The City Is the Factory: New Solidarities and Spatial Strategies in an Urban Age 9781501708060

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THE CITY IS THE FACTORY

THE CITY IS THE FACTORY New Solidarities and Spatial Strategies in an Urban Age Edited by Miriam Greenberg and Penny Lewis

ILR PRESS AN IMPRINT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright © 2017 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2017 by Cornell University Press First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2017 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Greenberg, Miriam, 1970– editor. | Lewis, Penny (Penny W.), editor. | Container of (work): Dunn, Kathleen (Sociologist). Street labor movement. Title: The city is the factory : new solidarities and spatial strategies in an urban age / edited by Miriam Greenberg and Penny Lewis. Description: Ithaca : ILR Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016047439 (print) | LCCN 2016048885 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501705533 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501705540 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501708053 (epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501708060 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Labor movement—United States. | Urban poor—United States. | Working class—United States. | Land use, Urban—United States. Classification: LCC HD8072.5 .C525 2017 (print) | LCC HD8072.5 (ebook) | DDC 331.880973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016047439 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cover design: Julie Rogge Cover photograph by Michael Gould-Wartofsky

To El Puente and 1199, for teaching me the value of community labor coalitions when I was young and impressionable. And to Simona and Tamar, born after, for your brilliance, imagination, and sense of the possible. MG

For my parents and heroes, Mina MacFarlane and Brian Lewis, with loving appreciation of the communities and connections you foster, and your lifelong dedication to making our city more fair, just, and beautiful. PWL

Contents

Prefaceix Acknowledgmentsxiii Introduction: From the Factory to the City and Back Again   Miriam Greenberg and Penny Lewis  1. The Street Labor Movement   Kathleen Dunn

1 26

 2. Day Labor Agencies and the Logic and Landscape of

Neoliberal Poverty Management   Gretchen Purser

46

 3. Economic Development for Whom? Retail,

Neoliberal Urbanism, and the “Fight for 15”   Stephanie Luce and Penny Lewis

62

 4. Context, Coalitions, and Organizing: Immigrant Labor

Rights Advocacy in San Francisco and Houston   Els de Graauw and Shannon Gleeson

80

 5. A Bridge Too Far: Industrial Gentrification and the

Dynamics of Sacrifice in New York City   Melissa Checker

99

 6. Radical Ruptures: Crisis Organizing and the Spatial

Politics of Uneven Redevelopment   Miriam Greenberg

120

 7. The Other Low-Carbon Protagonists: Poor

People’s Movements and Climate Politics in São Paulo   Daniel Aldana Cohen  8. The Space of

Speech   Lize Mogel

140 158

 9. Spatial Politics and Urban Borders: A Study of

Buenos Aires   Alejandro Grimson

178

10. From Workers in the City to Workers’

Cities?   Andrew Herod Notes References About the Editors and Contributors Index

197 221 231 255 259

Preface

We are writing this preface in the midst of an election cycle in the United States and Europe that has shown the growing strength of nationalist and right-wing policies and governments across a number of countries. While the directions these countries will take are still in flux, we write here to consider this volume in light of these developments. Our book focuses on the importance of cities, and the urban, for politics today. This urban scale, we argue, has been a limited but vital laboratory of progressive change and solidarity building, for both individual cities and coalitional urban movements that span continents. As a point of contrast, we and our contributors often implicitly or explicitly observe an inefficacy at the national scale. From climate policy to affordable housing, living wages to criminal justice reform, battles over much of what matters most to everyday people and the planet have for many years been stymied by national and international scales of governance. While cities and urban regions are incapable of solving national and global-scale problems on their own, the movements that have arisen in them, from “Fight for 15” to “Black Lives Matter” to “Occupy Wall Street,” have been instrumental in posing and organizing around alternative visions that have had impact at the state and federal levels. The recent conservative victory in the United States and the rise of similar forms of nationalist and right-wing populism globally may be seen, in part, as a backlash against these progressive urban politics. As we have seen historically, elite-driven populist movements draw on and stoke xenophobia and racism and promise grandiose benefits for economically excluded segments of the population—for the most part in rural areas, the deindustrialized belts, and the decaying exurbs. Meanwhile, these movements use their support to further consolidate power and wealth for elites. But in recent years these electoral turns have worked the other way as well. In Europe, conservative populists are often taking the reins from socialists; the competition for the right is often a more progressive left than local or national politics have seen in decades. Establishment parties of the left, right, and center, in their common commitment to neoliberal policy, have failed repeatedly to speak to this fractured and fractious electorate. The victors are those who promise change and new directions.

