise to often contingent articulations with varied and often contradictory effects. As the state’s role as guarantor of the welfare of the population has receded, for example, resilience has become a new global governing dispositif or apparatus. From austerity measures to disasters caused by global warming, resilience is seen as a necessary asset for institutions or individuals in order to weather the disassembling effects of predatory capitalism and state divestment in people’s welfare. Although it has generally been favorably embraced in government and academic circles, as the term itself implies, resilience equates the capacity to survive times of crisis to the highest possible measure of personal and public good. Resilience is part of the neoliberal assemblage that aggressively asserts that individuals are solely or primarily responsible for their wellbeing. This turn to resilience does not mean, however, that the state has become irrelevant or is becoming obsolescent. After all, philosophers of the state from Thomas Hobbes to John Locke have long noted that a central role of the state has always been ensuring the physical security of people and their property. As the state has divested from its role in securing the welfare of the population, “security imposes itself as the basic principle of state activity” (Agamben, 2001, p. 1). In a moment when societies are increasingly divided by the ever-expanding hierarchical inequalities produced by predatory practices, in every society there is a “sort of warlike tension between an aristocracy and the popular masses” (Foucault, 2003, p. 156). The state’s imperative for security not only must negotiate that tension, but itself further foments this warlike tension and divide. On the one hand, the state’s security mandate has always been negotiated in relation to the need to police and secure both the nation’s borders and the population from external and internal threats. “Every state is born of violence,” and “state power endures only by virtue of violence” (Lefebvre, 1995a, p. 280). In an era of radical precariousness, when uncertainty has become the norm for the vast majority of people around the planet, the violence of the state’s security machine has grown exponentially and vastly increased its focus on policing its own population. As Foucault argued, the imperative that “society must be defended” (2003) has split modern society into two camps or races, the dominant and the subjugated, that are at war through political or other means. The state’s role in this ongoing war has been to decide whom to make live and whom must die; or, in other words, whom to support in thriving and whom is expendable. We have entered an “emergent phase” of neoliberalism where “crime, policing, welfare reform and urban surveillance” by governments have the “purpose of disciplining and containing those

Organizing logics of predatory formations  75 marginalized or dispossessed by the neoliberalization of the 1980s” (Routledge, 2003, p. 334). Rather than work to guarantee that society is thriving, the state guarantees security to its privileged classes through the repression of the social sectors disassembled by neoliberalization. For the homeless, the poor, marginalized racial, ethnic and/or gendered groups, or incoming refugees and immigrants, the state perpetuates and ensures that conditions of permanent crisis are the norm through outright police violence or economic and social policies that disadvantage and dismantle opportunities for these groups. The disassembling dynamics of gaping income inequalities, forms of discrimination including racism and sexism, and media messages feeding on negative news and fomenting fears of violence stimulate state repression, helping ensure that the security achieved through its aggressions only produce further states of insecurity. As the state has divested from its pastoral role as community caretaker, transforming from a welfare to a security state, urban space has also radically been transformed. Most specifically, by militarizing both public space and private living, the violence of the security state is critical in securing and exacerbating extreme levels of urban segregation. The criminalization of the urban poor, immigrants, and refugees and antagonistic policing tactics ensure that those disadvantaged and driven to migrate to cities to seek physical safety, economic survival, or who are born into challenging neighborhoods remain sequestered in ever crowding slums and impoverished inner cities across the world. Graham, among others, has suggested that “[t]he increasing polarization of cities caused by neoliberal globalization is providing many conditions that are ripe for extremes of civil and militarized violence” (2004, p. 7). Fanon’s warning in Wretched of the Earth (1961) that the urban and social apartheids of colonial Algeria were theaters for revolutionary insurgency is echoed loudly by many today. Fear of rising discontent from increasing income and social inequality suggests “poverty is not just an issue of ethics or charity but one of direct self-interest” (Wolfensohn, 2006, p. 111). Those in positions of power and privilege recognize that poverty breeds discontent with the more affluent in society and that this discontent brings conflict, strife, and social mobilization. Rather than seek to fundamentally alter the system and thus address the root causes of inequity and inequality, one reaction to the notion that impoverished slums and neighborhoods are ticking time bombs ready for revolution or radicalization (and therefore harbor enemies of the state) has been a further escalation of the hostile policing and polarizing segregation of the poor that have historically plagued marginalized communities around the world. Anxiety generated by the global “war on terror” has only broadened the perception that urban streets are active warzones, “tightening the overlap between the tactics of outright war and the practices of urban policing” (Williams, 2006, p. 67). Impoverished populations in the Global South have long been under the apprehensive gaze and military thumb of wealthier sovereign Western states seeking to curb their potential for rebellion in order to secure their cheap labor and natural resources. Today, however, marginalized urban neighborhoods in the Global North used to aggressive policing now have to contend with militarized police forces armed as if for warzone combat; meanwhile, in both poor

76  Iván Arenas and Elizabeth L. Sweet and prosperous communities, surveillance cameras and clandestine government data gathering ensure that everyone in today’s urban spaces is under suspicion. Inequality gained media and political attention in the United States and around the Western world when the largely white and (formerly) middle-class activists of Occupy claimed the mantle of the 99%, thereby making visible and audible that the negative ramifications of predatory capitalism were now being felt by the middleclass. The violence of state surveillance similarly gained traction as a media and political issue after revelations of seemingly indiscriminate internal and external surveillance by the United States were revealed by Edward Snowden, producing discomfort in middle- and upper-class communities unused to being targeted. The fact that the panopticon has become an index for the spatial and social power of the modern state and has been used to describe not only the design of prisons, but also of public spaces speaks to a nervous anxiety equally concerned that the state’s sweeping gaze cannot see it all and worry that it can see it all. When assessing the importance of increasing inequality and the security state’s reach, it is important to remember that there are vast numbers of disenfranchised and marginalized populations across the globe for whom predatory economic practices and state violence have long been the historical norm. The violent militarization of urban spaces by the state and the shrinking middle-classes around the world point to the increased scale, scope, and reach of the logic of the neoliberal global economic system, but expulsions and the disassembling of lives and livelihoods are not novel even as their virulent effects reach further and may be intensifying. In the time of colonial modernity, for example, economic exploitation and spatial militarization were core technologies through which Western nation-states controlled the people and places they occupied. The categorical separation of populations and the construction of boundaries between “us” and “them” was at the center of colonial logics and practices. These boundaries were as much the product of physical borders and boundaries (Rabinow, 1995; Wright, 1987) as they were of “imaginative geographies” (Said, 1994). State sponsored violence, divisive urbanism, and an exploitative global economic regime not only created separate possibilities for colonial and settler populations, but also justified their hierarchical divide by institutionalizing and popularizing the notion that the world was populated by different kinds of people. The effect, to paraphrase Gregory (2004), was a territorial logic whereby place and people were fused and geography became ontology. Then and today, state violence works through a spatializing, territorial reasoning that connects space and self, assigning particular bodies to particular places. Assessing the divided spatiality of Israel/Palestine, Eyal Weizman (2004) has commented that this territorial logic has a strategic function, namely that an effect of the building of Israeli settlements, road systems, and the West Bank’s separation wall has been “[t]he fixing of the Palestinian population as relatively stationary, and its separation into isolated, immobile islands, mak[ing] it much easier to manage and control” (p. 182). This spatial fix works not only because it separates Palestinian and Israeli bodies physically – thus rendering certain bodies out of place – but also because this separation has consequential effects with respect to Palestinian economic, political, and social organization and futures.

Organizing logics of predatory formations  77 Whether at a security checkpoint on a manufactured border in Israel or on a street corner in Istanbul or Indianapolis, today’s global apartheids and states of insecurity ensure that every community is under scrutiny; however, the longstanding targeting of disadvantaged communities of color and increasing militarization of city streets produced by police practices, government strategies, and architectural trends have gained little attention (Davis, 1992). Though they have not garnered much media coverage or public debate, the effects of increasing states of economic and social insecurity and the security state’s violence have had very visible consequences. Namely that, “we live in ‘fortress cities’ brutally divided between ‘fortress cells’ of affluent society and ‘places of terror’ where the police battle the criminalized poor” (Davis, 1992 p. 224). Part of the disassembling of the present has been to make the streets of our cities into battlefields, rendering public spaces zones of fear rather than sites of contact. Dread of an ever-expanding impoverished class, coupled with their categorical criminalization by society and the state, have led not only to the violent marginalization and segregation of communities of color, but also to the voluntary sequestration of those who can afford it in heavily guarded and insular enclaves (Caldeira, 2000). Along with the institutionalization of fear in public space, as the state has retreated from its role in caring for the population, the role it once served as an anchor for group belonging has also receded, leaving people to seek physical and psychological shelter in isolated communities where “community means sameness, while ‘sameness’ means the absence of the Other, especially a stubbornly different other” (Bauman, 2008, p. 115). While the urban poor are warehoused in slums and the inner city, the more affluent and privileged spatially confine themselves in homes that have become urban bunkers and move around cities in sport utility vehicles that were first designed for the military; the inequalities and violence of neoliberal predatory formations have physically materialized contemporary states of insecurity. While gated communities may literally fence off real estate submarkets and have reduced the commons to the maintenance of property values and oppositional insider-outsider identities, physical walls and antagonistic police bodies are not the only forces dividing spaces and societies into two camps. As Rosalyn Deutsche has noted, the architectural and urban planning designs of many sites designated as public spaces also act as disciplinary mechanisms, often using eminent domain, zoning, and design codes to evict people deemed undesirable or suffering from neoliberalism’s disassembling effects. Deutsche quotes New York City planner Oscar Newman’s description of what he calls “defensible space” as follows: “Design can make it possible for both inhabitant and stranger to perceive that an area is under the undisputed influence of a particular group, that they dictate the activity taking place within it, and who its users are to be” (in Deutsche, 1986, p. 83). Even when there are no gates or gun-toting security guards, how an area is physically designed affects who its users are, rendering particular sites the domain of some users at the expense of others and further territorializing economic, political, and social divisions. Moreover, the uneven deployment of security state forces and exclusionary character of urban design are ultimately “procedures for transforming the city to

78  Iván Arenas and Elizabeth L. Sweet meet the needs of capital” (Deutsche, 1986, p. 86). The spatial segregation and social division of populations was highly profitable for colonial capitalism’s overseers and is highly profitable for its present corporate beneficiaries. For example, even as the West Bank’s separation wall has divided Palestinian towns and fields under the guise of security, disassembling lives and livelihoods in the process, the Israeli state has changed its path to incorporate water extraction points and thereby claim the right to this lucrative and life-giving resource (Weizman, 2004, p. 186). In Mumbai, as in many slums around the world, researchers have noted that while the state does not feel compelled to provide utility services to slums or other sites of informal housing, they have instituted harsh laws to penalize and prosecute impoverished urban dwellers for having to procure water illegally even though many of the pipes drawn from city lines have been installed by paying substantial sums to gangsters tied up with police and politicians (Graham, Desai, & McFarlane, 2013). In these laws, as well as in media messages and politician’s statements, “the urban poor [. . .] are represented as a parasitic threat requiring increasingly violent response and draconian control” (Graham et al., 2013, p. 117). In being labeled as a threat, the urban poor’s right to resources is delegitimized while their bodies and goods become legitimized as targets of police repression and militarized violence. The pathologization and criminalization of the urban poor not only effectively divides them socially and spatially from the rest of the city’s “legitimate” and “law-abiding” citizens, but it also masks the predatory and exploitative practices of the people and companies who profit from impoverished communities. The criminalization and often militarized policing of communities most affected by capitalism’s disassembling dynamics are no longer just a means to construct the semblance of security or to repress revolution but have themselves become a source of lucrative profits. The neoliberal security state not only follows a carceral logic that physically segregates and confines the disadvantaged populations that predatory formation has made expendable, but through incarceration, it has made surplus bodies profitable commodities. Private security firms including prisons and their suppliers act as any other for-profit corporation (Sassen, 2014, p. 72). When prisons are paid by the number of beds occupied at one time, profits are produced by prisoners’ bodies inside; profits are also generated by exploiting those incarcerated as unimaginably low wage labor for the transnational corporations that operate factories inside prison walls (Sassen, 2014, p. 74). Economic incentives are therefore important factors that help explain the growing expansion of prisons and the prison population across the world. Just as economic crises are not anomalies within capitalism, but part of its normal functioning, so too prisons, slums, and gated communities are not exceptional spaces at the margins but are, rather, spatial and social manifestations of the territorializing reasoning behind neoliberal predatory formations and the security state. Fortress urbanism is rapidly gaining ground in cities and spaces across the globe. On the one hand, then, the spatiality of the (in)security state lifts up walls along state borders, at prison enclosures, around gated communities, and surrounding private residences. The codes of who belongs and who does not are

Organizing logics of predatory formations  79 printed in bodies; these codes of race, clothing, class, and gender determine who is the target of the public gaze, and the vigilante. These material assemblages are powerful physical manifestations of fear and of the recognition that rising levels of inequality are both violently produced and violently maintained. On the other hand, while the spatiality of the (in)security state raises walls, the violence of neoliberal predatory formations is also tearing down walls, disassembling spaces and social communities wholesale. Greg Grandin’s examination of the remains of the urban landscapes that Fordist economics built in Detroit and in the Amazon city of Manaus lead him to conclude that there exists a “relationship between capitalism and ruin” (2013, p. 114). The abandoned and foreclosed homes of Detroit and the derelict rubber plantations and factories of Manaus in the Amazon are object lessons speaking to the ruins of the promise of Fordist economics that high pay and high worker productivity would be profitable for all. Entire neighborhoods where shuttered windows and overgrown lots predominate manifest how capitalism’s just-so story of the “American Dream” that hard work is a stepladder to success has become an illusion if not a nightmare. These ruined landscapes are also reminders of the warlike devastation on physical spaces and societies that capitalism’s shift from Fordist to neoliberal predatory practices have generated. A shift that, as Grandin’s research reminds, was violently imposed upon cities such as Manaus by militarized death-squads that demobilized unions and worker solidarity (2013, p. 124). A shift that is also evident in inner cities and favelas from Chicago to Calcutta (now Kolkata) where militarized police violence maintains those most adversely affected by neoliberal predatory formations caged in and constantly on edge or effectively transfers them to the growing and global for-profit prison industrial complex. State sponsored violence in the name of corporate profits has a long and troubled history of disassembling lives and livelihoods and producing ruins. State sponsored violence also has a long history of using the spectacle of militarization as a weapon of mass distraction to divert attention from the effects of disassembling dynamics. Images of drones dropping bombs or of tanks traversing streets and spectacular pictures of violence beyond our borders serve to draw and focus our attention in a particular direction and away from others. As Derek Gregory points out, images of the dramatic fall of the World Trade Center in New York City dominated global media coverage, creating a carefully erected space of visibility that largely eclipsed any public discussion of the consequential disassembling effects of the US war in Afghanistan or Iraq, constituting this site as “a space of invisibility” (2004, p. 12). The military operations of the security state offer a space of hyper-visibility whose dramatic spectacle often raises fears of global threats that overshadow other concerns. Mesmerized and overwhelmed by such images, Jonathan Crary assesses that “[t]he logic of the spectacle prescribes the production of separate, isolated, but not introspective individuals” (1999 p. 79). The blinding spectacle of militarization and fearful insecurities of threatening others from beyond national borders occlude our attention to less spectacular, but nonetheless critically consequential local examples of the violence of predatory neoliberal practices, allowing us to live next to foreclosed homes and overlook increasing hunger and homelessness in our communities.

80  Iván Arenas and Elizabeth L. Sweet As the chapter in this volume on the urbanism of Medellín, Colombia by John J. Betancur and Catalina Ortiz Arciniegas further demonstrates, state-sponsored architectural projects in impoverished communities can also serve as spectacular distractions whose success whitewashes the violence of their production as well as the troubling realities of those living in the very neighborhoods where they rise. As they argue, moreover, the success of the architectural projects is judged principally in relation to the way in which they have transformed the optic of Medellín from a city riddled with murder and crime to an award winning “comeback city” ripe for business investments and now contending for global city status with the likes of Shanghai and Sydney. The prominent global cities discourse in urbanism perceives slums as a problematic blight that must be erased if cities like Medellín or Mumbai are to rise in the global city ranks. Whether in Colombia or India, as the competition for global city status intensifies and moves capital around the planet, Graham et al. remind, millions around the world living in precarious slums and most directly impacted by the local ebbs and flows of capital “are painfully aware of how their demonization has served the purposes of the city’s political and economic elites” (2013, p. 136). Whether profiting from the bribes needed by the poor to secure services or fines levied to deny them, through the exploitation of their bodies as cheap labor warehoused in slums or inside prisons, or by bolstering business prospects through spectacular urban renewal projects that raise eyebrows and global city rankings, neoliberal capitalism generates wealth around the world by disassembling the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions around the planet. Parallel to the dismantling of labor solidarity and unions in the workplace, part of the disassembling effects of neoliberalism’s predatory practices and of the security state’s spectacular violence have been to increase precariousness to such a degree that people are forced to concern themselves primarily with their own struggle to survive. Even as inequality continues to grow across all social sectors and in all corners of the world, neoliberal logics have promoted the adage that individuals are personally responsible for their success or failure. Facing divestment by the state from social safety supports, the militarization of streets and public spaces, precarious employment, indebtedness to banks for school loans, credit card balances, and home mortgages, many individuals have been forced to retreat to insular spaces in order to cultivate resilience. Rather than retreat, however, many are also resisting neoliberal predatory logics by assembling new relationships to each other, to governing, and to urban space. As the chapter in this section of the book by Iván Arenas points to, protest practices during a social movement in Oaxaca, México in 2006 transformed the exclusionary dynamic of Oaxaca’s “defensible public space” and, by assembling protesters into a social and political community, challenged the individualizing logic of personal accountability that dominates economic and political governance. As the criminalization of dissent and brutal military repression of this and other social movements also demonstrates, however, the privileges and profits from disassembling under neoliberalism are violently guarded. On the one hand, then, city streets are under the surveillance and militarized control of the security state as a way to control those most affected by the disassembling dynamics of neoliberalism

Organizing logics of predatory formations  81 and thus to ensure that resilience does not become resistance; on the other hand, the control of public spaces and the silencing of the public sphere are also a means to secure and amplify the role of public life and public spaces as sites of consumption.

References Agamben, G. (2001). Security and terror. Theory and Event, 5(4), 1–24. Translated by C. Emcke. Bauman, Z. (2008 [2001]). Community: Seeking safety in an insecure world. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Caldeira, T. P. R. (2000). City of walls: Crime, segregation, and citizenship in Sao Paulo. Berkeley: University of California Press. Crary, J. (1999). Suspensions of perception: Attention, spectacle, and modern culture. Cambridge: Mit Press. Davis, M. (1992). City of quartz: Excavating the future in Los Angeles. New York: Vintage Press. Deutsche, R. (1986, Autumn). Krzysztof Wodiczko’s “homeless projection” and the site of urban ‘revitalization’. October, 38, 63–98. Fanon, F. (1961). The wretched of the earth. (Constance Farrington, Trans.). New York: Grove Press. Foucault, M. (2000 [1982]). Governmentality. In J. D. Faubion & P. Rabinow (Eds.), Essential works of foucault, volume 3 power (pp. 201–222). New York: The New Press. Foucault, M. (2003 [1997]). Society must be defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976. New York: Picador. Graham, S. (2004). Introduction. In S. Graham (Ed.), Cities, war, and terrorism (pp. 1–25). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Graham, S., Desai, R., & McFarlane, C. (2013). Water wars in Mumbai. Public Culture, 25(1), 115–141. Grandin, G. (2013). Empire’s ruins: Detroit to the Amazon. In A. L. Stoler (Ed.), Imperial debris: On ruins and ruination (pp. 114–128). Durham: Duke University Press. Gregory, D. (2004). The colonial present. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Lefebvre, H. (1995a [1974]). The production of space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc. Lefebvre, H. (1995b [1960]). Notes on the new town. In J. Moore (Trans.), Introduction to modernity (pp. 116–126). New York: Verso. Mitchell, T. (1991). The limits of the state: Beyond statist approaches and their critics. The American Political Science Review, 85(1), 77–96. Rabinow, P. (1995 [1989]). French modern: Norms and forms of the social environment. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Routledge, P. (2003). Convergence space: Process geographies of grassroots globalization networks. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 28(3), 333–349. Said, E. (1994). Culture and imperialism. New York: Vintage Books. Sassen, S. (2014). Expulsions: Brutality and complexity in the global economy. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Sharp, J. P., Routledge, P., Philo, C., & Paddison, R. (2000). Entanglements of power: Geographies of domination/resistance. In J. P. Sharp, P. Routledge, C. Philo, & R. Paddison (Eds.), Entanglements of power: Geographies of domination/resistance (pp. 1–42). New York: Routledge.

82  Iván Arenas and Elizabeth L. Sweet Wakefield, S., & Braun, B. (2014). Guest editorial. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32(1), 4–11. Warner, M. (2005). Publics and counterpublics. New York: Zone Books. Weizman, E. (2004). Strategic points, flexible lines, tense surfaces, and political volumes: Ariel Sharon and the geometry of occupation. In S. Graham (Ed.), Cities, war, and terrorism (pp. 172_191). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Williams, P. J. (2006). Theaters of war. In R. Scholar (Ed.), Divided cities: The Oxford Amnesty lectures 2003 (pp. 56–78). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wolfensohn, J. (2006). The undivided city. In R. Scholar (Ed.), Divided cities: The Oxford Amnesty lectures 2003 (pp. 109–128). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wright, G. (1987). Tradition in the service of modernity. The Journal of Modern History, 59(2), 291–316.

8

Disassembling foundational fictions of democracy The people and the plaza, militarization and mobilization in Oaxaca Iván Arenas Freedom of old used to be the monopoly of the privileged class. By means of the cities it again took its place in society as a natural attribute of the citizen. Hereafter it was enough to reside on city soil to acquire it. Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade, 1925

Introduction The birth of modern cities due to the expansion of trade and the rise of the mercantile class during the age of empire has been commented upon as a transformative social moment that gave rise to the freedom of the individual and ended rigid feudal bonds (Pirenne, 1925; Weber, 1922). Even if this medieval origin story is not part of our popular discourse, what has filtered through in this just-so story is the idea that cities offer individuals economic, political, and personal freedoms and that, by bringing heterogeneous people together, cities are also critical to the democratic exchange of ideas and social progress. Whether as a melting pot, cultural mosaic, jigsaw puzzle, or salad bowl, the idea of the city as a space of engagement with others across difference is fundamental not only to our image and imagination of the modern city but is also a central pillar of our image and imagination of democracy. Since its inception, the street and public plaza have offered material anchors for the idea and ideal of cities as blenders spinning people from all walks of life together. City planners and theorists alike have long championed the crowded streets and public plazas of ancient and modern cities as the material grounds for a functioning democracy (Arendt, 1963; Holston, 1989; Low, 2000; Rowe, 1997; Sorkin, 1992). Though celebrated as a space of freedom for individuals and for its democratic promise to bring together a mix of races, classes, genders, and identities in novel encounters, theorists have at the same time pointed to the city’s crowded streets and often segregated populations as emblematic of the isolation, alienation, and exploitation of modern individuals (Caldeira, 2000; Engels, 1844; Simmel, 1968). As this edited book makes clear, there is a tension between the democratic promise of the city and the proliferation, in cities across the globe, of greater division, increased inequity and inequality, and social strife. These social, spatial, and

84  Iván Arenas economic divisions have many roots. Although capital accumulation has always generated inequalities, the predominance of the neoliberal market system worldwide has increased division and inequity by privatizing public resources for private profit. Whether talking about colonial regimes or contemporary societies, social, spatial, and economic divisions are also fed by systems of racial domination and racism that create segregated societies. This greatly diminishes the capacity for democratic interactions across difference. As scholars have therefore pointed out, under today’s system of neoliberal racial capitalism, racial divisions that create underserved, surplus, and criminalized populations ready for exploitation are central to capitalist profit (Clarno, 2017). In this moment when neoliberal racial capitalism is radically transforming our cities and societies, this chapter asks whether or not hanging on to the enduring foundational fiction of an articulation between democratic politics and public space continues to have practical or theoretical purchase. Or, to put it another way, as neoliberal market rationality saturates social and spatial arrangements, often disassembling the possibilities for political publics and politics, how do the lived realities of spatial forms and political practices transform our understanding of, and aspirations about, the articulation between cities and democracy? Before addressing the ambivalence between the democratic promise of the city and the perils of contemporary urbanity, however, it is important to first briefly examine this articulation itself. After all, it is easy to point to the gap that exists between the ideal of the modern city as a space of democratic encounters and the divisive reality of the polarized politics and public spaces of our contemporary cities. And yet, even as urban theorists from Jane Jacobs (1961) to Teresa Caldeira (2000) lament the disappearance of the public street as a space of encounter, they also hold on to the discourse and idealized imaginary of public space as a pillar of democratic political life, insisting that the ideal matters because it legitimates struggle, impelling people to strive to fulfill its inclusive promise. Yet, even when the tension between the ideal and the lived reality is readily acknowledged, the democratic promise of the city has become a theoretical shorthand that often forecloses further investigation and explanation. Rather than take this articulation for granted or dismiss it outright as a fiction, what kernel of truth underlies this articulation and its hold on our imagination of city spaces and democratic political practices? What is at stake if this foundational fiction is disassembled? Like historian Henri Pirenne, sociologist Max Weber also undertook a historical account of the rise of the city (1922). As Pirenne did, in his writings Weber emphasized that medieval cities brought about a revolutionary transformation that ended the caste-like feudal social order. However, although Weber emphasized that cities brought people of all social strata together, this was not by choice. He notes that for medieval lords, cities represented new opportunities to exploit their serfs and bondsmen as artisans or small merchants. Weber reminds that it took serfs coming together in solidarity and association through guilds to fight for their freedom. Freedom was hard won and there was much blood spilled to achieve this right to freedom. The struggle for sovereignty from feudal bonds eventually coalesced and congealed into the “legal status of ‘citizenship’” (Weber, 1922, p. 96). The right of

Disassembling foundational fictions  85 citizenship, as Pirenne reminds, was codified by city law and, “whatever might be the differences and even the contrasts which wealth set up between men, all were equal as far as civil status was concerned” (1925, p. 193). As this equal status of citizenship spread throughout European cities, both Weber and Pirenne quote a German saying of the time: “City air makes man free.” Across the generations, the laws that codified the gains of citizenship won by the struggle and sacrifice of people in medieval cities also erased the history of that collective struggle. Because laws provide us with the rights that others long ago struggled to achieve, we generally take those struggles for granted. Instead of centering particular people, the principle that city air makes man free became a fixture of our popular understanding of the power of cities as spaces that bring people of all walks of life together as equal citizens who have a right to associate with others to struggle for one’s rights. Democratic rights of citizenship and assembly became fused and even confused with the notion that city air makes man free. However, what we conceive of as rights of citizenship and freedom differ from those that Weber describes. Under the logics of neoliberal racial capitalism, as anthropologists Arjun Appadurai and James Holston point out, liberal notions of rights bearing citizenship “do not presuppose or promote any substantive conception of the good. Rather, they are supposed to enable citizens to pursue their own ends consistent with a similar liberty for all” (1996, p. 193). The freedom that Weber’s medieval citizens fought for was the freedom to associate and, by coming together, to collectively shape conceptions of the good life. In our contemporary cities, the right to association is sacrosanct, yet the drive impelling a sense of freedom tends toward what geographer David Harvey describes as a “neoliberal ethic of intense possessive individualism and its cognate of political withdrawal of support for collective forms of action” (2008, p. 8). Despite the necessary interrelation and dependence on other people in urban space, neoliberal transformations in our conception of freedom have resulted in an individualistic logic of dis-aggregation, one where the imagination of the common good resides in the freedom of everyone to pursue their own private interests. Even as democratic freedoms have come to be synonymous with individual rights rather than with struggles for community or the common good, the image of the city as a fundamental space of interaction and as the preeminent stage for political protest continues to color contemporary political imaginations. In part, this is because historical struggles for civil rights across the globe make it clear that public demonstrations and mobilization in city streets and public parks and plazas are critical to both securing and maintaining individual and collective legal rights. This supports the notion that a functioning democratic public sphere is anchored by the rights of people to free speech and assembly and that the public spaces of our cities are the sites where these democratic rights are anchored. As the example of civil rights struggles in the United States in the 1960s to obtain and secure rights for black Americans, or more recently for marriage equality demonstrate, the social and political results of public marches and demonstrations are powerful. And so is their hold on our popular imagination. The image of millions of people coming together and flooding the streets and plazas of cities to struggle for rights provides a powerful optic.

86  Iván Arenas Thus, whether in academia, the halls of government, or our television screens, much of the discourse of public space articulates people, place, and politics together and, in doing so, the plazas, parks, streets, and other open spaces of the city have come to stand-in or become a proxy for an imagined heterogeneous public perpetually engaged in the instantiation of a democratic public sphere. As much as politicians or the press, architects, planners, and urban theorists have come to fetishize city spaces, imbuing them with power. Yet, though these spaces provide room for the creation of a democratic public and public sphere, in and of itself this does not make these spaces sites for the democratic interaction of people across difference. This is, of course, not a new insight. Skepticism about the long history of planners such as Le Corbusier, who were convinced of the power of urban planning to remake society, led critic Michel de Certeau to assert that “history begins at ground level, with footsteps” (1984, p. 129). De Certeau’s touted dichotomy between urban planners atop skyscrapers and streetwalking pedestrians has lent a certain romance in urban theory to the street as a space of resistance, one that is animated anytime social movements take to the streets in protest. Even as urban theorists criticize the modernist sensibility that social norms follow spatial forms, we remain wedded to a romanticized notion of public spaces such as streets and plazas. However, as architect Susana Torre reminds, “the public realm neither resides nor can be represented by buildings and spaces but rather is summoned into existence by social actions” (1996, p. 243). Although our popular imagination populates the streets or plazas of our cities with heterogeneous publics and imagines them as free to engage in democratic discourse or dissent, a democratic political public and public space need to be produced. As Weber might note, the articulation between public space and democratic politics needs to be and is only actualized through struggle. Yet, our contemporary cities are not the medieval city that Pirenne and Weber analyzed or the city of tomorrow that Le Corbusier envisioned (1929). As publics and public spaces come under siege and are disassembled by neoliberal racial capitalism, what are the democratic practices and publics that social action and social struggle assembles in our contemporary urban spaces? More specifically, if the streets and the public plazas of cities are understood as critical for those engaging in democratic acts of political protest and public dissent, how are neoliberal racial capitalist discourses and practices transforming this fundamental democratic action? This edited volume calls for a concrete look at the dynamics of neoliberal racial capitalist practices and logics as these disassemble the democratic possibilities of urban spaces. It also calls for a closer look at how people resist and remake publics and politics in response to these disassembling dynamics. To unpack these questions, I turn to struggles over public space in Oaxaca, Mexico in order to illuminate how neoliberal racial capitalist practices and logics are disassembling both publics and public space and how Oaxacans are in turn reassembling a commons and community. Given its long history of contentious urban politics, Oaxaca is particularly well suited to study contemporary transformations in the relationship between politics and public space. By turning to Oaxaca, I hope to address the

Disassembling foundational fictions  87 contested complexities of the disassembling dynamics of neoliberal racial capitalism, namely, how the privatization, commercialization, and militarization of public space has altered its political possibilities. Even as the democratic possibilities of Oaxaca’s urban spaces are being disassembled, I also address how Oaxacans are reassembling and transforming the possibilities of its public spaces as places for political practice and for the making of publics. In the end, what Oaxaca’s contested political and spatial dynamics reveal is that any articulation between public spaces and democratic politics is tenuous and fragile, ever under threat and needing always to be struggled for rather than assumed.

The uses and abuses of urban planning to disassemble democracy The city of Oaxaca is the capital of one of the poorest states in all of Mexico, a state with one of the highest indigenous populations in the nation and also one of the highest indices of marginalization. Despite the poverty that surrounds it, Oaxaca’s city center is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that attracts millions of tourists every year. The city center is also the place where, for almost every year during the past four decades, one of Oaxaca’s teachers’ unions has taken over the central plaza in the month of May to demand better public schools with adequate working conditions and higher teacher salaries. Although this teachers’ union is over 70,000 strong and has the power to close down schools across the state, it has repeatedly taken the practice of seizing Oaxaca’s main square, or zócalo, to get the government’s attention to deficiencies in schools and the needs of teachers and students. And so, year after year the teachers have returned to set up their encampment, and year after year the state government has negotiated with the leaders of the teachers’ union and found a little more money or made a few promises of improvements in order to placate the striking teachers. And year after year, after each side has given way and both sides reach a compromise, the encampment’s plastic tarps are rolled up and the sleeping bags are loaded onto trucks and the zócalo returns to its state as a public plaza. In this way, over the last three decades the teachers’ encampment has actualized the political possibilities of Oaxaca’s zócalo, transforming this public space into a political forum by which to effectively sustain the state’s public schools. Although politically effective, achieving positive changes for public schools that the ballot box has not achieved, the teachers encampment is a contested and contentious space; it is generally accepted by those that support the teachers, tolerated but disliked by many who understand its function as a political tool but dislike the takeover of the plaza, but also opposed by supporters of the government and city elites who see the encampment as a danger to their political and social power and to the tourism that largely supports the city and state economically. Thus, although the zócalo is traversed by a multiplicity of people with varying political and social views during times when protests such as the teacher’s strike take it over, political acts of dissent such as these may have political traction but they do not generally

88  Iván Arenas instantiate dialogue or debate across difference. As urbanists Jon Bannister and Ade Kearns remind, “the eradication of spatial distance through co-presence does not in itself lead to engagement with difference” (2013, p. 2703). Whether during exceptional moments that people gather in Oaxaca’s zócalo to voice their political dissent or in everyday moments when people gather to celebrate mass, listen to a concert, have a meal, or pass through the square on their way elsewhere, the zócalo generally bustles with a heterogeneous mass of people who pass by but do not necessarily seek or engage with others different from them. Understanding the political power of the square, in 2005 state governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz used urban planning as a political tool to thwart the teachers’ yearly encampment. For starters, the governor decided to move the governor’s office out of the zócalo and the nearby state senate away from the city center to a location on the outskirts of the metropolitan area. Critics pointed out that moving these sites of government bureaucracy were political decisions having to do with removing the seat of government from the immediate proximity of social protestors. Despite criticism, as construction on the remote Administrative City began in 2005, the governor’s palace underwent renovations to become a museum and the state senate a theater. With government functionaries in the process of relocating to different sites around the city, the symbolic and operational functioning of the governing bureaucracy was uprooted from the historic center and became a moving target for political protestors looking to express their discontent. Undeterred by criticism, governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz mobilized an army of workers who descended upon the zócalo early one Sunday morning in March of 2005 and quickly enclosed it with a tall laminate fence. Although they lacked the required authorization of the federal agency that oversees this World Heritage Site, workers used heavy machinery to begin tearing up the porous green stones that the plaza was known for in order to replace them with cement. In addition to exchanging the green cobblestones for cement blocks, this work uprooted and killed historic laurel trees in the plaza that had given shape and shade to the square. Cement slabs were the primary material and square edges the governing aesthetic of the project. As local architect Jaime Ortiz Lajous proclaimed, “the zócalo has a mediocre fascist spirit, it is a vulgar fascism, the result of the state of impunity that we are living in, and a lack of respect to citizens” (in Arellanes Meixueiro, 2007, p. 139). By the end of the project, no official reason had been given for the plan and it was unclear how much money was spent on the work since the overall project had been subdivided in such a way as to avoid the need for contractors involved to publicly bid for it. While the government cited figures of 2.3 million dollars, rumor has it that not only did the project reach upwards of 60 million dollars, but that much of the money went to fund the candidate from the governor’s political party in upcoming national elections. Funneling taxpayer money for the profit of governing elites and political parties is nothing new in Mexico or the world over. The importance of using urban planning as an effective political tool also has many historical examples and is readily evident whether one is examining the record of Haussmann’s cuts through Paris in the 1860s, the transformations of New York by Robert Moses through the

Disassembling foundational fictions  89 1960s, or the use of bulldozers in 2005 by Ulises Ruiz Ortiz as a way to impede the annual teacher’s takeover of the zócalo. The remaking of urban spaces through planning projects undertaken in the name of the public good can foreclose the political possibilities of public spaces and offer an important tool for neoliberal governments to thwart dissent. In addition to imposed urban planning projects, public-private partnerships have been another critical tool that neoliberal governments have championed as a way to remake and regulate the social and political use of city spaces. After all, if the political possibilities of public space are produced through social usage, what happens if the material landscape, the very grounds for this articulation, has been privatized or rendered the exclusive domain of particular users? By changing the seat of government to a museum and the senate into a theater in what he termed a “tourism and culture for development” campaign, governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz was attempting to evict political practices and protesters from Oaxaca’s zócalo and replace them with tourists who were to consume culture in a plaza materially sanitized and politically sterilized. Although not officially privatized, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz’s urban planning project and the discourse of his tourism and culture for development campaign sought to alter the normative social and political uses of the zócalo and was effective in keeping the teachers from striking in the square in 2005.

Disassembling democracy through spectacular consumption The transformation of the governor’s palace into a museum and of the zócalo during Ulises Ruiz Ortiz’s “tourism and culture for development” campaign was important in halting the political effectiveness of protestors who were seeking visibility for their demands vis-à-vis the government. It was also part of a broader pattern of neoliberal racial capitalist transformations that have found both economic and political profits by fostering a culture of consumption that has displaced marginalized racial groups, poor and homeless people, and political protesters from public places. Since Oaxaca’s city center was named a World Heritage Site in 1987, city elites and government functionaries have not only cultivated and policed its colonial image but also generously profited from it through their control of tourism and urban development. This has given form to a particular architectural morphology – two-story, traditional, colonial, colorful; this has also framed a particular vision of the place of everyday Oaxacans within its social landscape – traditional, a folkloric cultural attraction to complement the fanciful wooden figurines, woven rugs, black and green pottery, archeological sites, regional cuisine, and colonial center (with former monasteries now 5-star hotels), that draw in tourists from across the globe by the thousands. Oaxaca’s cultural heritage – material and human – has become commercialized for consumption by an industry catering to foreign eyes and for foreign incomes. With restaurants, hotels, and shops in the center affordable only to city elites and tourists, the commercialization of the city and of culture has left many Oaxacans

90  Iván Arenas feeling that their traditions and identity are exploited for the benefit and enjoyment of the wealthy elite and foreigners. When not pushed out by restrictive prices, active police patrols and private security companies employed by local businesses ensure that the normative publics of the World Heritage Site are shoppers and tourists engaged in acts of conspicuous consumption. The commercialized spatiality of Oaxaca’s tourism and economic development and the interests of the city’s elite who profit from it are antagonistic to practices of political protest in the city center. In place of urban democracy and a commons, we have an urbanism where transactional exchange is the only acceptable form of use value. Today’s neoliberal racial capitalist order has elevated the idea that, above all, we should maximize the value of the self as economic actors and that, moreover, through maximizing our economic selves we will achieve the greatest collective worth. As philosopher Wendy Brown has pointed out, “most striking about the new homology between city and soul is that its coordinates are economic, not political” (2015, p. 22). The end result of urban governing centering economic rather than political concerns is that urban administrative practices are valued and valuable in relation to their capacity to maximize investments and capitalize on their material value. Thus, for Brown, “as economic ends replace political ones, a range of concerns become subsumed to the project of capital enhancement, recede altogether, or are radically transformed as they are ‘economized.’ These include justice (and its sub-elements, such as liberty, equality, fairness), individual and popular sovereignty, and the rule of law” (201, p. 22). In places like Oaxaca, social justice has become subordinate to market share and practices of political dissent in public are met with derision as a barrier to the more lucrative and profitable practices of consumer culture. The move to a society of consumption has meant that we have reoriented the social norms around our spatial forms. Increasingly, the freedom to consume is the only freedom that urban dwellers are customarily granted. Rather than a concern for the collective and debate over the common good, under the practices and discourse of neoliberal racial capitalism rights have been individualized – and at the center of it all is the sacrosanct right of individuals to purchase as they see fit. The pervasive advertising that covers cities like Oaxaca offers weapons of massdistraction, colonizing the very dreams and manufacturing the desires of its residents, with the effect that purchasing comes to be seen as a capitalist citizen’s primary civic duty. (No example more evident than when then U.S. president George Bush asked that people go shopping in response to the felling of the World Trade Center towers.) Our complacency or disillusion with the ballot box and our participation through purchase ensures the efficacy of the dreamworks of neoliberal capitalist democracy and its project to sell us goods as the good life itself. Thus, day and night during Oaxaca’s busy summer and fall festivities, tourist police and cleaning crews patrol Oaxaca’s newly remodeled zócalo while business and government workers hand out material promoting that month’s cultural events to the Mexican and international tourists that traverse the space. With performance stages set up in the remodeled zócalo and throughout the World Heritage Site, anthropologist Gary McDonogh’s observation that competing cities must construct a sanitary spatiality through both “technocratic urban cleansing” (1999, p. 370)

Disassembling foundational fictions  91 and by ensuring that city spaces are populated by a diverse citizenry “linked to ‘culture’” in order to appeal to the consumptive tourist seems apt for Oaxaca. As McDonogh further points out, this process highlights a “transformation of discourse in and about the city [ . . . ] from a city of process to a city of events, indeed, of spectacle” (1999, p. 373). From city officials to architects and urban planners, spectacle and multicultural diversity structure the form and discourse of Oaxaca; and, throughout, spectacular events and the image of diverse but not dissenting multicultural residents are geared to sell the city both to tourists and to businesses ready to invest. The government’s urban cleansing and the spectacle of harmonious cultural diversity are also geared for sale to Oaxacans as much as to tourists, forming an important technology of power for a government attempting to forge a sanitary citizenship where city spaces and cultural belonging are presented as if free from struggle and streets are swept clean from undesirables (Overmyer-Velázquez, 2006). For the ruling government and city elites, the pretext of preserving UNESCO’s World Heritage Site status and the colonial and cultural heritage of Oaxaca is paramount to their economic enrichment and political survival. The result is that, as anthropologist Charles Rutheiser notes, to the degree that it engages its residents and tourists, the city does so blandly only under the guise of “edutainment” (1999). Offering entertainment as education, cultural events and city spaces are spectacles “imagineered” for immediate legibility and consumption for passive spectators who are asked to see rather than to participate. As art historian Jonathan Crary has pointed out, “spectacle is not primarily concerned with a looking at images but rather with the construction of conditions that individuate, immobilize, and separate subjects” (1999, p. 74). Though produced and often rendered precisely for the crowd, the general effect of spectacles is to produce passive and pliable subjects. As the next section points out, moreover, when the economically exploited and racially marginalized groups in society cease to be passive and pliable subjects and come together to express their dissent, governing forces commonly respond with violence and the further militarization of public (and private) spaces.

The militarization of public space and the muzzling of democracy Though the image of public space is one of democratic interactions across difference, the reality of the narrow limits of permissible publics and politics of our consumptive and radically unequal societies means that a general suspicion marks any and all “others” encountered in our communal city spaces. In a moment when “the populations of our cities are increasingly disconnected, spatially and socially,” urbanists Jon Bannister and Ade Kearns have asked whether or not urban populations have “lost its capacity, or indeed its willingness, to encounter and engage with difference?” (2013, p. 2700). Despite the radical interrelation of urban dwellers, in the last century the ideal of meaningful democratic interaction across difference was replaced at best by the hope for the mere tolerance of differences. But in our contemporary cities of walls where we retreat to homogenous enclaves

92  Iván Arenas and live hidden behind personal fortresses, today even this has eroded and been replaced by a general fear of difference. In public and private spaces, the institutionalization of fear has meant to a turn to community as security. The result is that, as sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has written, “community means sameness, while ‘sameness’ means the absence of the Other, especially a stubbornly different other” (2008, p. 115). In Oaxaca, the violence of urban renewal projects like the remodeling of the zócalo is one of the ways in which stubbornly different others such as the poor or protesters are marginalized and evicted from the city center. Although street sellers were a central feature of Oaxaca’s zócalo, after the 2005 remodeling was complete, they were not allowed to come back to the square. The space promised to the vendors by the governor was in a corner of the center largely unknown to tourists and their sales dropped precipitously. While this endangered their livelihood, parts of the structure they were housed in caved in because of the poor state of the building, endangering their very lives. Cleansing the struggles of the past through the production and privileging of a sanitized culture and photogenic heritage for the consumption of tourists often go hand in hand with urban renewal projects and is another way in which the poor and protesters are pushed out and the struggles of marginalized populations are whitewashed. It is in this way that buildings such as Santo Domingo, which was an active monastery in the colonial era and then an army barracks for over 120 years, has today become an archeological museum and botanic garden that is largely mute on the subject of the historical violence of the church or state and the role of military repression and resistance in Oaxaca. Evicting street vendors and protesters was an important part of the governor’s plan for the economic development of Oaxaca. The transformation of the zócalo and the removal of state offices from the city center in favor of cultural establishments for the city’s wealthy and for foreigners were clear signs that those who were politically or economically marginalized were to be evicted from the city center and had no place under his “tourism and culture” campaign. The economistic logic of neoliberal racial capitalism produces an apartheidlike spatiality that segregates classes, races, and ethnic groups and thereby makes democratic interactions less likely; it also criminalizes the very populations that it exploits. Geographers Stephen Graham, Renu Desai, and Colin McFarlane point out in their study of the profits that corporations and city governments squeeze out of slum dwellers that the criminalization of the poor masks the exploitation of the poor for profit: “the urban poor are [. . .] represented as a parasitic threat requiring increasingly violent response and draconian control” (2013, p. 117). How is it possible to fulfill the democratic promise of the city when the privatized city of neoliberal consumption is consuming people in its frenzy for profits, segregating economic and racial groups into highly differentiated enclaves with radically disparate spatial and social realities and futures? Whether Oaxaca or Oakland, the electrified wires and 12-foot fences surrounding wealthy homes and the dirt roads and social stigma that form moats around poor areas and poor populations create zones of exclusion. Whether in relation to

Disassembling foundational fictions  93 Oaxaca, the Mexico-US border, or the Palestinian territory, to name a few global examples, an architecture and urbanism of isolation and separation creates two different spatial and social geographies that overlap but rarely intersect (Weizman, 2007). The rise of gated urban and suburban communities and the further marginalization of the urban poor in the growing peri-urban slums on the peripheries or in neglected urban zones are two trends of urban spatiality that most mark our age; rather than democratic interactions and debate or political protest practices, enclosures and evictions (Sassen, 2014; Davis, 2006) are the two most striking developments marking our contemporary urban spaces. Any facile notion of connectivity across a space of flows is therefore interrupted by the archipelago-like spatiality and sociality of urban life in the contemporary city. We live in segregated societies whose spatial and social exclusion is secured through urban planning projects as well as differences in consumer possibilities. The apartheid-like spatiality of neoliberal racial capitalist spaces is increasingly secured through the intensifying militarization of our streets in order to discipline difference and dissent. Given an incessant discourse and focus on vulnerability from criminals, immigrants, and terrorists, moreover, the general response has been to call for greater security measures and tougher punishments on those deemed criminals, foreigners, or Others – whom many people think have too many “rights.” We imagine public space to be a critical feature of democracy and our plazas and streets as critical stages for democratic participation via expressions of free speech and assembly. Yet, in the United States, as Peterson notes, “the relation between public space and protest is figured through legal arrangements that sanction dissent by controlling its expression, allowing it to take place in particular times and spaces with permission from and under the watchful eye of the state” (2006, p. 374). Free speech in the United States is highly curtailed and corralled. Expressing dissent has become possible largely only under the watchful and sanctioned eye of the state, often the same state that one is protesting. Scheduled and sanctioned, these formal expressions of dissent generate fleeting spaces and the transitory politics of protest covered as spectacles by the media but quickly forgotten as the streets and plazas return to their daily use as sites of consumption or transportation from home to work and back again. In spaces such as Oaxaca, however, where protests are often not scheduled or sanctioned, a common tool to control dissent is through military repression. As it happened, the teachers’ union returned to set up their annual encampment in 2006, one year after Ulises Ruiz Ortiz was able to halt their take-over of the zócalo through his urban project privileging the plaza as a site for tourism and cultural consumption. In 2006, while negotiations between the government and teachers’ union were taking place, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz ordered police to mobilize and forcefully take down the teachers’ encampment. Under the cover of night in the early morning hours of June 14, 2006, over a thousand police used batons, shields, and their firearms to dislodge the teachers from the square. Having previously used urban planning projects and the restraining limits of Oaxaca’s culture of heritage consumption to limit political dissent, in 2006 Ulises

94  Iván Arenas Ruiz Ortiz used military-like repression to quell opposition to his government’s policies. Although Mexico has a long history of violently repressing political dissent – most famously in the Tlatelolco massacre during protests before the Olympics in 1968 – the force and violence of the Oaxacan governor’s repression shocked many in Mexico. The militarized repression of Occupy Wall Street encampments or of protests in Ferguson are reminders that police violence is a tactic even of the governments and societies that imagine themselves as the most democratic. As this edited volume and the example of Oaxaca show, throughout the world, state sanctioned violence and the militarization of urban spaces attempts to ensure that the survival and resilience of the poor in the face of imposed scarcity and exploitation does not become effective resistance. Throughout the world, however, people have attempted to reassemble the political possibilities of public spaces in response to the disassembling of democratic politics and publics by urban planning projects, a demobilizing culture of consumption, and militarized repression. As the next section shows, Oaxacans responded to the government’s 2006 repression by mobilizing and assembling an unforeseen urban politics and political public.

Reassembling politics and publics in Oaxaca’s neoliberal urban spaces Violence protects Oaxaca’s politicians, ensuring they remain in power. Violence and militarization do more than this, however, for they also protect the profits elites make from Oaxaca’s lucrative restaurants, hotels, and tourist enterprises. Militarization also secures the endless cycle of public works projects through which government functionaries and friends make their millions and maintain Oaxaca’s colonial city center as their private fiefdom. The state sanctioned violence of 2006 against encamped teachers in the zócalo was but the most extreme expression of an everyday reality for the city’s marginalized majorities. Their revolutionary response to this repression was anything but ordinary. The morning of June 14th, word spread quickly through the city of Oaxaca and beyond about the violent eviction of the teachers from the plaza. People came pouring into the center to join the teachers who had gathered in the streets beyond the square. Angered by the police violence and emboldened by those who came to support them, the teachers fought back and retook the zócalo that very morning. In the days that followed, what started as a teachers’ strike quickly became a broad-based social movement that included students, farm workers, and multiple indigenous groups, as well as over 300 social and civic organizations and an array of social actors ranging from dedicated anarchists and devout church groups to committed socialists. Those brought together in opposition to the governor and by their desire to transform the authoritarian politics of the state coalesced into the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca, or APPO, which mobilized over a million people in a state of 3.5 million residents. In the next six months, this mobilization resulted in a massive encampment in the city center, mega-marches through the city, the taking over of local radio and television stations, participatory

Disassembling foundational fictions  95 assemblies, and a robust art of protest on the city’s walls that denounced the state’s repressive politics and deep injustices. The government responded to the broad-based social movement with further violence. At night, armed paramilitary convoys supporting the governor began traveling through city streets. In late August of 2006, after the paramilitary groups shot at a radio station and killed an APPO member, barricades were quickly and spontaneously erected all over the city at night to protect against the government’s “convoy of death.” Barricades were a necessary means by which to maintain the safety of spaces taken over by APPO members in the center as well as in the large and small streets of the city’s many neighborhoods. Though some barricades in the center were permanent, most of Oaxaca’s estimated 1,500–3,000 barricades were put up at night and taken down in the morning. The sweaty work of creating barricades by dragging the city’s rubble out into the street, then holding them from dusk to dawn could only be truly accomplished by people laboring together since in general there was no one house or individual who had enough material or muscle power to form a barricade on their own. It was through the sweaty and dangerous shared practices of creating the barricades, holding them from dusk to dawn, huddling together to listen at the radio for updates, sharing food and coffee that others brought, and taking turns maintaining the lookout post so that others could sleep that Oaxacans began to recognize the strangers they lived amongst as comrades. The material and social demands of these insurgent spaces brought together individuals who may have lived next to each other all their lives but had never truly spoken to each other and created a barricade sociality (Dzenovska & Arenas, 2012). The social and political effects of the barricades as a site of social and political assemblage remained potent years after they were no longer a nightly occurrence. Thus, when I spoke with Oaxacan activist Sergio Beltrán in December of 2007, a year and a half after the barricades had come down, he felt that they were by and large created by groups who “worried about taking care of their city” and were an example of people “recuperating our space.” It took the insurgent barricades of 2006 for Oaxacans to actualize the celebrated democratic possibilities of streets as sites of encounter across difference. Similarly, it took the insurgent art of protest on the walls of Oaxaca’s city streets to actualize these public spaces as sites of free speech and as an active political forum that could form part of a public sphere. While urban theorist Saskia Sassen notes that cities provide “a space where the powerless can make speech, presence, a politics” (2013, p. 210), in the forcibly muted political landscape of Oaxaca, participants in APPO’s social movement needed to forcibly take over the streets to make their voice heard. During the six months that APPO controlled the city center in 2006, a broad cross-section of society transformed the walls of the World Heritage Site into the largest community mural in Latin America. The decidedly negative or incomplete media coverage of the insurgency allowed people to see how profoundly the government and corporations controlled the means of communication in Oaxaca’s public sphere. With images covering almost every corner of the city center, the city’s wall therefore became an important site

96  Iván Arenas for the public projection of both discontents as well as wishes for alternative futures. At a basic level, the insurgent art of protest of stencils placed on city walls resisted the privatization of public space and attempted to constitute the streets of the city as spaces of debate. Given their criminalization, stencils question the ways in which discourses about the democratic nature of public space mask the reality, in practice, of the exclusionary, policed, and privatized character of public space in our modern cities. Moreover, as a practice that did not seek to sell a product and did not pay to put up images, Oaxaca’s stencils challenged the dominant capitalist consumer paradigm that determines that the majority of the messages in public space and those punctuating our public sphere are those meant to incite the consumption of goods and that define the consumption of goods as the good life. This recovery of public space and of a public sphere of debate, however, does not preserve a social imaginary where citizenship provides shared birthrights to all; neither does it envision the practices of representative democracy as capable of producing either political freedom or an inclusive public sphere of debate. If it is true that “the city, and especially the street, is a space where the powerless can make history,” as Sassen concludes, and that “becoming present, visible, to each other can alter the character of powerlessness” (2013, p. 213), Oaxaca’s mobilized insurgency found that political empowerment came from the assembling of mobilized political publics themselves rather than from greater visibility to their grievances and demands vis-à-vis the government (Esteva, 2008). In Oaxaca, as in most of the cities around the world, city spaces are meant to provide the grounds for the visibility and voice through which marginalized communities can struggle to achieve rights to the city that are eventually secured through laws or state regulations. Despite mobilizing over 1 million Oaxacans in a state of just over 3 million, however, in the six months that the social movement held the city, the state and federal government’s response was further militarization. Thus, what ended the social movement’s occupation of the city in 2006 was not the resignation of the governor, as demanded, but the federal troops that swept through the city at the end of November. Reflecting on their experiences in the streets in the years after the social movement, political street artists in Oaxaca have concluded that the streets of the city are sites for the expression and production of a radically differentiated citizenship rather than sites for the production of a democratic public space and public sphere of debate. In 2006, the Oaxacan state militarized the streets and people mobilized. This mobilization manifested itself in the making and maintaining of barricades, participatory assemblies, collective marches of hundreds of thousands, the takeover of the city center and state-owned media, and a robust art of protest. The political public that the social movement articulated through these practices was built on a growing sense of connections and points of intersection between individuals who were no longer abstract to one another. Oaxacan protestors created a grounded community through practices of struggle that constructed shared social experiences and imaginaries. This community was a particular political public in a contested public space. As philosopher Jacques Rancière has written, “there are two major ways of symbolizing the community: one represents it as the sum

Disassembling foundational fictions  97 of its parts, the other defines it as the division of its whole. One conceives it as the accomplishment of a common way of being, the other as a polemic over the common” (2010, p. 100). An inclusive democratic society where differences are discussed and consensus or an agreed upon compromise is achieved through public debate remains elusive in the deeply unequal and divisive social and political culture produced by neoliberal racial capitalism. Rather than suturing or papering over differences or divisions, insurgent politics involves the tearing open of society to expose its open historical wounds. It involves making space for political confrontation and active contestation. The mobilized individuals of Oaxaca came to find that, as Appadurai and Holston propose, “right becomes conceived as an aspect of social relatedness rather than as an inherent and natural property of individuals” (1996, p. 197). Much as the medieval citizens that Weber studied demonstrated long ago, the power and political possibility of social struggle resisting the privatization of public space and democratic participation is not in creating consensus, but rather in making space for the radical participation and often active confrontation over the very nature of community and of the good life.

Disassembling foundational fictions of democracy Neoliberal racial capitalism presents a challenge to democratic political participation in the public sphere the world over. The profits neoliberal racial capitalism produces by increasing social divisions and criminalizing oppressed communities is as alive in marginalized sites like Oaxaca, Mexico as it is in seemingly privileged sites like Manhattan in New York City. Increasing inequality and the privatization of public space and publics in seemingly stable first-world countries like the United States present a threat to democracy. Much as it was in Oaxaca, however, insurgent politics are being assembled across the globe over in response to the disassembling of democracy the world over. The Occupy Wall Street movement that started in New York City offers a more familiar example of these dynamics of diassasembling and assembling than the much less publicized case of Oaxaca. Much as in the Mexican zócalo, the closing of public spaces to protestors and the importance of public-private partnerships was also evident during the Occupy Wall Street movement, where protesters looked to exercise their right to assemble, to free speech, and to use public space by taking over a city plaza in New York City. Ironically, participants could not surround the charging bull in Bowling Green Park as was first intended because the police shut that plaza down. They were able to take Zuccotti Park because it is private property and the police had no cause to deny access to protestors or evict them without the owner’s say so. This calls into question not only who the public is in public space, but also where and whether any public space exists at all. Whether in Mexico or Manhattan, as Mike Davis has pointed out (1990), public space in contemporary urban cities has been largely privatized and walled off, resulting in a fortress urbanism marked by insular enclaves rather than accessible sites.

98  Iván Arenas We know, for example, that more cities are undertaking urban renewal in publicprivate partnerships that produce spaces such as Zuccotti Park; how does this redefine the relationship between democratic publics and public space? In New York, for example, the private-public Union Square Partnership uses quality of life issues such as crime and concern for property values to effectively police access and use of Union Square Park. Here and elsewhere, in the name of the public good, private guards, security cameras, and a host of regulations ensure that the homeless are evicted, that graffiti is quickly painted over, and that the normative public is one of shoppers at the arts and crafts and farmers market (Deutsche, 1986). Though not literally fenced off, what does it mean that we maintain the discourse of public space in sites where access is effectively curtailed? As anthropologist Marina Peterson points out, the right to use or be in privatized public space is always revocable for those who are deemed to be their permissible users or what she calls “permitees” (2006). It follows from Foucault’s notion of governmentality (1978) and the panopticon (1975) that, as permitee users, we all participate in the production of privatized public space through the acceptance, enactment, and enforcement of limits on our own and other’s activities, behavior, discourse, demeanor, dress, language, etc. Under surveillance by video cameras, by security guards, and by each other, we police ourselves and also others. Whether in Oaxaca or New York, this limits not only the extent of who the permissible publics are in public space, but also its political possibilities. Whether in the public spaces of Oaxaca or New York, the only permissible public hailed by privatized and commercialized city spaces is a stupefied and docile consumer public. With societies entranced by spectacles and living under the gaze of police, video surveillance, and each other, rather than instantiate a political sociality, we actualize a consumptive spatiality whose slogan might be “no politics, just purchase please.” Constantly under surveillance in public space, Peterson suggests that, “the camera reflects a wider social control, insofar as the choice and effort to present oneself as invisible to the cameras constitutes the moment of force” (2006, p. 373). Assembling to engage in political practices of protest ensures that people render themselves visible. And, of course, for most black and brown bodies – whether gathered at the plaza in Oaxaca or in a street corner in Manhattan – invisibility is not just a luxury but often an impossibility and comes with the very real threat of state sponsored violence. The practices of neoliberal racial capitalism the world over, including the privatization and regulation of public space through public-private partnerships, a spectacular culture of consumption, and militarized repression, transform the political possibilities of any site’s sociality and spatiality. The limits these intersecting practices impose on democratic participation are evident in the public spaces of the United States or Europe that urbanists from Pirenne to Peterson have largely used to build their spatial theories as much as they are in the cobblestone streets of Oaxaca. This should give academics pause when championing the democratic virtues of public spaces and the democratic possibilities of cities as sites that concentrate and bring together people from radically different backgrounds who often have conflicting social and political perspectives.

Disassembling foundational fictions  99 Moreover, although the dynamics of neoliberal racial capitalism are a global norm, the articulation and relationship between public space and democratic practices – including insurgent politics – is nevertheless often configured very differently in Oaxaca and New York City than it is in Natal, Nairobi, or Nanjing. That this is so does not mean necessarily abandoning the desire for an articulation between city spaces and democratic practices, but it does mean recognizing that the specificities of this articulation matter. And, furthermore, that it matters not just in relation to debates over the limits of urban theory, but, more importantly, concretely to the lives of the majority of people on this planet. And for the majority of people on this planet, city life under neoliberal racial capitalism offers dim economic and political futures. As urbanists Teresa Caldeira and James Holston have noted, disjunctive democracy is the contemporary norm rather than the exception (Holston & Caldeira, 1998). Even as theorists hold out hope for utopian urban futures and highlight the moments when people fulfill the inclusive and democratic promise of urban space, the reality of urbanism’s disjunctive and differentiated political and unequitable economic realities should also give pause when championing cities as sites ripe with progressive futures. After all, what does it mean to continue to champion the city as the preeminent site for economic, political, and personal opportunity when, as Ash Amin notes, “slums are set to become ‘normal’ urban neighborhoods” (2013, p. 203). The rise of the city as the dominant space for social reproduction has meant the (further) increasing institutionalization of global inequalities and inequities. For the vast majority of the population in the world and for the vast majority of the urban spaces of the world what we have is increasingly a planet of slums (Davis, 2006). City growth in the majority of urban spaces today is largely driven by exploitation, not opportunity; or, to put it another way, the forced migration of impoverished people across the globe, whether due to economic scarcity, military conflict, or increasingly environmental factors, is largely an opportunity for the parasitical capitalists, landlords, and financiers who make up the appropriating class. The reality that millions if not billions of poor people across the globe are forced to migrate to cities not by choice but by necessity – and by capitalist design – should give urban theorists pause when confronting the accepted image and imagination that articulates city spaces and democratic practices. Part of the necessary work in reassembling urban analytics needs to be, therefore, fighting the pernicious sentiment that cities in the abstract are the desired or de-facto sites of resistance for millions if not billions of poor; this means continuing to illuminate how politics and publics are actually articulated (or often disarticulated) in city spaces rather than how we wish them to be. It means continuing to document and describe the practices through which people around the world are reassembling, reconfiguring, and realizing the democratic political possibilities of urban spaces. It means as well that while we celebrate their gains, we also recognize rather than romanticize the limits of these articulations. Rather than romanticize the inclusive democratic possibilities of the city, we need to highlight its insurgent manifestations. We need to focus, as James Holston has done, on how the everyday challenges of life for people in Brazil’s urban

100  Iván Arenas periphery provide opportunities for political education and participation (2009) while remaining ever clear on the limitations that neoliberal racial capitalism imposes on the marginalized black and brown populations that it exploits for profit. As urban philosopher Henri Lefebvre noted, the fact that city air makes man free is not enough: “‘necessary rights’ of habeas corpus and right to the city are no longer sufficient. The urban must also make itself threatening” (1974, p. 187). The disassembling effects of Oaxaca’s urban planning projects, its spectacular culture of consumption, and the severe militarized repression of protest provided opportunities for resistance and ultimately led to an insurgency that took over the city for six months. This insurgency transformed the physical reality of the city center and its insurgent political practices generated social and political articulations that challenged the isolation of neighbors, Oaxaca’s patriarchal gendered politics, and the place of youth in the city (Arenas, 2015, 2014, 2011; Stephen, 2013). Although the militarized response by federal forces was effective in ending the uprising, the social and political reverberations of the insurgency and its threat to the status quo continue to be felt a decade after it started. However, with a new crop of tourists – many of whom are looking for and seeking traces of the insurgency and in the process have commercialized revolution – and with prices in the city center still well above the typical Oaxacan wage, neoliberal racial capitalist norms have also re-imposed themselves, and this is an urban reality and an urban threat as important as any other and that, even if less dramatic than the barricades, assemblies, or stencils of 2006, also deserves attention.

References Amin, A. (2013). The urban condition: A challenge to social science. Public Culture, 25(2), 201–208. Appadurai, A., & Holston, J. (1996). Cities and citizenship. Public Culture, 8(2), 187–206. Arellanes Meixueiro, A. (2007). Zócalo destruido, pueblo enfurecido (Zócalo Destroyed, the people outraged). Cuadernos del Sur, 12(24/25), 139–148. Arenas, I. (2011). Rearticulating the social: Spatial practices, collective subjects, and Oaxaca’s art of protest. PhD diss., University of California at Berkeley, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 3498755. Arenas, I. (2014). Assembling the multitude: Material geographies of social movements from Oaxaca to Occupy. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32(3), 433–449. Arenas, I. (2015). The mobile politics of emotions and social movement in Oaxaca, Mexico. Antipode, 47(5), 1121–1140. Arendt, H. (1968 [1963]). On revolution. New York: The Viking Press, Inc. Bannister, J., & Kearns, A. (2013). The function and foundations of urban tolerance: Encountering and engaging with difference in the city. Urban Studies, 50(13), 2700–2717. Bauman, Z. (2008 [2001]). Community: Seeking safety in an insecure world. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. New York: Zone Books. Caldeira, T. P. R. (2000). City of walls: Crime, segregation, and citizenship in São Paulo. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Disassembling foundational fictions  101 Clarno, A. (2017). Neoliberal apartheid: Palestine/Israel and South Africa after 1994. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Crary, J. (1999). Suspensions of perception: Attention, spectacle, and modern culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Davis, M. (1990). City of quartz: Excavating the future in Los Angeles. New York: Vintage Books. Davis, M. (2006). Planet of slums. New York: Verso. de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life (Steven Rendall, Trans.). Berkeley: University of California Press. Deutsche, R. (1986). Krzysztof Wodiczko’s “homeless projection” and the site of urban “revitalization”. October, 38(Autumn), 63–98. Dzenovska, D., & Ivan, A. (2012). Don’t fence me in: Barricade sociality and struggles of democracy in Mexico and Latvia. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 54(3), 644–678. Engels, F. (2009 [1844]). The condition of the working class in England. London: Oxford University Press. Esteva, G. (2008). Crónica de un movimiento anunciado. In Cuando hasta las piedras se levantan. Oaxaca, México, 2006 (pp. 21–89). Buenos Aires: Editorial Antropofagia. Foucault, M. (1995 [1975]). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (Alan Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Vintage. Foucault, M. (2000 [1978]). Governmentality. In J. D. Faubion (Power Ed.) & P. Rabinow (Series Ed.), Essential works of foucault (Vol. 3, pp. 201–222). New York: The New Press. Graham, S., Desai, R., & McFarlane, C. (2013). Water wars in Mumbai. Public Culture, 25(1), 115–141. Harvey, D. (2008, September/October). The right to the city. New Left Review, 53, 23–40. Holston, J. (1989). The modernist city: An anthropological critique of Brasília. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Holston, J. (2009). Insurgent citizenship in an era of global urban peripheries. City & Society, 21(2), 245–267. Holston, J., & Caldeira, T. P. R. (1998). Democracy, law, and violence: Disjunctions of Brazilian citizenship. In F. Aguero & J. Stark (Eds.), Fault lines of democracy in post-transition Latin America (pp. 263–296). Miami: University of Miami North-South Center Press. Jacobs, J. (1961). The death and life of great American cities. New York: Random House, Inc. Le Corbusier. (1987 [1929]). The city of to-morrow and its planning (F. Etchells, Ed. and Trans.). New York: Dover Publications, Inc. Lefebvre, H. (1995 [1974]). The production of space (Donald Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Low, S. M. (2000). On the plaza: The politics of public space and culture. Austin: University of Texas Press. McDonogh, G. (1999). Discourses of the city: Policy and response in post-transitional barcelona. In S. M. Low (Ed.), Theorizing the city: The new urban anthropology reader (pp. 342–376). New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Overmyer-Velázquez, M. (2006). Visions of the emerald city: Modernity, tradition, and the formation of porfirian Oaxaca, Mexico. Durham: Duke University Press. Peterson, M. (2006). Patrolling the plaza: Privatized public space and the neoliberal state in downtown Los Angeles. Urban Anthropology, 35(4), 355–387. Pirenne, H. (1925). Medieval cities: Their origins and the revival of trade (Frank Halsey, Trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

102  Iván Arenas Rancière, J. (2010). Dissensus: On politics and aesthetics (Steven Corcoran, Ed. and Trans.). New York: Continuum. Rowe, P. (1997). Civic realism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rutheiser, C. (2002 [1999]). Making place in the nonplace urban realm. In S. M. Low (Ed.), Theorizing the city: The new urban anthropology reader (pp. 317–334). New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Sassen, S. (2013). Does the city have speech? Public Culture, 25(2), 209–221. Sassen, S. (2014). Expulsions: Brutality and complexity in the global economy. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Simmel, G. (1968). The conflict in modern culture and other essays. New York: Teachers College Press. Sorkin, M. (Ed.). (1992). Variations on a theme park: The new American city and the end of public space (M. Sorkin, Ed.). New York: Hill and Wang. Stephen, L. (2013). We are the face of Oaxaca: Testimony and social movements. Durham: Duke University Press. Torre, S. (1996). Claiming the public space: The mothers of plaza de Mayo. In D. Agrest, P. Conway, & L. Kanes Weisman (Eds.), The sex of architecture (pp. 241–250). New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Weber, M. (1958 [1922]). The city. New York: The Free Press. Weizman, E. (2007). Hollow land: Israel’s architecture of occupation. New York: Verso.

9

Dis/assembling Palestine Andy Clarno

Introduction In March 2017, the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) released a report on “Israeli Practices toward the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid” authored by Richard Falk and Virginia Tilly (United Nations, 2017). Under the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (United Nations, 1973), apartheid is defined as a crime against humanity involving “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.” Responding to a call from member states, the ESCWA secretariat commissioned Falk and Tilly to undertake a comprehensive review of Israeli practices toward the Palestinian people to assess the applicability of the international legal prohibition on apartheid. Falk and Tilly reviewed Israeli policies toward Palestinian citizens of Israel, Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, Palestinian subjects of military rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and Palestinian refugees in the diaspora. Their report concludes that “Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole” (United Nations, 2017, p. 1). More specifically, it argues that “the strategic fragmentation of the Palestinian people is the principal method by which Israel imposes an apartheid regime” (emphasis added) (2017, pp. 3–4). After a firestorm of criticism from US and Israeli representatives, the UN Secretary General removed the ESCWA report from the UN website. Nevertheless, the report represents the first time that a UN body has formally addressed the question of apartheid in Palestine/Israel. And its conclusions highlight the importance of fragmentation as a strategy of racial domination. Building on this insight, my chapter will elaborate on the fragmentation, or disassembling, of Palestine. Indeed, the Oslo “peace process” has enabled Israel to intensify the fragmentation of the Palestinian people. As a young Palestinian refugee points out, “Israel has succeeded in creating 100 Palestinian nations; we are more divided than ever and don’t really know one another anymore” (Field notes, August 2012). The ESCWA report, however, overlooks the importance of neoliberal restructuring for Israel’s apartheid regime. Taking seriously the economics of

104  Andy Clarno Israeli apartheid reveals that Israel’s settler colonial project now operates through neoliberalism – which has transformed the Palestinian people into a disposable population while facilitating their differential incorporation into Israel’s apartheid assemblage. Palestinian strategies of resistance, meanwhile, attempt to challenge fragmentation and reassemble Palestine by building connections between people and with the land.

Israeli apartheid As the ESCWA report demonstrates, Israeli apartheid is grounded in the fragmentation of the Palestinian people into four distinct domains (2017). First, Palestinian refugees are systematically prevented from returning to their homes and lands while the state encourages the immigration and naturalization of Jews from around the world. Second, Palestinian citizens of Israel face formal discrimination and informal obstacles to equal treatment due to laws and regulations that privilege Jewish nationality. Third, a dual legal system in the West Bank and Gaza Strip subjects Palestinians to Israeli military rule and Israeli settlers to Israeli civil law. Finally, Palestinians in East Jerusalem have tenuous residency rights, but face a range of colonial strategies designed to increase Jewish settlement and drive Palestinians out of the city. Each fragment of the Palestinian population confronts a different form of racial rule from the same Israeli apartheid regime, which uses fragmentation to reproduce and reinforce the racial character of the state. The fragmentation of Palestine is grounded in Israel’s settler colonial project. In 1948, the Zionist movement declared the formation of Israel as a Jewish state; forcibly displaced 750,000 Palestinians from their towns and villages; and took possession of over 78% of the land of Palestine (Pappe, 2006; Masalha, 2012). For over 70 years, the State of Israel has systematically prevented the return of the Palestinian refugees. After occupying the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, Israel installed a military administration to govern the Palestinian population and began steadily colonizing Palestinian land and building Israeli settlements (Aruri, 1983; Hajjar, 2005; Gordon, 2008). The state also forcibly incorporated the occupied Palestinian population into the Israel economy as low-wage workers and captive markets (Roy, 1995; Farsakh, 2005). After 1967, Palestinian resistance movements assembled under the banner of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to establish a unified body representing Palestinian people everywhere. Starting in the late 1970s, these movements also built networks of women’s committees, student committees, worker committees, health committees, and other organs of people’s power in villages, cities, and refugee camps throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip (Hiltermann, 1991). During the first intifada (1987–1993), Palestinians in the occupied territories rose up against Israeli military rule. A unified national leadership provided direction to the uprising, while the popular committees became the infrastructure to sustain a participatory, popular uprising (Lockman & Beinin, 1989; Hiltermann, 1991).

Dis/assembling palestine  105

Oslo: deepening fragmentation In 1993, Israel and the PLO ended the uprising through a negotiated accord that launched the “Oslo peace process.” Rather than creating an independent Palestinian state, the Oslo process has intensified Israel’s settler colonial project and deepened the fragmentation of Palestine (Weizman, 2007; Gordon, 2008). The new divisions are political, geographic, and social/economic. Politically, the Oslo process established the Palestinian Authority (PA) as a semi-autonomous governing body for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The creation of the PA effectively sidelined the PLO. Unlike the PLO, the PA only has jurisdiction over Palestinians in the occupied territories. The decline of the PLO means that Palestinian citizens of Israel, residents of Jerusalem, and refugees in the diaspora have no political representation (Said, 1996, 2001). The PA is dominated by the Fatah party, initially under Yasser Arafat and later under Mahmud Abbas. From the start, Fatah worked to marginalize alternative political formations in order to consolidate its power in the occupied territories. The unified national leadership of the first intifada (1987–1993) along with Islamists, leftists, and grassroots organizers throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip were demobilized through a combination of co-optation, repression, and NGO-ization. And, since 2007, political divisions within the Palestinian community have been further entrenched and territorialized, with Hamas governing the Gaza Strip and the Fatah-led PA governing the West Bank. The Oslo process also intensified the fragmentation of Palestine by restructuring the geography of occupation. Through a regime of checkpoints, closures, and permits, Israel effectively separated the West Bank from the Gaza Strip, isolated East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, and fractured the West Bank into dozens of separate enclaves (Weizman, 2007). The fragmentation of Palestine is most evident in the West Bank, where Israel created a series of isolated Palestinian enclosures by withdrawing its military from the heart of Palestinian cities; surrounding these areas with checkpoints, roadblocks, fences, and walls; imposing a generalized military “closure” of the occupied territories; introducing a permit regime and a segregated road network to regulate Palestinian movement; and charging the PA with suppressing resistance inside the enclosures. During the second intifada (2000–2005), Israel revealed the extreme potential of geographic fragmentation by erecting 500 checkpoints in the West Bank; using roadblocks and trenches to isolate Palestinian communities; detaching villages from neighboring cities; and intensifying the generalized “closure” with militarily enforced curfews and restrictions on movement between cities (Beinin & Stein, 2006; HonigParnass & Haddad, 2007). For six years, Palestinians rarely left the newly established confines of their designated enclosures. Through the Oslo process, the PA gained limited autonomy over civil affairs such as education and urban planning inside the enclaves (Areas A and B), which together make up 40% of the West Bank. Meanwhile, Israel retained full jurisdiction over the remaining 60% of the West Bank (Area C) and ultimate sovereignty over the entire territory. In the West Bank, Israel’s new colonial strategy involves

106  Andy Clarno concentrating the Palestinian population into the enclaves of Areas A and B and colonizing Palestinian land in Area C. In short, Oslo has intensified, rather than reversed, Israel’s settler colonial disassembly of Palestine. Colonization through geographic fragmentation is particularly acute in the Jerusalem metropolitan region. When Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, the state began confiscating Palestinian land and building Jewish settlements. In addition, Israel expanded the boundaries of West Jerusalem to annex the east side of the city and isolate East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank (Abowd, 2014). Yet East Jerusalem remained the heart of a Palestinian metropolitan region at the center of the West Bank, including Ramallah to the north and Bethlehem to the south. Since the 1990s, however, Israel has effectively severed East Jerusalem from the West Bank. Excluded from the territorial divisions of Oslo (Areas A, B, and C), East Jerusalem remains under Israeli control as part of the expanded Jerusalem Municipality. Israel introduced permits, closures, and checkpoints to limit Palestinian access to East Jerusalem; accelerated the construction of settlements in and around the city; and built a series of “separation fences” or “apartheid walls” that fortify Israeli control over Jerusalem (Yiftachel & Yacobi, 2002; Abowd, 2014). These policies have fragmented the metropolitan region and deprived West Bank Palestinians of access to their principal city. Moreover, East Jerusalem is a site of aggressive Israeli colonization. Palestinians are currently 40% of the population in Jerusalem. Yet the city council’s Jerusalem 2020 master plan outlines a vision of a 70% Jewish majority in the city (Jerusalem Municipality, 2005). To manufacture this demographic shift, the state is expanding Jewish settlements and displacing Palestinians from the city through regulations and violence. Palestinians in Jerusalem face a severe housing crisis due to planning restrictions and home demolitions. Palestinians who cannot demonstrate that Jerusalem remains their “center of life” risk having their residency permits revoked. And ideologically motivated Jewish settlers use violence to take over Palestinian properties, expel Palestinians from their homes, abuse Palestinians on the streets, and claim control over the Al-Aqsa Mosque and other Islamic holy sites in the Old City.