ix

x       PREFACE

The resonance of this promise says as much about the failures of neoliberalism and its attendant politics as it does about the success of the right. Neoliberal versions of economic dynamism and competitiveness have come at the expense of gains in wages, job security, and quality of life for working people in city and country alike. As our book details, cities that are home to many of the industries best positioned in the global economy and that provide the shiny image of a market-oriented future have been at the vanguard of this inequitable project. Thus, significantly, some of neoliberalism’s most powerful challenges on the left have come from urban workers and communities excluded, exploited, and displaced by this project, as many of our chapters also document. Yet “antiestablishment” campaigns from the right espouse platforms that oppose neoliberalism as well, successfully recruiting working-class voters, typically from outside these dynamic hubs. In the pages that follow, we elaborate various arguments implied by our metaphoric title, The City Is the Factory. One such claim is about the potential power inherent to the organized city, much like the organized factory of the Fordist era, to challenge and transform social relations. In this sense, our authors emphasize the inventive and progressive capacity of urban solidarities and spatial tactics to re-vision the neoliberal order from below. In the face of the new nationalism, as the right seeks to roll back progressive gains and turn communities against each other, this will involve not only the organized city’s offensive capacity but its defensive capacity as well. The current moment will test the power of “the local” to resist, protect, and provide sanctuary, as well as to organize and push forward. Part of what this combination of resistance and organizing will need, we think, will be to construct a broader and stronger base, building bridges of solidarity wherever possible. This means extending alliances to town and country and indigenous territory, recognizing that the degradations wrought by rampant inequality, lack of economic opportunities, increasing cost of living, declining environmental conditions, and eroded political representation do not end at the city limits. Put differently, it means recognizing that the dreams and demands located and organized at the urban scale are fundamental to those of ordinary people regardless of spatial location: the right to affordable housing, to a clean environment, to control of public and communal spaces, to good jobs, and to education and association, as well as the progressive vision that is arising today in cities, like the sanctuary city movement, against exclusion, for social rights, and against racism and brutality. These demands and visions encompass a more universal humanity. As the revanchist efforts to deny these rights grow, so too might the potential to recognize their collective necessity.

PREFACE      xi

The question of how rapidly and strategically we resist and organize will also be essential. Cities provide us with crucial sites for mass mobilization, for encounters and coalitions across difference. Their political and economic centrality provide opportunities for tactical, place-based organizing and, when necessary, disruption of business as usual. Their cultural diversity and dynamism can help frame and elevate these struggles, fuel our imaginations, and raise the visibility of how much is at stake for so many. Linking these efforts between cities and regions— urban, exurban, and rural—will be vital to building power. If cities are indeed the power blocks we see them as being, the success of the projects to promote the strength and solidarity of their citizens, like those described in this book, will help to determine the progress of the whole as well. Today, the potential power of the organized city to help set the terms of the social relations of the moment, and to create a just vision of the change so many seek, is more crucial to realize than ever.