Neoliberal apartheid While the ESCWA report captures this political and geographic fragmentation, it overlooks the economic fragmentation generated by the neoliberalization of Israel’s apartheid regime. Neoliberal restructuring has intensified the fragmentation of the Palestinian people by compounding political and geographic divisions with growing class divisions. At the same time, however, the neoliberal project is part of a new colonial assemblage that incorporates some Palestinians into their own oppression. The Oslo process coupled the reorganization of Israeli rule with neoliberal economic restructuring. Since the 1980s, Israel’s economy has been fundamentally reorganized from state-led production for domestic consumption to corporatedriven, high-tech production for the global market (Grinberg & Shafir, 2000;

Dis/assembling palestine  107 Shalev, 2000; Ram, 2008). Alongside massive corporate profits, neoliberal restructuring has dismantled the Israeli welfare state, weakened the Israeli labor movement, and increased inequality. These changes were closely connected to the Oslo process. In the eyes of Israeli political and business elites, peace with the Palestinians would open the markets of the Arab world to US and Israeli capital and facilitate Israel’s integration into the global economy (Peres, 1993). In practice, neoliberal restructuring reduced Israeli reliance on Palestinian workers. Israel’s transition to a high-tech economy reduced the demand for industrial and agricultural labor and free-trade agreements with Jordan and Egypt allowed Israeli manufacturers to shift production from Palestinian subcontractors to export-processing zones in neighboring countries. Moreover, “shock doctrine” neoliberalism in the former Soviet Union and global neoliberal restructuring led to the immigration of more than one million Russian Jews and over 300,000 migrant workers who now compete with Palestinians for the remaining low-wage jobs (Ellman & Laacher, 2003; Klein, 2007; Lewin-Epstein, Ro’i, & Ritterband, 2013). In short, neoliberal restructuring dovetailed with Israel’s settler colonial project to transform the Palestinians into a truly disposable population. The enclosures of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are designed to concentrate and contain this racialized surplus population. Just like Israel, the Palestinian Authority has embraced a neoliberal economic program based on the vision of an export-oriented, free market economy for the future state of Palestine (Hanieh, 2013; Haddad, 2016). The plan involves cuts to public employment, an expansion of private sector investment, and the creation of free trade industrial zones along the wall. Despite experiments, the industrial zones have failed to attract investors due primarily to Israeli restrictions on imports and exports and the relatively high cost of Palestinian labor compared to neighboring countries. Although neoliberalism has failed to produce jobs, it has led to the growth of new Palestinian elites who see some benefits from the status quo. Neoliberal restructuring has created opportunities for Palestinian capitalists, yet their businesses all depend on permits from the Israeli military authorities. As a result, most Palestinian capitalists accommodate the occupation while some even profit from Israeli colonization activities (Nakhleh, 2012; Hanieh, 2013; Dana, 2014). Some Fatah-affiliated business owners in the West Bank, for instance, sell stones and cement to Israeli companies for the construction of settlements and the apartheid wall. In addition to Palestinian capitalists, Oslo led to the emergence of a small group of powerful Palestinians who direct non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and have access to international donors. After 1994, the flow of donor funding contributed to the demobilization of Palestinian grassroots structures (Hammami, 2000). Although many Palestinian NGO officials have backgrounds in community organizing, the salaried elite has become increasingly professionalized, accommodating, and responsive to international agendas (Hanafi & Tabar, 2005). Visitors to Ramallah are often surprised to see private mansions, expensive restaurants,

108  Andy Clarno five-star hotels, and luxury vehicles. Although mistaken for signs of a thriving economy, these displays are signs of the growing class divide among Palestinians in the West Bank (Taraki, 2008). Most Palestinians in the occupied territories confront intense poverty, permanent unemployment, and constant repression. The only sector of the Israeli economy that has retained a relatively steady demand for Palestinian workers is construction – due largely to the expansion of Israeli settlements and the wall in the West Bank. The Israeli permit regime requires Palestinians from the occupied territories to obtain work permits from the military administration to access jobs in Israel and the settlements. These permits inculcate subservience: individuals with marks on their security record are automatically blacklisted and the state restricts the number of permits whenever there is an uprising in the occupied territories. In a context of widespread unemployment, the permit regime has become an effective disciplinary tool of the occupation (Berda, 2017). Israel now directs 50% of these work permits to the settlements (Farsakh, 2005). According to a 2011 survey, 82% of Palestinians employed in the settlements would leave their jobs if they could find a suitable alternative (Democracy and Workers’ Rights Center, 2011). As a Palestinian worker explains, the economic crisis forces them to accept this work: “What logic is there to this – that Arabs build houses for Jews on land belonging to Arabs? Why am I doing this? Because I must work and earn money for my family. So I build, and in my heart I pray that tomorrow they will return all this land to Arabs, and I hate myself, but I have no choice” (Foundation for Middle East Peace, 1998). One of the only other jobs available for West Bank Palestinians is working with the PA security forces. After the second intifada, the PA security forces were rebuilt under the supervision of the United States. More than 80,000 strong, the new PA security forces are trained by the US in Jordan and deployed in close coordination with the Israeli military to suppress resistance to the occupation (Tartir, 2015, 2017). Working together, Israel and the PA target not only Islamists and leftists but all Palestinian critics of Oslo through shared intelligence, coordinated arrests, and weapons confiscations. Security coordination in the occupied West Bank is one of the most sophisticated security assemblages in the world, incorporating both the forces of US empire and the colonized Palestinian population into Israel’s colonial security regime. Yet the PA security officers find themselves in an impossible situation – charged, on the one hand, with not doing enough to protect Israel, and, on the other, with being traitors to their people. The psychological costs are amplified by the fact that many people only accept work with the PA security forces because there are so few other job opportunities. In short, two of the only jobs available for West Bank Palestinians are building Israeli settlements on confiscated Palestinian land or working with the PA security forces suppressing Palestinian resistance to Israeli rule. In either case, the jobs involve participation in Israel’s neoliberal apartheid project. Palestinians from the Gaza Strip do not even have these “opportunities.” Gaza is one of the most extreme versions of engineered disposability on earth (Sassen, 2014; Pappe, 2016; Finkelstein, 2018). Since 2006, Israel has almost entirely

Dis/assembling palestine  109 eliminated work permits for the Gaza Strip. Gaza is surrounded, enclosed, and under siege. Between 2008 and 2014, Israel carried out three sustained assaults on Gaza that killed nearly 4,000 Palestinians. The stark contrasts between the repressive absorption of West Bank workers, the deadly exclusion of the Gaza Strip, and the conspicuous consumption of PA officials, Palestinian capitalists, and NGO elites highlights the differential incorporation of Palestinians into Israel’s neoliberal apartheid assemblage.

Resistance and reassembly It is no accident, therefore, that Palestinian resistance has prioritized efforts to rebuild – or reassemble – the connections severed by Israel’s neoliberal apartheid regime. To begin with, Palestinians in the occupied territories are working to rebuild the grassroots structures that sustained popular participation during the first intifada. Despite efforts by Israel and the PA to demobilize the network of popular committees, grassroots mobilizations never fully disappeared. During the second intifada, popular committees organized marches, sit-ins, hunger strikes, demonstrations, and other forms of civil unrest, including weekly protests in villages such as Jayyous and Bil’in (Qumsiyeh, 2011). In recent years, grassroots mobilizations have multiplied in the occupied territories. Villages such as Nabi Saleh hold weekly protests against settlement expansion. Workers organize independent trade unions. Youth in the refugee camps organize to confront Israeli soldiers who enter at night to carry out arrests. Palestinian political prisoners carry out hunger strikes – in some cases lasting more than 100 days – to resist administrative detention, solitary confinement, and torture. And a Palestinian youth movement organizes creative forms of civil disobedience such as “freedom rides” on settler buses and “protest villages” on land designated for settlement construction. On an everyday level, Palestinians challenge colonization though a culture of resistance known as sumoud (steadfastness) – the will to remain present rather than succumb to dispossession and displacement. In Palestinian villages, sumoud involves strategies to deepen the connection between people and their land. Farmers plant trees, dig wells, and pave roads to establish their presence on the land. Although the Israeli military targets these projects for demolition, organizations such as the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees support the efforts of villagers to reclaim their land. Other organizations have begun promoting hiking as a way to increase the Palestinian presence in rural areas, deepen popular knowledge of the land, and challenge the isolation and fragmentation of the Palestinian population. On a broader scale, Palestinians have discussed strategies for building a unified political body that could represent the Palestinian people as a whole. Some demand new elections for the Palestinian National Council, the Palestinian parliament in exile, as a first step toward rebuilding the PLO (Nabulsi, 2007). Others call for abandoning the PLO in favor of a more accountable, democratic, and participatory

110  Andy Clarno structure (Khalil, 2013). Yet all agree on the importance of establishing mechanisms for overcoming the political fragmentation of the Palestinian people. The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement represents a grassroots effort to counter the fragmentation of Palestine (Barghouti, 2011). As the second intifada was winding down, 170 Palestinian civil society organizations called for people around the world to organize BDS campaigns that target the Israeli government as well as companies that profit from the oppression of Palestinians and institutions that facilitate or participate in their oppression. The BDS movement is organized around three demands: ending the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, ensuring full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel, and achieving the right of return for Palestinian refugees. Rather than prioritizing one demand – such as ending the occupation – the BDS movement envisions a common struggle against the different forms of racial rule that Israel uses to oppress different fragments of the Palestinian population. While the primary goals of the BDS movement are to isolate Israel and reassemble Palestine, it is also part of a broader assemblage of global movements fighting for social justice. In addition to encouraging people to support the struggle for the liberation of Palestine, the BDS movement articulates a commitment to principled solidarity between people confronting racism, capitalism, colonialism, and empire around the world (Bailey, 2015). While neoliberalism is part of Israel’s settler colonial strategy to eliminate the Palestinian population, the combination of racial domination and neoliberal capitalism has produced growing inequality, racialized marginalization, and advanced securitization in many parts of the world. As movements and activists build connections between struggles against racialized poverty and policing in Palestine, South Africa, the US, and beyond, the BDS movement is an important node in a growing assemblage of movements against global, neoliberal apartheid.

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Dis/assembling palestine  111 Democracy and Workers’ Rights Center. (2011). Executive Summary of a study on “Palestinian wage workers in Israeli settlements in the West Bank: Characteristics and work circumstances”. Ramallah: Democracy and Workers’ Rights Center. Ellman, M., & Laacher, S. (2003). Migrant workers in Israel: A contemporary form of slavery. Paris: Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network and International Federation for Human Rights. Retrieved from www.fidh.org/IMG/pdf/il1806a.pdf Farsakh, L. (2005). Palestinian labour migration to Israel: Labour, land, and occupation. London: Routledge. Finkelstein, N. (2018). Gaza: An inquest into its Martyrdom. Berkeley: University of California Press. Foundation for Middle East Peace. (1998). Report on Israeli settlements in the occupied territories – July/August – 8.4. Washington, DC: Foundation for Middle East Peace. Gordon, N. (2008). Israel’s occupation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Grinberg, L. L., & Shafir, G. (2000). Economic liberalization and the breakup of the Histadrut’s domain. In G. Gershon Shafir & Y. Peled (Eds.), The new Israel: Peacemaking and liberalization (pp. 103–127). Boulder: Westview Press. Haddad, T. (2016). Palestine ltd.: Neoliberalism and nationalism in the occupied territory. London: I.B. Tauris. Hajjar, L. (2005). Courting conflict: The Israeli military court system in the West Bank and Gaza. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hammami, R. (2000). Palestinian NGOs since Oslo: From NGO politics to social movements? Middle East Report, 214, 16–19+27+48. Hanafi, S., & Tabar, L. (2005). The emergence of a Palestinian globalized Elite: Donors, international organizations, and local NGOs. Jerusalem: Institute for Jerusalem Studies. Hanieh, A. (2013). Lineages of revolt: Issues of contemporary capitalism in the middle East. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Hiltermann, J. (1991). Behind the Intifada: Labor and women’s movements in the occupied territories. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Honig-Parnass, T., & Haddad, T. (Eds.). (2007). Between the lines: Readings on Israel, the Palestinians, and the U.S. “war on terror”. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Jerusalem Municipality. (2005). Jerusalem 2000: Local outline plan: Report no. 4: The proposed plan and the main planning policies. Jerusalem: Jerusalem Municipality. Khalil, O. (2013, March 18). “Who are You?”: The PLO and the limits of representation. Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. Retrieved from https://al-shabaka.org/ briefs/who-are-you-plo-and-limits-representation/ Klein, N. (2007). The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books. Lewin-Epstein, N., Ro’i, Y., & Ritterband, P. (2013). Russian Jews on three continents: Migration and resettlement. London: Routledge. Lockman, Z., & Beinin, J. (1989). Intifada: The Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation. Cambridge: South End Press. Masalha, N. (2012). The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising history, narrating the subaltern, reclaiming memory. London: Zed Books. Nabulsi, K. (2007). Justice as the way forward. In J. Hilal (Ed.), Where now for Palestine? The deminse of the two state solution. London: Zed Books. Nakhleh, K. (2012). Globalized Palestine: The national sell-out of a Homeland. Trenton: Red Sea Press. Pappe, I. (2006). The ethnic cleansing of Palestine. London: Oneworld Publications.

112  Andy Clarno Pappe, I. (2016). The biggest Prison on Earth: A history of the occupied territories. London: Oneworld Publications. Peres, S. (1993). The new Middle East. New York: Henry Holt. Qumsiyeh, M. B. (2011). Popular resistance in Palestine: A history of hope and empowerment. New York: Pluto Press. Ram, U. (2008). The globalization of Israel: McWorld in Tel Aviv, Jihad in Jerusalem. New York: Routledge. Roy, S. (1995). The Gaza Strip: The political economy of de-development. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies. Said, E. (1996). Peace and its discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East peace process. New York: Vintage. Said, E. (2001). The end of the peace process: Oslo and after. New York: Vintage. Sassen, S. (2014). Expulsions: Brutality and complexity in the global economy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Shalev, M. (2000). Liberalization and the transformation of the political economy. In G. Shafir & Y. Peled (Eds.), The new Israel: Peacemaking and liberalization (pp. 129–159). Boulder: Westview Press. Taraki, L. (2008). Urban modernity on the periphery: A new middle class reinvents the Palestinian City. Social Text, 26(2), 61–81. Tartir, A. (2015). The evolution and reform of the Palestinian security forces 1993–2013. Stability: International Journal of Security and Development. Retrieved from www. stabilityjournal.org/articles/10.5334/sta.gi/ Tartir, A. (2017, May 16). The Palestinian authority security forces: Whose security? AlShabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. Retrieved from https://al-shabaka.org/briefs/ palestinian-authority-security-forces-whose-security/ United Nations. 1973. International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. General Assembly of the United Nations (November 30). https:// treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%201015/volume-1015-I-14861-English. pdf United Nations. (2017). Israeli practices towards the Palestinian people and the question of Apartheid. Beirut: United Nations and Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia. Weizman, E. (2007). Hollow land: Israel’s architecture of occupation. London: Verso. Yiftachel, O., & Yacobi, H. (2002). Planning a bi-national capital: Should Jerusalem remain united? Geoforum, 33(1), 137–145.

10 Urban assemblages and dis-assemblages Medellin’s hegemonic and counter-hegemonic forums John J. Betancur and Catalina Ortiz Arciniegas Introduction Capitalism produces uneven geographical economies and cities. Under colonization, it divided them into under-developing and underdeveloped geographies and political economies, generating, among others, the current North-South divide. But inequality has also defined the relational geography of cities both in the North and the South and between them. This order has been ceaselessly reinforced through the different reorganizations of capitalism. Whereas cities in the North benefit from the extraction and transfer of wealth from the South, deepening the divide, today’s flexible capitalism of multinational corporations (MNCs) is once again transforming the geography of inequality, for instance by planting global clusters of development in selected cities of the South. These plantings are part and parcel of ongoing processes of assemblage and disassemblage shaping and reshaping geographies and social relations. The result in selected cities of the South is the production of islands of wealth surrounded or interspersed by seas of misery (Galeano, 1994). Latin America is still a laboratory of the neoliberal doctrine. Informed by neoliberal practices and ideologies of individualism, market freedom, financialization and so-called governance, these dynamics have produced a drastic shake up throughout Latin America that started in the 1970s and peaked in the 1980s (the “Lost Decade”), undermining Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) and throwing the region into a tail spin that subjected it to chronic crises of foreign debt and structural adjustment. As capitalism reinvented itself, Latin America underwent forceful shock therapy (best reflected in Margaret Thatcher’s TINA claim, “There Is No Alternative”) on the promise of development and full participation in the newly enacted capitalist panacea of neoliberalism hailed as the end of history (Fukuyama, 2006). In two decades, the entire socioeconomic structure of the region was shattered and societies and cities disassembled. Following it, once again under the dictates of the core, the region has been working since the 1990s to put the pieces back together around the new creed. This paper examines these dynamics of assemblage and disassemblage in the City of Medellín, Colombia, through the narratives of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic groups. Medellín has been considered a major example of complete disassembling and successful reassembling. Yet, the leitmotif of the story was not one of socioeconomic

114  Betancur and Ortiz Arciniegas crisis and restructuring or socioeconomic polarization, but one of war between the Medellín cartel, other cartels, and government forces that had earned the city the label of “murder capital of the world” by 1990. Sensational stories of crime and horror filled media newsrooms throughout the world, removing from view the deep socioeconomic and legitimacy crisis and disassembling associated with the reinvention of capitalism. Meanwhile, dominant narratives did not connect the crisis to factors and forces such as the persistence of abject poverty, the entrenched alliance of state institutions with illegal activities or the international networks facilitating the drug trade between the South and the North. Indeed, rather than a secondary or shadow economy or a new phenomenon, criminality was part and parcel of alternative mechanisms of survival people had developed or linked up to in their efforts to cope with the unemployment, underemployment and misery wages proper of the formal economy. This is not to deny the contribution of the drug wars to the general crisis, but to suggest their close embedding in the local political economy and to point to the socioeconomic and political disassemblage that bred it. Ultimately, the drug war was only one of the affronts that brought Medellín to the breaking point. Then, they drove together the depths of the crisis. In response to overall disassemblage, the city launched a series of interventions that culminated in the 2004 adoption and adaptation of the Barcelona model of “intermediate scale architectural and urban space interventions deployed with the intention of reconstructing the urban fabric and rearticulating a sense of place, local identity and spatial equality” (Brand, 2013, p. 3) under two successive administrations; as part of this, the municipality embarked in physical interventions and highly symbolic social programs labeled “Social Urbanism” that successfully rebranded Medellín from the murder capital to the comeback city. Following various international awards recognizing this trajectory, in 2013, Medellín was declared the most innovative city in the world.1 On the surface, the pieces had been reassembled and the city was back on its tracks: decreasing homicide rates, “improved slums” connected with the central city through cable cars, iconic architecture and flourishing civic pride. As The Economist (2014) put it “[T]the solution was a radical urban makeover with a redistributive purpose: the best projects were reserved for the poorest, most violent areas.” “The point was to bring together a fragmented society and show respect for the most humble,” says Sergio Fajardo, the city’s mayor between 2004 and 2007, “who is credited with pioneering what city wonks call ‘social urbanism’.” But, using the title of an article from The Guardian (2013), we ask, “Is Medellín’s miracle show or substance?” Has the city gone from the chaos of neoliberal restructuring and the drug wars into a paradigmatic process of assemblage that turned it into a global success? While challenging the triumphalism of the city and the media, this paper argues that “the more things change, the more they remain the same.” In other words, as much as symbolic interventions produced a flattening and numbing effect of assemblage, the steep underlying realities of inequality maintained the inner disassemblage of unevenness (Colombia Politics, 2013). This takes us to the heart of the urban assemblages/ dis-assemblages framework: although following the comeback city’s temporal narrative of Medellín’s promoters, we argue that these dialectics of assembly and

Urban assemblages and dis-assemblages  115 disassembly are not temporally distinct or successive but rather continuous and overlapping. Thus, we think of the socioeconomic and governance crisis of the city and the tearing down of the social fabric by the drug war as a particular instance in which the forces of disassemblage became dominant, unleashing the forces of containment that put together a formidable repression (the stick) accompanied by flashy symbolic interventions (the carrot) to reinstate the image of assemblage. Whereas the forces of creative destruction and inequality at the root of capitalist relations are continuously disassembling existing relations, those of violence, hegemony and cooptation are ceaselessly working to glue them together. Though most of the narrative focuses on official interventions to pacify and regain control of low-income neighborhoods, it re-submerges the structural realities of inequality that bring about the disassemblages along with the actual self-help efforts of residents to cope with violence, hunger and disempowerment. Ultimately, what works for residents is not necessarily what the status quo throws on them: like any other neighborhood or any other people in the city, these neighborhoods want the peace and normalcy that comes from opportunity and livable income; but because they don’t have them, they have to rely on themselves to survive and thrive however they can.2 This chapter is organized into two major parts: the first provides an overview of Medellín’s crisis, bringing the forces of disassembling to the fore, and the second examines its apparent reassemblage. The extent and meaning of the latter is discussed through the analysis of two major declarations: (1) the Medellín Charter presented by the city to the seventh UN-Habitat World Urban Forum held in the city in April 2014 and, (2) the parallel Foro Urbano Social Alternativo y Popular (Social and Alternative Urban Forum) developed by grassroots organizations in response to it. In the context of these events, we explore the question of assembly and disassembly and its role in the construction of the new Medellín for the world to admire.

Capitalism and the city: the transformations of Medellín Capitalism produces uneven geographies within and between cities, countries and regions, generating environments of instability that require continuous interventions to keep them under control. Each societal regime and formation has its own forms and levels of inequality and its systems of social control that need to be adjusted or changed on an ongoing basis. These changes are particularly called for in times of crises or restructuring: because the forces sustaining the status quo lose efficacy, dominant hegemonies may no longer work, and submerged contentions may resurface. This was the case to a larger or lesser extent caused by the struggles and dysfunctions resulting from the disintegration of Keynesian capitalism and the efforts of neoliberal forces to take over and reshape the political economy around their interests. Forced by neoliberal mandates and their added inequalities, LatinAmerican cities have been undergoing traumatic processes of restructuring and have had to tighten their systems of social control to address the dramatic dislocations resulting from the process (this time via high-tech surveillance, militarization

116  Betancur and Ortiz Arciniegas of policing, criminalizing legislation and the redrafting or adjusting of local hegemonies). Layered on top of ancestral systems of inequality, the new agendas have deepened the chronic crises of the region’s economies, forcing them to lean ever more on heavy-handed political regimes and to explore “magic solutions” coming from everywhere (e.g., free markets, competitiveness, spectacle, heritage tourism, global events, new promises of wealth for all and so forth). Authors characterize the city of neoliberalism in terms of social disorder, fragmentation and polarization between (1) environments of wealth and celebration for the affluent and (2) environments of misery where cheap labor ekes out a living by combining minimum wages, if employed at all, with self-/mutual-help, informality and predation. Whereas the latter constitute carceral geographies3 (e.g., Wacquant, 2001; Wilson, 2009) of contention and exclusion, the former operate as clusters of self-exclusion and privilege. Although social extremes have always been dramatic in cities of the South and, for our case, in Latin America and Medellín, they have been exacerbated. Deepening polarization has increased the sources of tension and contradictions, especially in cities and societies with high levels of poverty. While in general the capitalist city is innately unstable, underdevelopment has made crisis and instability a way of life, especially at the low-end. Although self-help and solidarity made a difference, especially in the past, they have been deeply undermined, pushing forward predatory relations that are most damaging in low-income communities and in cities where people have to compete with each other for the crumbs. The allures of consumerism shape human desire everywhere, but inability to participate entices the search for alternatives; this is particularly troublesome in cities of the South where informal money-making activities are the only available alternative for a majority of the population, persuading many of them to seek other options with higher yields such as the drug trade. As disassemblages became dominant at the height of the crisis (around the 1980s), the city of Medellín intervened to push them back to the underworld through a combination of control of information and diversion of blame, messages of seduction, symbolic interventions, fear and, most certainly, state violence. Contextualized by these circumstances, we argue that Medellín’s new image has been carefully manufactured to generate a sense of order and assemblage that does not hold under careful scrutiny, but has effectively diverted, for the time being at least, attention to the symbols and appearances put forward. In this way, image creation emerges not only as a strong process of suppression of other voices, but also as a great mechanism to attract tourists and awards. Authors argue that cities throughout the world, but most particularly in the South, have the form of a collage of fragments in continuous re-composition held together by a combination of sheer force and image/hegemony. High levels of unemployment and sub-employment, informality, poverty and criminality combine with market absolutism, compromising the conditions necessary for social reproduction and increasing the expendable population. Although instability and ceaseless disassemblage and reassemblage have been at the root of capitalism and, most definitely, cities of the South, they have assumed such proportions today as to make one wonder if instability itself is the form of growth of capitalism. The

Urban assemblages and dis-assemblages  117 case of Medellín sheds light on these questions and on the dialectics of urban assemblage and disassemblage. Medellín, the second city in Colombia in population and economic activity, presides over the second largest metropolitan area of the country, housing approximately 3.5 million people. Since the city’s creation in 1616, it has been a dynamic commercial capital exporting gold initially and coffee next – the city is the capital of the major gold- and coffee-producing region in Colombia. These exports enabled the local economy to engage in import substitution industrialization starting in the late 1800s, making the city the main industrial producer of consumer goods in the country up to 1945 (Cuervo & González, 1997, p. 383) and accordingly a major destination for immigrants from the countryside.4 By 1971, however, with the exhaustion of the import substitution model and the increasing centralization of economic activity in Bogotá, Medellín started losing industrial jobs both in absolute and relative terms.5 Population growth with deindustrialization and the peak of the economic crisis in the 1970–1990 period led to increases in informal employment from an estimated 32% of all jobs in 1970 to over 54% in the 1990s (Wickware, 1999), stabilizing around 56% thereafter; moreover, increased unemployment6 and a sharp decline in salaries and wages resulting from the replacement of permanent with temporary workers7 and outsourcing accelerated an already skewed income distribution with a majority of the population at the bottom, a comparatively small middle class and a tiny group at the top. The UN classifies Medellín in the group of cities with the largest gap between the rich and the poor in the world. In Medellín, the gap actually grew by 15% between 1990 and 2010 (The Guardian, 2013). The Gini coefficient of the city today is 0.53. (Selvanayagam, 2013) and the proportion in poverty went from 37.8% in 1986 to 44.8% in 1992, 50% in 1995, 52% in 1998, and 55% in 2001, hovering around this figure since. The trajectory of the city reveals that: (1) Large waves of immigration were produced for the most part by fighting and violence in the countryside; although violence has been a constant in the history of the country, people only started to seek refuge in cities since the 1950s when armed groups (from political parties to guerrillas and paramilitary) formed in the countryside in part encouraged by political parties, in part against government, causing a mass forced displacement of peasants in a process that continues today. Best known are the armed conflict between the two main political parties between the late 1940s and the late 1950s named “La Violencia”; the formation of guerrillas out of this conflict; paramilitary groups established or supported by politicians or the military since 19628 to help the war against guerrillas; this last group eventually took on a life of its own, mixing paramilitary activities with drug trafficking and forceful land grabs; and the military itself was accused of producing more rights violations than the guerrillas or supporting paramilitary land grabs and social cleansing. These actions have produced tremendous scars and unresolved conflicts that migrated to the city with economic and political refugees.

118  Betancur and Ortiz Arciniegas (2) In the absence of jobs, housing and other programs to absorb them effectively, a huge proportion of internally displaced persons and immigrants had to house (squatting) and employ themselves (informal economy) – even provide their own security; many of these practices placed them outside of or in violation of established rules and regulations. The same processes of warfare and poverty that made their life unbearable in the countryside followed them to the city. In fact, lacking the means and supports to make a fresh start, they fell in the hands of the same parties and groups that displaced them from the countryside. In these ways, the growing instability and misery in cities not only disassembled their already meager livelihoods, but it pushed them into a new battlefield, having to put their lives back together however they could – or becoming part of the violence to survive. (3) Further poisoning the environment was a political and economic system of “gamonales,” or bosses, in which law and order applied only to the poor (coined into a local saying, “la ley es para los de ruana,” roughly translated as “the law applies only to the masses”). Absence of opportunity, the traumas of forced displacement and armed conflict and one-sided, self-serving local governments produced an environment of uncontested power and abuse at the top and fear and self-help survival at the bottom as people tried to fend for themselves. In other words, Medellín was a city of loose pieces kept together by authoritarian rule, clientelism and do-it-yourself dynamics. But this has to be qualified: although many indicators point to fragmented or dual societies, actually the pieces are knit together by relationships of predation or violence/cooptation; that is the case of the relationship of value extraction between the formal and the informal economies and that of clientelism between politicians and citizens. In this sense, disassemblage results from a constant process of “accumulation by dispossession” where the apparent stability of a segment of the population is built at the expense of the other. At the end of the day, it might be more accurate to say that the capitalist city is disassembled by definition but kept together by relations of domination, value extraction and hegemony that, by their instability and the contestation of the dominated, call for ceaseless processes of assemblage. This ethos has actually permeated all levels of society, making violence a common thread of all classes and populations (of course with the proviso that the state makes it legal for those it is controlled by). In this environment, a culture of hustling (cultura del rebusque), or the means justify the ends (Betancur, 2004), has formed especially in cities of the south. Despite Colombian’s deep Catholicism,9 in practice this culture of “what is there for me” is currency in its cities as these popular sayings testify, “el vivo vive del bobo” (the wiser lives off the fool), “el que peca y reza empata” (he who sins and prays evens the score) or “the problem is not to cheat but to be caught.” Actually, local drug dealers are noticeable for patronizing particular virgins and saints on the expectation that they will protect their activities. Government synchronizes its actions with those of the church depending on the numbing effects

Urban assemblages and dis-assemblages  119 on the poor of their version of Catholicism and on strategic public appearances with the Catholic hierarchy to legitimize themselves in the eyes of the citizenry. Moreover, while the informal sector is accused of unfair competition and extralegality, formal businesses get advantages from their close association with government or dance around regulations (e.g., by dodging sales taxes, doctoring income returns, selling fake goods often acquired illegally or informally, violating labor legislation, building in terrains classified as rural and so forth). In other words, culturally embedded values related to such contradictions and crashes reproduce spatial and discursive practices that strengthen urban disassemblage processes. The Medellín cartel emerged in this environment and was able to bribe its way into legality or at least tolerance until it defied the powers that be over extradition to the US, unleashing an all-out war that threw the city into a free fall. The situation was further aggravated by wars between the Medellín and other cartels. Peaking in the early 1990s, the cartel dramatically reduced the government’s ability to govern while permeating deeply into the local economy and society.10 Entire sections of the city became battlegrounds and the cartel recruited in low-income neighborhoods arming many of their youth; as a result, in the 1990s, Medellín registered 25% of the country’s public order violations – compared to a population that was 7% of the country; homicides peaked at 381 per 100,000 people in 1991, making the city one of the most violent in the world (El Colombiano, 2001, p. 10A; Alcaldía de Medellín, 1988, p. 461). The Colombian government then resorted to the United States Special Forces and tactical units to disband the cartel and kill many of its leaders and associates, reducing this type of violence significantly. Although the generalized economic crisis from 1970 to 1990 affected all cities in the region and the world and all sectors of society, its actual impact was mediated in each case by local factors; in the case of Medellín these factors include: a tradition in which conflicts between political parties and by extension the citizenry were solved in the battlefield; elite control and use of state power for its private interests; clientelism that made access to the state a function of people’s vote and their place in the queue; monopolization of resources, powers and opportunities by a few; economies operating largely ad hoc; selectively applied law and order; de facto immunity for elites and their associates; sectarian politics; in short, a culture in which force prevailed and justice was either a function of a person’s position or ability to impose it by her/his own means. Not only did the 1970–1990 crisis add fuel to such fires, but it unleashed a struggle for societal control on the part of emerging forces (especially drug cartels, guerrillas and paramilitary groups), shaking up extant political and economic powers. In the economic front, deindustrialization provided a new excuse to dismiss contractual obligations and dismantle labor laws, and to outsource or shift to maquila production; an economic group – Sindicato Antioqueño – that had monopolized the main activities in the city and beyond organized formally into the equivalent of a private sector cartel; and the informal economy boomed,

120  Betancur and Ortiz Arciniegas operating as a source of cheap labor and products for formal businesses. At the political level, the state took the opportunity of the drug cartel to engage in wholesale militarization of urban policing with heavy support of (if not takeover) by the US government while de facto continuing the state of exception of earlier decades to suspend the human rights of government targets. The convergence of these factors turned low-income barrios into battlefields among armed groups of various sorts and the military. Disassemblage reached a peak: while the affluent hid behind gates protected by the police and the military or ran their businesses from overseas, the rest of the population was at the mercy of militarism and private armies. Of much concern was the crisis of governability resulting from all these factors. Roughly two decades later, in February 2013, Medellín was designated the most innovative city in the world11 and declared a preferred corporate business destination in South America. In the same year, Harvard University gave the Verónica Rudge Urbanism Award to the Urban Development Enterprise on account of the City’s North-Western Integral Development Project, and the United Nations chose Medellín as the site for UN-Habitat’s Seventh World Urban Forum held between April 5 and 11, 2014. Ratifying this, Indra’s Smart Cities survey (2014) classified Medellín along with Santiago de Chile as the best cities to live in South America. How did the city go from the Murder Capital of the World to a model for the world to follow? Was this a radical or a cosmetic makeover? The official story attributes the shift to successive local administrations implementing what came to be known as “social urbanism” (Echeverri & Orsini, 2010; The Architectural Review, 2011) inaugurated by Mayor Fajardo (2003–2007) and continued by Mayor Salazar (2008–2011). In Fajardo’s words, “The point was to bring together a fragmented society and show respect for the most humble” (The Economist, 2014). Roundtables sponsored in the 1990s by the “Consejería Presidential para Medellín,” a direct link between the presidency and the city, brought together businesses, NGOs, universities, politicians and even people from the underworld in efforts to build bridges and develop ways out of the impasse. Fajardo himself rode on the wings of the Compromiso Ciudadano group he formed out of these dialogues to become mayor: “Our challenge has been to open doors in that sealed wall, doors so that people can pass through and go on participating in the construction of hope. What is hope? When someone in the community sees a path they can follow. If they are living with only a wall in front of them and can’t see any options other than illegality and informality, they have no real alternatives.” (Mazzanti, 2010) For this, the mayor’s office engaged in the erection of flashy architectural projects in the most violent areas to change the city’s image. Altogether, ten new libraries were built along with ten new schools in selected low-income areas accompanied

Urban assemblages and dis-assemblages  121 by educational, art, employment and training programs to keep youth from joining armed groups. Other spectacular architectural developments included a concentration of museums and recreational institutions such as Orquideorama, the Botanical Garden and the Explora Park along with the relocation of squatters of a former garbage dump located between the North end of downtown and a sea of low-income neighborhoods; other destination signature developments included the Plaza de los Pies Descalzos and the EPM Library, all seeking to instill pride and identity in the citizenry at large. This and an impeccable modern metro whose stations are part of an integrated urban plan and a system of aerial cable-car lines communicating poor neighborhoods in the hills to the metro helped change the image of the city and redirect people’s minds away from crime. The effort has been successful in attracting tourists, events, professionals and mayors and in rebranding Medellín as a comeback model for other cities to follow.

Examining the Medellín model Although this is not an evaluation of the “model,” we advance here some points suggested by our research. Medellín put together a great machinery of selfpromotion, earning the attention of the world, postulating itself for all kinds of awards and dressing this work in highly appealing rhetoric. As a result, internationally, the city was hailed as a major case of urban comeback, indeed a cuttingedge model that has attracted mayors and public functionaries from throughout the world to see, learn and imitate. The Urban Land Institute’s explanation of the choice of Medellín as the City of the Year best summarized this (Wall Street Journal, ND): Few cities have transformed the way that Medellín, Colombia’s second largest city, has in the past 20 years. Medellín’s homicide rate has plunged, nearly 80% from 1991 to 2010. The city built public libraries, parks, and schools in poor hillside neighborhoods and constructed a series of transportation links from there to its commercial and industrial centers. The links include a metro cable car system and escalators up steep hills, reducing commuting times, spurring private investment, and promoting social equity as well as environmental sustainability. In 2012, the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy recognized Medellín’s efforts with the Sustainable Transportation Award. But a change in the institutional fabric of the city may be as important as the tangible infrastructure projects. The local government, along with businesses, community organizations, and universities worked together to fight violence and to modernize Medellín. Transportation projects are financed through public-private partnerships; engineering firms have designed public buildings for free; and in 2006, nine of the city’s largest firms funded a science museum. In addition, Medellín is one of the largest cities to successfully implement participatory budgeting, which allows citizens to define priorities

122  Betancur and Ortiz Arciniegas and allocate a portion of the municipal budget. Community organizations, health centers, and youth groups have formed, empowering citizens to declare ownership of their neighborhoods. Medellín’s challenges are still many, particularly in housing. However, through innovation and leadership, Medellín has sowed the seeds of transformation, leading to its recognition as a city with potential for long-lasting success. A major element of the rhetoric has been the characterization of critics as spoilers, largely pre-empting careful assessments that can read through the rhetorical veils and assess candidly the actual impact of the “Urbanismo Social Model.” Here is a typical example (Brodzinsky, 2014): City officials recognize violence and gang control remains a problem in many areas. ‘But that does not detract from the positive things that have been achieved,’ says Melguizo [head of Medellín’s civic culture and social development programs from 2004 to 2010]. ‘And big plans lie ahead’ . . . The city has certainly known how to sell itself well internationally . . . But he [Melguizo] argues that the most important move has been to sell the idea that transformation is possible to city residents themselves. This last claim is a half-truth as residents’ pride of their city and region has always been the basis of their identity and their sense of exceptionalism vis-à-vis the rest of Colombia; local elites have been a major example of this throughout the story of the city, conforming a united front aimed at positioning the city above the rest. Meanwhile, two major elements are not usually included in the story, the availability of a special fund that made the flashy architecture and showcase infrastructures possible and the militarization of the city. As owner of a public multinational utility company, EPM, in the last ten years alone Medellín received from it $3.2 billion, or around 25% of the city’s budget for discretionary projects; according to Brodzinsky (2014) this fund has paid for most of the projects of “Social Urbanism.” The main innovation here, however, was that, rather than using all the funds to embellish downtown or other elite areas, the city decided to locate modern and high-tech libraries and high schools in low-income neighborhoods with major problems of crime and gangs. Yet, interestingly, while EPM’s profits grow by the day, according to the Social Urban Forum declaration, in Medellín alone, over 30,000 families have a precarious supply of potable water and about 20,000 have limited access to electricity.12 Meanwhile, these discretionary funds privilege spectacular projects over basic services to the same neighborhoods. Although progressive forces hail the decision of the municipality to resist the privatization of its utilities, low-income communities question the choice of flashy libraries and educational centers over basic services – a significant part of those profits come from the energy purchases of Medellín’s low-income neighborhoods. On this basis, we ask whether the priorities of the city are the same as those of its residents and whether the projects constitute “social urbanism” or urbanism for show.

Urban assemblages and dis-assemblages  123 The second piece was the city’s “pacification” carried out through a USsupported and heavily funded militarization of the city that de facto exempted the military from inquiry into any of its excesses and human rights violations. Using its full might, the military combed entire low-income neighborhoods, detaining people they had identified through extensive intelligence operations as well as any person they decided on the spot could be involved in any illegal operation. A major example comes from Comuna Trece,13 a low-income neighborhood heavily contested by the different armed groups involved in the war. As part of his war against guerrillas, the president of Colombia ordered in 2002 an all-out military invasion (Operation Orion) that included helicopters and fully armed soldiers. These soldiers officially killed 17 people, wounded 30, and arrested nearly 400, defeating a guerrilla front (Pachico, 2011); rumor has it that the government went explicitly after the guerrilla presence, actually allowing the paramilitary to take over. This comuna is still the most violent in the City with an estimate of 21–25 gangs and 162 murders for every 100,000 people in 2010 – most of them related to gang and paramilitary activities and their war for control (Pachico, 2011). To facilitate this, the city developed an elaborate system connecting the neighborhoods to the outside that includes a winding road and an electric escalator than can be easily controlled by the police and the military as it is based on only two points of entry and exit. Meanwhile, military sweeps were common in low-income neighborhoods terrorizing and abusing their entire population, but having little impact on gangs, drugs and the paramilitary – in Medellín’s low-income neighborhoods nearly 250 street gangs, including an estimated 5,000 youth, continue competing for “control of highways, big drug shipments, micro-trafficking (or ‘narcomenudeo’), extortion, legal and illegal casinos, prostitution rings and the networks of sicarios, or hit men” (Pachico, 2011). Although the reported figures of homicides in the city have decreased substantially, researchers attribute it to the militarization of policing, the end of direct confrontation proper of the Medellín cartel, the end of the cartel wars of the 1980s and 1990s, demobilization (2003–2006) of one of the largest paramilitary groups, AUC, with nearly 3,000 combatants, and agreements of no aggression among paramilitary organizations and between them and government forces. Lastly, despite large decreases in homicides, numbers oscillate, increasing periodically with gang wars and their struggles for turf with paramilitary groups as well as with military operations. In short, the reduction in crimes cannot be attributed to the programs of the Medellín model of social urbanism, but to the military operations, wars for turf and the alliances mentioned. Despite lowering homicide rates (from 183.7 in 2002 to 52.3 in 2012 per 100,000 inhabitants), intra-urban forced displacement has almost quintupled in a decade (from 2,000 people in 2002 to almost 12,000 people in 2012) suggesting that violence and territorial control have simply mutated and continue to be part and parcel of the everyday life especially of low-income neighborhoods (Ortiz, Navarrete, & Donovan, 2014). Indeed, according to the Latin-American Council of Security, Medellín is one of the 50 most dangerous cities in Latin America.

124  Betancur and Ortiz Arciniegas Thus, while narratives, awards, architectures, statistics and optics assemble the image of a pacified, vibrant city, little is said about violent repression and mass displacement of people within the city today. Moreover, the properties near cables, libraries and the “redevelopment” of prime locations to the south and north of the central business district have increased in price adding to the displacing impact of interventions. The rhetoric of a coherent city of connected and pacified low-income neighborhoods with a new, positive identity and great pride in their lavish libraries appears as a layer of smoke and mirrors over a displaced or suffocated reality. It’s an assemblage of surfaces over a disassembly of poverty and oppression – with a touch of aesthetics. Crime and poverty reduction, new programs, civic pride, increased connectivity and pacification have been presented as resulting from the model; they indeed have made the city a national and international showcase. Although the turmoil of the 1980s and 1990s has subsided, it cannot be attributed to social urbanism. Disintegration of cartels, militarization of low-income neighborhoods and policing – aided by the introduction of high-tech systems of surveillance – and general repression kept on hold or submerged much of the violence. But the problems associated with extreme inequality and absence of opportunity for a majority may be growing under the surface. We suggest that the main effect of the model was to detract attention away from the conditions of a majority of the City’s population and to sell to the world the novelty of spectacular architectures in the midst of poor neighborhoods. The official story zooms in on the presence of tourists in low-income neighborhoods that nobody would dare to visit before (e.g. Comunas 13 and Santo Domingo), signature architectures, the cable system, international awards and selection of the city for international events (The Economist, 2014; Brodzinsky, 2014; WF7 Medellín, 2014; Wall Street Journal, ND; Mazzanti, 2010). Praises and recognition of the City’s transformation are the order of the day (e.g., Davila, 2013; Fukuyama & Colby, 2011; Hylton, 2007). But, as is the case with the Urban Land Institute’s earlier quote, stories end with a footnote pointing to the fact that the city and its majority population continues living in and off informality, that many cannot afford the utilities that financed the interventions, that opportunity is a far cry for most, and that the city continues to be one of the most unequal in Latin America and the world. Like Barcelona, Medellín built on ancestral elements of pride and exceptionalism.14 Unlike it, Medellín has many of the characteristics of cities of the Global South. The leadership of Mayors affiliated with a progressive movement helped remove (at least during their mayoralties) some of the corruption and clientelism of the political parties ancestrally controlling City Hall. But, again, little has changed in the actual socioeconomic conditions, culture and fragmentation the city already exhibited before the drug war. City Hall has been recaptured by one of the ancestral political parties and the focus is shifting to projects such as a green belt circling the city, a river park and a technology innovation partnership between the public and private sector and institutions of higher education, actually redirecting interventions to the mainstream and to the agenda of competitiveness the city has

Urban assemblages and dis-assemblages  125 embarked on. While heavy in symbolism, the intervention has fallen rather short in addressing the housing and employment crisis.15 Similarly, mass displacements of peasants and minority communities continue turning Colombian cities (Medellín and Bogotá in particular) into refugee camps housing the largest population of internally displaced persons in the world – with the aggravation that they do not count much on the services of the UN or the Red Cross or even the state. Rather than subsiding, militarization and authoritarian rule have actually increased in the last decades. Criminalization of the poor and low-income youth and their systemic removal from the strategic areas of class and capital in the city are a major expression of this. Another major part is the development of areas like the southeast corner of the city into a major gated citadel of residential and commercial high and low-rises and shopping centers. Although class segregation and militarized repression of the poor and the opposition are historical characteristics of Colombia’s society, they have been brought to new heights. How does social urbanism operate under neoliberal urban policies? A major stated goal of social urbanism was the reconstitution of the social fabric of the early years of settlement of the urban poor that had been negatively affected by dead ends such as the lack of opportunity and social mobility, generational poverty, public neglect of local infrastructures and services and absence of quality education, health services and other support; whereas violence is presented as the cause of social decomposition and disintegration of the social fabric, a mutual causality between it and local conditions might be a better explanation. Although the interventions of social urbanism provided some mitigation, neoliberalism has exacerbated conditions. Meanwhile, although somewhat legitimating the presence of the state in targeted neighborhoods, social urbanism has not made much of a difference in governability; although the state was successful in establishing its presence in those neighborhoods, it continues playing a primarily repressive role. Careful research would be needed to determine resident’s perceptions of the libraries, colleges and cables. The media did not cover the opposition of a sector of the neighborhood at the inauguration of the most celebrated library, Biblioteca España. Although for the most part unnoticed, the heavy US support of militarization and the name given to the library (inaugurated by the King of Spain himself) are strong reminders of the colonial order that has and continues plaguing the country and its economy. The amenities are there but not only are they insufficient for the population in need but are heavily policed and have created islands of development that contrast heavily with the rest of the neighborhood and expanding squatter settlement further up the mountain. Libraries are heavily guarded against graffiti and other possible intrusions. Increase in property values along the cable and especially at the stations has increased housing costs. Private surveillance companies and police presence around the libraries has provided security that they did not have before; yet, it is dedicated primarily to the protection of tourists and the libraries. But the presence of these libraries and colleges does not imply that the quality of educational services has improved to the level of the colleges attended by middle and upper classes. Although we have been

126  Betancur and Ortiz Arciniegas intrigued by the innovations, we disagree with the notion that the libraries and colleges will make a huge difference: not only has the quality of education not improved, but the factors explaining the condition of residents are not changed by ostentatious architecture, impressive buildings for secondary education, art and training programs. Social urbanism as described to us and as practiced appears at best as a form of environmental determinism and at worst as a set of token interventions. We agree that space matters, however, these spaces are shaped by social relations of exclusion, confinement and deprivation. Cables, fancy buildings and educational services can provide escapes for a few for a moment, but they do not change the inequalities that produced and continue reproducing these spaces in the first place. Whereas they can bring a message of hope initially, once the numbing effect passes and social and police repression dominate, the uplifting will be short-lived. Brand (2013) points to limited and temporary material gains while arguing that changes in family income and urban livelihoods cannot be attributed to the interventions as they actually continue following the trends (up and down) of the economy. Although a sense of inclusion has developed among residents of low-income areas, it has not translated into major socioeconomic gains, suggesting the possibility that, once this “sensation” (Brand’s term) or seductive hypnosis (our term) wears off, the realities and conditions it has veiled will move back to center stage. Actually, despite its social impact goals, PRIMED, a major forerunner of social urbanism dedicated to the physical normalization of these neighborhoods had more of a social control than an uplifting effect for residents (Betancur, 2004).16 To a large extent, by default, intent or economic logic, social urbanism is actually producing the business environment that neoliberal globalization has imposed on cities and that Medellín is fully invested in. It certainly generated the branding and the destinations that the economy of spectacle calls for (Dabord, 2006). Beyond the neighborhoods of the poor, the impact may be higher because, in the eyes of the middle and upper classes, what mattered were the pacification of the city and the contention of crime. Often sharing the perception of the poor as a problem and a threat, they often welcome the militarized repression of the poor and their neighborhoods. Such interventions have certainly produced the seductive hypnosis of these classes (and the world) who celebrate the panacea of poverty tourism and the awards the city has received as a confirmation of the exceptionalism and exclusivity of the “paisa” culture. In April of 2014, at the Seventh UN-Habitat World Urban Forum held in the city, the Municipality of Medellín officially presented itself to the world as a model born in a document titled the Medellín Charter. Parallel to it, the Foro Alternativo, a coalition of grassroots organizations, drafted a counter-charter. This section examines and contrasts the two documents using them as proxies of the claims of the Medellín Model and those of the poor. Analyzing the Charter is beyond the scope and purpose of this paper. Rather, we limit this discussion to major issues and questions it raises while briefly contrasting official claims (leading hegemony) and counterclaims (counter hegemony). Whereas the

Urban assemblages and dis-assemblages  127 former presents it as a successful reassemblage, the latter characterizes it as deceptive and fraudulent, indeed disassembled.

The Medellín charter: hegemonic assemblage from the top? Based on the requested submissions of 17 authors, including both academic and public functionaries from a wide range of disciplines, the Medellín Charter (Alcaldía de Medellín, 2014) offers a path for the development of cities for life with equity. Starting with six essays emphasizing a sustainable urban future, moral restoration, recovery of the spirit of pre-Hispanic cities, humanization of the earth and a principled life of dignity for all, the charter goes into a strategy titled “integrated city management to live with equity.” The main thrusts of this strategy are governability and governance emphasizing “genuine inclusion,” commitment to international cooperation and to the rule of law, solidarity, re-emergence, conviviality and moralization especially through education; democracy, autonomy and participation; a close relationship between public space, art and the city; sustainability; and creation of a genuine intercultural dialogue.17 The charter lists contributing tools next, namely, strategic spatial plans (POT); participatory, inclusive adjustment of soil assessments; annual tax on ownership of real estate property; partial plans; integration of national and local policies; public policies and instruments in the fronts of health and sustainable housing; converging management of public services; models for integrated management of roadway safety; norms for physical planning to help cities and territories; partnership agreements or agendas; participatory consensus-based budgets, implemented by sectors or areas of the city; strategic projects to implement the new concept of cities; and innovative alliances to lead transformations. To close, the Charter outlines the current strategic vision of Medellín that it explains was developed on the basis of collective dialogue for social cohesion emphasizing five lines for Medellín and the Metropolitan area: 1) 2) 3) 4)

“an educational city basing its development on upgrading human talent; the epicenter of social and cultural policies; decentralized and participatory; logistical center providing advanced services in the Andean Region, as the basis for a new industrial dynamic; and 5) a sustainable, accessible, welcoming, integrated metropolitan city”. (Alcaldia de Medellin, 2014, p. 162) Claiming that Medellín “has moved from fear to hope and is now advancing toward consolidation of the social fabric of a more humane, freer, happier and fairer community,” the most recent plan, The vision Up-to Date City – Think about Medellín as a City for Life, states four guiding principles toward “the revolution of equity,” namely transparency, participation, non-violence, and innovation. These principles guide a human development and equity agenda based on five sectors, “education and culture; institutional development and justice; sustainable habitat;

128  Betancur and Ortiz Arciniegas inclusion and well-being; and economic development with equity” (Alcaldia de Medellin, 2014, p. 163). The document ends with a message to participants of the Seventh UN-Habitat World Urban Forum. The document is loaded with principles and philosophies that overlap throughout the chapters and make readers wonder if Medellín’s recent trajectory has been truly guided by them.18 While adopting much of the utopia of liberalism and adding elements such as sustainability and diversity, the charter is clearly guided by neoliberal principles, emphasizing competitiveness, governance, partnership and market equity. Although supporting fairness, democracy and participation in the abstract, it does not make inequality, classism, top-down violence and authoritarian rule or the judicial system part of the problem. Rather than engaging in a deep dialogue and participatory process of change, not only does the Charter dictate the terms for them, but it blames the population for the violence, immorality and social disorder of the societal crisis. This explains the presence of elements that are unusual in this type of document such as consolidation of the social fabric, moral restoration and a “revolution of equity” based on participation, non-violence and innovation. Meanwhile, redistribution or state-supported or enacted violence and immorality are excluded from the list of culprits while equity is reduced to market and abstract commitments that are not reflected in the proposed tools. Altogether, thus, the utopian vision of the city subordinates classical and other principles to neoliberal principles. Examining the record of both Medellín and the current societal order, we do not see how the principles of solidarity, conviviality, democracy, equity or autonomy can be overlaid on market supremacy, ever-higher levels of concentration of wealth and social polarization and a system that exists for the sake of accumulation. Can we redirect such a system into one that puts life and redistribution ahead of accumulation? This seems to be the assumption on which this document rests. At least in principle, utopia can drive the construction of a new society and city, but the proposed tools not only pay homage to strategic urban planning based on competition between cities for standing in the global order, but also reads as a top-down statement conveying the sense that “we, the architects of this discourse and practice, know what is best for people,” – not quite living up to the participatory process proclaimed in the charter. Evidence suggests that social urbanism and the Medellín Charter were developed by a group of progressive liberals seeking a way out of the extreme violence of the city and to establish law and order in areas where the presence of government was and continues to be predominately repressive; although somewhat apparently conceding that violence is far more than mere individual behavior, they expect to end it through dialogue and education, while barely addressing the factors that incubate and unleash it. Despite the apparent good intentions of this group to redirect government to help the less affluent, in practice repression prevailed over social urbanism and the carrot was too weak to make a meaningful dent on their conditions and those of their neighborhoods: what one side of government may have gained with symbolic interventions and some assistance, another side lost. Architecture is given a central place in the former. But, underlying and

Urban assemblages and dis-assemblages  129 dominating both sides were neoliberal principles of competitiveness, governance, entrepreneurship, responsibility, law and order, discipline and compliance.

Social and alternative urban forum proclamation: counter – hegemonic assemblage from the bottom? The social alternative urban forum proclamation sets up an agenda to challenge the disruptions of capitalist urban development. Contrary to the Medellín Charter developed by “experts,” the social and alternative urban forum proclamation was built through the discussions of 17 working groups from a coalition of leftist political movements, local grassroots organizations,19 and international NGOs. The event was a somewhat ephemeral reassemblage of the otherwise dispersed social urban movements at the national scale linked mainly to political movements such as the Patriotic March [Marcha Patriótica] and the Congress of the People [Congreso de los pueblos]. Furthermore, the collaboration with the International Alliance of Inhabitants energized participants representing Latin-American countries that are involved in alternative practices of spatial production. The proclamation synthesizes the conclusions of each panel of the general event celebrated at the University of Antioquia simultaneously with the UN-Habitat World Urban Forum. The main objective of the proclamation was to “Generate a platform of encounter and participation of local, national and international experiences to advance an urban proposal to confront the city of the big capital; moreover, to strengthen the construction of the urban social movement that Colombia needs” (Foro Social Urbano Alternativo y Popular, 2014, p. 7). The proclamation focuses on giving visibility to urban struggles seeking an anti-capitalist integral urban reform for the grassroots. Even though the document can be considered also inherently utopian, the proclamation was anti-neoliberal and was conceived as a united front for social mobilization. The Foro Alternativo adopted the Right to the City framework for defining its basic claims of direct participation in: (a) spatial planning decisions, (b) housing and habitat with dignity, (c) defense of the public interest, (d) risk mitigation and neighborhood upgrading, (e) struggle against land market speculation, (f) demilitarization of territories and attention to the refugee crisis, (g) better working conditions, (h) decreases in oil prices and (i) minimum vital public utilities fares. Based on these claims, the forum called at the same time for a state that guarantees inhabitants rights, rather than the mandate from neoliberal forces and their experts and for empowered social movements that promote spaces of self-determination. In this move, participants sought to open doors for the construction of an alternative society where people come first and accumulation is considered a means rather than an end, and where experimentation with non-commodified systems of housing and other non-market solutions could be explored. Each section of the Foro Alternativo proclamation provided a diagnosis and proposals to overcome the conditions in priority fronts, namely: a) Economic model, work and unemployment; b) Housing, habitat and public utilities;

130  Betancur and Ortiz Arciniegas c) d) e) f) g) h) i) j) k) l) m) n) o) p) q)

Relationship between urban and rural territories; Environmental justice, common goods and sustainable cities; Public transit and mobility; Life plans and spatial planning; Ethnic resistance, racism and city; Militarization of life and territories; Cultural and artistic resistance; Education and the city; Health and the city; Women and the city; Diversity and sexual dissidents; Political subjects to transform urban territories; Social organizing of a wide and cohesive social urban movement; Social and political agenda; and Strategy of political incidence.

The document ends with a political declaration that both denounces the current neoliberal urban development model and lists principles and proposals to address urban problems from a counter-hegemonic perspective. The main criticism the document raises about the World Urban Forum is the absence of a discussion around the distribution of wealth and the property of the means of production as central matters to genuinely address equity in the city. The pillars of the Foro Alternativo declaration are self-management, rights and the values of affection, solidarity, respect and harmony with nature in clear dissent with the WUF approach on equity. Relating to the view of Medellín as a model of urban development, the Foro asks: why does Medellín remain the most unequal city in Latin America despite huge public investment and high-quality architecture in selected informal settlements? Why, despite a relative fall in the homicide rate, are the rates of forced internal displacement and extortion rising dramatically in the city? And more broadly, to what extent are the architects of the development model interested in changing the modus operandi of urban policies and politics? Lastly, the political declaration of the alternative social forum consists mainly of mottos to animate social mobilization.

Hegemony and counter hegemony The collision of narratives shows a major divide between city leaders acting from above and grassroots leaders operating from below or on behalf of the downtrodden. Whereas underlying the Charter’s abstract commitments to fairness, sustainability and opportunity seems to be the assumption that these goals can be achieved within existing neoliberalism, in contrast, emphasizing redistribution, direct participation in decisions, housing and habitat with dignity, the public interest, risk mitigation, neighborhood upgrading, struggle against land market speculation, demilitarization of territories, better working conditions and affordable energy prices, the Foro Alternativo posits neoliberalism as part of the problem, suggesting that social relations

Urban assemblages and dis-assemblages  131 need to be changed for the other factors to fall into place. Running in opposite directions, community and elite expectations seem to be unbridgeable. At times using the same terms (e.g., fairness and participation), they clash in their meanings (redistribution and direct participation in decision making versus transparency, nonviolence, innovation, moral restoration, opportunity and hope). Whereas the Charter seems to lean on governance and governability as law and order, the Foro views them as emerging from social mobilization and changes in the modus operandi. Most importantly, the Medellín model seeks people’s submission and collaboration with the competiveness mandate. Rather than addressing up front the effects this mandate has already produced in the city (e.g., the increase in an already deep gap between “the haves and the have nots” reflected in the fact that the wealthy made 12 times more than the poor in 1991 and 56 times more in 2010), the model engages people in a catch-up agenda of education/skills/technology neglecting facts such as unemployment and underemployment among residents with high school and university degrees in the city or the chronic underdevelopment that for generations has produced so much poverty and informality. An example comes from efforts to educate for entrepreneurship when the urban poor can teach anyone about making it with nothing. But this is not to place the Foro’s agenda above or below that of the Charter. The latter definitely is music to the ears of progressives throughout the world that find the Medellín model so fascinating. The former, meanwhile, does not make it to official forums because it challenges even those progressives to confront facts rather than wishes. The Foro Alternativo seems to hit at the root of the problem the Medellín Charter seeks to address with a compassionate neoliberalism advancing a far more radical agenda. To an extent, it sounds like the old left that was so discredited by the fall of the Soviet Union and even by the inability of Keynesianism to offer an alternative to the crisis of the 1970s. But to another extent, it is actually promoting many of the same principles of the Charter but turning them on their head: to calls for participation and dialogue in the abstract, it answers with participation in actual decision making and the shaping of their lives; to abstract calls for fairness and opportunity, it responds with removal of sources of unfairness and lack of opportunity via dignifying working conditions and livable compensation, affordability and guarantee of basic necessities; to calls for education and training, it answers with calls for quality education and actual job opportunities; to calls for governance and governability based on law and order, it answers with calls for horizontality and demilitarization. In short, although the Medellín Charter appears to be an advance over the gamonalismo and authoritarianism of traditional government in the city, it needs to come down further and tie intentions with actual system changes (see Table 10.1). The Medellín model has done the magic of rebranding the city and seeking ways out of crises other than authoritarianism, corruption and patronage. Yet it has remained at the surface while holding on to the forces of inequality that are the bases of the conditions forcing people to do whatever they can to survive. It is time to consider structural conditions of inequality if the city wants to avoid being trapped as an “international best practice” and die of its success (Ortiz, 2014).

132  Betancur and Ortiz Arciniegas Table 10.1  Discursive hegemonic and counter-hegemonic practices and voices in Medellín Medellín Charter – World Urban Forum

Alternative Social Urban Forum Proclamation

Value Claims

City for life Democracy, autonomy and participation Close relationship between public space, art and the city Sustainability Creation of a genuine intercultural dialogue

State role

State creates the conditions for neoliberal accumulation including militarization and repression to crush resistance or dissidence and the guarantee of competitiveness Crime, insecurity, violence from below Culture of poverty: improper values, immorality and irresponsibility Lack of civility from below Lack of competitiveness Becoming a major globally competitive city Having a pacified population participating in the terms of government and the private sector Technical innovation, new markets, law and order

Habitat with dignity Right to the city Direct participation in planning decisions and implementation Dignity, against rhetoric of innovation, competitiveness and entrepreneurialism Sustainability Dialogue between State – insurgency and State – social movements State guarantees the rights of the population and takes its mandate from the population State as peace keeper rather than repressor State as protector of social diversity

Sources of inequality

Aims / aspirations

Concentration of wealth and resources Urban crisis as byproduct of global capitalism and predatory transnational enterprises – State’s and laws protecting the interests of capital over those of people Building a global and local movement of resistance of an exclusionary – antidemocratic – unsustainable economic model Empowerment and Coordination of an urban social movement in Colombia Promoting an integral urban reform to struggle against land market speculation and the demilitarization of territories

Source: the authors

Concluding remarks In the eyes of conference attendees, elites, progressives and destination seekers, Medellín has come a long way, becoming part of their rounds and conversations. Symbolically, it has presented a view that makes the poor part of the show and gives them the sense of inclusion. Materially, it has produced flashy architectural structures and places. Most importantly for our discussion, it appears to have reassembled from above the fragments of a city on the path of self-destruction. Interestingly, to achieve the magic, it had to lean on violent militarization and repressive policing of the poor. Judging by the contrast between the hegemony

Urban assemblages and dis-assemblages  133 it represents and the counter-hegemony grassroots representatives formulated, this assemblage has reintroduced discipline and control but has not incorporated effectively the pieces coming out of its fold. In this way, it has operated more as the re-imposition of hegemony than as the assembling of the pieces into a society of inclusion, horizontality, basic need satisfaction and fairness. By intent, default or socialized instinct, underlying the Medellín model is a deep search for competitiveness; in this context, the Medellin model assembled the pieces by force and promises of a better future under neoliberalism producing a disassembled assemblage. Olive branches have been extended to the deserving poor, while bayonets have been cutting the heads off of those daring to challenge the status quo by either demanding radical changes or ignoring or violating the established rules for a living. While much of the attention goes to the latter, the rest are sedated by hegemonies and symbols. Through gestures and minimal concessions, the Medellín model has showed the possibilities that could result from the inclusions of the downtrodden but, most importantly, when real change can replace injustice and inequality setting off new dreams and planting new seeds. Unfortunately, inequality does not disappear by covering it with aesthetics or submerging it with bayonets. From this perspective, the Medellín model only disguises and reinforces institutionalized power. In this way, its promises and hopes are hollow mechanisms of assemblage by force and spectacle. Capitalism is a system of huge contradictions and value extraction that translate into ever growing levels of inequality and social conflict. The higher the exploitation and inequality, the more it has to rely on surveillance, discipline and hegemony. Indeed, at root, it is a highly disassembled system held together by combinations of force and hegemony. Whereas on the surface, cities may take the form of systems of law, order and opportunity, in truth, they are marked by daily conflict and struggles that may best characterize the multiple social relations defining them (between government and people, employers and employees, landlords and tenants, police and citizens and so forth). But everybody needs and pursues adequate levels of stability to grow their families and live their lives. They all work to generate environments of assemblage and conviviality, regardless. But the challenges of inequality make this difficult. The case of Medellín illustrates how inequality keeps cities on the edge; absent opportunities and a guaranteed base to satisfy their needs and wants with dignity, people have to produce their own lives and reproduction often through dissent, predation, violation of the law and so forth. Similarly, in their drive to accumulate, middle and upper classes resort to their own white-collar tactics to extract more value from others and stay ahead of the pack. Along the way, both groups engage in processes of disassemblage. We presented two cases of efforts to keep the forces of disassemblage at bay, one from the top and one from the middle. We did not speak of the daily efforts of the poor themselves to put some assemblage in their environments and their lives. In this context, if the capitalist city is not more conflictive and disassembled, it is in part due to people’s efforts to create smooth environments of social reproduction; meanwhile, from the top, assemblages tend to suffocate the tensions of inequality, value extraction and absence of opportunity through combinations of

134  Betancur and Ortiz Arciniegas force, strategic symbolic interventions and hegemony to maintain the status quo. In contrast, agents of change seek assemblages that address the daily issues that prevent people from living dignified lives. Medellín’s forces in power bent a bit to accommodate the latter; yet, they did not bend enough to produce social change. While acknowledging the sources of ongoing disassemblage, their efforts at reassemblage include more bullets and symbols than actual efforts at redistribution and opportunity.

Notes 1 Award given by the Wall Street Journal and the City Group in 2013. 2 A major example comes from youth: whereas the actions of government suffocate and criminalize them, they focus on the creation of spaces where they can be themselves and grow protected from abuse; whereas government reduces their spaces, pushing them into bad schools and disciplining institutions, they want to be a contributing part of society, attend good schools and expand their horizons. 3 Interestingly, while the poor end up in environments that often acquire the form of jails without walls and gates, the affluent willingly gate themselves away from the rest – or are they forced to do it out of fear, selfishness or else. 4 The City grew from 138,000 in 1938 to 326,000 people in 1951, to 1,071,252 million in 1973, to 1.9 million in 1993, 2.2 million in 2005 and 2.4 million today. The main increase resulted from infighting between the two main political parties in the 1950s and the ensuing instability in the countryside in the 1960s which has been exacerbated since the 1980s by guerrilla, paramilitary and government armed conflict in the countryside: according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, in Colombian cities there are approximately 5.2 million people forcefully displaced from the countryside and small towns (UNHCR, 2014). Among cities, Medellín receives the largest number of them. 5 While Bogotá gained 20,000 manufacturing jobs in the 1974–1991 period, Medellín lost 48,000. Also, while the city’s share of these jobs was 12.3% in 1991 and the metropolitan area 22.2%, these figures declined to 20.5% and 11.2% respectively. Although maintaining its dominant national position in textiles and clothing design, the gap with Bogotá decreased from 60 points in 1966 to nearly 30 today. 6 Official employment figures increased steadily from 12.5% in 1973 to 16.8% in 1988, decreasing briefly in the 1990–1996 period, going back to 16.3% in 1998 and leaping to 22.2% in 2000 and again oscillating between 15% and 20% thereafter. 7 In Medellín, temporary employment increased at an annual rate of 25% in the 1980s (López Castaño, 1996, pp. 32–33). 8 First established as Operación Lazo in 1962 on the advice of the US in 1962, the arming and training of civilians to fight the guerrillas was formalized by Law 48 of 1968 leading to a series of military initiatives against communism and communist guerrillas, the American Anti-communist Alliance (also AAA or Triple A), a far-right paramilitary organization operating between 1978 and 1979; the Muerte a Secuestradores (MAS) group established between the Colombian military, Texas Petroleum, elected representatives, small industrialists, and wealthy cattle ranchers to defend their economic interests, to fight against the guerrillas, and to provide protection for local elites from kidnappings and extortion; the Asociación Campesina de Ganaderos y Agricultores del Magdalena Medio (ACDEGAM) created to handle the logistics and the public relations of the organization, and to provide a legal front for various paramilitary groups; the Movimiento de Restauración Nacional (MORENA) formed by members of ACDEGAM; the Autodefensas Campesinas de Córdoba y Urabá (ACCU) formed in 1994 as a collaboration with regional military forces against the guerrillas and anyone suspected of supporting them; the Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar (PEPEs) group established in

Urban assemblages and dis-assemblages  135 1992; The CONVIVIR groups authorized by the government to control high risk areas that worked alongside the military and paramilitary in counterinsurgency operations. Following the apparent demobilization of these groups in 2006, groups such as Las Aguilas Negras, Los Rastrojos, los Urabeños, Los Paisas, Los Machis, Renacer, Los Gaitanistas, Nueva Generación, Bloque Meta, Libertadores del Vichada, ERPAC and La Oficina de Envigado formed from the remnants of previous groups along with new recruits. Largely involved in the drug trade and the forceful takeover of agricultural land, these groups continue to be a feature of Colombian society, causing the displacement of entire communities, death and terror. 9 Some people have characterized Medellín’s regime as Corporate Catholicism to emphasize the symbiosis between elites, government and the institutional Catholic Church. 10 In 1989, Forbes listed Pablo Escobar as the seventh richest man in the world. 11 Award given by the Urban Land Institute, Wall Street Journal and the Citi Group in 2013. 12 In low-income neighborhoods, EPM has established a pre-paid card to pay for utilities; as is the case for phone cards, people are limited to consuming what they can pay in advance and have to go without the services once they consume what they paid for. 13 Medellín is divided into six large zones comprising 16 comunas; in turn, altogether comunas include 249 neighborhoods. 14 Notice however, that the experiment profited from early interventions such as the metro system opening in 1995, the Consejería para el Area Metropolitana Alcaldía de Medellín (established in 1990), especially its programs of outreach to youth and the roundtables that seeded the independent political movement of which Fajardo and Salazar were members, PRIMED, a program of squatter settlement ‘normalization’ established in 1993 and innovative programs launched in other Latin-American cities, especially Bogotá. 15 According to The Guardian (2013), “In 1991, a rich resident earned 12 times more than a poor one; in 2010 the multiple was 56. El Poblado, the district for the rich, feels like Singapore; Popular, the poorest neighborhood, is reminiscent of the slums of Dhaka.” 16 PRIMED focused on the development of access and exit roads that both improved residents’ access to the rest of the city and allowed police and the army to enter. Similarly, its programs of “normalization” focused on the titling of properties and their connection to public utilities, allowing for the collection of property taxes and utility services – increasing household costs in significant ways. 17 The authors propose a process that adds integral thinking, a new life for quality for all, restoration of connections, opportunities and social inclusion, collective goods and services to create “cities for life.” 18 Whereas utopias promote a better world, claims of hope, dialogue and so forth wear out, making people cynical (the classical unfulfilled promises politicians make especially while campaigning) when they don’t translate into real improvements in their daily life. 19 Most participating local organizations operate at the neighborhood scale in topics such as public utilities, youth programs, housing cooperatives, displacement, relocated households affected for public works and the like.