Acknowledgments

The editors of this volume met at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and would like to first acknowledge the paramount role played by public institutions of higher education in the development, exchange, and fruition of the ideas and experiences that undergird this project. Another of these is the University of California, and UC Santa Cruz in particular, with its commitment to engaged and interdisciplinary projects, which enabled this book to get off the ground. The original impetus and inspiration for the project was a conference held at UC Santa Cruz in 2011, “Whose City? Labor and Right to the City Movements,” sponsored by the UC Santa Cruz Center for Labor Studies and the Urban Studies Research Cluster. Also crucial has been the Joseph S. Murphy Institute at CUNY, with its dual specialization in labor and urban studies, which provided further intellectual and political space for this project’s realization. The Murphy community, its students in particular, come from and contribute to the labor and community efforts and organizations like those considered in this volume, and their work teaches and inspires us as well. Many thanks are due to Steve McKay, director of the Center for Labor Studies at UC Santa Cruz, who co-organized the initial conference with Miriam Greenberg and helped conceive of the book project. We extend our appreciation to the conference participants, four of whom are in the current volume, and all of whom contributed vital ideas, including Joshua Bloom, Melissa Checker, Gerardo Dominguez, Shannon Gleeson, Julie Guthman, Gilda Haas, Stephanie Luce, Faranak Miraftab, Gretchen Purser, Nari Rhee, Jeff Rickert, and Jon Zerolnick. We are especially grateful to David Harvey, who gave the sharp and rousing keynote, and Gihan Perera, whose concluding talk for the conference on the theme “the city is the factory” helped us appreciate the powerful implications of this core argument. Many of our colleagues and friends provided valuable insights, assistance, ­ eborah and provocations along the way, including Kafui Attoh, Elsa Davidson, D Gould, Sarah Huges, Maureen LaMar, Jon Liss, Dara Mayers, Tony Perlstein, Eric Porter, and David Unger. Annette ­Bernhardt and Michael Gould-Wartofsky generously shared their remarkable photographs; Sam Lewis and Cea Weaver provided much-appreciated last-minute assistance. Miriam’s graduate students, Claudia Lopez and Steven Araujo, as well as colleagues Hilda Herzer, Gabriela Merlinsky, and Pablo Vitale at the University of Buenos Aires, contributed xiii

xiv     ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

valuable insights in terms of Latin American urban scholarship on territorial movements. Our contributors, as well as Carolina Bank Muñoz, Marnie Brady, and Rachel Sherman, also helped by reading drafts of our introduction. Scholarly work can be isolating; creating an edited volume is anything but. We are grateful to all the contributors to this volume, from whom we learned so much and who universally exhibited generosity, patience, responsiveness, and excellence at all stages of this project. We extend particular thanks to Andy Herod for reading through the manuscript and engaging others’ contributions in his own chapter. Our profound thanks go also to the many people from neighborhood organizations, unions, government offices, research centers, community-labor alliances, worker centers, and social movements of all kinds who gave of their time to provide interviews and personal experience, without which our collective contributions would have been impossible. We are thankful to Emily Powers and Susan Specter at Cornell University Press, as well as our copy editor, Glenn Novak, and indexer, Ken Bolton, for ­working with us so kindly and carefully to bring the many disparate parts of the book together. We are especially grateful to our editor, Fran Benson, for seeing the value of the project and supporting us with exacting and judicious guidance at all points along the way. Reviewers for the press provided us with close, clear, and constructive feedback that greatly strengthened all individual chapters and the work as a whole. The book would have been inconceivable, unexecutable, and far less rewarding without the love, support, patience, and daily uplift of our wonderful families. For Miriam this includes Simona and Tamar, Suzanne and Peter, and Nathaniel, who also read over early drafts and provided endless encouragement. For Penny, this includes Clara and Eleanor, Mina and Brian, Abigail and Justin, Mary and Chris, Parissa and Kevin, and Steve, whose insights from work in labor alliances helped sharpen our analysis. Our volume raises questions of contemporary urbanization and social power in an academic context that we hope will inspire further discussion and study among our students and peers. Yet we are as concerned with the practical and political stakes of the issues raised within. Our final acknowledgment therefore goes to the individuals, groups, and movements who are working to organize and transform “the city as factory” across the globe, and through these efforts realize our rights to a more just, sustainable, and equitable world.

THE CITY IS THE FACTORY

Introduction

FROM THE FACTORY TO THE CITY AND BACK AGAIN Miriam Greenberg and Penny Lewis

This is a book about the interaction between work, new social movements, cities, and urban space. We begin with three different urban spaces—all in New York City—that inspired us, helped us crystallize our ideas, and pushed us to recognize what was at stake in our writing. Oddly enough, the first of these spaces was a conference room. We had gone to interview a lead organizer for the Alliance for a Greater New York (ALIGN), an organization that consolidates the efforts of two other organizations, New York City’s Jobs with Justice, connected to the nationwide labor-community coalition, and Urban Agenda, a local progressive research and policy institute. Visiting ALIGN’s busy office in Lower Manhattan, we ducked into the conference room for a quiet space to talk. The wall we faced upon sitting down was covered with an oversize map of New York City, studded with color-coded tabs for labor, community, religious, environmental, and other groups, organized in clusters all over the city. When asked about it, the organizer explained how this map was fundamental to their mission. The unions that support ALIGN, and the organization itself, recognize the traditional shortcomings of the labor movement—organized workplace by workplace, focused mostly on economic issues important to their members, but too rarely addressing the problems their members experience as renters or parents, as community members facing environmental threats or police harassment. ALIGN’s form of coalition building has been framed in terms of a broad-based “right to the city” agenda, and is self-consciously “place based,” paying attention to neighborhood and geography, alongside worker issues. This framing has proved essential across all the campaigns the organization initiates 1