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Part IV

Disassembling democracy and urban planning

11 The organizing logics of predatory formations Disassembling democracy and urban planning Iván Arenas and Elizabeth L. Sweet Neoliberalism propels a retreat from state supports for the population and the unfettering of privatization and profit seeking. This has resulted in profound changes in how community is understood and has popularized the notion that the freedom of individuals to pursue their private interests is the source of common good. It has transformed what people understand as “the real meaning of the word ‘democracy’: the law of the individual concerned exclusively with satisfying her desires. Democratic individuals want equality. But the equality they want is that which obtains between the seller and the buyer of a commodity. Consequently, what they want is the triumph of the market in all human relations” (Rancière, 2009, p. 38). Under neoliberal rationalities, rights have become narrowly defined as the right of a bourgeois propertied individual to pursue his or her individual desires unencumbered by others and democratic equality has become the freedom of all (who can afford it) to purchase what they please. Facing the disassembling effects of precarious employment but still feeling the need to maintain the garage and home stocked with the goods peddled by the latest consumer craze, more and more individuals today are finding that the democracy of the market is a luxury they cannot afford. In this last section of the edited volume we look more closely at how neoliberal predatory formations are changing and challenging our political imagination of democracy, human rights, citizenship, and the public function of urban planning. The collapse of the Soviet Union was believed by many to be proof that Western democracy and capitalist markets had not only conquered the world, but were amongst the greatest achievements of humanity. Around the world, the tenets of neoliberalism have transformed people’s relationship to both capitalist markets and democratic practices for, as David Harvey notes, “[t]his is a world in which the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive individualism and its cognate of political withdrawal of support for collective forms of action can become the template for human personality socialization” (2008, p. 8). As the state’s role safeguarding the welfare of the population has eroded, democratic politics has moved from being a collective debate over the commons and community to becoming a site to seek personal freedoms without collective responsibilities. Democratic politics has shifted from a deliberation over the common good to prioritizing and parceling out rights: “This liberal ethic asserts principles of justice which do not presuppose

142  Iván Arenas and Elizabeth L. Sweet or promote any substantive conception of the good. Rather, they are supposed to enable citizens to pursue their own ends consistent with a similar liberty for all” (Appadurai & Holston, 1996, p. 193). The disassembling of politics as a discussion over the commons has meant that the neoliberal political subject has been reduced to a rights-bearing citizen whose political practice is largely and often solely that of casting an election ballot. It “produces citizens who are predominantly passive in their citizenship. They are, for the most part, spectators who vote” (Appadurai & Holston, 1996, p. 193). Electoral democracy in a neoliberal age produces autonomous political individuals who are imagined to be equally free to cast a ballot, thereby effectively fulfilling their political obligation and giving their consent to be ruled by proxy. While neoliberalism has shifted the state’s stake in the welfare of the population, the state remains important in determining and legitimating the rights of individuals and corporations to pursue a vulturine profit maximizing agenda. Corporate funds for electoral campaigns have commodified governing and made politics a business in the interest of big business. Political parties looking for control of the state are flush with ever growing sums of corporate cash that they must spend on media spectacles in order to capture the attention and ballot votes of neoliberalism’s passive political spectators. The effect “is that political ritual is substituting for arenas of discussion and argumentation” (Lomnitz, 2001, p. 164). Much as the World Cup or Olympics, political elections have become lucrative media events whose spectacles are broadcast for mass consumption. Produced for individuals no longer as concerned for the common good as they are in fighting for their particular interests, the dramatic events of political rituals have become less a substantive debate than a sporting contest with a clear winner and many losers. The profitable display of electoral politics creates theatrical dramas whose polarizing debates offer “a fantasy of liberal capitalist society” characterized as “convulsive competition purged of real conflict, social difference without social consequences. To provide a sensorium of cultural competition and difference without subjecting the liberal subjects to the consuming winds of social conflict” (Povinelli, 2002, p. 16). In reducing political participation to casting a ballot or answering a marketing poll, the procedural politics of electoral democracy and its competitive theatrical performances produce a sanitary citizenship that cleanses us of any responsibility to struggle for social transformation. Though procedural democracy demobilizes active political participation, historical struggles to extend suffrage and human rights have offered the promise of political and social inclusion to an enlarged field of individuals. The rhetoric and discourse of democratic inclusion is exemplified by David Miller’s observance that, in democratic societies, “citizenship embodies an equality of status, and to that extent meets the radical ideal of egalitarian community” (1992, p. 100). Beyond the fact that this falsely suggests that democratic political communities are merely the sum total of its citizens, the notion that common citizenship status provides equal footing is a seductive but ultimately pernicious sentiment. It ignores the vast number of individuals within a community who lack citizenship status to begin with or who may have citizenship status but are nonetheless discriminated

Organizing logics of predatory formations  143 against. A “tension of empire” since colonial times has been “the relationship among the discourses of inclusion, humanitarianism, and equality that informed liberal policy [. . .] and the exclusionary practices that were reactive to, coexistent with, and perhaps inherent in liberalism itself” (Stoler, 2002, p. 79). Citizenship and its rights have never been shared or enjoyed evenly. Despite democracy’s inclusive promise, economic, racial, ethnic, gendered, ableist, and other differences continue to provide a gap between citizens that differentiates their social, economic, and political power. Analyzing the substantive difference in legal prosecution and police violence faced by poor and wealthy Brazilians, Caldeira and Holston point out that “these combinations of contradictory developments reveal a fundamental characteristic of democratization itself – namely, that it is normally disjunctive” (1999, p. 717). The assemblage of neoliberal predatory formations brings increased precariousness and instability surrounding jobs, housing, healthcare, and food procurement and exacerbates gaps in disjunctive democracies. The disassembling effects of the gap between political inclusion and social exclusion are particularly evident in urban spaces where health and mortality rates, grocery and school options, and foreclosure signs often differ dramatically across city neighborhoods. More importantly, research on urban homelessness demonstrates how the material and social evidence of the exclusion of others in city spaces works as a disciplinary mechanism: “cities are the stage on which society chooses to display the price paid by those who do not accept – because they cannot – the obligations of social existence, in particular the obligation to work. So cities are not only the birthplace of human rights; they also reveal the limits that society chooses to set on those rights” (Declerck, 2006, p. 161). These limits apply equally to those that have seemingly chosen to reject social norms as well as to those that have been evicted by force. From sexual harassment and wage discrimination inside the workplace to police violence on the streets, instances abound of examples where the fact of legal rights offers little in the way of protection against discrimination. Amongst the most marginalized and excluded social group within the city are slum dwellers. Many within these socially and spatially segregated and informal neighborhoods have fought to gain property title to their land and incorporate themselves into city services, but have found that property rights and a deed have not made them less subject to police harassment or protected them from the threat of eviction. The promise of equal status for all rights bearing citizens may be a hallmark of democratic discourse, but it will remain an abstract pledge so long as the state remains the guarantor and arbiter of rights yet is beholden to the interests of capitalist profit maximization. Mobilizations around the world seeking more transparent democratic processes and for the state to adhere to human rights conventions have often been met with violent state repression. While the criminalization of dissent and militarization of the streets have been used by governments to discipline those who assemble to protest, human rights has also become a tool for state control. Leaders of an indigenous community seeking greater autonomy in Chiapas, Mexico were arrested by state agents who claimed the leaders “violated the human and constitutional rights

144  Iván Arenas and Elizabeth L. Sweet of community members” (Speed & Collier, 2000, p. 878). Thus, despite the rhetoric of democratic equality and inclusion suggesting expanded freedoms and rights, in practice democracies remain deeply disjunctive and harbor many governing activities that are actively authoritarian. Although liberal democracy and capitalist markets have been proclaimed as the endpoint of political progress and economic history, they offer no guarantees of political equality or financial fairness. Despite this lack of guarantees and although pundits espousing neoliberal ideologies do acknowledge that some individuals have to overcome greater obstacles to success due to the environment in which they find themselves, they also emphasize that through perseverance and hard work all individuals can achieve the goals they set before themselves. On the one hand, this promotes the fantasy that neoliberal individuality and democratic equality are populated by unmarked and even ahistorical subjects capable of heroically overcoming and even surpassing injurious legacies such as slavery and racism. On the other hand, the effect of neoliberal subjectivity is important to the extent that “[w]e make a point of treating all people as equals, which is fine; but we also treat them as interchangeable, which is false” (Declerck, 2006, p. 174). The equality that neoliberal predatory formations demand goes beyond the fantasy of equal rights and equal opportunities for individuals but, following its profit maximizing agenda, involves the view that all individuals are ultimately interchangeable, replaceable, and thus expendable. Rather than acknowledge and value people’s differences, neoliberal notions of equality suffer from a reductive economism that is deeply violent and oppressive. The fantasy of equal rights and equal opportunities for unmarked individuals are not the only democratic fictions with significant effects. Credited with being the first Western democracy, fascination with the Greek Athenian city-state has popularized the notion that democracy has a consequential spatiality anchored by the agora, a gathering space where adult male citizens assembled for both political deliberation and commerce. From the Greeks onward, the idea – and ideal – of public space as an anchor for debate and the creation of the public sphere has been central to our understanding of democratic practice and to its promise for equality and inclusion. “Public spaces of modern cities promote interactions among people who are forced to confront each other’s anonymity on the basis of citizenship and therefore to acknowledge and respect each other’s equal rights” (Caldeira, 2000, p. 303). Even if powerfully seductive to urban planners and architects alike, this idealized vision of the power of public space to produce a democratic public has always been limited in practice. Beyond the fact of continued if not increased inequality and discrimination, it has been limited in practice in part precisely because the public spaces designed by architects and urban planners are intended to regulate and control people’s interactions rather than set them free. The growth of the discipline of urbanism since the 1900s is built on “the notion that it was possible to transform society so that both force and politics would become unnecessary. [. . .] Social self-regulation could be achieved spatially” (Rabinow, 1995, p. 231). Even if intended to promote democratic interactions, the design of public places is supported by the vertical institutions of the planning profession and the state as a mechanism of social control. Moreover, the abstracting optic of architectural

Organizing logics of predatory formations  145 maps or aerial photographs gives planners a god’s-eye-view whose position of oversight “creates the fiction of knowledge” by transforming the chaotic reality of the embodied streets into a scopic vista devoid of struggles or contradictions (de Certeau, 1989, p. 123). It was Michel de Certeau’s position that, as much as the planner’s blueprints, the everyday pedestrian practices of people streetwalking the metropolis make the city. Despite their designed intentions, for de Certeau and optimistic others, people’s use of public urban spaces has the potential to fulfill the democratic promise of the city. As Friedrich Engels recognized in London, cities have transformative potential insofar as “this colossal centralization, this agglomeration of three and a half million people on a single spot has multiplied the strength of these three and a half million inhabitants a hundredfold” (2009, p. 36). The multiplication power of urban spaces is evident today not only in making possible the rising skyscrapers that dot the skyline, but also in how they have enabled the development of new technologies and medical treatments that have changed our world. At the same time, though cities multiply the strength of individuals and increase their productivity, the very agglomeration of people into crowds and crowded spaces also creates impersonal exchanges that alienate us from each other. Friedrich Engels was struck both by how cities brought individuals from all walks of life into proximity to each other in its public spaces, but also by the fact that they failed to acknowledge each other’s physical existence – let alone their equal rights. Baffled, he wrote, “[h]undreds of thousands of people of all classes and ranks of society jostle past one another; are they not all human beings with the same characteristics and potentialities, equally interested in the pursuit of happiness? [. . .] And yet they rush past one another as if they had nothing in common” (2009, p. 37). The public spaces of our modern, crowded cities are brutal reminders that the democratic promise of the city remains unfulfilled even as its capacity to multiply and increase people’s economic productivity has been fully and often violently realized. The imagined relationship between public space and democratic debate has also been limited in practice because the logic of neoliberalism has divested from and disassembled collective forms of subjectivity such as the public, but also because public space acts less as a forum for the free expression of political, social, or personal sentiments than as a billboard purchased by consumer advertising. Contrasting the “oppositional discourse” of graffiti to the “corporate aesthetics in the city . . . [s]treet writers often argue that the reason why corporate billboards are legal forms of public display rests solely on the fact that companies pay for these spaces” (Latorre, 2008, p. 106). The privatization of accepted discourse in public space disenfranchises the political speech of communities already marginalized by social and economic inequalities. Individuals coming together to actualize their right to free speech and their right to assemble in the United States often find that “the relation between public space and protest is figured through legal arrangements that sanction dissent by controlling its expression, allowing it to take place in particular times and spaces with permission from and under the watchful eye of the state” (Peterson, 2006, p. 376). Though the United States is often touted as the land of freedom and democracy, when expressions of dissent are largely only

146  Iván Arenas and Elizabeth L. Sweet possible there under the gaze of the state, often the same state that one is protesting, it can only be said that free speech in the United States is highly curtailed and corralled. Contemporary cities have many public spaces, but while plazas, parks, streets, cafés, theaters, and other sites offer a stage for collective forms and forums of expression, the public experiences itself collectively principally only as an imagined community. What Friedrich Engels observed of the crowded public streets of London over a hundred years ago remains salient since these and other public spaces are, more often than not, sites where one goes to be alone with others. Under neoliberalism’s insistence on the right to personal freedom and the pursuit of individual happiness, encounters with strangers in public space raise the specter of conflict and contestation and thus appear as limiting roadblocks on the road to private fulfillment. “People become comfortable by giving up their active political involvement in space and acquiescing instead in becoming spectators of the urban ‘scene’” (Mitchell, 2000, p. 138). Public space continues to be imagined as the spatial anchor of democratic discourse; however, it has been cleansed of conflict through the controlling dictates of urban planning design, via state surveillance in the form of permits as well as police, by its role as the canvas for corporate advertising pushing the spectacle of consumption, and through our unease at risking our individual viewpoint to the potentially explosive friction of encounters with others. Most importantly, however, the creation of public spaces today does not have fostering democratic encounters as its primary aim but is instead intended to produce profits. The privatization of public space is perhaps the most poignant example of the devastating and disassembling effects of the neoliberal profit maximizing agenda. “‘[P]rivatization’ suggests that a transfer of public goods into private hands has occurred. The term is, however, a misnomer since ‘privatization’ in effect means that [. . .] corporations will be able to count on the government to help them realize their profit potential. It is really a public-private partnership” (Likosky, 2006, p. 181). While privatization suggests the sell-off of public assets to private firms and retreat or displacement of the state, the reality is that the state – and taxpayer funds – support and subsidize the profits of corporations. In the realm of urban planning, this can mean favorable zoning changes, easing of height or parking restrictions, lucrative tax breaks, and other concessions for corporations promising to develop public sites. Profits are privatized, but labor, resources, and much of the risk remain public. Typically unrecognized, the privatization of public space and its development as a vehicle for profits capitalizes on the “representational relationship between the people and the state” (Peterson, 2006, p. 361) whereby profitable urban development projects that are good for business are assumed to be good for the people in general. The redevelopment of low-income housing projects or the razing of entire neighborhoods under eminent domain laws are justified in the interest of the greater public good, but may actually be in the interest of greater private profit. The revitalization of downtown Atlanta for the Olympics, for example, rather than support the existing community, effectively raised real estate values by evicting marginalized groups as well as by securing corporate sponsorship in developing

Organizing logics of predatory formations  147 city spaces (Rutheiser, 1999). The result was not only the displacement of existing low-income residents, but also a piecemeal approach to urban development, which, rather than establish a coherent plan, opened the city and its future form to competitive private developers whose demands needed to be met by the city rather than the other way around. A further effect of private profits becoming the primary benchmark for public urban projects is that there are neighborhoods in the city where profits are secured not through investment, but from disinvestment. Examples abound of “devalorized” spaces where “landlord control, blockbusting, redlining, and abandonment – terminates in a situation in which a developer’s investment can result in a maximization of profit” (Deutsche, 1986, p. 70). The predatory optics of neoliberal financial speculation has, in this way, managed to turn willful neglect, abandonment, and disassembling into profits. These are private profits that come at a high personal and public cost. Contrasting fires in Malibu and downtown Los Angeles, for example, Mike Davis (1998) documented how concessions to slumlords, absent code violation enforcements, and the perceived low worth of the impoverished immigrant communities who populate downtown Los Angeles tenements intersected to create fortunes for landlords at the expense of the highly preventable and unnecessary fire deaths of tenants (Davis, 1998). While extreme, this example reveals and represents the general transformation of priorities under capitalism and, at its most extreme elaboration, its vulture-like economics that value and support profits rather than value and support life. This is plainly evident in urban planning where “[t]he use of the city neighborhood as a commodity to be exploited for profit” has replaced the role neighborhoods used to have when they “provided the conditions for reproducing necessary labor power” (Deutsche, 1986, p. 71). While exploitation in the name of profits is not new and has been a fact of life for workers and for worldly resources for centuries, the scale and scope of destruction unleashed by the wealth-generating focus of neoliberalism’s predatory formations seem to offer the vast majority little more than the disassembling of their lives and livelihoods. Capitalism’s ability to make dollars from death make evident how neoliberalism’s predatory formations profit handsomely from planetary destruction even as their beneficiaries call for the broadening of markets and the privatization of public resources in order to solve the very destruction that the capitalist system has produced. The dominant belief espoused in government offices and by corporate capitalist sponsors throughout the world proclaims “the idea that everything must have a market value and be managed within a market structure” (Sassen, 2014, p. 192). As in city spaces, where profits are privatized and the risk remains public, so too in broader geographies where the planet’s resources are exploited for plentiful profits, but the terrible environmental costs of increased pollution, environmental degradation, and toxic clean-up, amongst others, remains public. Throughout the world, neoliberal privatization does not mean a decrease in public funding, but its repurposing for private profit. And, throughout the world, people responding to neoliberalism’s disassembling are finding ways to survive, struggle, and craft alternative ways to give meaning and purpose to their lives. Some of these are described and assessed in this section.

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References Appadurai, A., & Holston, J. (1996). Cities and citizenship. Public Culture, 8(2), 187–206. Caldeira, T. P. R. (2000). City of walls: Crime, segregation, and citizenship in Sao Paulo. Berkeley: University of California Press. Caldeira, T. P. R., & Holston, J. (1999). Democracy and violence in Brazil. Society for Comparative Study of Society and History, 41(4), 691–729. Davis, M. (1998). Ecology of fear: Los Angeles and the imagination of disaster. New York: Metropolitan Books. De Certeau, M. (1989 [1980]). Practices of space. In M. Blonsky (Ed.), R. Richard Miller & E. Schneider (Trans.), On signs (pp. 122–145). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Declerck, P. (2006). The necessary suffering of the homeless. In R. Richard Scholar (Ed.), Divided cities: The Oxford Amnesty lectures 2003 (pp. 161–176). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Deutsche, R. (1986). Krzysztof Wodiczko’s “homeless projection” and the site of urban ‘revitalization’. October, 38(Autumn), 63–98. Engels, F. (2009 [1993]). The condition of the working class in England. New York: Oxford University Press. Harvey, D. (2008). The right to the city. New Left Review, 53(Sept./Oct.), 23–40. Latorre, G. (2008). Walls of empowerment: Chicana/o indigenist murals of California. Austin: University of Texas Press. Likosky, M. B. (2006). Who should foot the bill? In R. Scholar (Ed.), Divided cities: The Oxford Amnesty lectures 2003 (pp. 179–190). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lomnitz, C. (2001). Deep Mexico, silent Mexico: An anthropology of nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Miller, D. (1992). Community and citizenship. In S. Avineri & A. de-Shalit (Eds.), Communitarianism and individualism (pp. 85–100). New York: Oxford University Press. Mitchell, D. (2000). Cultural geography: A critical introduction. New York: Blackwell Publishing. Peterson, M. (2006). Patrolling the plaza: Privatized public space and the neoliberal state in downtown Los Angeles. Urban Anthropology, 35(4), 355–387. Povinelli, E. (2002). The cunning of recognition: Indigenous alterities and the making of Australian multiculturalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Rabinow, P. (1995 [1989]). French modern: Norms and forms of the social environment. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Rancière, Ja. (2009). The emancipated spectator (G. Elliott, Trans.). New York: Verso. Rutheiser, C. (1999). Making place in the nonplace urban realm. In S. M. Low (Ed.), Theorizing the city: The new urban anthropology reader (pp. 317–341). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Sassen, S. (2014). Expulsions: Brutality and complexity in the global economy. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Speed, S., & Collier, J. F. (2000). Limiting indigenous autonomy in Chiapas, Mexico: The state government’s use of human rights. Human Rights Quarterly, 22, 877–905. Stoler, A. L. (2002). Carnal knowledge and imperial power: Race and the intimate in colonial rule. Berkeley: University of California Press.

12 Some thoughts and findings from the field Women and the illicit politics of slum redevelopment in globalizing Mumbai Tarini Bedi Introduction “With my work and with Shiv Sena, the thing is my pehchan [recognition] has increased. I am known more. Now there is some dependence on me because I do so much work. Just using my name means things will be solved on their own! I am dangerous. I talk sweetly but I can break your bones.” (Ragini Munde, Shiv Sena member in Mumbai)

As Ragini argues above, in cities of the Global South it is imperative to recognize how the politics of local and charismatic personality is connected to broader logics of urban protection and to electoral politics (Bedi, 2016). Over ten years, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork with women of a militant, political party called Shiv Sena (Shivaji’s1 Army) in the state of Maharashtra in Western India (Bedi, 2016). I was particularly interested in politics as it plays out on the “margins” of the formal state. I was also interested in how women function at the lowest levels of India’s democratic system as fixers, brokers, and distributors of a wide range of resources in poor, urban neighborhoods. Slum redevelopment projects have become particularly important sites for women to gain, sustain, and lose political power in Mumbai. My work is located within the broader work in urban history and anthropology of postcolonial cities that has found that the production and social operation of disorder is an important part of democratic politics. Disorder is often attached to critical, everyday matters of urban life such as housing availability of resources like water and electricity, and healthcare. Women withstand the worst of urban degradation and displacement and therefore these disordered spaces are often where women politicos build their constituencies. Most centrally, I ask whether one might conceive of a feminized (or perhaps even a feminist) approach to the commonly posed analytic of political brokerage and to the messy realm of what James Scott has called infrapolitics. Infrapolitics, as it is used by James Scott, defines it as the realm of political struggle that is waged daily by subordinate groups as they work to claim the material resources they need to sustain themselves (Scott, 1990). In my own work, I find that this encompasses the ways that women not only claim resources but also circulate and distribute resources amongst those who vote for them.

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Land politics in Mumbai Mumbai, like many cities, is undergoing dramatic transformation. Property developers and investors have descended upon centrally located properties. Governments have aided in this process, altering the regulatory context and administrative frameworks that facilitate conversion of urban land. This has meant that current inhabitants of these spaces are engaged in struggles to retain their now sought-after real estate. Amidst these struggles, some of the most disadvantaged inhabitants have asserted themselves as central political figures and assumed positions of relative influence and power (Weinstein & Bedi, 2012). One particular process associated with the dynamics of land conversion in Mumbai is that women at the lower levels of political parties who operate at the neighborhood-level and are generally thought to be absent from the politics of global city construction have emerged as central political figures in negotiations over land conversion. Until the 1990s, India had a protected economy. In 1991, the economy liberalized. As the Indian government made cities more attractive to international investment and positioned them as global commercial hubs, it undertook strategies to free up urban land and promote development projects associated with “global cities” (Sassen, 2001). In Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, one of the primary mechanisms for acquiring land for infrastructure and urban development has been the state-level Slum Rehabilitation Scheme (SRS), initiated in the mid-1990s (Weinstein, 2014). According to the SRS, a settlement of approximately one hundred slum dwellers occupying a plot of public or private land may organize itself into a housing society and solicit a local builder to construct a mid-rise apartment building onsite.2 Once an arrangement is reached with the builder and approved by the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA), the builder constructs a building. The land is leased from the government and deeds for the housing units are given free of charge to the residents. In exchange, the builder is provided land, either onsite or in Mumbai’s suburbs, to develop and sell at market rates. For example, I discuss here the case of the Filmcity area of Mumbai, which is located in the city’s lucrative northwest suburbs. Here builders have tried to use the SRS to get access to property. This is because the area has become highly desirable for younger, upwardly mobile home buyers who are looking for housing options that have become associated with middle-classes in a global economy (Falzon, 2004). In order to control the public outcry over the injustice of displacement and the exploitation of state power, the government has set up what is referred to as an “independent”3 body – the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA). In this area around Mumbai’s Filmcity, two important women have emerged as local negotiators. They are Geeta and Seeta. Both are formidable figures in the local politics of Shiv Sena and both are the last word on any decisions made by the rehabilitation authority. People typically invoke their names in both fear and respect as the tag team of Geeta/Seeta. While the SRA’s offices are tolerated in the Filmcity slums, most people have no illusions about the selfless intentions of the SRA’s stakeholders. As Geeta, one of the key Shiv Sena leaders in the area expresses: There are 2000 houses [here]. Builders are trying to make us feel greedy [and offer us more]. They come and say, “just put a door in between here and you

Some thoughts and findings from the field  151 will get two flats, one for the husband, and one for wife.” However, really we will not get anything. If I am the one going around to the builder, then I have to speak the language of the dollar. I can tell the builder, “If you give me this many dollars then I will get so many of the public on your side.” Another builder will tell me that if I get support [from my people] for his building he will give me a flat and one lakh of rupees. Yet another builder will come and say, “That builder is no good, why are you going after him?” Now this one we have now, he had something in writing from Filmcity and that is why we made an agreement with him. However, he will bring two or three other builders in and then he will just be digging his ass here and digging his ass there telling us that he can make four houses out of three. He is a madarchod (motherfucker). Geeta’s disgust over the politics of commercial property development comes from an incisive understanding of the rapacious nature of these builders. She also knows how to play one developer against the other. The conditions in this area mandate that developers must court slum dwellers to get their agreement on the scheme they propose. Many builders promise all kinds of things to those they negotiate with in order to seal the deal; monetary bribes and promises to the local patron of additional property are common forms of enticement.

Shiv sena and its urban politics The Shiv Sena party was founded in Mumbai in 1966 by a journalist and cartoonist called Bal Thackeray as a regional movement that aimed to protect the rights and jobs of those native to the state of Maharashtra. The party was founded against the backdrop of Bombay’s deindustrialization, and the decline of the city’s textile industry (Katzenstein, 1973, 1979). Deindustrialization had deep social and cultural consequences (D’Monte, 2005 [2002]; Menon & Adarkar, 2004). As other forms of social organization declined, Shiv Sena provided alternative visions of urban community. Its opposition to entrenched capitalist interests struck a chord with unemployed and disenfranchised workers. The party’s initial demand was for preferential employment opportunities for the local Marathi-speaking population. By the 1980s, the party aligned itself with militant politics of Hindu majoritarian, anti-Muslim nationalism (Hansen, 1996, 2001). In 1995, the alliance between Shiv Sena and the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party) came to power in the state of Maharashtra, and changed the name of the city of Bombay (to Mumbai). Shiv Sena has a complex relationship with the city of Mumbai and an even more complex relationship with space in particular Mumbai neighborhoods (Eckert, 2003; Hansen, 2001). While the party’s founder Bal Thackeray drew on a highly dictatorial and centralized model of charismatic leadership, in fact Shiv Sena’s power is widely dispersed and localized in various informal networks of brokerage across slums and middle-class areas of Mumbai (Hansen, 2001, pp. 70–71).

Emergence of local power brokers Shiv Sena politically dominates the slums around Mumbai’s Filmcity. Drawing from the party’s populist stance, local debates over slum rehabilitation have taken

152  Tarini Bedi on violent forms of assertion. I have observed that Shiv Sena women have emerged as key negotiators in these debates. The insecurity in the lives of Filmcity’s residents around the manner and location of their displacement has deep ramifications. Insecurity is an important factor in the formation of brokerage relationships between slum residents and those who they perceive to be connected to systems of protective power. It is in this environment of insecurity that brokers, patrons, and fixers emerge. This emergence is tied to their affiliations to political parties perceived as urban protectors. Even more important is the patrons’ personal involvement in people’s problems (Contursi, 1989). This importance of involvement may explain the rise of female brokerage in these areas given that the greatest impact of urban degradation here is generally borne by women. Until the 1970s, the area where Filmcity is located was disengaged from what were then the thriving economic hubs of Bombay (D’Monte, 2005 [2002]; Patel, 2003). Even today, the area has elements of an agricultural economy: Geeta for example, keeps several hens whose eggs she sells out of the general supplies store that she runs in her neighborhood. She tells me that she is the only one in the area who sells these, “Big, fresh eggs, and so I can therefore sell them for a ‘nice price’”. The monopoly over distribution of eggs is only one way in which Geeta has assured dependency on the presence of her general store within an area that is unconnected to suburban Mumbai’s commercial marketplaces. What her example illustrates is that while she bemoans that displacement, and perhaps relocation to high-rise public housing will be painful to many aspects of community in the area, she also admits that for her, it will be bad for business; and indeed undermine the kinds of power she has been able to accumulate. Starting in the late 1970s, settlements emerged around the Filmcity studio, offering labor to production units. Filmcity, as a government undertaking had prohibited any private stake on its land. However, in the 1990s it allowed one of Bollywood’s largest film producers to build the first state of the art film-school here (Mehta, 2004). The original site for the institute where the unfinished building still stands is right next to the public toilet and garbage dump in Geeta/Seeta’s slum. The permanently unfinished building has the look of a dream thwarted. Geeta/Seeta talk with glee about the unfinished building, and about chasing private encroachers out of their area. This half-finished building became a playground for the slum children. It also became a standing symbol of the triumph of the muscle of local patrons Geeta/Seeta.

Geeta/Seeta Geeta and Seeta have been Shiv Sena members for decades. Both are heads of their own households and are therefore free of the everyday male gaze in their domestic lives. While I discuss these two women as the team of Geeta/Seeta, I do not suggest that their personal narratives or their public strategies are identical. They are quite different and at times in private, each of the women criticized the political ambitions and intentions of the other. However, they both realize that working together

Some thoughts and findings from the field  153 to negotiate the optimal housing arrangements for themselves and their neighbors is the most lucrative thing to do. Besides, neither of them wants to allow the other to take full charge of the negotiations for fear that the more central negotiating figure will shut the other out of personal benefits that the builders offer once in a while to move the process along. Therefore, they keep up appearances of cooperation for the slum redevelopment authorities as well as for their constituents and continue to refer to their public images as Geeta/Seeta. Their constituents do the same. Geeta is a physically commanding figure with a booming laugh, and a loud voice. She is equally physically demonstrative in her affection as in her violent assertions against the slum rehabilitation authorities. Through the course of my research, I witnessed her throw slippers and chairs at them in disgust and threaten to break down their doors when she suspected they were plotting against her recommendations. Geeta is a slumlord of sorts. She “owns” at least seven of the twenty-five homes on her street, renting these out to poor families who pay her rent marginally below the market rates. When they are unable to meet their rental obligations every month, she tells them that because she is a Shiv Sena social worker, she is “kind to the poor” and will not evict them. I learnt from her tenants that she charges heavy rates of interest on any unpaid portion. Geeta also runs a locally notorious money-lending operation where she lends money to her neighbors at high rates of interest. Many of her tenants borrow from her money-lending business in order to pay her their rent or rental interest. This results in an almost complete dependence on her will. Geeta calls her real estate and money-lending positions as “social work” for the needy and sees it intertwined with her position as a local political leader. These roles contribute to her ascendance as a dealer in the rehabilitation project. This local authority is also no doubt one of the key reasons that she has received Sena patronage herself; senior Shiv Sena leaders strategically select their local representative, identifying those with relative power in slum neighborhoods who are most likely to wield influence over voters during election campaigns. Indeed, I heard from many of Geeta’s tenants that during election campaigns she will often tell them that they will get some relief on rental interest if they vote for the Shiv Sena candidate. Geeta knows that she possesses considerable political power acquired primarily through her everyday production of social disorder around the slum redevelopment project, her financial dealings, and her association with a political party that encourages violent tactics. Many of Geeta’s tenants, and recipients of her moneylending operations, complain about how she keeps them daba ke (firmly under her thumb). However, they also admit that they could not do without her help and are happy to follow her rules in return for the shelter and protection she provides. “See when we don’t have water, she can go to the municipality; when we didn’t have electricity, Geeta/Seeta went to the city government to fight. They can speak up. They have the party on their side.” Seeta on the other hand is slightly built and soft-spoken, though she hurls curses and abuses at the SRA with great regularity. Seeta’s experience with poverty, domestic abuse, and finally deep grief at the loss of her teenage son are well known throughout. Women and men come to ask her advice on a variety of things ranging

154  Tarini Bedi from marital problems, to employment, to her opinion on a particular television program, to love. Given her long-term residence in the area, people feel that Seeta holds access to the area’s history. This is important in the relationships of trust she has developed with her constituents. Most of her constituents trust that she has a stake in the area’s future because she has access to its past. The SRA has capitalized on Seeta’s networks of trust and brokerage. They admit that, “If Seeta tells people that [moving into a building] is the right thing to do then they will listen.”

Conclusions The transformations associated with the redevelopment of the “irrational” spaces of slums and squatter settlements have created opportunities for local political hopefuls like Seeta/Geeta to assume presence in the debates about Mumbai’s “global” future. Political parties like Shiv Sena have provided a unique space for political action in these urban spaces. In these spaces people’s access to urban services is dependent on contingent and shifting relationships to urban brokers, or “big men” (Rodman, 1977) or rather “big women” (Lepowsky, 1990) like Seeta/Geeta. As can be seen from the cases of Seeta and Geeta, the capacities they build in disordered spaces is produced not out of formal systems but on the affective grids, and the personalities who constitute themselves as, and are vastly accepted as brokers within their urban localities. The reality is that women most often bear the brunt of urban degradation, class and caste anxieties, sexual vulnerability, and the accompanying burdens of policed mobility on the urban margins (Bell, 1991). Therefore, in poor urban neighborhoods, women are assumed to understand suffering and the problems of disorder better than men do. For Geeta/Seeta, their power as brokers rests in the chaos and disorder of the urban spaces that they live in. Their loud, public negotiation and their ability to build networks of local trust are centered on everyday issues of livelihood. Geeta/Seeta are integral to the messiness of urban disorder and dislocation. It is in this disorder that their power is located. Since women are generally absent from formal institutions of power, their place in the politics of global cities is often overlooked. However, we now recognize that people who inhabit cities and participate in the struggles that shape their social and political landscapes are “present” in the very construction of these strategic spaces (Holston, 2007; Keil, 1998; Sassen, 2006; Weinstein & Bedi, 2012). Shiv Sena has provided a unique space for political action in these urban spaces. As Geeta/Seeta illustrate, women are in a particularly advantageous position to acquire political presence because of the inherently “political” nature of their seemingly “private” concerns.

Notes 1 Shivaji was a 17th century Maratha warrior who has become an icon of bravery and valor in many parts of India. The political party, Shiv Sena is named after him. 2 However, in practice (as in the case discussed here) the builder usually initiates the process. 3 In practice these are rarely actually “independent” of the control or influence of political parties.

Some thoughts and findings from the field  155

References Bedi, T. (2016). The dashing ladies of Shiv Sena: Political matronage in urbanizing India. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Bell, J. K. (1991). Women, environment & urbanization: A guide to the literature. Environment and Urbanization, 3(2), 92–103. Contursi, J. A. (1989). Militant Hindus and Buddhist Dalits: Hegemony and resistance in an Indian slum. American Ethnologist, 16(3), 441–457. D’Monte, D. (2005 [2002]). Ripping the fabric: The decline of Mumbai and its mills. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Eckert, J. (2003). The Charisma of direct action: Power, politics and the Shiv Sena. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Falzon, M.-A. (2004). Paragons of lifestyle: Gated communities and the politics of space in Bombay. City and Society, 16(2), 145–167. Hansen, T. B. (1996). The vernacularisation of Hindutva: The BJP and Shiv Sena in rural Maharashtra. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 30(2), 177–214. Hansen, T. B. (2001). Wages of violence: Naming and identity in postcolonial Bombay. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Holston, J. (2007). Insurgent citizenship: Disjunctions of democracy and modernity in Brazil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Katzenstein, M. F. (1973). Origins of nativism: The emergence of the Shiv Sena in Bombay. Asian Survey, 13(4), 386–399. Katzenstein, M. F. (1979). Ethnicity and equality: The Shiv Sena party and preferential policies in Bombay. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Keil, R. (1998). Globalization makes states: Perspectives of local governance in the age of the World city. Review of International Political Economy, 5(4), 616–646. Lepowsky, M. (1990). Big men, big women, and cultural autonomy. Ethnology, 29, 35–50. Mehta, R. (2004). The great land grab – Filmcity: The director’s cut. The Indian Express. Mumbai, March 8. Menon, M., & Adarkar, N. (2004). One Hundred years, One Hundred voices: The millworkers of Girangaon. Calcutta, India: Seagull. Patel, S. (2003). Bombay and Mumbai: Identities, politics, and populism. In S. Patel & J. Masselos (Eds.), Bombay and Mumbai: The city in transition (pp. 3–30). New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Rodman, W. L. (1977). Bigmen and middlemen: The politics of law in Longana. American Ethnologist, 4(3), 525–537. Sassen, S. (2001). The global city: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sassen, S. (2006). Territory, authority, rights: From medieval to global assemblages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Weinstein, L. (2014). The durable slum: Dharavi and the right to stay put in globalizing Mumbai. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Weinstein, L., & Bedi, T. (2012). Building politics: Gender and political power in globalizing Mumbai. In S. Dasgupta, R. Driskell, Y. A. Braun, & N. Yeates (Eds.), Women’s encounter with globalization (pp. 157–173). London: Frontpage Publications.

13 Disassembledge in the Siberian city of Ulan-Ude How ethnic Buryats reconstruct through time and space Elizabeth L. Sweet and Melissa Chakars Introduction The Buryats – a Mongolian indigenous people in Russia’s Siberia – have undergone two significant disassembly processes; first under Joseph Stalin’s authoritarian modernization policies in the Soviet period, and second with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transition from a state-run, socialist economy to state capitalism enmeshed by neoliberalism. During each phase of disassembly, the Buryats faced challenges in seeking to preserve their traditional culture, religion, and territory in the face of an increasingly dominant Russian European presence and economic policies that dramatically altered their everyday lives. In each era, the Buryat people also found ways to reconstruct and reassemble their communities, combining traditional beliefs and ethos with new and changing practices. Our chapter focuses on the Buryat experience centered in and around the city of Ulan-Ude, the capital of the Republic of Buryatia – a territory of the Russian Federation located in eastern Siberia. Ulan-Ude is the largest city in Buryatia and it is the educational, cultural, economic, and political center for the southeastern Siberian region and for the Buryat people. We begin with the colonial historical background of the city and region, then turn to Soviet communism, and end with the post-Soviet period. We highlight Stalin’s modernization project in the 1930s and the creation of neoliberal structures in the 1990s and 2000s as economic and political colonial measures that tore down previous ways of being and practices. The chapter also examines how the Buryats reconstructed their society in new ways that built on and sometimes borrowed from each successive system. Ulan-Ude’s 350-year history provides the story of a space that has seen multiple outside expansions into its territory, the contested process of defining Buryat ethnic identity and autonomy, and blistering and dramatic socioeconomic changes among the Buryat population. We are not limiting the phenomenon of disassembly to contemporary neoliberal regimes as many of the other chapters in this volume do, but instead, we are developing a timeline of historical processes that bring us to more current times and tells a story of short and long-term strategies through changing circumstances. We highlight how people’s lives were impacted and the ways in which the political and economic systems became blurred for Buryat people. While the protagonists in power changed, their desire to control and dismantle

Disassembledge in Ulan-Ude  157 Buryat life and cultural identity did not. Hence the responses have been similar in some ways as Buryats struggle and sometimes win the fight to remain and continue as Buryat people in Ulan-Ude, as do other groups in other cities as other chapters in this volume document.

Historical background Ulan-Ude was founded in 1666 in southeastern Siberia at the confluence of the Selenga and Uda rivers during the Russian Empire’s expansive march east across Siberia to the Pacific Ocean. Originally constructed as the Udinskii Fort, it was created as one of the empire’s many frontier settlements filled with military men and officials sent to hold territory and collect tribute from Siberian indigenous peoples. While Buryats and others resisted Russian encroachment on their lands, the fort and the region surrounding it were well under the empire’s control by the 18th century. The fort then grew into an important trading center, adopting the name Verkhneudinsk. Traders brought goods to the town from China and Russian settlers and indigenous people regularly came to sell their wares (Imetkhenov & Egorov, 2001). Positioned between the civilizations of Europe and Asia, residents of the city and its surrounding regions were exposed to various cultures, religions, and traditions. For example, Russian Orthodoxy, Mongolian Buddhism, and indigenous shamanism all had a presence in the growing town. The imperial Russian government used different approaches in its relations with the Buryats and these changed over time. To varying degrees over the course of centuries, the imperial government sought to control, exploit, and assimilate the Buryats into the larger Russian society. When the Russian Empire first gained control of the lands of the Buryats in the 17th century, there was initially little oversight of administrators whose jobs were to control territory and collect regular tribute from indigenous peoples, usually in the form of furs. Imperial administrators, ruling from places like the Udinskii Fort sometimes took hostages and forced Buryats to hand over large numbers of animal pelts. Buryats had two strategies for responding to this: they sent delegations to central authorities to lodge complaints about local administrators, and if this was unsuccessful, they moved to more remote areas to escape the oppression (Imetkhenov & Egorov, 2001). In the early 19th century, as military control increasingly changed to civilian administrators and the Udinskii Fort grew into the town of Verkhneudinsk, the governor-general of Siberia, Mikhail Speransky, developed another approach to governing the Buryats. He introduced the Statute of Native Administration in 1822 that allowed for the creation of steppe dumas, Buryat-controlled autonomous governing bodies that respected traditional land use and allowed Buryats to largely run their own internal affairs. In addition, the legislation guaranteed rights to land, allowed for religious freedom, and permitted the establishment of schools that taught in Buryat (Hundley, 1984; Raeff, 1969). Buryats were able to retain and even strengthen their authority as well as protect and adjust their ways of life within the borders of imperial Russia.

158  Elizabeth L. Sweet and Melissa Chakars The relationship that many Buryats had to the city of Verkhneudinsk at this time was one largely based on trade. While few Buryats lived in the city, they did regularly bring meat, dairy products, grain, wool, and leather to sell at the market in Verkhneudinsk. Some Buryats also worked for larger trading businesses helping to bring cattle from Mongolia or tea from China (Zhimbiev, 2000). However, despite the better position for the Buryats under the Statute of Native Administration, Speransky and other government administrators still hoped the Buryats would eventually give up nomadism, move to cities like Verkhneudinsk, and integrate into the wider Russian culture. Some imperial administrators began, therefore, to increasingly support Russian Orthodox missionary work as a method for incorporating the Buryats into the Russian Empire. In the 19th century, missionaries went to Verkhneudinsk and its surrounding regions to set up schools, build new churches, and convert Buddhist and shamanist Buryats to Russian Orthodoxy. Regardless of the increase in missionary work in the 19th century, the majority of Buryats did not convert and continued to practice their traditional religions into the 20th century (Hundley, 1984; Murray, 2012). At the turn of the 20th century, the Russian imperial government built the TransSiberian Railway and vigorously encouraged its European peasant subjects to move east. In the ten years between 1898 and 1908, around 4 million people moved from the western regions of the Russian Empire to Siberia (Treadgold, 1957). This rapid migration meant a sharp rise in population and an increased importance for Verkhneudinsk. The city became a significant stop along the rail tracks and the gateway for the empire’s European settlers seeking to move into eastern Siberia. While some Buryats gained jobs on the railway, increased their income by selling goods to the new settlers, or found work in the growing city of Verkhneudinsk, many more Buryats found themselves in competition over land with European peasants. This came to a head when the imperial government introduced new laws that completely redefined land usage in Siberia. All commonly owned lands in Siberia were to be confiscated by officials and redistributed in small plots to indigenous Siberians and European settlers. Given that many Buryats practiced pastoral nomadism that required a great deal of land, this legislation seriously upset their traditional economy. In addition, the steppe dumas were canceled and replaced with imperial administrators, thus ending Buryat autonomy (Asalkhanov, 1968; Montgomery, 2011). A number of Buryats responded to these new laws with protest. For example, in 1901, around 300 Buryats gathered in Verkhneudinsk and refused to allow authorities to swear in the new officials that would replace their steppe duma leaders. Demonstrations like this occurred in other cities as well. However, by 1904, the government had largely disbanded the steppe dumas, introduced new imperial officials to govern Siberia, and arrested, exiled, and imprisoned Buryats who protested. When some Buryat leaders traveled to Saint Petersburg to appeal to Tsar Nicholas II, he ignored their requests (Okladnikov, 1951). These events began an intense period of disassembly that continued under the first decades of the Soviet period. Ruling officials – first under the tsar and then under Stalin – enacted policies to end nomadism, force the Buryats to move into

Disassembledge in Ulan-Ude  159 cities like Verkhneudinsk or onto collective farms, and publicly give up traditional markers of their identity such as their religions. Authorities believed that they were forcing the “traditional” and even “backward” Buryats to modernize. Resistance and reassembly was the two-pronged strategy that Buryats could use to respond and continue to practice their traditional ways of life and community.

Disassembly in the Soviet Union under Stalin When the Bolsheviks came to power and created the Soviet Union, they initiated new policies that changed the identity of Verkhneudinsk. In 1923, Soviet authorities founded a new ethnically based territorial unit within Russia: the Buryat-Mongolian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. They then assigned Verkhneudinsk to be the republic’s capital. In 1934, leaders changed the name of Verkhneudinsk, which in the Russian language means “the upper Uda [River],” to Ulan-Ude, which means in Buryat “Red Uda [River].” The river’s name remained in the title as the city is located alongside it. The city then went from being a Russian imperial trading town to being the capital city of a region designated by Soviet authorities as the official territory of the indigenous Buryat people. Changing the name from Verkhneudinsk, a Russian word, to Ulan-Ude, a Buryat one, signified this shift and the emblematic role of Soviet authorities’ disassembling process in the region. In addition, the choice of the word Ulan (red, a color long associated with revolution and socialism), symbolized the change from the Russian imperial period to the communist Soviet one. With these changes, the Soviet system ushered in new and different circumstances that challenged Buryat life in Ulan-Ude. The creation of the Buryat autonomous republic was part of a larger Soviet strategy to appease the many different ethnic groups in the USSR through a federal system, as well as implement structured social mobility for non-Russians that would be most effective for state goals (d’Encausse, 1992; Martin, 2000). Authorities in Ulan-Ude envisioned a city with many factories, Buryat workers, and an educated Buryat professional class to run the region. In reality, most Buryats still lived in the countryside, few had higher education, and many did not speak Russian. When Stalin took control of the country in 1928, his policies prioritized rapid industrialization over all else and this left little room for gradual socio-economic change among the Buryats. As with post-Soviet neoliberal policies, the focus was on growth at any cost. Stalin’s policies required an immediate pool of factory workers, technicians, and engineers. For that, people were brought from other parts of the USSR (mainly ethnic Russians from the European region) to staff the new industries. By the end of the 1930s, an aviation plant, railway repair works, textile factory, food processing plant, ship-building factory, and others could be found in Ulan-Ude – all largely staffed by ethnic Russians. Industrialization increased the city’s population and it grew from around 20,000 in 1923 to 125,000 by 1939 (Imetkhenov & Egorov, 2001; Namsaraev, 1993). While industrialization in Ulan-Ude brought new factories and more ethnic Russians to the city, Stalin’s government also introduced other policies that drastically

160  Elizabeth L. Sweet and Melissa Chakars altered the character of the city and surrounding regions. Stalin was convinced that the Soviet Union was under threat of attack from the capitalist West. He therefore believed that the country must modernize, eliminate enemies, and create a society that was more homogenous and dedicated to state goals. In Buryatia, authorities worked to carry out these aims by collectivizing the region’s agriculture, which meant eliminating private trade, seizing all land, forcing Buryats to reside on communal farms, and running the rural economy more like an urban factory, similar to the agribusinesses of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. These economic policies were coupled with an attack on Buryat political, cultural, and religious elites that included the destruction of religious institutions such as Buddhist monasteries and Orthodox churches. Because Ulan-Ude was the seat of government for the Buryat autonomous republic and a cultural and educational center, residents there experienced the heaviest purges. In 1938, authorities arrested all of the republic’s ministers along with the leader of the republic, the Buryat Mikhei Erbanov, who died in prison a year later. Many Buryat writers, educators, journalists, Buddhist lamas, and other cultural elites were purged at the same time (Basaev & Erbanova, 1989; Chakars, 2014). These purges represent the literal disassembling of Buryat human bodies and the core glue holding Buryat culture and way of life together. Many Buryats responded to these actions in similar ways as they had done under threats to their existence in the imperial period. Buryat herders in the countryside who resisted collectivization sometimes protested or tried to move as far away from authorities as possible – some even to Mongolia and China. However, collectivization and purges were countrywide policies and great resources were devoted to carrying them out. To quell unrest, central authorities sent in the military and the secret police. They arrested thousands, murdered many, and sent others to labor camps across the country. Religious practice by Buryat Buddhists, shamanists, and Orthodox Christians were reassembled underground in homes and in the minds of practitioners. While not exactly the “predatory formations” Sassen (2014) describes, the experiences of the Buryats under Stalin are “assemblages of powerful actors, markets, technologies, and governments” that disassemble culture (2014, p. 221). These new spatialities of culture going from public to private is resistance.

Reassembly in the Soviet Union after Stalin While Stalin’s policies meant enormous destruction in Buryat society and in the city of Ulan-Ude, they did put into place opportunities for reassembly. When Stalin died in 1953, Soviet authorities curbed his most drastic policies such as the mass purges of indigenous elites. In addition, the decades after Stalin’s death saw a massive upswing in economic growth thanks in large part to the development of the Soviet oil-exporting industry. Greater economic stability meant that authorities now had the money to devote to infrastructure, urban development, continued industrialization projects, and the creation of educational and cultural institutions. This, along with the many vacancies left by the purges of the 1930s, meant that there was an explosion of new job opportunities in Ulan-Ude for many Buryats.

Disassembledge in Ulan-Ude  161 Indeed, in the late Soviet period, Ulan-Ude experienced extraordinary growth. It also became increasingly populated by Buryats who left their rural collective farms to move to the city in order to gain higher educational degrees in the new universities and technical institutes and/or to find new jobs in the growing administrative, cultural, educational, and industrial institutions. By 1989, around one third of all of the ethnic Buryats in the Buryat autonomous region (74,243) were living in UlanUde, which had a population of 351,806 at the time (Bolkhosoeva, 2002; Imetkhenov & Egorov, 2001). Even though Buryats only made up 21% of the population of Ulan-Ude when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the Buryats had gone from being an overwhelmingly rural population to almost 50% urban (some living in other cities besides Ulan-Ude). Taking advantage of the educational opportunities in Ulan-Ude, Buryats also held a significant share of professional work in the city. By 1979, for example, there were more ethnic Buryat writers, journalists, editors, and instructors of higher educational institutes than ethnic Russians.1 Additionally, while the proportion of ethnic Buryats was still less than ethnic Russians, Ulan-Ude had become a center for Buryat cultural activity. All of the Buryat-language media (literature, newspapers, TV and radio programs) were largely produced in Ulan-Ude. Buryat artists displayed their work at the Buryat State Fine Arts Museum, Buryat actors, dancers, and musicians performed at the Buryat State Theater, and Buryat history was preserved at the Buryat History Museum – all unique institutions located only in Ulan-Ude. The Buryats who moved to Ulan-Ude in large numbers in the late Soviet period came to represent a new and reconstructed Buryat identity – urban, professional, and Russian-speaking. While their lives as rural residents diminished, they were able to reconstruct new lives as Buryats in the city, where they maintained some of their traditions, but also adapted to the new Soviet regime by creating new ones. Strikingly, Buryat women’s participation in the workforce and urban life increased dramatically during the Soviet period. This became particularly evident starting in the 1960s when central and local authorities devoted resources to improving educational opportunities and building more schools. In the 1960s and 1970s, the number of residents in the Buryat Republic enrolled in high schools, technical institutes, and higher educational institutes rose by 40% (Khalbaeva, 1999). Between 1959 and 1970, the number of Buryat women with a high school degree doubled and the number of Buryat women with university degrees tripled (Jones & Grupp, 1992). Buryats in general entered educational institutes in record numbers in the late Soviet era and by 1979, they ranked third highest among all of the nationalities of the Soviet Union in education levels (Kaiser, 1994). Women were a large part of this process. In fact, they were so much so that by 1989 more Buryat women held degrees from higher educational institutes than Buryat men (Chakars & Sweet, 2015). While Ulan-Ude increasingly became a cultural and educational center for educated Buryats, it also became a space gradually devoid of more traditional markers of Buryat culture. For example, fewer and fewer urban Buryats spoke Buryat. The reasons for this are many: few schools in Ulan-Ude taught Buryat, intermarriage (usually between Buryats and Russians) was more common among urban dwellers,

162  Elizabeth L. Sweet and Melissa Chakars Russian language was necessary for professional success as it was the main lingua franca of the Soviet Union, and, for some, Russian language held greater prestige. A Buryat colleague told the story of her uncle arriving in Ulan-Ude in the 1970s from the countryside. When he began speaking Buryat on the bus, his relatives hushed him explaining, “We speak Russian in Ulan-Ude.” In addition, religious expression continued to be suppressed in line with Soviet political and economic ideologies. There were no official or public spaces in UlanUde to practice shamanism and only one Buddhist temple in existence in the late Soviet period in the Buryat republic. This was the Ivolginsky Monastery located about 20 miles outside of Ulan-Ude. Founded in 1946, authorities strictly limited the monastery’s activities. For example, ceremonies and meetings with followers could only take place at the monastery and the KGB closely monitored who came and went. While this surveillance kept many Buryats, who feared reprisals such as getting fired from work, away, KGB reports from the 1960s and 1970s point to an increasing number of visitors.2 It is also likely that some people in Ulan-Ude practiced religion quietly at home, reassembling. While Soviet policies of collectivization destroyed much of the Buryats’ traditional economy and Stalin’s purges of the 1930s wiped out many early 20th century Buryat elites, the industrialization and urbanization of the post-war period, as well as the creation of new educational, cultural, and administrative institutions in Ulan-Ude, provided opportunities for new types of employment. These developments also created greater stability, especially as the Soviet system provided widespread social services such as low-cost daycares, medical facilities, monthly pensions, and free higher education. At the same time, however, the Buryats increasingly began to speak less Buryat (as mentioned earlier) – especially in Ulan-Ude – and cast aside more traditional markers of identity. In addition, while the economy improved in the 1960s and 1970s, it began to decline in the 1980s. The Soviet government’s inflexible planned economy increasingly led to serious scarcities of consumer goods. In order to obtain ordinary items ranging from food to shoes to furniture, Soviet citizens often had to rely on forms of barter, such as blat, that included informal exchange networks, mutual support, and exchanging economic or social favors. Buryats often had to rely on large networks of family, including clan/kinship groups, friends, colleagues, and others in order to receive desired consumer goods and services (Ledeneva, 1998; Metzo, 2001). While blat was not unique to the Buryats, their strong family connections meant that their networks were extensive. The clan structure was deemphasized as urbanization, economic, and educational opportunities emerged, but during the decline of the 1980s these traditional forms of relationships proved to be an important survival component for the Buryats.

Disassembly after the collapse of the Soviet Union The dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 and the rapid transition and restructuring to a market economy in the new Russian Federation had a devastating impact on Buryatia and its capital city of Ulan-Ude. In the 1990s, the region

Disassembledge in Ulan-Ude  163 fell into a deep recession that was even worse than the economic depression that existed in many of the other parts of the Russian Federation. Certain sectors, such as defense, saw total collapse. Rural parts of the Buryat Republic were especially affected as collective farms dissolved and this caused many more Buryats to leave the countryside and move to Ulan-Ude. In the first three years after the break-up of the USSR, industry in Buryatia dropped by 35% and agriculture by 30%. The region also had twice the rate of unemployment than the average for the Russian Federation. In 1995, the economy had reached such a serious level of decline that the republic received special status from the central government in Moscow for economic assistance (Dashieva, 2007; Gill, 2007; Humphrey, 2007; Manzanova, 2007). Many in Buryatia lost not only their jobs, but the guaranteed social services once provided by the Soviet government because these were severely cut during the transition to capitalism. Prices for daycare, education, housing, food, and medicine rose rapidly while people’s savings disappeared. By 1998, 46% of the population of the Republic of Buryatia was living below poverty level (Manzanova, 2007). Women in Buryatia were the most negatively impacted. As noted by Valdivia and Ortiz Escalante in chapter 6, women are often the primary caregivers of children and elderly parents. Therefore, neoliberalism, flanked by patriarchy, more dramatically impacts women. As in Barcelona, cuts in social services, reductions in education and healthcare – industries that also employed large numbers of women – and unchecked gender discrimination meant that by 1998, women made up 73% of the unemployed residents of Buryatia (Chakars & Sweet, 2015). Also, among those women who were employed in the 1990s, on average their income was less than men. More than half of these women made less than the official subsistence level for the Russian Federation (Dashieva, 2007; Gill, 2007). In the 2000s, the economy in the Russian Federation, including in Buryatia, began to improve. Inflation rates stabilized and many people began to successfully recover from the initial shock of the transition to a market economy. However, job growth has been varied. While work in many fields such as industry, agriculture, and science have continued to decline, jobs in the service sector such as retail trade, finance, and insurance have grown considerably (Cooper & Bradshaw, 2007), echoing the global experiences of neoliberal economics discussed by others in this volume. In the context of some new job opportunities, official statistics from Buryatia continue to reveal extremely high unemployment rates. Local government statistics from 2007 show that women’s unemployment rate stood at 44% and men’s at around 31%.3 The economic devastation brought serious changes to the city. Very shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, people moved in large numbers to Ulan-Ude from the countryside in search of work and educational opportunities. However, many quickly could not afford to live in the city. The rise in population thanks to the rapid rural migration increased housing prices. Therefore, these rural migrants began to build their own small wooden homes, bringing the wood from their rural communities, around the periphery of the city, sometimes with large garden plots. During Soviet times, there had been no real suburbs of Ulan-Ude, although some

164  Elizabeth L. Sweet and Melissa Chakars city residents had summer garden plots outside of the city. Within 20 years after the break-up of the Soviet Union, the migrant population had informally created four major suburbs around the city. Initially, these suburbs lacked infrastructure such as schools, medical facilities, and roads. Some homes tapped into city services, but did not pay for them, which at times led city administrators to seek to dismantle these settlements and force people into more permanent housing within city limits. More recently, these new suburbs have begun to organize local administrations that work with the city of Ulan-Ude to create permanent infrastructure for them. By 2010, it was estimated that around 37,000 people were living in these suburbs (Breslavskii, 2012, 2013). The new suburban spatiality created by mostly Buryat immigrants was a literal reassembly of their communities. Most migrants came with their families and often, (re)built wooden houses grouped together with other people from the same region. In this way, they came to the city with a support system intact, relying on other people from the same village to help them find work, get into higher educational institutions, and gain necessary resources (Breslavskii, 2013; Manzanova, 2007). At the same time, these people still kept their connections to their villages, living, as one researcher described, as “people of two worlds” (Manzanova, 2007). Thanks to this rural to urban migration, Ulan-Ude’s population grew in the first two decades of the post-Soviet era. In 1989, it had around 350,000 residents and by 2010 it had 404,000 (Breslavskii, 2013). Many people also regularly move to the city without legally changing their residency or live there temporarily for work – therefore the population is likely even larger than this official statistic. Notably, population growth occurred in Ulan-Ude even though many people were leaving the Republic of Buryatia all together. In the year 2000 alone, around 2,500 people left the republic for the Irkutsk region in search of better economic conditions. While both Buryats and Russians will move for work, the Russians, without long cultural roots to the land, have generally felt more comfortable leaving Buryatia for other parts of the country and do so in greater numbers than the Buryats (Manzanova, 2007). In addition, since ethnic Russians have dominated industrial jobs since the 1930s and many of those industries collapsed in the 1990s, ethnic Russians have been left with fewer options. For example, a study conducted about homelessness in Ulan-Ude showed that the majority of those living on the streets were ethnic Russians. Buryats, with their strong ties to family and kin, even if unemployed, were rarely homeless (Baldayeva, 2007). In line with other neoliberal processes, in post-Soviet Ulan-Ude housing has been privatized and there has been an explosion of small retail businesses. In the Soviet Union, all housing and stores were public property and state controlled. People were given apartments often based on where they worked. For example, the Railroad neighborhood (Zheleznodorozhnyi raion) in Ulan-Ude with its own stores, theaters, schools, and community center housed the workers of the railway repair works and, closer to downtown, Victory Prospect contained apartment buildings that housed government administrators. While the city for the most part was not segregated by ethnic groups, the domination of different groups in economic sectors resulted in some segregation, which may have helped each group

Disassembledge in Ulan-Ude  165 maintain cultural and social traditions. Housing shortages in the late Soviet period also meant that people simply took what was available, diminishing the economic segregation that had existed in Soviet times. With privatization in the early 1990s, the state essentially gave people their apartments and people could then sell them if they desired. In addition, developers have built new housing. Therefore, residents increasingly do not live among their coworkers as before. Also, some neighborhoods – such as those closer to the city center – have become more desirable and therefore more expensive following typical capitalist trends (Humphrey, 2007). As mentioned above, the poorest segments of society live on the periphery of the city. The post-Soviet period has also seen an explosion of small retail businesses in Ulan-Ude. Because there were fewer stores in Soviet times, in the early 1990s, people with ground floor apartments in large socialist apartment blocks would sell their apartments so that people could turn them into shops. Lots of people also gathered in open spaces to hold flea markets. City authorities eventually started to regulate this, allowing for only certain places to have outdoor markets. For example, one was an empty piece of land near the Kolkhozny Market. Ulan-Ude also saw the growth of “minimarkets,” large outdoor or indoor spaces for housing many small individual kiosks or stalls where people could sell food, clothing, and other items (Zhimbiev, 2000). Many of the products sold there were from the shuttle trade – people going to China, Mongolia, Turkey, and other countries and bringing back inexpensive goods to sell. In the context of these massive economic changes, there have also been significant political and territorial transformations. In the 1990s under President Boris Yeltsin, the Russian Federation was designed with a certain number of ethnically based territorial regions with political and economic structures that gave them a good deal of autonomy. However, when Vladimir Putin came to power, he enacted a series of policies that removed the autonomy of these regions and gave greater control to the center in Moscow. In 2000, he created seven large federal districts that overlaid the 89 territorial units that already existed. In 2004, he eliminated the right for regions to elect their own leaders. In the Republic of Buryatia, this meant that residents could no longer elect their own president of their region. Instead, Putin appointed one – a non-local ethnic Russian named Vyacheslav Nagovitsyn. In 2006, Putin enacted policies to reduce the number of Russia’s 89 regions and merge many of them into larger entities. In 2006 the Ust-Ordinsk Buryat Autonomous Okrug (okrugs are smaller territorial units than republics in the Russian Federation) was dissolved and merged into the larger Irkutsk region and in 2008 the Aginsk Buryat Autonomous Okrug was merged into the Chita region (Sweet & Chakars, 2010). These political changes have meant a drastic reduction in Buryat control over their lands, but at the same time Buryat spaces have emerged.

Reassembly after the collapse of the Soviet Union The disassembling of the Soviet regime and the imposition of a neoliberal market economy rapidly required retooling of daily life for most people. With the collapse of the economy, residents of Buryatia both relied on former methods of economic

166  Elizabeth L. Sweet and Melissa Chakars stability, as well as adopted new strategies. Because consumer goods began to increasingly be available, certain aspects of the Soviet social and economic relationships of exchange, blat, as mentioned above, were dismantled. However, although products were available, they were also very expensive and out of reach for many. Therefore, many Buryats continued to rely on blat related to services, such as medicine (getting a doctor’s appointment quickly) and education (help with entrance to a university). Buryats often do this through kinship connections and this is especially true for the newcomers to Ulan-Ude. In addition to relying on kinship relations, many of these recent rural residents also rely on connections with other newcomers from the same village (Manzanova, 2007). Another strategy that endures from the Soviet period to the present is that many Buryats continue to rely on gaining higher degrees of education in order to try and secure better employment. The main higher educational institutions are located in Ulan-Ude and therefore it is also educational opportunities that attract people from rural villages to the city. Ulan-Ude has remained the cultural, educational, and political capital for the Buryats in the post-Soviet period. Buryats also tend to fill jobs in these spheres in large numbers as they did in Soviet times. However, while these jobs are often stable and provide certain benefits, they do not pay well. For that reason, many of these people also participate in shuttle trading or travel in the spring and summer to villages or plots just outside of the city to grow food to last them through the winter (Chakars & Sweet, 2015; Manzanova, 2007). People have often employed the same strategies and skills in both the Soviet and post-Soviet systems. There is popular belief that the systems are dynamically different and ideologically distinct, but the everyday reality for many under each system is similar. The need to scramble to put food on the table, the belief that education will increase economic possibilities, and the importance of kinship and village networks remained through the transition and into the market economy. A striking change from the Soviet to the post-Soviet period, however, has been the enormous religious revival in Ulan-Ude. After the destruction of Buddhism under Stalin in the 1930s, only one Buddhist temple was allowed to remain and as mentioned earlier, those who attended ceremonies there risked losing their jobs, entry into universities, or promotions at work. However, with the end of communism, freedom of religion returned and the Republic of Buryatia saw massive construction of new Buddhist and shamanist institutions, many within the city limits of Ulan-Ude. Traditionally, Buddhist temples and monasteries were built in remote places outside of cities to facilitate more quiet contemplation and to reach nomadic, rural populations. Shamanism has historically lacked any physical institutions being linked instead to natural spaces. Since the early 1990s, this has been changing. Many new Buddhist institutions have been built in Ulan-Ude, including temples and a nunnery, although smaller organizations operate in apartments or rent spaces in various buildings. In addition, shamanist organizations have also created physical spaces within the city. In 1993, a Shaman’s Association was established in Ulan-Ude and the organization opened an office in the center of the city (Hurelbaatar, 2007). Some of these institutions also train lamas and shamans of which there are an increasing number.

Disassembledge in Ulan-Ude  167 Buddhist and shamanist organizations have adapted to meet the needs of their urban followers by being readily available in the city. They serve the Buryats’ spiritual needs, but also are changing their identities. Several anthropologists who study religion in Siberia argue that Buddhism, in particular, has become a post-Soviet marker of identity for many Buryats (Amogolonova, 2009; Bernstein, 2002; Zhukovskaya, 1992). Religion also provides an opportunity to transmit other aspects of Buryat culture ranging from language to art to literature. These are also ways in which Buryats are distinguishing themselves from the more dominant Russian culture in a country that is around 80% ethnically Russian. In addition, old Orthodox churches within the city have been revived. For example, the 18th century Odigitrievsky Cathedral that was an anti-religious museum during Soviet times, has been renovated and now holds regular services for Russian and Buryat practitioners. While Putin’s disassembling of the autonomous governance structure in Buryatia continues, young activists mount campaigns of protest and are engaging in movements to reassemble their culture through translating books to the Buryat language, resurrecting historical theater, and promoting art through public statues. They also have a strong commitment to, and are urging a revival of, the language and traditional spiritual practices. They have protested. In 2004, a group centered in UlanUde and calling itself the Young Scholars launched a series of activities aimed at curbing Putin’s centralization policies. They participated in demonstrations, sent petitions to authorities, and organized conferences to express their demands (Sweet & Chakars, 2010). The “crisis has given rise to everyday insurgencies and different strategies reassembling the fractured jigsaw puzzle of contemporary urban life” in Ulan-Ude (Chapter 1, this volume, Arenas and Sweet, p. 5).

Conclusion There seems to be a long and complicated chess game happening where the Buryat players respond to new moves on the part of the Russian pieces. New disassembling moves are made and new resistant strategies and reassembly are the response. In this chapter, we show how the disassembling occurs on the ground and in the everyday lives of the Buryat people and also illuminate their resistance and reassembling efforts. That is, we show how the identities and histories of culture and governances, as well as gender and racial/ethnic relations, have reassembled under three regimes. Our point is, while from the outside things looked or were portrayed as though Buryats have been willing and submissive participants; there is much evidence to the contrary. Buryats have at multiple places and in multiple ways reinstated and reconstituted their everyday lives in the context of top down disassembly processes. Ulan-Ude, like many other Russian territories, has gone through disassembly in literal, symbolic, tangible, and multidimensional ways. There are several key and intersecting spots at which we can clearly see disassembly: governance structures, economic systems, spiritual practices, gendered norms, geographies of culture, and land use. For instance, during the transition from a socialist economy to a capitalist one, the governance structure was dissolved, the economic system was taken

168  Elizabeth L. Sweet and Melissa Chakars apart, gender equity laws and relations were retracted, and new Buddhist temples were built. Race relations have deteriorated and are being repaired. The process of disassembly in Russia has been all encompassing. The process of reassembling has been less recognized or documented. In this chapter, we present an analysis of data we collected from 2004 to 2006, archival documents, and secondary literature in Russian and English to demonstrate that the Buryats have begun a process of rebuilding their disassembled city and life. They are making visible what was thought to have been disappeared – their cultural and governance structures, while subsumed or possibly buried, are being unearthed in different configurations, as is happening in cities across the globe.

Notes 1 This statistic represents the percentage of Buryats working in these jobs in the entire autonomous republic. However, most of these types of jobs were located in Ulan-Ude. The statistics come from the National Archive of the Republic of Buryatia (NARB), f. R-196, op. 1/8, d. 8. 2 For example, see reports from the National Archives of the Republic of Buryatia, f. P-1, op. 1, d. 8984. 3 Compiled from Zhenshchiny i rynok truda: Analiticheskaia zapiska no. 01–03–23. 2008. Ulan-Ude: Territorial’nogo organa federal’noi sluzhby gosudarstvennoi statistiki po Respublike Buriatiia (Territorial Organ of the Russian Federal Office of Government Statistics of the Republic of Buryatia).

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Disassembledge in Ulan-Ude  169 Chakars, M., & Sweet, E. L. (2015). Professional women and economic practices of success and survival before and after regime change: Diverse economies and restructuring in the Russian Republic of Buryatia. GeoJournal, 79(5), 649–663. Cooper, J., & Bradshaw, M. (2007). Russia’s new economy. In P. Daniels et al. (Eds.), Geographies of the new economy: Critical reflections. New York: Routledge. Dashieva, A. D. (2007). Zhenshchiny Buryatii v usloviyakh sistemnogo krizisa 1990-kh gg. Ulan-Ude: Izdatel’stvo Buryatskogo gosuniversiteta. d’Encausse, H. C. (1992). The great challenge: Nationalities and the Bolshevik state, 1917–1930 (N. Festinger, Trans.). New York: Homes and Meier. Gill, G. (Ed.). (2007). Politics in the Russian regions. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Humphrey, C. (2007). New subjects and situated interdependence: After privatization in Ulan-Ude. In C. Alexander, V. Buchli, & C. Humphrey (Eds.), Urban life in post-Soviet Asia (pp. 175–207). London: University College London Press. Hundley, H. S. (1984). Speransky and the Buriats: Administrative reform in nineteenth century Russia. PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Hurelbaatar, A. (2007). The creation and revitalization of ethnic sites in Ulan-Ude since the 1990s. In C. Alexander, V. Buchli, & C. Humphrey (Eds.), Urban life in post-Soviet Asia (pp. 136–156). London: University College London Press. Imetkhenov, A. B., & Egorov, E. M. (Eds.). (2001). Ulan-Ude: Istoriia i sovremennost’. Ulan-Ude: Buriatskii nauchnyi tsentr SO RAN. Jones, E., & Grupp, F. W. (1992). Modernization and traditionality in a multiethnic society: The Soviet case. In G. W. Lapidus (Ed.), The “nationality” question in the Soviet union. New York: Garland Publishing. Kaiser, R. (1994). The geography of nationalism in Russia and the USSR. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Khalbaeva, M. M. (1999). Buriatiia v 1960–1990 gg.: Tendentsii i protivorechiia sotsial’noekonomicheskogo razvitiia. Ulan-Ude: Buriatskii gosudarstvennyi universitet. Ledeneva, A. V. (1998). Russia’s economy of favors: Blat, networking, and informal exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Manzanova, G. (2007). City of migrants: Contemporary Ulan-Ude in the context of Russian migration. In C. Alexander, V. Buchli, & C. Humphrey (Eds.), Urban life in post-Soviet Asia (pp. 125–135). London: University College London Press. Martin, T. (2000). The affirmative action empire: Nations and nationalism in the Soviet union, 1923–1939. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Metzo, K. (2001). Adapting capitalism: Household plots, forest resources, and moonlighting in post-Soviet Siberia. GeoJournal, 54, 549–556. Montgomery, R. W. (2011). Buriat political and social activism in the 1905 revolution. Sibirica, 10(3), 1–28. Murray, J. D. (2012). Building empire among the Buryats: Conversion encounters in Russia’s Baikal Region, 1860s–1917. PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Namsaraev, S. D. (Ed.). (1993). Istoriia Buriatii, konets xix v.–1941 g. Ulan-Ude: ONTs. “Sibir’.” Okladnikov, A. P. (Ed.). (1951). Istoriia Buriat-Mongol’skoi ASSR (Vol. 1). Ulan-Ude: Buriat-Mongol’skoe gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo. Raeff, M. (1969). Speransky: Statesman of imperial Russia, 1772–1839. The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff. Sassen, S. (2014). Expulsions: Brutality and complexity in the global economy. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

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14 How to take flight from menacing futures? Young people and education in the slums of the global south Silvia Grinberg and Mercedes Machado Introduction We dream . . . about traveling, going to school wherever we want, sailing, driving around in a car, having a house of our own, studying with all our might. We would like everyone to have a smile on their face every day. We want to live in José León Suarez, for it to be a nicer place. We think about the difficulties facing the planet. (Female high school student)

The future, the possibility of imagining the future, of controlling and guiding it – and also of improving it – is a longstanding concern. Since the Enlightenment, the future has been shrouded with utopian dreams of emancipation that, in the 21st century, are as hard to sustain as they are to eschew. There is growing concern with the future in fields as diverse as android robotics, anthropomorphic telepresence, neuroscience, mind theory, neuroengineering, brain-computer interfaces, neuroprosthetics, neurotransplantation, long-range forecasting, future evolution strategy, evolutionary transhumanism, ethics, bionic prostheses, cybernetic lifeextension, mid-century singularity, neo-humanity, meta-intelligence, cybernetic immortality, consciousness, spiritual development, science, and spirituality.1 The internet has websites that offer us “global future solutions” whose contents range from private bio-medicine companies to non-governmental organizations like the World Future Council2 that attempts to construct a public agenda that entails “essential ingredients for a sustainable future.” In the academic milieu as well, there is more and more production that focuses on the hereafter.3 Over the course of the 20th century, the design of the future gained ground in, for instance, science fiction literature as well as apocalyptic visions that World War II both exacerbated and attempted to prevent from coming true.4 A certain nihilism is often associated with narratives of the future. This is particularly true when those narratives put forth predictions about young people, and even more so when those young people live in contexts of extreme urban poverty in the global south. While we demand that young people make a better world than the one we now live in, we also – paradoxically – reprimand them for lack of initiative or apathy about the world in which they live. The future has more and more dimensions and facets. It generates all sorts of fears, but also bears meanings, expectations, hopes, and utopia (Augé, 2012). The complexity of envisioning the

172  Silvia Grinberg and Mercedes Machado future in slums entails juxtapositions and overlapping webs, tensions and apparent contradictions. Different futures with no linear logic are enmeshed; past futures and future presents form tangles and knots. The present as told by the young people and adults in these urban spaces is raveled and jumbled in a complex web where pasts and futures intersect and overlap. These young people are eager for what is to come, but not as a prophet is eager for it,5 that is, not as someone who knows what and where to wait, or the conditions in which that waiting ensues. In school, the specific nature of the relationship to the future is patent. Schools are, on the one hand, assigned the task of improving society6 and, on the other, implored to do something with a youth now considered “lost,” that is, youth that requires intervention to prevent bad futures (Youdell & McGimpsey, 2015). When it comes to the slums of the global south – to say nothing of the schools and students in those slums – the rhetoric combines apocalyptic statements and dystopias (Arabindoo, 2014) as it expresses the abject vision of that which is equally denied and feared (Grinberg, 2010, 2011). The scenario for the governance of urban flows that take the shape of global flows quickly grows blurry as a consequence of living in a permanent state of crisis; the configuration and reconfiguration of an increasingly urban life acts as, among other things, a backlash bound to the logics of globalization. As Achankeng says, “It is rightfully argued that globalization brings opportunities for many cities, especially those that can be key centers for production, distribution and services for liberalizing economies. However, increasing evidence suggests that globalization is also creating an increasingly unequal world in terms of distribution of incomes, assets and economic power. While some few countries and their cities are incorporated into it, others are bypassed or excluded. Some are incorporated but at huge social costs” (2003, p. 1). That is the framework for the heading at the opening of this chapter. The words of the young high school student address the specific ways that globalization affects how she assembles her vision of her future, her dreams, in conjunction with the neighborhood where she lives. Jose León Suarez (heretofore JLS) is the name of a train station and of an area where this young woman lives. It is where the school she attends is located and where, since 2008, we have been working on a research project some of whose results are discussed here. JLS located in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Region where, since the late seventies, a succession of shantytowns has sprouted up, one next to the other. These settlements have grown in the context of the crisis of Fordist accumulation, of the welfare state, and finally of globalization (Grinberg, 2011, 2013). Thus, when this student mentions JLS in her dream of the future, in her daydreams (Bloch, 2004), she makes a political statement. In her narrative, desire is assembled by collapsing into one the place and the conditions in which dreaming ensues. This young woman was, in fact, born in one of the shantytowns in JLS, one of the many slums of the global south that took shape starting in the late nineteen seventies as part of the disintegration of social and urban life just as, in the present, we find ourselves before new forms of urban assemblage. On the one hand, then, we have selective metropolitanization (PrevotSchapira, 2001) and, on the other, urban flows and shantytowns that

How to take flight from menacing futures?  173 years ago ceased to be intermediate, temporary places to become the permanent neighborhoods and homes of those who live there. As one neighbor, who arrived in this area in the late eighties, when it was still a barren wasteland, told us, “I said it the other day at a meeting at City Hall: they have to stop calling us a settlement. This is a neighborhood like any other.” These zones of the city have been around for some forty years. At least three generations have been born and raised in them. Regardless of what the rhetoric of slums may say (Arabindoo, 2014), these spaces are by no means places of trash or waste. They are, rather, places where lives are lived and dreams, as in the case of this young woman, are dreamt. Dreams and desires that go from having a house to smiling more, from the state of the planet to a nicer JLS. Dreams that are territorialized and take on a particular density when they are assembled with the urban life and with the position that this student, her home, and her neighborhood occupy in the metropolitan life of the globalized south. These stories formulate other ways of thinking and imagining the future. Rather than apocalypses, we come upon affirmation of life, an affirmation that, in the very act of its utterance, assembles a singular vision of history that is at once the life of a city, of a neighborhood, and of a young woman. The specific modality of this act of desiring puts before us the many ways that the local becomes global. At stake are dreams and desires, as well as assemblages. As MacFarlane points out (2011), “rather than a kind of opposition to structural hierarchy, the spatialities and temporalities of urban assemblages – for instance, in relation to urban policy or urban infrastructure – can, of course, be captured, structured and storied more effectively and with greater influence by particular actors” (p. 208). But they offer another surplus as well, one that, by way of a hypothesis, we formulate as follows: in the very act of their enunciation, those dreams take shape and come true not only as sedimented practices of urban life, but also as lines of flight that constitute modes of reassembling. This young woman, like her classmates, dreams precisely where nothing of that sort would seem possible. She desires history, city, and the neighborhood itself from the place of the neighborhood and, as soon as she does, she renders that neighborhood a political reality. Thus, these young people escape not only from the abject vision cast on them, but also from the romanticism that sometimes informs how slums are envisioned (Hickey-Moody, 2013; Roy, 2011; Grinberg, 2010). In the very act of dreaming, these young people take flight from the voluntarism and “you-can-do-it” logic that often structures the discourses of resilience characteristic of this management age, discourses that form the basis of proposals to improve life in the slums. These narratives of management both rest on the hypothesis that young people who live in slums have low self-esteem and demand the empowerment of them. Beyond those narratives, the students produce their dreams in and from the context of school, telling dreams that interrupt both logics. Our interest in interrogating stories of the future is the result of daily work with these young people in their schools and neighborhoods. Indeed, the future is one of their primary concerns. When asked to make a collage to introduce themselves, some students – like the one quoted in the heading – address not only the question of who they are but also of where they were born and who they want to be. The

174  Silvia Grinberg and Mercedes Machado question of what exactly those desires for the future and wishes entail, then, is fundamental to our interrogation. Crucial as well is the very fact that they choose to introduce themselves through what they desire and wish for. In the same act, they say “I am” and “I desire.” In a specific way, then, they rework the phrase “I think therefore I am,” as “I desire therefore I am.” And that, in and of itself, is a point of inflection. Thus, a future is assembled, one that escapes from a past that has left them on the symbolic borders of the city and with a present that comes to life when conceived in relation to that space in between past and future. The fabric of their desires is enmeshed in the question of where they live and, hence, the abject vision that falls on these neighborhoods is cut short. Thinking of and imagining the future in the face of that vision is a provocative act. It is no longer a question of whether you go to school to kill time or whether you hang out on the corner like a criminal, but rather of young people with hopes, young people who know where they live and what it means to the outside world and fear that that abjection delivers a fatal blow to their lives. And so, from the cracks in the city, in that present that takes shape between the past and the future, they introduce themselves, they say “I am and I want.” If, as Bayat points out (2000), it is possible to identify “the quiet encroachment of the ordinary,” the power of this act of dreaming indisputably forms part of this complex fabric. Thus, on the basis of Deleuze’s understanding of the political as possibility, occurrence, and singularity, we suggest that these young people reside in the short circuits that open up toward the future. In this chapter, then, we intend to problematize the narratives of the future that these young people construct, narratives that constitute a political map that is drawn on the basis of lines of sedimentation that become lines of flight. We will focus on those subjects born in these neighborhoods, children of those who migrated here, of those with no place who found and forged a place for themselves in the slums. We will address those stories and narratives that render the city’s place of abjection a place in the world. These are populations that have been left to their own devices in the framework of management societies, young people who are well aware of the conditions in which they dream, well aware that that dream and its realization is, in and of itself, a line of force. It is in that sense that we formulate the question that gives origin to this chapter – “how to take flight from menacing futures?” – as the restless horizon in which that act of dreaming ensues.