2       MIRIAM GREENBERG AND PENNY LEWIS

or lends support to, from Alliance for a Just Rebuilding, which mobilized a cross-section of workers and residents impacted by Hurricane Sandy, to the living-wage campaigns in New York, including the Workers Rising demonstration of July 2013 and the “Fight for $15” (hourly minimum wage). Ultimately, the organizer explained, ALIGN has learned to approach coalition building from a “geostrategic dimension,” as evident on the city map. “We’ve come to realize that the city is now like the factory once was—it’s in the neighborhoods and on the streets where the organizing happens. And so we have to change our strategy.”1 We heard this argument—the city is the factory—echoed numerous times over the years that led to the research and writing of this book. Perhaps nowhere did we hear it more forcefully than by participants in Occupy Wall Street (OWS), whose original encampment was located just a few blocks up Broadway from ALIGN’s offices—and which became a second place where our ideas took shape. For a few months at the end of 2011, the Occupy movement seized delimited, central, and highly symbolic public spaces in hundreds of cities and towns across the globe. This upsurge expressed the outrage of the “99 percent,” who were still reeling from the world financial crisis and drawing global attention to the historic levels of economic and political inequality endemic to contemporary capitalism. The first occupation took advantage of the freighted symbol of Wall Street, an actual locale that also serves to represent the global power of finance capital. Like striking workers occupying a factory, the protesters who marched daily from Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan sought to “shut it down” and disrupt the capacity of urban financial elites to engage in regular commerce and work. And like factory occupations, the encampments dramatized central questions of power and control: who runs things, who should run things, how can things run differently? While their occupation lacked the immediate leverage workers can achieve when taking over their workplaces, it carried levels of symbolic and associative power that echoed the dramatic self-organization achieved in places like Seattle’s general strike of 1919 or Flint’s famous autoworker sit-downs in 1937. For a brief period the Occupy encampments took great advantage of the public spectacle they created, shifting the media and political discourse around inequality, corporate power, and the shortcomings of liberal democracies. Similarly, they “capitalized” on the associative ties made possible by their enduring physical presence in public space, engaging creative tactics, forging new friendships and networks, and exploring innovative forms of social and political organization. Michael Kimmelman, the New York Times architecture reporter, articulated what many saw upon first laying eyes on OWS: “Much as it can look at a glance like a refugee camp in the early morning, when the protesters are just emerging from their sleeping bags, Zuccotti Park has in fact become a miniature polis, a