Slums, urban assemblage, and future narratives in the you-can-do-it age Real history is, as Deleuze and Guattari point out (1973), the history of desire. These multiple histories can only be understood as lines that intersect where history is assembled, fractures, and divides. Stories of the future never cease to be those stories that are constituted in lines of forces that, since the end of the 20th century, are assembled in urban slums. It is not a question of context versus individuals. Returning to Anderson and McFarlane (2011), the notion of assemblage “appears

How to take flight from menacing futures?  175 as a specific form of relational thinking that attends to the agency of wholes and parts, not one or the other . . . thinking with assemblage is also in part about the play between stability and change, order and disruption” (p. 162). That means understanding that what we find in the life of subjects, institutions, and/or neighborhoods are modes of urban assemblage insofar as they are forms of arrangement but also of struggle. Slums in the second decade of the 21st century are sedimented realities characteristic of the accelerated growth and profound inequality of cities. Yet, that which is sedimented in the neighborhood becomes reassemblage, daily struggle for life, for making things better. We find, then, modalities of population government associated with the urban and territory, and with their flows, as well as struggles and counter-flows; the historical modalities of the exercise of power, lines of force associated with the conduct of conduct, the bio-politics of urban life as well lines of flight. At play, then, are lines of different natures, which break and change direction. As Legg states regarding the notions of apparatus (dispositif) and assemblage (2011): What we have in these two discussions is, then, an acknowledgement that apparatuses are etymologically and genealogically indissociable from regulation and government, but that their very multiplicity necessarily opens spaces of misunderstanding, resistance and flight. What we can also see, through the increasing exploration of the utility of assemblage theory, is that stability is assembled as much as destabilisation. Stuart Elden (2009, p. xxvii) stressed that, despite the common trend to associate globalisation with de-territorialisation, Deleuze and Guattari always stressed the ongoing and complex configuration of de- and re-territorialisation. (p. 131) The question of agency as well as the ways that that agency is enmeshed in the life of neighborhoods is crucial in contemporary societies from the perspective of both government and of counter-conducts. This is because in the age of management appeal to agency and self-governance is a sine qua non. In the case of the poorest neighborhoods, it is enmeshed in notions of abjection, empowerment, and self-esteem. Films like Slumdog Millionaire are clear examples of a narrative that wavers between nihilism and the “you-can-do-it” discourse of self-help. In these narratives, poverty is romanticized and voluntarism embodied in government programs and policies that address the resilience of subjects evaluated as suffering from low self-esteem in an explanation that only serves to blame the poor. As opposed to those who call for increased resilience, we believe that it takes enormous resilience not only to reproduce life in the slums every day but also to strive constantly to improve the neighborhood and the houses in it – an effort observed whenever one walks down the street in these neighborhoods. Rather than prepare subjects for that which, by definition, they already appear heartily prepared for, programs of this sort only serve to reterritorialize practices. Responsibility for the life of the neighborhood is then transferred onto individuals and/or the community, and young people are called on to take charge of their

176  Silvia Grinberg and Mercedes Machado fates; they are accused of a lack of will, of responsibility, and of confidence (Grinberg, 2008). Nonetheless, in the midst of the turbulence in which they live, these young people – though angry and even disenchanted – burst forth with desires for the future even though they are well aware of the obstacles those desires will face. And that is because that future in no way depends on their will. But, amongst these subjects the future itself, and the possibility of imagining it, acts as a force of resistance in the neighborhood. This population, these families, wants their children to attend school so that they “don’t have to go through what I went through.” School is the depositary of hope, the locus of a wish: “I hope my child finishes high school.” These young people are charged with the responsibility of making a tomorrow that does not necessarily mean leaving the neighborhood but does entail the promise of becoming someone. This is also the ground for these young people’s concern with the future – a constant concern, especially for those who attend school and think they can make it, but also for those who have dropped out but hope to go back to school. It is in the framework of this turbulence, the rhythmic insistence of waking dreams, the ground beneath our feet, that we speak of the variations or moments of life that involve cycles of transformation whose consistency and vectors make up an assemblage individual, family, group, project, workshop, society, institution (Guattari, 2013; Cole, 2014). It is in this sense, then, that, with Li (2014), we can understand “how assemblages are pulled together and made to cohere . . . [This] requires attending both to rationalities (what makes it rational to think in this way, to proceed in this manner) and to the work of assemblage, which involves managing fractures, dealing with incoherencies, and forging alignments” (p. 35). This is key to the daily study of these neighborhoods. If, when seen from above, life in slums might have a measure of coherence, when one is enmeshed in the daily life of these neighborhoods that coherence dissolves while jarring juxtapositions and the ungraspable gain ground. It is tempting, at first, to attempt to restore that seemingly lost coherence through analysis. Yet, we wager on other approaches. That inconsistency is more than a deviation that research must organize. To this, assemblage ethnographies (Youdell & McGimpsey, 2015) are key because those juxtapositions and that incoherence are not an accident but a modality of relations of force, of how subjects operate and construct themselves in that tension that can only be found on the ground. A thorough understanding of the flows that imply permanent assemblage and disassemblage would mean missing the opportunity to capture that tension. Finally, and briefly, the neighborhoods we address here are, as said above, at the “back” of the town of José León Suárez in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area. The limits of the neighborhood consist of urban barriers like train tracks and the stream that becomes zanjón – or drainage pipe – in the neighborhood (Grinberg, 2011). Living conditions include the outright lack or extreme irregularity of access to basic utilities like drinking water and sewage, trash collection, power lines, and so forth, as well as the improvised layout of streets/passageways. The area is vulnerable to flooding and subject to myriad environmental risks as

How to take flight from menacing futures?  177 the very ground people walk on consists of trash dumps and landfills. Toward the “back” of the shantytown there are more dirt roads, recreational spaces that exist alongside mounds – indeed sometimes mountains – of trash and a constant curtain of smoke from the burning of trash. The zanjón is just one of the many piped streams in Greater Buenos Aires into which the city’s sewage and waste are drained. When that piped stream reaches the neighborhood, it becomes zanjón, flooding whenever it rains. It is evident in the stories of these young people that these conditions – along with drug dealing and violent deaths – are among their chief concerns – keys to the possibility, or to the impossibility, of conquering the future.

Menacing futures and emerging flight It is important not to be seduced by the possibility of taking a static photo of the neighborhood and of those who live in it and, instead, to embark on a description of the stories of the future produced by those subjects in that context. As if delving into the lines of a rhizome (Deleuze, 2004b), we inquire about how these young people and their neighborhoods came into being and where they are heading in order to produce some sort of cartography, even though we recognize that that is an impossible task. Our inquiry, our question, but – in particular – the responses to it that speak of the future and of schooling in contexts of extreme urban poverty, involve that coming into being as well as creation and discontinuity. It is a question, then, of elevating the event, taking root in it and in a process of becoming aware of all its components and singularities. “Becoming isn’t a part of history,” it’s not history. “History amounts only [to] the set of preconditions, however recent, that one leaves behind in order to ‘become,’ that is, to create something new. This is precisely what Nietzsche calls the Untimely” (emphasis added) (Deleuze, 1993). That untimeliness is characteristic of stories of the future that undermine a linear, continuous, and homogenous conception of time. The idea of “forward” and “backward” grow blurry. In slums, we encounter that which becomes, that which escapes the linear and progressive logic of time. There is not necessarily an end or a final cause, and it is in that crack in linear time that the future opens up. These young people rupture a teleological logic that supposes an origin and an end, a point of departure and a destination (Deleuze, 1980b) as they envision a hereafter beyond dichotomies and binary logics, a hereafter that ensues in multiplicity, perhaps because that rupture offers the greatest possibility for something different to ensue. Just as all things and people are composed of lines of diverse natures (Deleuze, 1980b) with varying thickness, intensity, texture, and trajectory, the stories of the future that take shape in these urban spaces are enmeshed in a context characterized by discontinuity, rupture, the unexpected. In these urban spaces left to their own devices (Grinberg, 2011), the future comes onto the scene as the possibility of flight from the menacing living conditions that beset both a sedimented past and a future that threatens to repeat itself.

178  Silvia Grinberg and Mercedes Machado That flight does not mean inaction – “there is nothing more active than flight. It is also to put to flight – not necessarily others but to put something to flight, to put a system to flight as one bursts a tube [. . .] To fly is to trace a line, lines, a whole cartography. One only discovers world through a long broken flight” (Deleuze & Parnet, 2007, p. 27). And, most likely, that is what these young people enact or, rather, struggle to enact. We will now present some of the forms of this future.

The future and its forms The future as told by these young people seems shrouded in layers of fabric that expose fears of what’s to come, the menace of what has already been experienced, and the possibility of creating something different. These young people neither stop dreaming nor imagine a romantic future; they do not deny the poverty and inequality that besets them and they condemn the social injustice in which they live. The place that their neighborhood occupies in the city is not a minor piece of information. The fact of becoming a subject, of being a young person in a shantytown, is enmeshed in a fabric woven by the state of exception, menace, and fear, but also affirmation and desire for the future. The neighborhood: between past and future At the very place where contamination, poverty, and the abject vision would seem to prohibit anything from living or desiring, at the very place where the present, but also the future, is condemned, we find subjects that dream. The conditions surrounding life in these urban spaces becomes central when questions of tomorrow – a tomorrow steeped in “todays,” a tomorrow that approaches the horizon of the present but is not tied to the present – are asked. These images of the future are produced at the intersection of the question of today – the here and now – and of the doubt incited by the possibility of looking if only slightly beyond. The question, for these young people, lies in the ability to combine and playfully arrange different timeframes and to envision the future from current conditions without being overwhelmed by those conditions: How do you get that kid to start thinking? His brother cries all day, his mother screams at him, another guy doesn’t have anything to eat, his brother’s in jail. What’s he supposed to do? How do you make that kid reflect? To think seriously about things, goals? It’s not easy. How to get him to sit down and concentrate? To think for a while, to touch the ground. Because his surroundings lead him [ . . . ] the way the system works, the way society is put together . . . pot on every corner, pills and coke out back. Every time he wants to focus on something, something happens. (Interview with a neighbor, age 25, 2012) Though still young, this neighbor speaks like an adult of that which menaces. The act of imagining is ambushed by a present and by an ever-present past. In thinking

How to take flight from menacing futures?  179 of the future, the past threatens to repeat itself; the sedimented, the history, and the present of the neighborhood become difficult to negotiate. At the same time, the future presents so many questions, fears, and uncertainty. Like an expedition into unexplored lands, the task of conquering the future leads these young people to seek refuge in firm ground – a strategy to approach silently the place to be designed: Sure, we may be saying now that we’re going to go to college, but later when we’re older we’ll be in the street. I’ve heard so many people, so many kids, say that they were going to stay in school, but they never had the chance. Their parent walked out on them, they started taking drugs, whatever. And now they’re in the street. They can’t afford school supplies and stuff like that. I mean, tomorrow I may not be able to afford to go to school and I might be on the street asking for spare change. (Interview at school with a female student, age 16, 2011) At play are two forces: first, the menacing possibility of repetition, of coming against that which – as the neighbor points out – impedes focus; second, the also menacing possibility of dreaming. The complexity of these stories, of their plots, stops short any possible dichotomous reading that wavers between romantic optimism and nihilistic fatalism. Live in the present or venture to think deliberately about the future. While the phrases “I don’t think about that,” “I live in the present,” and “what do I know about tomorrow?” are heard again and again beyond the confines of these urban spaces as well, they have a particular resonance here. At stake is a sort of presentification that urges us to live for today. For these young people, that is a line of flight. To live in the present is not to have a future, and the future is what must be conquered. When these young people speak of the present, they immediately refer to the future and to the immediate past and the suffering it has brought. They express the desire to have what they have never had but they also – indeed principally – express prudence. They desire from the place of a present that does not ignore the past and that recognizes, quite directly, just where they stand since, though very young, these students have experienced very painful and traumatic situations. So, they are prudent. In their lived conditions, they hope. From a place in the city that is, by definition, dubious, they desire and imagine the future: What future do you see for yourself? A nice one. I mean, I’m not going to imagine a horrible future . . . (laughs) I’ve been through enough to imagine a bad future. [. . .] I want a house and family of my own. I’ve never had a house – well, I did have one, but not anymore. When my grandma died that house was going to go to me but my dad didn’t take care of the house or of me. But I don’t want to think about that. It was awful. (Interview with female high school student, age 17, 2013)

180  Silvia Grinberg and Mercedes Machado They are aware that they have to imagine other futures for themselves and that those other futures are dubious. The present, on the other hand, is something to wager on. “Who I am” is enmeshed with “Who I want to be”: I used the word “future” because I want to have a future. I used the image of the earth and the word “earth” because it’s our planet and we have to take care of it. I used the word “success” because I want to be successful in the future. (Interview with a male student, age 16, 2011) So here, as on so many other occasions, these young people affirm their desires and dreams. They do not retreat into the impossibilities of where they were born, but rather struggle to conquer that which seems if not denied outright, at least undermined. That is why these young people’s desires and dreams often take center stage when they introduce themselves. In the words at the beginning of this chapter, for instance, the explanation of “who I am” merges with “where I am from”: We dream . . . about traveling, going to school wherever we want, sailing, driving around in a car, having a house of our own, studying with all our might. We would like everyone to have a smile on their face every day. We want to live in José León Suarez, for it to be a nicer place. We think about the difficulties facing the planet. (Group introduction, 2011) What we come upon, albeit with vacillations, are stories that elude nihilist explanations and apocalyptic visions. The students’ expressions contain the sedimented, but also fractured, history that left their parents and, in many cases, their grandparents living in a shantytown that is now their neighborhood, their home, their place. But their stories contain as well lines that entail the configuration of life in large metropolises in the second decade of the 21st century and third generations of residents with desires and plans about how they want to live. There are those who left their place (these young people’s parents and grandparents) and, along with these young people, found in that space a place. These are the words of those who have heard their parents and grandparents explain how, decades ago, this now overpopulated neighborhood was a grassland, a swamp. For those who live here, that land has become their territory, a place that they know exists in the state of exception implicit to living in the borders – both literal and symbolical – of the city.

Beyond voluntarism and self-help Sometimes the perplexity of what the future may hold is at the center of the stories these young people tell. To envision the future in these contexts also implies the sense of “I don’t know,” that is, the uncertainties, insecurities, concerns, and doubts implicit to imagining what will happen in places beset by the urgent need to tackle present difficulties: finding work and enough to eat, access to clean drinking water, making an appointment at the public hospital, handling the rain and the

How to take flight from menacing futures?  181 flooding and mud it brings, to say nothing of shootouts. Nonetheless, that “I don’t know” is not a simple “I don’t want.” These young people manage to give meaning to the impossibility of prediction and the despondency that that provokes, turning it into a present rich with the future: •

I say “right on,” “I like that,” I say this, that, and the other but who knows what tomorrow may bring, where I may end up, right? I might not have enough money to pay for school supplies and stuff [. . .] that’s why I don’t get too interested, that’s why I just sit back and listen. I have seen people, kids, that say, that have said, that they are going to stay in school to become, let’s say, a teacher or whatever, and when they grow up they are living on the street or something. • So you would like to, but you’re afraid to get your hopes up. • Exactly. (Interview with female student, age 16, 2011) While that “I don’t know” does not deny the possibility of dreaming, it recognizes from whence, from what place, that dreaming takes place. These young people know that living in these neighborhoods can cost you your life, and the future is conquered in the neighborhood, despite its mud and muck. The phrase “this is now” becomes a strategy for survival and struggle. These young people situate themselves beyond narratives of emancipation and romantic utopias while also contesting logics of management and empowerment. They know that neither their present nor their past depends on their will. They are fully aware of where they live and desire. They build a present rich in dreams and projects and, on that basis, they develop other ways of envisioning their emerging subjectivity in these urban spaces. These students elude the “you-can-do-it” discourses that demand that they – as subjects accessed as having poor self-esteem – develop greater willpower, resilience, and empowerment. These young people take distance as well from the abject vision cast on them as they formulate a political reading of the urban space, of how the shantytown – and they as the subjects who live in it – took shape in the global south. In addition to knowing full well what it means to live there, they know that what they are, want, and can be, ensues in that setting. While walking with us through downtown Buenos Aires, two young women from the shantytown said in reference to two other young women of the same age but from another neighborhood, “Check them out. There might not be much difference now, but in a few years, we are going to be complete wrecks.” There is no resentment, denial, or despondency. There is just – perhaps wrenchingly – recognition that, due to the lines of force that assemble that political map that is both individual and social, their bodies will age more quickly and ruinously than others. Many of the students interviewed in 2011 are now mothers. They have left school, but they still think in terms of the future – now the possible future of their children: “I want to finish school. I want a future for my daughter” (Interview with female student, age 18, 2015).

182  Silvia Grinberg and Mercedes Machado That daydreaming (Bloch, 2004) is not romantic and it by no means conceals the scant possibilities afforded by the context in which these young people live and study. They dream of finishing high school in order to be and to have, and then they’ll figure it out. That desire to have is steeped in their personal backgrounds. Both the past and the future threaten in that act of desiring. Suffering, going hungry, being cold, is what incites them to dream without forgetting the risks that they run. • •

Do you think about the future? About what I want to be? Or what I want to have? Yes, I think about it, often. I think about it and I dream about it. But it’s like . . . Sometimes I dream and I just fly away, leave everything behind. But not really. I dream about it, I think about it, but until I finish high school [. . .] For now, my goal is to finish high school [.  .  .] I don’t know, so much is going to happen. [. . .] To keep getting better and better. (Interview with female student, age 17, 2013)

They can say what they want today, but tomorrow may bring something else. They know that the logic of hard work and the will to get ahead is only part of what it takes to get the focus of which the neighbor spoke above. They are prudent when they desire, which does not mean they stop desiring. They are not naïve. They have their feet on the ground. It is not low self-esteem but, rather, very high self-esteem that allows them to dare to imagine what they hope to have. In fact, it is thanks to a strengthened sense of self that they keep desiring, fighting for that place for themselves and for their children. It would seem, then, that only through awareness of how difficult the road is can they, disenchanted as they are, construct their hopes: • •

What do you mean that you’ll “do whatever comes your way”? Whatever comes my way, whatever crops up, I’ll do whatever. I hope to finish high school because some people say [she changes her tone of voice], “I’m going to be a lawyer” but end up cleaning houses or whatever. Let’s say I’m going to be a lawyer when I get older and all that [she changes her tone of voice] and they end up mopping floors. I don’t know, I hope to finish high school and then do whatever. I don’t like saying what I’m going to do, I’m going to finish high school and do whatever comes my way. (Interview female student, age 16, 2013)

The disenchantment that often makes itself felt in these words is the result of having seen too much which, in turn, means that, at the age of eighteen, these young people are no longer young. What emerges, then, is a melancholy awareness that the world can, at times, be enchanting, and that makes disenchantment an oxymoron. The disenchantment that inhabits and runs through the stories of the future that take shape in these urban spaces both rectifies utopia and reinforces its basic element – hope – such that that hope becomes ironic, melancholy, and hardened.

How to take flight from menacing futures?  183 A way of existing, of thinking, and of dreaming, then, formulates another vision of the slums, one that escapes management logics and tips on how to live in these neighborhoods. These young people, students, have experienced too much life, and they know it. On the basis of that experience and knowledge, they rise up to conquer a future as threatening as the past. And school plays a key role in this struggle.

School as future possibility Narratives of the future are multiple; they have a range of meanings and combine an array of elements.7 At times they seem ungraspable, and they are more a silent plurality than major events (Deleuze, 1986). In any case, schools – despite the bad press they get – play a key role in these narratives. The students interviewed go straight to the point when they speak of why they go to school, what they get out of it, and the role it plays in their lives. • • •

I go to school to learn. [. . .] School opens a lot of doors. I like going to school. What do you think school is good for? To get an education, knowledge, to be free. Because if you don’t have an education and knowledge, you aren’t anybody in society. You’re nobody. You have to have knowledge, I think, otherwise anybody can come along and stomp on you. That’s the way it is. School teaches you to face life. It teaches you how to defend yourself. How to be someone. (Interview with a female student, age 17, 2013)

To be someone is, sometimes, to have – things, brands, luxury, and money. In the now classic conceptions of human capital, there is an indivisible link between education, income, and progress. The notion of employability held in such esteem at present has revitalized those ideas. Even though in many cases these students desire things, school represents something else; how to think, defend yourself, choose, among other things. Not swayed by romantic images, these young people know that to want and to be able are by no means one and the same. In any case, and beyond instrumental logic, school is envisioned and valued as a space that opens up other possibilities. It is the place from which to move ahead and to find a place in present society while also eluding predictions that condemn these young people to live in an eternal present. On the basis of this conception, the future becomes a space to be conquered, and these young people devise strategies that include school and education, straining the utilitarian logic and imagining other possibilities for themselves and their futures. None of these students go to school without harboring a hope, without the belief that something can happen to them there, without commitment to what they are doing there. • •

Does school have to do with your future? Yes, because thanks to school I may be able to have a house one day, to become what I will be one day [. . .] Thanks to school, I may be able to have everything I mentioned. That’s why I stay in school. And

184  Silvia Grinberg and Mercedes Machado because I like it. [. . .] It’s nice to be able to communicate with people, to know things, to learn from others and for others to learn from you. (Interview with female student, age 17, 2013) This student starts out talking about what she is going to have, but she is soon talking about the value of communicating, of learning, of having knowledge, and of offering the school and her neighborhood a way of thinking; her discourse, then, alters the way we are used to thinking about these neighborhoods. An excess takes the shape of a divide and reassemblage in what she says. While reassemblages may not be radical acts (Youdell & McGimpsey, 2015), they are small daily conquests, key to the life of students and, of course, to these neighborhoods. This is the “quiet encroachment” of which Bayat speaks.

Closing reflections In conjunction with the growth of megacities and of slums, the 20th century witnessed the revitalization of narratives that associate those zones of the metropolis with crime and degradation as well as narratives that attempt to demonstrate that honorable, decent, hardworking people live in slums. The film Slumdog Millionaire constitutes one of the most precise examples of this tension: in the midst of the slum of a megacity where children are condemned to live in contexts riddled with thugs, trash, and pollution, the hero emerges. Despite the deplorable conditions in which he is born, he manages to make something of himself. That narrative structure expresses, and not without complexity, how we see these neighborhoods. At both poles of these lines of enunciation, individuals are deemed responsible for their fate: one is responsible for becoming a criminal or for becoming a success, a hero. In both cases, a no longer so sui generis ethics founded on the notion that “you can be who you want to be” is at work. Despite apparent differences, both possibilities are based on the idea of resilience as means to appeal to the agency of subjects and of neighborhoods that, in fact, only exist by virtue of the very resilience that is called for. Roy (2011) asserts that subaltern urbanism is an important paradigm “to confer recognition on spaces of poverty and forms of popular agency that often remain invisible and neglected in the archives and annals of urban theory.” (p. 224) This entails “[writing] against apocalyptic and dystopian narratives of the slum that provides accounts of the slum as a terrain of habitation, livelihood and politics.” We find something of that subaltern urbanism when these young people speak of their lives as enmeshed in the fabric of their neighborhood. But, as pointed out above, there is something else at play. In times of such discontent and disconcertion, times where we have so few points of reference, everything is unsettling. These times are overwhelming and the present often crushing. Envisioning the future can provide a means of escape, a way out, a form of flight, in the construction of new references for a world where there are none. In this framework, we have questioned the visions cast on young people in general, but mostly those who live in contexts of urban poverty. Nihilism does

How to take flight from menacing futures?  185 not mean not-being, but rather valuelessness (Deleuze, 1986). The supersensible world and higher values are reacted, their existence is denied, they are refused all validity (Deleuze, 1986). As Bloch points out (2004), against all static and vacuous nihilism one must insist that nothingness is also a utopian category, albeit an extremely anti-utopian one. Heretofore, the only form of utopia recognized has been social utopia. This has meant, as Augé points out (2012), that the concept of utopia has become too narrow, too abstract and arbitrary, and unduly confined to the political. While utopia, like apocalypse, is usually conceived as outcome, there are many reasons to think otherwise. Apocalypse, in Greek, means revelation and discovery, not catastrophe, destruction, or downfall. The common definition supposes a linear conception of time where a beginning flows to an ending. That Judeo-Christian image of time contrasts with a cyclical notion of time as repeating and returning (Magris, 2001). According to that logic, disenchantment is understood as a reason not to want to change the world. Notwithstanding, Don Quijote needs Sancho Panza and vice versa (Magris, 2001). The stories of the future described here resist and defend both utopia and disenchantment as trench. Utopia is not, in these narratives, a naïve or optimistic affirmation of an ideal future, but rather a projection from a present that incites disenchantment and dissatisfaction. Like other questions that, at times, are impossible to address with everyday language and hence circulate in silence, the future can only be put into words between utopia and disenchantment, between rage and illusion, between hope and hopelessness . . . “On lines of flight there can no longer be but one thing, lifeexperimentation. One never knows in advance since one no longer has future or past. ‘See me as I am,’ all that stuff is over. There is no longer a phantasm, but only programs of life, always modified in the process of coming into being, betrayed in the process of being hollowed out, like banks which are disposed or canal that are arranged in order that a flow may flow [. . .] Programs are not manifestos – still less are they phantasms, but means of providing reference points to an experiment which exceeds out capacities to foresee” (emphasis added) (Deleuze, 2007, pp. 47–48). The stories of the future discussed here evidence emerging subjectivity in slums of the global south. They escape from both nihilism and the “you-can-do-it” discourse that demands resilience and self-esteem, naturalizing poverty and blaming the poor for their circumstances. This urban space that ensues in a state of exception, in life on the borders of the urban, takes shape between menace and protection. The future is always in a state of tension due to the past and the present. Taking flight into the future sometimes entails dwelling on the present, touching ground in it. In these tensions, students assemble other ways for shantytowns – and themselves as subjects living in them – to come into being.

Notes 1 see among others Global Future 2045, International congress http://gf2045.com/ 2 The word future council is an NGO that present itself as guardian for future generations, see more at www.worldfuturecouncil.org/english.html 3 See Futures Research Quarterly, Research Committee on Futures Research RC07 (www. isa-sociology.org/rc07.htm)

186  Silvia Grinberg and Mercedes Machado 4 Texts like those by Adorno (1973) on the impossibility of writing poetry or of educating after Auschwitz are fundamental to this concern. 5 The prophet, for Deleuze (2004a), is the one who complains about what is happening to him, who is filled with sorrow and not always certain what to say. 6 Locke, Kant, Rousseau, Condorcet, Durkheim, as well as Latin American authors like Sarmiento have, among so many others, envisioned education as the path to improve society and procure progress. 7 “There is no event, no phenomenon, word or thought which does not have a multiple sense. A thing is sometimes this, sometimes that, sometimes something more complicated . . .” (Deleuze, 1986, p. 4).

References Anderson, B., & McFarlane, C. (2011). Special Issue: Assemblage and geography. Area, 43(2), 124–127. Achankeng, E. (2003). Globalization, urbanization and municipal solid waste management in Africa. African studies association of Australasia and the Pacific 2003 Conference Proceedings – African on a Global Stage 1. Adorno, T. (1973). La educación después de Auschwitz, en Consignas, Amorrortu, Buenos Aires. Arabindoo, P. (2014). Urban design in the realm of urban studies. In M. Carmona (Ed.), Explorations in urban design: An urban design research primer. London: Ashgate. Augé, M. (2012). Futuro. Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo Editora. Bayat, A. (2000). From ‘dangerous classes’ to ‘quiet rebels’: The politics of the urban subaltern in the global South. International Sociology, 15(3), 533–557. Bloch, E. (2004). El principio esperanza I. Madrid: Editorial Trotta. Cole, D. (2014). Strange assemblage. Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, 11(2), 1–17. Deleuze, G. (1980a). Flammarion. Pre-Textos, Valencia, España. Deleuze, G. (1980b). Mil mesetas Traducción: José Vázquez Pérez con la colaboración de Umbelina iarraceleta. Pre-Textos, Valencia, España. Deleuze, G. (1986). Nietzsche y la filosofía. Barcelona: Anagrama. Deleuze, G. (1989). Périclès et Verdi (La philosophie de François Châtelet), Minuit, París, 1988, pp. 19–20; trad. de U. Larraceleta y J. Vázquez, Pre-textos, Valencia, 1989, pp. 19–21. Deleuze, G. (1993). Entrevista. Magazín Dominical. Nro. 511 Dossier Deleuze-Guattari, febrero 7 de 1993, pp. 14–18. Traducción: Edgar Garavito. Versión francesa disponible en:http://lesilencequiparle.unblog.fr/2009/03/07/controle-et-devenir-gilles-deleuze-entretienavec-toni-negri/ Deleuze, G. (2004a). L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, by Pierre-André Boutang, interview with Claire Parnet. Paris: Éditions Montparnasse. Deleuze, G. (2004b). Desert Island and other texts (1953–1974). New York: Semiotext(e). Titulo de la edición original en lengua francesa: Dialogues. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1973). Antiedipo, capitalismo y esquizofrenia. Barcelona: Traducción de Francisco Monge. Deleuze, G., & Parnet, C. (2007). Dialogues II. New York: Columbia University Press. Grinberg, S. (2008). Educación y poder en el siglo XXI. Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila. Grinberg, S. (2010). Schooling and desiring production in contexts of extreme urban poverty. Everyday banality in a documentary by students: Between the trivial and the extreme. Gender and Education, 22(6), 663–678.

How to take flight from menacing futures?  187 Grinberg, S.M. (2011), Territories of schooling and schooling territories in contexts of extreme urban poverty in Argentina: Between management and abjection. Emotion, Space and Society, doi:10.1016/j.emospa.2011.01.001 Grinberg, S. (2013). Researching the pedagogical apparatus: An ethnography of the molar, molecular and desire in contexts of extreme urban poverty. In R. Coleman & J. Ringrose (Ed.), Deleuze and research methodologies (pp. 201–218). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Guattari, F. (2013). Líneas de Fuga. Por otro mundo de Posibles. Editorial Cactus: Buenos Aires. Hickey-Moody, A. (2013). Youth, arts, and education: Reassembling subjectivity through affect. New York: Routledge. Legg, S. (2011). Assemblage/apparatus: Using Deleuze and Foucault. Area, 43(2), 128–133. Li, T. (2014). Fixing non-market subjects: Governing land and population in the global south. Foucault Studies, 18, 34–48. Magris, C. (2001). Utopía y desencanto. Historias, esperanzas e ilusiones de la modernidad. Barcelona, España: Editorial Anagrama. McFarlane, C. (2011). Assemblage and critical urbanism. City, 15(2), 204–224. PrevotSchapira, M. F. (2001). Buenos Aires: métropolisation et nouvel ordre politique. Hérodote, 101(2), 122–152. Roy, A. (2011). Slumdog cities: Rethinking subaltern urbanism. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 35(2), 223–238. Stuart, E. (2009). Terror and territory: The spatial extent of sovereignty. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Youdell, D., & McGimpsey, I. (2015). Assembling, disassembling and reassembling “youth services” in Austerity Britain. Critical Studies in Education, 56(1), 116–130.

15 Chronic and concentrated youth joblessness in disassembled neighborhoods in Chicago Teresa L. Córdova and Matthew D. Wilson

Introduction The dynamics of global restructuring that followed the economic crisis of the mid-1970s were driven by “a new regime of corporate and government policies and practices” that “sought to enhance the profitability of investments and growth, expand markets, control the circulation of capital and ensure minimal regulation” (Córdova, 2016, p. 62). Shifts in the production process, the changing role of the state and the expanded scope of internationalized economic activities were quickly reflected in organizational structures and increasingly in the range of social relations (Castells, 1989). Along with creating massive unemployment, these policies and practices exacerbated, across the globe, disparities in wealth and the control of and access to resources (Gamble, 2014). The reverberations were felt in neighborhoods and households in cities like Chicago, whose economy had been built around industrial manufacturing and whose neighborhoods reflected the culture of the surrounding mills and factories. This chapter describes the flight of industry from many of Chicago’s neighborhoods and the lingering effects of this latest phase of economic restructuring (often referred to as neoliberalism), with an emphasis on youth joblessness. The depths of disintegration due to joblessness, we argue, must be understood as the backdrop for the gun violence, loss of population, and near despair plaguing neighborhoods that are suffering the pains of economic abandonment most severely. While efforts exist to address joblessness and provide wrap-around services, a much more concerted effort is required to rebuild neighborhoods wrought by the lingering effects of forty years of economic restructuring.

Job loss and lower wages Central to these economic changes was the primacy and flexibility of capital to be increasingly mobile. Enhanced by technological advances, industries restructured, accompanied, most typically, by expansive job loss. In the 1970s, for example, estimates of job loss to capital mobility were 30 million, combined with the 15–20

Youth joblessness in Chicago  189 million lost in the 1980s (Ranney, 2003, p. 44). Deindustrialization of the U.S. economy and the parallel attack on labor “contributed to the lowering of global social wage” (Ranney, 2003, p. 44). Manufacturing jobs that paid $18.96/hour were reduced to $1.54 for the Mexican worker when jobs moved south of the border (Ranney, 2003, p. 44). Parallel to the decline of employment in the manufacturing sector (29 percent of all U.S. jobs to 19 percent), service sector jobs increased from 42 percent to 54 percent of all jobs (Bluestone & Harrison, 1982). High paying manufacturing jobs were replaced with low wage, less stable, service sector jobs. These low wage jobs, however, provided little opportunity for upward mobility. Unemployment rates, which only include those actively seeking work, were higher than in previous decades. Large numbers of workers were laid off or forced to part-time work while wages continued to be slashed. Contrary to claims, flexibility of wage structures did not preserve employment in the U.S. during the 1970s (Bel & Freman, 1985). Job loss and reduced wages were inherent to the reshaped globalized economy. Simultaneously, these disassembling effects were devastating for those who lost jobs and wages. Industrial centers experienced decline and even decay. While some rust belt regions have seen some economic rebound, although often with disparate benefits, entrenched joblessness remains visible in many neighborhoods that are relics of a once vibrant era. Chicago is a city where the dynamics of deindustrialization reflect “processes of disassembling at the local level that create spaces and societies in constant crisis” (Chapter 1 in this volume). It is also “a tale of two cities,” where parts of Chicago, particularly the downtown area (The Loop) and its surrounding neighborhoods are in stark contrast to severely disinvested areas to the south and west. This is evident when we view neighborhoods where the grandchildren of factory workers face conditions of economic abandonment and social disintegration and where pathways for participation in the changing economy are not readily available. This chapter draws upon research from the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago (Córdova & Wilson, 2016a, 2016b, 2017a, 2017b) to highlight the crisis of chronic and concentrated conditions of joblessness among teens and young adults in Chicago that has persisted for generations and worsened since the 2008 recession. The pervasive violence in many of those neighborhoods speaks to the crisis and serves as an urgent call to action to address a set of problems that stem from the “disassembling effects” of forty years of economic restructuring.

The disappearance of work and the disassembled neighborhood In 1987, William Julius Wilson, in his book on urban poverty, The Truly Disadvantaged, called attention to the conditions for Blacks in the urban economy and the “deterioration of their economic position” (p. 42), which was visible in

190  Teresa L. Córdova and Matthew D. Wilson the downward trend in employment for Blacks, especially males, who “began dropping out of the labor force in increasing numbers as early as 1965” (p. 43). Describing the “severity of joblessness among younger blacks” (p. 43), Wilson was already calling attention to the “problem of joblessness for young black men that has reached catastrophic proportions” (p. 43). Wilson continued his research on employment conditions for Blacks in urban areas. In the mid-1990s, in The Disappearance of Work (1996, 1999), he described inner-city neighborhoods where most adults were not working. Focusing on Chicago neighborhoods with predominantly Black populations, he asserts, The consequences of high neighborhood joblessness are more devastating than those of high neighborhood poverty. A neighborhood in which people are poor but employed is different from a neighborhood in which people are poor and jobless. Many of today’s problems in the inner-city ghetto neighborhoods – crime, family dissolution, welfare, low levels of social organization, and so on – are fundamentally a consequence of the disappearance of work. (1996, p. xiii) Using data from three research projects at the University of Chicago Center for the Study of Urban Inequality, e.g. Urban Poverty and Family Life Study, Wilson described the disintegration of the social fabric of the neighborhoods along with constraints on households and individuals due to joblessness. Despite – or perhaps because of – the severity of the conditions he described, Wilson urged a strategy that was transracial and built on common values of “intergroup harmony and unity” to pull together people within the U.S. to pursue their common interests to tackle issues such as “unemployment and job security, declining real wages, escalating medical and housing costs, the scarcity of childcare programs, the sharp decline in the quality of public education, and the toll of crime and drug trafficking in all neighborhoods” (1996, pp. xxi–xxii). When Wilson conducted his studies, there had already been twenty years of deindustrialization in the Chicago region with hundreds of thousands of jobs lost with some workers never returning to the workforce (Bluestone & Harrison, 1982; Ranney, 2003). Twenty years after Wilson’s book on the disappearance of work, many, if not most of the neighborhoods that he wrote about continue to face the same conditions of social disintegration associated with widespread joblessness. Chicago is continuously plagued with long-term conditions of chronic, concentrated and deeply entrenched joblessness among many of its Black and to some extent Latino teens and young adults, many of whom grow up in households and neighborhoods where adults were not employed in the formal labor sector.

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Chronic and concentrated joblessness amidst the flight of industry In 2016, reports from the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago brought attention to the “chronic, concentrated and comparatively worse” conditions of joblessness among teens and young adults in Chicago neighborhoods with high concentrations of Blacks and Latinos (Córdova & Wilson, 2016a, 2016b). Figures (including employment to population ratios) were calculated starting with 2005 for several geographies, both within and outside of Chicago. Among the most startling numbers was that in 2014, nearly half of African American men in Chicago ages 20–24 were neither working nor in school (ElejaldeRuiz, 2016). In some neighborhoods that number was even higher. The dramatic figures conveyed an urgency to address these conditions. Front-page articles in the Chicago Tribune, editorials in the New York Times and Chicago Tribune and countless television, radio, print and digital media expressed concern for the “staggering” numbers. In Chicago, as elsewhere, the crisis of permanent joblessness is concentrated in minority neighborhoods where it feeds street violence, despondency, health problems and a socially corrosive brand of hopelessness among the young. The problem extracts a heavy social cost in those neighborhoods and threatens the viability of entire cities (New York Times Sunday Editorial, February 20, 2016). In January 2017, the Great Cities Institute produced “Abandoned in their Neighborhoods: Youth Joblessness amidst the Flight of Industry and Opportunity” (Córdova & Wilson, 2017a). Still highlighting the “chronic and concentrated” nature of joblessness among young people in Chicago, tracing the numbers to 1960, the report showed the steady decline of employment, especially for Blacks and Latinos, that was made worse by the 2008 recession. Disparities in joblessness figures are directly related to racial segregation; is comparatively worse in Chicago than in Illinois as a whole, the U.S., Los Angeles or New York; and cannot be seen apart from what is happening in the neighborhoods where the jobless youth live. The report showed that joblessness in Chicago persisted in 2015, was comparatively worse than in Illinois, and the U.S., and was particularly high for young Black men and women. For 16 to 19 and 20 to 24-year-olds, jobless rates in Chicago were higher than in Illinois and the U.S. in 2015. For 16 to 19-year-olds, Chicago’s jobless rate of 81.3 percent compared to 69.9 percent in Illinois and 69.7 percent in the U.S. For 20 to 24-year-olds, Chicago’s jobless rate of 41.2 percent was higher than in Illinois (34.4) and the U.S. (34.0). Among racial/ethnic groups, the starkest contrast in jobless rates were seen in Black (non-Hispanic or Latino) 20 to 24-year-old men and women in Chicago, who had higher jobless rates compared to males in New York City, Los Angeles, Illinois and the U.S. in 2015. Black (non-Hispanic or Latino) 20 to 24-year-old women in Chicago had a jobless rate of 60.4 percent compared to 44.7 percent in

192  Teresa L. Córdova and Matthew D. Wilson New York City and Los Angeles, 50.9 percent in Illinois, and 38.3 percent in the U.S. in 2015. For males in 2015, Black (non-Hispanic or Latino) 20 to 24-yearolds in Chicago had a jobless rate of 60 percent compared to 50.3 percent in New York City, 48.4 percent in Los Angeles, 51.6 percent in Illinois, and 45.2 percent in the U.S. Rates of joblessness in 2015 reflected a long-term trend, made worse by the Great Recession. Examining jobless rates over a fifty-five-year span from 1960 to 2015 showed jobless rates for 20 to 24-year-olds were higher in Chicago in 2015 compared to 1960. In Illinois and the U.S., this trend is reversed, where rates were lower in 2015 than in 1960. Examining jobless rates by race/ethnicity for 16 to 19-year-olds showed that the Great Recession severely impacted Black (non-Hispanic or Latino), White (non-Hispanic or Latino) and Hispanic or Latinos in Chicago, Illinois and the U.S. but had the largest impacts in Chicago. Even after a period of recovery after the Great Recession from 2010 to 2015, White (non-Hispanic or Latino), Black (non-Hispanic or Latino) and Latino 16 to 19-year-olds in Chicago, Illinois and the U.S. had employment to population ratios lower than pre-recession levels. While Black and White 16 to 19-year-olds showed some recovery, Latinos in Chicago were the only racial/ethnic group of 16 to 19-year-olds that did not show any recovery after the recession, continuing to decline after 2010. Comparing the rate of 16 to 19 and 20 to 24-year-olds who were out of work and out of school in 2015 in Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, Illinois and the U.S., Chicago had the highest percentage of total population and highest percentage of Black (non-Hispanic or Latino) 16 to 19 and 20 to 24-year-olds out of work and out of school. In Chicago, 12.9 percent of Black (non-Hispanic or Latino) 16 to 19-year-olds were out of work and out of school compared to 8.2 percent of Hispanic or Latinos and 6.3 percent of Whites (non-Hispanic or Latino). For 20 to 24-year-olds, out of school and out of work rates for Black (non-Hispanic or Latino) 20 to 24-year-olds was 39.1 percent compared to 20.8 percent for Hispanic or Latinos and 6.9 percent of Whites. Separating by genders, Black (non-Hispanic or Latino) 20 to 24-year-old males in Chicago fared worse than all other groups in New York City, Los Angeles, Illinois and the U.S. in out of school, out of work rates with 42.8 percent of Black males being out of school and out of work in 2015. Examining out of school and out of work rates by gender for 20 to 24-year-olds in Chicago from 1960 to 2015 shows that rates for males increased substantially, while rates for females decreased substantially over the fifty-five-year period. For 20 to 24-year-old males in 1960, 22.3 percent of Black (non-Hispanic or Latino), 9.6 percent of Hispanic or Latino and 7.3 percent of White (non-Hispanic or Latino) males were out of work and out of school. Fifty-five years later, in 2015, all groups had increased rates, with 42.8 percent of Black (non-Hispanic or Latino), 17.6 percent of Hispanic or Latino males and 8.5 percent of White (non-Hispanic or Latino) males being out of work and out of school. During this period, females showed decreasing out of work and out of school rates. In 1960, 60.6 percent of Hispanic or Latino females, 57.1 percent of Black (non-Hispanic or

Youth joblessness in Chicago  193 Latino) females and 14.7 percent of White (non-Hispanic or Latino) females were out of work and out of school in 1960. By 2015, rates for each group decreased, when 35.6 percent of Black (non-Hispanic or Latino), 24.3 percent of Hispanic or Latino and 5.3 of White (non-Hispanic or Latino) females were out of school and out of work. The Great Cities Institute’s 2017 report “dramatically reveals a downward and long-term trend of economic abandonment in many of Chicago’s neighborhoods, leaving behind chronic and concentrated conditions of joblessness that have affected generations of young people” (p. 55). Although the impacts of the “Great Recession” are evident in the numbers and may suggest that the residues may be felt for a long time to come, joblessness in Chicago is systemic and tied to changes in manufacturing. Manufacturing was a significant part of Chicago’s economy in 1960, employing 57.8 percent of working Hispanic or Latino 20 to 24-year-olds, 35 percent of Whites (non-Hispanic or Latinos) and 29.6 percent of Blacks (non- Hispanic or Latino). A continuous downward trend from 1960 to 2015 left just 10.2 percent of working 20 to 24-yearold Hispanic or Latinos in manufacturing and just 2.9 percent of both Black and White 20 to 24-year-olds. The subsequent decline indicates that Chicago’s large manufacturing sector was hit harder by the decline in manufacturing than the U.S. In Chicago, the decline in manufacturing resulted in an economy with large retail trade and professional and related services sectors – both of which, in 2015 paid lower wages to 20 to 24-year-olds than manufacturing did in 1960. For Blacks and Latinos, their percentage decline in manufacturing is paralleled in their percentage increase in retail and services, while Whites increased employment in higher paying professional and related service jobs. In 1960, compared to the U.S., Chicago had larger concentrations of 16 to 19 and 20 to 24-year-olds who worked in manufacturing and with larger declines over time, suffered a bigger impact from the decline in manufacturing. Among 16 to 19 and 20 to 24-year-olds, Latinos, which had the largest concentration in manufacturing employment also saw the largest decline over time. Manufacturing wages in 1960 put more 16 to 19 and 20 to 24-year-olds in higher income groups in contrast to retail trade and professional and related services employment in 2015. The lower wage retail and service jobs that replaced higher paying manufacturing jobs means that the earnings of 16 to 24-year-olds Blacks and Latinos in Chicago were considerably lower as a result of economic restructuring (Córdova & Wilson, 2017a). Because of the geographic disbursement of factories and mills throughout the city, the decline of manufacturing in Chicago, was also the flight of jobs from its neighborhoods. In 1957, large numbers of jobs were located throughout Chicago’s zip codes. By 2015, jobs become centralized toward the Loop with the South and West Sides of Chicago having fewer jobs (Córdova & Wilson, 2016a) (See Maps 1, 2, and 3). In their 2018 report, Industrial Restructuring and the Continuing Impacts on Youth Employment in Illinois, Wilson and Córdova provide data further documenting the lasting impacts of deindustrialization where manufacturing was once strong.

194  Teresa L. Córdova and Matthew D. Wilson

Map 15.1  Total Number of Private Sector Jobs by Zip Code in Chicago, 1957

Joblessness and hopelessness The Maps 15.1, 15.2, and 15.3 dramatically reveal the “economically abandoned neighborhoods” that are the critical context to understand and address, not only joblessness, but also other socio-economic conditions, including violence. In a July 28, 2017 Chicago Tribune column, William Lee, comparing Chicago rappers Chance and Chief Keef, states that their “disparate rap tales is the ongoing story of

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Map 15.2  Total Number of Private Sector Jobs by Zip Code in Chicago, 1970

communities at the tail end of a silent and slow four-decade erosion of resources.” Further, comparing the Grammy award winner and gift giving Chance the Rapper with Chief Keef whose drill music reflects his own history of violence, Lee adds, Chance represents the multitude of socially conscious and socially climbing youth who through talent or ambition, have a legitimate shot of success

196  Teresa L. Córdova and Matthew D. Wilson

Map 15.3  Total Number of Private Sector Jobs by Zip Code in Chicago, 2015

despite living in crumbling communities. Chief Keef symbolizes the untold numbers of dispirited young men who are surrounded by tragedy, poverty, and criminality with few prospects for escaping. Population loss and “ravages of drugs and gang wars,” “have left deserted blocks and broken families in an already debt-ridden city and state” (Lee July 30, 2017, Section 4, p. 5)

Youth joblessness in Chicago  197 Citing data reported from the 2016 report on youth joblessness by the Great Cities Institute, Lee points out that among Chance the Rapper and Chief Keef’s age group in Chicago, nearly half are out of school and out of work. “It is to this Chicago that Chance and Chief Keef came of age, the sons of a dying Black community that 180,000 African Americans have left since the early 2000s” (Section 4, p. 5). It is this Chicago, that Lee urges “social service agencies, city officials and community leaders” to understand and follow the clues “to neutralize the hopelessness that leads to crime.” Chance’s neighborhood, though “dwindling in resources,” might give clues on how to retain talent, while simultaneously restoring hope and productivity. “. . . While we’re busy patting ourselves on the back for producing a talent like Chance, we should remember that the neighborhoods helped create Chief Keef too, for better or for worse” (Section 4, p. 5). The disassembled neighborhood is, as Lee describes it, “at the tail end of a four-decade erosion of resources” and without the economic flows that jobs provide and to which neighborhood residents have access. One such neighborhood is Austin on Chicago’s West Side. In Austin, the decline in the number of manufacturing jobs and opportunities for employment, reflected in extreme rates of joblessness among teens and young adults, is associated with staggering gun violence, and significant population loss – all indicators of neighborhood disassemblage – and has eroded the social fabric leaving instead feelings of frustration and even despair. A neighborhood that, even during a period of relative stability and economic access, experienced severe racism that evoked “riots” and militancy, was devastated further with the decline of employment anchors and opportunities.

A disassembled neighborhood In 1960, 74,480 individuals were employed in the formal labor force in Austin. In 2011, the number was 41,984, a 44 percent drop. Manufacturing, where 35 percent (25,900) of Austin’s labor force was employed in 1960, dropped by 89 percent to 7 percent (2,958) of Austin’s workforce in 2011. According to these tabulations by Great Cities Institute, though the percentage of the Austin labor force in retail increased slightly from 18.2 percent to 22.4 percent, the absolute numbers of Austin residents employed in retail went from 13,520 in 1960 to 9,405 in 2011 – a 30.4 percent drop. Numbers of employed in business and repair services increased by 78.5 percent (2,300–4,106). Professional and related services jumped 63.7 percent (7,920–12,963) and employed 30.9 percent of the labor force in 2011 compared to 10.6 percent in 1960. Finance, insurance and real estate, on the other hand showed a 77.3 percentage drop from 5,080 employed in the industry in 1960 to 1,151 in 2011. The industrial and occupational shifts in the Austin area help explain the loss in population and other socio-economic indicators. Austin declined from 138,026 persons in 1980 (U.S. Census) to 97,643, of these, 83 percent are Black (NonHispanic) (2011–2015 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates, U.S. Census). Its overall unemployment rate (distinct from jobless rate) was 19.5 percent

198  Teresa L. Córdova and Matthew D. Wilson compared to the City’s 12.1 percent. Median household income in Austin was $31,478 compared to Chicago’s $48,522 and its per-capita income was $16,114 compared to Chicago’s $29,486. In Austin, 26 percent of families had incomes below the poverty level, compared to Chicago as a whole of 18.4 percent. The rates of joblessness among teens and young adults are particularly revealing. According to analysis by the Great Cities Institute of 2011–2015 ACE 5-Year Estimates, in Austin, 59.7 percent of 20 to 24-year-olds were jobless. In Chance the Rapper’s home turf of Chatham, the 20 to 24-year-old jobless rate was 55.2 percent and in Greater Grand Crossing where Chief Keef spent formative years, the rate was 65.7 percent. In nearby Englewood, the 20 to 24-year-old jobless rate was 67.2 percent and in West Englewood, it was 70.2 percent (Córdova & Wilson, 2017a, p. 54). The same report shows that community areas in the west and south sides of Chicago with large concentrations of Black populations have the highest rates of joblessness among teens and young adults. Areas with the highest rates of homicides also have high rates of youth joblessness. Citing the Great Cities Institute January 2017 report, the Editorial Board states, “Joblessness almost certainly is a big reason why violence in Chicago has spiraled into an urgent crisis and national headlines” (Editorial Board. Chicago Tribune, February 1, 2017). Chronic joblessness has consequences for those who experience it (Dooley & Catalano 1988). Depriving young people of the dignity of work leaves “permanent scars,” impedes an overall sense of wellbeing, and can lead to counterproductive behaviors (Córdova & Wilson, 2017a, p. 55). The high rates of joblessness among teens and young adults in Austin give context to the 88 homicides in 2016 (11 percent of the city’s 781 total, even though Austin represents less than 4 percent of the city’s population). Describing the Austin neighborhood as “center stage” to many of Chicago’s shootings and homicides, a Chicago Tribune article reported that as of July 13, 2017, there were 258 shootings and 44 homicides in the Austin area. With a city unnerved by the highest rates of homicides and gun violence since the gang wars of the 1990s, those families living in the midst of the violence fear for their safety and despite living there their entire lives, are seeking ways out of the neighborhood, leaving behind those who might leave but can’t because of underwater mortgages, age or limited options (Eltagouri, July 16, 2017). Not every block in Austin is the same and despite feelings of despair that comes from unseen, and largely unavailable opportunities, many Austin residents engage in community-based planning projects and community building activities, including demonstrations of hope such as the Wednesday dinners by the group, Good Neighbors. After shootings in their immediate vicinity and with donations by Corcoran Food Mart and Prestige Food Market, the group hosts dinners, “to rebuild the community.” Zerlina Smith says about the dinners, “‘I have to be out here. Every Wednesday,’ she said, ‘to show my daughter that if you show people you care, eventually they’ll start to care about the community too’” (Eltagouri, 2017, p. 17). That kind of caring may be the basis for strategies to reassemble neighborhoods.

Youth joblessness in Chicago  199

Emerging from neoliberal wreckage to reassemble urban neighborhoods While the Great Cities Institute research demonstrated higher rates of youth joblessness in Chicago than New York, Los Angeles or the U.S. as a whole, the problem is by no means unique to Chicago. In rust belt cities across many industrialized nations, empty factories are persistent reminders of a bygone era of thriving economic activity, made worse by the 2008 economic recession. Global restructuring, which has centralized wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer individuals and corporations, has also produced multitudes of jobless youth in countries across the globe including Italy, Greece, Poland, South Korea and Kenya, to name only a few (Sánchez-Castañeda et al., 2012; Tienda & Wilson, 2002). In Tunisia, young and unemployed college graduates “have forged a united movement out of protesters from a swatch of towns and villages across the area” (Gall, 2017). Faced with what increasingly looks like long-term unemployment and fed up with broken promises from government officials, their primary demand is straightforward: more jobs. The National Bureau of Economic Research provided data in 1986 on The Black Youth Employment Crisis and expressed alarm that beginning with 1954 data, the numbers of jobless Black youth since the mid-1970s was increasing, especially in relation to White youth (Freeman & Holzer, 1986). Since then, the crisis of youth joblessness has deepened, and a more urgent response is clearly needed from every sector of every society where high percentages of young people are unable to participate in the formal labor sector. Addressing education and skill development have been the most typical responses, with mixed success. Innovative apprenticeship programs seem to offer avenues for transition into employment (Sánchez-Castañeda et al., 2012). No doubt, facilitating the connection between youth and employment opportunities through skills development and matchmaking is a necessary strategy to address youth joblessness. In the Austin neighborhood, the non-profit organization, Manufacturing Renaissance, has developed its Manufacturing Connect program, which provides training and certification in manufacturing skills, while simultaneously working with employers to connect the young people to jobs. The program includes dualenrollment education opportunities, mentorship and leadership training along with access to wrap-around services and access to college counseling. In addition, Manufacturing Renaissance works with other organizations in the region and nationally, to promote the renaissance of manufacturing in the region with inclusion as the priority. A June 2018 gathering in Chicago, for example, Industry and Inclusion 4.0, featured a report demonstrating the potential for advanced manufacturing to address employment needs for young Black and Latinos (Córdova, Wilson, & Stettner, 2018). But if it is the global policies of neoliberal regimes (Córdova, 2016) that created the entrenched joblessness are inherently exclusive, then perhaps the most likely paths – and perhaps even the potentially more inclusive and democratic ones – are locally based social enterprises that builds on innovation and creativity, including cooperatives aided by incubators. Through his own style of rap, Chief Keef

200  Teresa L. Córdova and Matthew D. Wilson captures – and feeds – the essence of neoliberal wreckage in urban neighborhoods. But is it possible that the entrepreneurship that propelled Chief Keef into fame could also be a reminder of the innovation and creativity of young people, even in the midst of wreckage that they themselves may perpetuate. Could innovation and creativity also serve as a pathway to reassembling hope and possibility? At the same time, given the social-psychological impacts of chronic and concentrated joblessness, strategies that involve youth development and the rebuilding of capacity, confidence and general wellbeing are essential measures to reverse the long-term damages. For example, the many youth programs around leaderships, sports and science projects, can be an important avenue toward mental health and a sense of connectedness as well as efficacy. Nearly every community has examples of such programs and evidence of their success. Directing resources toward these programs is a good investment that reverberates beyond the individuals themselves. Increasingly, there is more interest in trauma-informed clinical services, though exactly what this means is still being defined and measured. It is at least important to recognize the trauma associated with disassembled communities. The concept of neoliberal disassemblage is useful to help us connect forty years of economic restructuring aided by the neoliberal policy regimes (Córdova, 2016) with conditions that are visible in racially segregated urban neighborhoods. Disassembled communities expose intertwining conditions from economic abandonment and mirrors, in some cases, the dystopian images of chaos and raw survival. The concept of disassemblage, however, can – and must – give rise to utopian visions of reassemblage, possible only with strategically devised steps to reassemble – rebuild neighborhoods. Policies of inclusion mixed with projects of ownership will likely require leadership from within (Córdova, 2015b). Partnerships are essential, however, to any enterprise and as the Chicago Editorial Board suggests, youth joblessness is not just the problem of the neighborhoods most plagued with the impacts, It’s not just Englewood’s problem, or Roseland’s problem. Employers and citizens across the city and the metropolitan area have a stake: Chicago’s epic struggle with violence has grave ripple effects for a region that needs to ceaselessly grow new generations of dependable workers, skilled professionals and prospering consumers. The city’s overall health – its economic health included – depends on what happens to young people in Roseland and Englewood (2017, Section 1, p. 16). So, everyone has a stake, and as the Great Cities Institute has described this as an “all hands on deck situation,” requiring “a multi-pronged approached,” the young people, their households, and their neighborhoods do matter – to them and to the world. Speaking about disassemblage, however, forces us to also think about reassemblage and turns the focus to creative and collective solutions (Wilson & Córdova, 2018). Through their edited volume of case studies “from the inner city ghettos of the United States to the barrios of Brazil, or the ethnic neighborhoods of Germany and Lebanon,” Tienda and Wilson (2002) argue that to better understand the particulars of the crisis of youth joblessness among young people of color, is to

Youth joblessness in Chicago  201 involve them in the research design and the process of finding solutions (Tienda & Wilson, 2002). We couldn’t agree more.

References cited Bel, L. A., & Freman, R. B. (1985). Does a flexible industry wage structure increase employment?: The U.S. experience. Working Paper No. 1604. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. Bluestone, B., & Harrison, B. (1982). The deindustrialization of America: Plant closings, community abandonment, and the dismantling of basic industry. New York: Basic Books. Castells, M. (1989). The informational city: Information technology, economic structuring, and the urban-regional process. Oxford: Blackwell. Córdova, T. (2015a, May 14). New strategies for youth employment: Rebuilding community jobs in the face of globalization. Harvey Perloff Lecture Series, Department of Urban Planning, Luskin School of Public Affairs, University of California, Los Angeles. Córdova, T. (2015b). Restoring neighborhoods to the center: Alternative mechanisms and institutions. In M. Pagano (Ed.), The return of the neighborhood as an urban strategy (pp. 64–68). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Córdova, T. (2016). The neoliberal policy regime: Implications for Latino studies scholarship. Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, 41(1), 55–83. Córdova, T., & Wilson, M. (2016a, January). Lost: The crisis of jobless and out of school teens and young adults in Chicago, Illinois, and the U.S. Great Cities Institute, Chicago, IL for Alternative Schools Network, released at Chicago Urban League. Córdova, T., & Wilson, M. (2016b, March 22). A lost generation: The disappearance of teens and adults from the job market in Cook County. Great Cities Institute, Chicago, IL, Presented before hearing of Cook County Commission Committee on Workforce, Housing and Development. Córdova, T., & Wilson, M. (2017a, January 30). Abandoned in their neighborhoods: Youth joblessness amidst the flight of industry and opportunity. Great Cities Institute, Chicago, IL for Alternative Schools Network, released at Chicago Urban League. Córdova, T., & Wilson, M. (2017b, June 12). The high costs for out of school out of work youth in Chicago and Cook County. Great Cities Institute, Chicago, IL for Alternative Schools Network, released at Press Conference with U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, U.S. Representative Robin Kelly. Córdova, T., Wilson, M., & Stettner, A. (2018, January 30). Revitalizing manufacturing and expanding opportunities for Chicago’s Black and Latino communities. The Century Foundation, Bernard L. Schwartz Rediscovering Government Initiative, and UIC Great Cities Institute. Retrieved from The Century Foundation: https://tcf.org/content/report/ revitalizing-manufacturing-expanding-opportunities-chicagos-black-latino-communities/ released at Industry and Inclusion 4.0 Summit, University of Illinois, Chicago. Dooley, D., & Catalano, R. (1988). Recent research on the psychological effects of unemployment. Journal of Social Issues, 44(4), 1–12. Editorial Board. Chicago Tribune. (2017, February 1). Fix Chicago’s violence? Start by helping kids land jobs. Chicago Tribune. Retrieved from www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/ editorials/ct-chicago-youth-unemployment-jobs-edit-0202-jm-20170201-story.html Elejalde-Ruiz, A. (2016, January 25). Nearly half of young black men in Chicago out of work, out of school: Report. Chicago Tribune. Retrieved from www.chicagotribune.com/ ct-youth-unemployment-urban-league-0126-biz-20160124-story.html

202  Teresa L. Córdova and Matthew D. Wilson Eltagouri, M. (2017, July 16). Austin shrinking as residents flee violence: Once the city’s most populated community area faces steady slide. Chicago Tribune, p. 1. Freeman, R. B., & Holzer, H. J. (1986). The Black youth employment crisis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gall, C. (2017, May 28). Young and unemployed, Tunisians agitate for a “second revolution”. The New York Times, p. 12. Gamble, A. (2014). Crisis without end?: The unravelling of western prosperity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lee, W. (2017, July 28). Chance and Chief Keef: A tale of two rappers. Chicago Tribune. Retrieved from www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/ct-ae-chance-the-rapperand-chief-keef-comparison-0730-20170729-story.html Ranney, D. C. (2003). Global decisions, local collisions: Urban life in the new world order. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Sánchez-Castañeda, A., Serrani, L., & Sperotti, F. (2012). Youth unemployment and joblessness: Causes, consequences, responses. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Tienda, M., & Wilson, W. J. (2002). Youth in cities a cross-national perspective. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, M. D., & Cordova, T. (2018). Industrial restructuring and the continuing impacts on youth employment in Illinois, U.S. Great Cities Institute, Chicago, IL for Alternative Schools Network. Wilson, W. J. (1987). The truly disadvantaged: The inner city, the underclass, and public policy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wilson, W. J. (1996). When work disappears: The world of the new urban poor. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Wilson, W. J. (1999). When work disappears: New implications for race and urban poverty in the global economy. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22(3), 479–499.

Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures; page numbers in bold indicate tables. Abbas, Mahmud 105 aesthetic community 27 Africapolis 58 Alternative Social Urban Forum Proclamation 129, 132 American Dream 79 Amin, Ash 99 Appadurai, Arjun 85, 97 APPO movement (Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca) 12, 94–95 Arafat, Yasser 105 assemblage: distributions 45–46, 46; of Eko Atlantic 53, 58–59; ethnography 37, 39–40, 41; Israeli apartheid 104; lines of late neoliberal 41–42, 43–44, 47; machinic 36–39; Medellín, Colombia 113; molar inscriptions 44, 44; neoliberal 5, 12, 34, 38, 73–74; neoliberal apartheid 106–109; predatory 28; public service 34, 35; social and political 95; synthesis of 40–43; violent forms of 11; see also disassembling austerity 32, 35; public service assemblage 38, 46–47 Bachelard, Gaston 30 Bannister, Jon 88, 91 Barcelona: capitalist and sexist disassembling processes in 62–64; Col·lectiu Punt 6 62, 68, 69n5; economic crisis of 2008 62, 63, 64; families as shock absorbers 65; governments of 63–64; grassroots responses to crisis 66; impact of crisis on women 64–66; Indignados movement 62, 66; Kellys and tourism 62, 67; neoliberal dynamics 62, 69n1;

responses from feminist movement 66–69; smart city strategy 63; social struggles in 62; tourism as concern 64; touristification 63, 64; Women’s Strike (Vaga de Totes) 62, 67 Bauman, Zygmunt 11, 27, 92 Beltrán, Sergio 95 Benjamin, Walter 8 Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party) 151 Bogota, Colombia 117, 125, 134n5, 134n14 Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement 110 Braun, Bruce 73 Brown, Wendy 90 Buddhism, Buryats in Ulan-Ude 157, 160, 162, 166–167 Buryats: creation of autonomous republic 159, 168n1; cultural identity of 156–157; disassembly processes 156; historical background of 157–159; religious expression 157, 160, 162, 166–167; Statute of Native Administration 157, 158; Ulan-Ude as cultural activity center 161–162; see also Ulan-Ude in Republic of Buryatia Bush, George 90 Caldeira, Teresa 84, 99 Calderón, Agenjo 65 capital as value in motion 17 capitalism: consumption and 26–27; inequality and social conflict 133; neoliberalism’s predatory formations 147; spatial production under 16–19; transformations of Medellín 115–121;

204 Index uneven geographical economies and cities 113; urban spaces 5–6 caring consumption 29 Castro, Carmen 65 Chance (rapper) 194–197 Chicago neighborhoods 188; chronic and concentrated joblessness 191–193; disappearance of work and disassembled 189–190; disassembled neighborhood of Austin 197–198; emerging from neoliberalism to reassemble urban 199–201; flight of industry 188, 191–193; joblessness and hopelessness 194–197; job loss and lower wages 188–189; map showing number of jobs by zip code (1970) 195; map showing number of jobs by zip code (2015) 196; map showing private sector jobs by zip code (1957) 194 Chicago Tribune (newspaper) 191, 194, 198 Chief Keef (rapper) 194–197, 199–200 citizenship: legal status of 84–85; procedural democracy and 142–143; rights of 85 Clinton Global Initiative 56 Col·lectiu Punt 6 (feminist urban planning cooperative) Barcelona 62, 68, 69n5 Colau, Ada (Mayor): Barcelona 64 Cole, Patrick Dele 56 commodities: rituals surrounding 27 consumption: capitalism and 26–27; caring 29; city life and 29–30; global economy 29; neoliberal individualism and 27–28 Crary, Jonathan 63, 91 Davis, Mike 52, 97, 147 de Certeau, Michel 6, 86, 145 deindustrialization: Chicago and dynamics of 189; see also Chicago neighborhoods democracy: disassembling foundational fictions of 97–100; fantasy of equal rights and opportunities 144; muzzling of 91–94; neoliberalism and 141–142; participation in procedural 142–144; urban planning for disassembling 87–89 Desai, Renu 92 Deutsche, Rosalyn 77 Disappearance of Work, The (Wilson) 190 disassembling: alternative and assemblages 12–13; capitalist and sexist, processes in Barcelona 62–64; democracy through spectacular consumption 89–91; foundational fictions of democracy 97–100; housing 9–10; of Palestine

103–104; uses and abuses of urban planning to disassemble democracy 87–89; see also Chicago neighborhoods; Palestine disorder 149; see also Mumbai Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) United Nations 103, 104, 106 Economist, The (magazine) 114 education: possible future for children 181; school as future possibility 183–184; tasking schools to improve society 172, 176, 177, 179; see also futures of young people e-Geopolis 58 Eko Atlantic project: in contemporary context 56–57; creation of 53–54; ecocity 52–53; practices of dispossession and repossession 57–59; as Public Private Partnership (PPP) 56; see also Nigeria Elden, Stuart 175 electoral politics: citizenship status and 142–143; corporate funds for 142 employment see Chicago neighborhoods Engels, Friedrich 145, 146 Enlightenment 171 Erbanov, Mikhei 160 European Central Bank 3 Exxon Mobil 51 Fajardo, Sergio 114, 120 Falk, Richard 103 Federici, Sylvia 64 feminist movement, responses to crisis in Barcelona 62, 66–69 Foro Alternativo 126, 129–130, 131 futures of young people: beyond voluntarism and self-help 173, 180–183; dreaming of 180–183; dreams and desires for 172–174; neighborhood past and 178–180; nihilism and 171, 175, 179–180, 184–185; possibility of imagining the 171–172; school as possibility 183–184; slums and 172, 173; slums and urban assemblage 174–177; taking flight from menacing 177–178; “you-can-do-it” discourse 173–175, 181, 185; young people imagining 179–180 Global North 12, 65, 75 Global South 10, 75, 124, 149

Index  205 global “war on terror” 75 Good Neighbors 198 Graham, Stephen 92 Grandin, Greg 78 Great Cities Institute (University of Illinois at Chicago) 189, 191, 193, 197–199, 200 Gregory, Derek 79 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) 3, 8 Guardian, The (newspaper) 114, 117

Lagos, Nigeria see Nigeria Latin America see Medellín Colombia Leahy, Deana 39 Le Corbusier 86 Lee, William 194 Lefebvre, Henri 4, 17, 73, 100 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 10 Locke, John 74

Jacobs, Jane 84 joblessness: chronic 198; chronic and concentrated, amidst flight of industry 191–193; crisis of permanent 191; and hopelessness 194–197; rates of in Chicago 191–193; research projects at University of Chicago 190; see also Chicago neighborhoods

McDonogh, Gary 90–91 McFarlane, Colin 92 machinic assemblage, neoliberalism 36–39 Manufacturing Renaissance 199 Marx, Karl 8 Massey, Doreen 4 Medellín, Colombia 113–115, 132–134; awards for 120; capitalism and city 115–121; cartel emergence 119; Catholicism of 118–119, 135n9; counter– hegemonic assemblage from the bottom 129–130; crime and poverty reduction 124; economic crisis (1970–1990) 119–120; examining Medellín model 121–127, 131, 133; example of complete disassembling and successful reassembling 113–115; Gini coefficient of 117; hegemonic assemblage from the top 127–129; hegemony and counter hegemony 130–131, 132; Medellín Charter 127–129, 131, 132; militarization of city 123, 124, 134–135n8; neoliberalism and social disorder 116; Operation Orion 123; pacification of city 123–124; population and economic activity 117, 134n4; social and alternative urban forum proclamation 129–130; social urbanism 114, 120, 122, 125; trajectory of city 117–118; transformations of 115–121; transforming optic of 80 Miller, David 142 Moses, Robert 88 Mumbai: emergence of local power brokers 151–152; Filmcity area of 150, 151–152; Geeta and Seeta (Shiv Sena members) 152–154; land politics in 150–151; Shiv Sena party and urban politics 151; slum redevelopment projects 149; Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) 150; Slum Rehabilitation Scheme (SRS) 150 Munde, Ragini 149

Kearns, Ade 88, 91 Kellys, Barcelona 62, 67

National Bureau of Economic Research 199 National Citizen Service 34

Hall, Stuart 4, 10 Harvey, David 7, 11, 12, 25, 85, 141 Hayden, Dolores 30 Hobbes, Thomas 74 Holston, James 85, 97, 99 imaginative geographies 76 Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) 113 income inequality 3–4; fear of rising discontent with 75–76 Indignados movement 62, 66 individualism: consumption and 27–28, 30; ideology of 25–26; neoliberalism and 25; social organization based on 26 Industrial Revolution 7, 30 infrapolitics 149 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid 103 international financial crisis: changes in lives of young people 33–36; cities with 32 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 3, 10 intifada 104; first (1987–1993) 104, 105, 109; second (2000–2005) 105, 108, 109, 110 Israel and Palestine: apartheid in 103, 104; assessing divided spatiality of 76; spatial segregation and social division 78; Zionist movement 104

206 Index neighborhoods see Chicago neighborhoods neoliberal apartheid, Palestinian people 106–109 neoliberalism 4, 18; continuity and discontinuity 36; disassemblage concept 200; doing assemblage ethnography 37, 39–40; electoral politics and populations in 142; globalization and 20; individualism and 25; lines of late 41, 43–44; machinic assemblage 36–39; policy-making 34–35; public service assemblage 34, 39–40, 43–46; shock doctrine 107; youth service provision 33–36 neoliberal predatory formations: disassembling traditional role of state 73–74; social and spatial effects of 6–12 Newman, Oscar 77 new materialism 33 New York Times (newspaper) 191 Nigeria: eco-city Eko Atlantic 52, 53; Eko Atlantic in contemporary context 56–57; housing and infrastructure crisis in Lagos 51–52, 55; Lagos Executive Development Board (LEDB) 54–55; maps of 53; planned displacement in context 53–56; practices of dispossession and repossession 57–59; relocation of Lagos residents 55; slum clearance in Lagos 51, 54, 56 Oaxaca, Mexico: APPO (Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca) 12, 94–95; disassembling democracy through spectacular consumption 89–91; public space in 86–87; reassembling politics and publics in 94–97; social movement in 80; uses and abuses of urban planning to disassemble democracy 87–89; World Heritage Site 87, 88, 90, 91 Obama, Barack 3 Occupy Wall Street movement 3, 12, 94, 97–98 Ortiz Lajous, Jaime 88 Oslo peace process 103; fragmentation deepening 105–106; reorganization of Israeli rule and neoliberal economics 106–107 Palestine: Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDC) movement 110; fragmentation of 104, 105–106; Israeli apartheid 104; neoliberal apartheid

106–109; Oslo peace process 103, 105–106; Palestinians from Gaza Strip 108–109; Palestinians in occupied territories 108; resistance and reassembly 109–110; West Bank Palestinians 108; see also Israel and Palestine Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) 104, 105, 109 Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees 109 Palestinian Authority (PA) 105, 107–109 Peterson, Marina 98 Pirenne, Henri 83, 84, 85 Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (Platform of People Affected by Mortgage Loans) 66 Pred, Allen 8 predatory economics 4–5 predatory formations: capitalism and 147; inequalities and violence of neoliberal 77; neoliberal ideologies 144; state and neoliberal 73–74; see also state PRIMED 126, 135n14, 135n16 privatization 4; care services 65; housing 165; profit seeking and 141; public assets 73; public space 87, 96–98, 145–147; social services 66; term 146; utilities 122 Production of Space, The (Lefebvre) 4, 17 public service assemblage: austerity 38, 46–47; distribution 45–46, 46; flows 45, 45; molar inscriptions 44, 44 Rancière, Jacques 96 Regan, Ronald 6 Republic of Buryatia see Ulan-Ude in Republic of Buryatia Ruiz Ortiz, Ulises 88–89, 93–94 Russian Federation 162–165; see also Soviet Union Rutheiser, Charles 91 Sassen, Saskia 4, 6, 11, 95, 96 Scott, James 149 security: fortress urbanism 78–79; militarization of state 77, 78, 80; state’s mandate 74–75; see also state shamanism, Buryats in Ulan-Ude 157, 162, 166–167 Shiv Sena (Shivaji’s Army) 149; land politics in Mumbai 150–151; members Geeta and Seeta 152–154; urban politics of 151; see also Mumbai shock doctrine neoliberalism 107 Siberia see Ulan-Ude in Republic of Buryatia

Index  207 skyscraper skylines 10–11 Slumdog Millionaire (film) 175 Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) 150 slums 11; clearance in Lagos, Nigeria 51, 54, 56; flight from menacing future 177–178; redevelopment projects in Mumbai 149, 154; social exclusion of dwellers 143; urban assemblage and future narratives 174–177; see also futures; futures of young people; Mumbai Smith, Zerlina 198 Snowden, Edward 76 social justice 35; BDS Movement fighting for 110; Oaxaca, Mexico 90; spatialization of 19 social movements 12, 62; BDS Movement 110; feminist responses in Barcelona 66–69 Soviet Union: collapse of 141, 156; disassembly after the collapse of 162–165; disassembly under Stalin 159–160; reassembly after Stalin 160–162; reassembly after the collapse of 165–167 space 4; global consumption economy 29; housing 9–10; privatization of public 146–147; relationship between public, and democratic debate 145–146; urban 5–6; urban planners and 144–145 Spanish dream 63 Speransky, Mikhail 157, 158 Stalin, Joseph 156 state: construction of boundaries 76; fortress urbanism 78–79; gated communities 77; income and social inequality in 75–76; inequality gaining attention 76; militarization of 77, 78, 80; part of neoliberal assemblage 73, 74; security mandate of 74–75; security of people and property 74; uneven deployment of security in 77–78; violence sponsored by 74, 76, 79 synthetic city, eco-city Eko Atlantic (Nigeria) 52–53; see also Nigeria Tamboukou, Marie 39 Thatcher, Margaret 6, 113 Tilly, Virginia 103 Torre, Susana 86 Truly Disadvantaged, The (Wilson) 189 Ulan-Ude in Republic of Buryatia 156–157; disassembly after collapse of Soviet Union 162–165; disassembly in Soviet Union under Stalin 159–160; disassembly

of 167–168; historical background 157–159; industrialization in 159–160; process of reassembling 168; reassembly after collapse of Soviet Union 165–167; reassembly in Soviet Union after Stalin 160–162; see also Soviet Union UNESCO World Heritage Site, Oaxaca, Mexico 87, 88, 90, 91 UN-Habitat Seventh World Urban Forum 115, 120, 126, 128 United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) 103 urban planning 5; eco-city Eko Atlantic 52, 53; power of 86; practices of dispossession and repossession 57–59; privatization of public space 146–147; public space 86; spaces and 144–145; spatial and social exclusion through 93–94; spatial production under capitalism 16–19; touristification in Barcelona 64; uses and abuses to disassemble democracy 87–89; see also Eko Atlantic project utopia 36, 135n28; concept of 185; dreams of emancipation 171, 181; of new society and city 128; proclamation 129; social utopia 185; urban futures 99; urban spaces 182; vision of reassemblage 200 Vaga de Totes (Women’s Strike) Barcelona 62, 67 value: classical economic theory 15; concept of 17; labor theory of 18; as a quality 18–19 Verónica Rudge Urbanism Award 120 Wakefield, Stephanie 73 Weber, Max 84, 85 Weizman, Eyal 76 Wilson, William Julius 189, 190 Wolfensohn, James 11 Women’s Strike (Vaga de Totes) Barcelona 62, 67 World Bank 10, 11 World Future Council 171, 185n2 World Trade Center 79 World Trade Organization (WTO) 10 Yeltsin, Boris 165 young people see futures of young people Zionist movement 104