INTRODUCTION      3

little city in the making” (Kimmelman 2011). It was in this sense a prefigurative city, in which one could experience what a radically different world might look, sound, and feel like. Here food and lodging were free, work was collaborative, and one could participate in the deliberative democracy governing the daily interactions and decisions at the park. Included in this prefigurative work were the difficulties faced by occupiers confronting internal power dynamics, inequalities, and conflicting goals, which made Occupy messy, generative, and difficult to sustain.2 Nevertheless, here the city was a “factory” for imagining an alternative future. For all the symbolism and tactical leverage of the central square, the problems of inequality, access to power, and public control of community that had inspired OWS were the daily bread of the neighborhoods far from Manhattan’s cavernous financial district. These neighborhoods became our third site of inspiration. During OWS’s heyday and in the months and years since the occupations were shut down by police forces across the country, many Occupy activists turned to, or returned to, the local work of building social movements rooted in preexisting places with their own long histories of organizing. In the working-class-majority African American and Caribbean neighborhood of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, for instance, occupiers began a neighborhood-based “assembly,” bringing long-term residents together with the newer, “gentrifying,” college-educated and predominantly white Occupy crowd. Over time, through their focus on landlords who force evictions and then gouge the newcomers, a diverse alliance drawing from the Crown Heights Assembly and tenant advocates such as the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board began to organize together using a traditional model—a tenants union. With three “locals” grouped by common landlord, stretching across the neighborhood and making connections to nearby Bushwick and Williamsburg, the Crown Heights Tenants Union has grounded aspects of the initial OWS in the concrete (and brick and mortar) daily lives of Brooklynites, old and new. Crown Heights residents—who include union members in transit; workers in city offices, education, and communications; graduate students and the unemployed; artists and designers—meet monthly in a coalition that, when working well, recognizes the differences within as well as common interests across the vast “99 percent.” The CHTU combines direct action, protest, and traditional pressure on elected politicians to get landlords to fix the heat and stop evictions. It also joined with other housing groups whose pressure helped assure the lowest rent hike in the history of regulated apartments in New York City in 2014–2015, followed by a historic rent freeze for 2016.3 We saw in these emergent spatial politics—from ALIGN’s citywide worker organizing, to Occupy’s tactical and prefigurative transformation of public space, to CHTU’s neighborhood-based tenants unions and coalition building—a growing global trend. For while the particular cases mentioned above were situated

FIGURE 0.1.  Workers Rising #RiseUpNY demonstration, July 24, 2012. Photo by Annette Bernhardt.

FIGURE 0.2.  General Assembly, Occupy Wall Street, October 14, 2011. Photo by Michael Gould-Wartofsky.

FIGURE 0.3.  Crown Heights Tenants Union Rally, June 7, 2014. Photo by Urban Homesteading Assistance Board.

INTRODUCTION      5

within a few miles of each other in Manhattan and Brooklyn, it was hard to miss how related they were in political spirit, and often actual political ties, to similar mobilizations around the world. Over the past decades, many places have witnessed a shift in the primary location of worker-based and popular protests from the gates of the workplace to urban public space. The target of protesters’ organizing has similarly shifted, from individual bosses or corporations to political elites and industry groups often bounded by the urban centers the protesters use and disrupt. From Puerta del Sol in Madrid to Gezi Park in Istanbul, from the streets and squares of Buenos Aires to Zuccotti Park in New York City, we have seen “the urban” become the emblematic site and scale of contentious politics among workers and precariously employed people in the twenty-first century, much as the shop floor was for the twentieth. In an era of escalating inequality; unemployment and underemployment; and increasing recognition of the interconnection between economic, social, environmental, and spatial justice, organizers find common cause across disparate groups whose similar experiences and physical proximity bridge their roles as citizen, neighbor, and worker. Labor and community coalitions move outside the workplace to social halls, church basements, and pubs to organize campaigns around issues of joint concern—from living wages to immigrant rights to disaster relief. Activists increasingly seize plazas and buildings, disrupt business and traffic, and use direct action to call attention to their causes and to create new movement spaces for future action. The use of streets and squares, bridges and parks, churches and bars, is not a new tactic of popular organizing or dissent. Indeed, contemporary struggles echo the spatial tactics of social movements of the last two centuries, from the Paris Commune to the march on Selma. Traditional workplace-based struggles, meanwhile, are far from obsolete. Strikes, boycotts, and slowdowns continue to be a central part of the protest landscape, dominant in China, and intermittently paralyzing cities and countries of the European Union, West and Southern Africa, Latin America, and even on rare occasion the United States (for example the Chicago Teachers Union strike of 2012). Furthermore, these strikes reveal the degree to which work stoppages, when successful, leverage their ability to bring business as usual to a halt far beyond the gates of the workplace. Nonetheless, we find there are interesting indications of a shift away from workplace-based struggles. Data compiled by the New Unionism Network and others indicate that “while the number of traditional work stoppages may be on the decline in many parts of the world, the number of people involved in larger political or general strikes may be on the rise, at least in parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa” (Luce 2014, 141). Though the data collected from country to country are inconsistent, analysts find that strikes at particular firms, or even across particular industries, have grown less common. At the same time, cities in Spain, Portugal, France, Greece, Turkey, South Africa, Nigeria, and India have

6       MIRIAM GREENBERG AND PENNY LEWIS

been shut down by general strikes, wherein unions make use of the organizing opportunities afforded by urban space, informal workers engage in direct action, and together they leverage allies beyond the workplace. We draw attention to this relocation of the space of protest from the factory to the city because we see in it a shift that is both historically distinct and politically significant. Across these city-oriented struggles, we focus on the increasing prominence of what Henri Lefebvre called “right to the city” demands and frameworks that link work-related and “place-based” actions and identities to forge more sustained movements. Here workplace concerns, for example of port truckers, teachers, or fast food workers, are linked to the environmental health of local port communities, or keeping neighborhood schools open, or ending brutal policing in marginalized communities. So, too, we see precarious workers, new immigrants, and the unemployed using the city as a lever of power, from gaining community support for day labor centers and rights for street vendors, to organizing in public squares when job conditions or surveillance means shop-floor organizing is not an option. Finally, urban social movements focused on what Manuel Castells termed “collective consumption” goods, like housing, education, child care, and public green space, find allies among labor organizations that aim to connect good jobs to broader social and environmental needs in the neighborhoods in which their members live. These allied struggles involving labor, the “precariat,” and right to the city, while in many ways continuous with the past, are also shaped by, and revealing of, our current political and social moment, a moment characterized as neoliberal and precarious, and distinguished by the importance of the city as political, economic, cultural, ecological, and demographic force in what is popularly termed “the urban age.” The pieces in The City Is the Factory provide an analytical overview of the form, substance, limits, and possibilities of these timely struggles. On the one hand, many authors address how these efforts recognize the profound challenges facing workers in this new age, from rampant unemployment and the “fissured” workplace (Weil 2014), to resurgent antiunion politics and the difficulties in running successful strikes. On the other, they recognize the expansion of “right to the city” organizations and efforts, and the salience of their struggles—over who can afford to live in the city, under what environmental conditions, and according to whose justice—for non-rich urban populations as a whole. Together, these efforts are taking seriously the strategic territories of their urban milieus, and organizing with self-conscious knowledge of the multi-scalar points of leverage that the contemporary city makes possible. Thus the campaigns and activists profiled here examine where work and right-to-the-city orientations explicitly or implicitly overlap. The book focuses on U.S. cities, but

INTRODUCTION      7

the dynamics at play can be traced internationally as well, and half our chapters address cities outside the United States or compare U.S. and international cases. To frame these contemporary dynamics, we build upon the work of a wide range of scholars who—much like the activists cited above—now argue that the contemporary metropolis is both preeminent “space of the commons” and an emergent site of sociopolitical mobilization, analogous in its strategic centrality to the role of the factory in the industrial era (D. Mitchell 2003; Hardt and Negri 2011; Harvey 2003, 2012). Seizing control of the city, or key parts of it, now provides significant political leverage at multiple levels of governance, from the national to the global. This idea is entering the liberal mainstream, evinced by a spate of new books—If Mayors Ruled the World, Triumph of the City, and The Metropolitan Revolution—celebrating the ability of a constellation of progressive mayors and urban-regional coalitions to transcend state, federal, and international gridlock to advance commonsense environmental, labor, immigration, living-wage, and social welfare policies (Barber 2013; Glaeser 2011, Katz and Bradley 2013).4 It is also entering the calculus of groups striving for more radical forms of social change, as evident in cases highlighted in books like Rebel Cities, Labor in the New Urban Battlegrounds, and Cities for People, Not for Profit (Harvey 2012; Turner and Cornfield 2007; Brenner, Marcuse, Mayer 2011). In short, and together with much of this analysis, we see the contemporary roles of the metropolis—as commons, locus of power, economic engine, and target of organizing—underlying the everyday dynamics of contemporary politics in crucial ways, and in ways that can be distinguished from earlier eras of capitalism. We concur with Neil Brenner when he says: “The urban is . . . no longer only a site or arena of contentious politics but has become one of its primary stakes. Reorganizing urban conditions is increasingly seen as a means to transform the broader political economic structures and spatial formations of early twenty-first-century world capitalism as a whole” (2014, xx). In our volume we draw upon an interdisciplinary and empirically grounded set of contributions to critically examine, and explore the actual politics of, these crucial arguments. In what follows, we situate these contributions in three key contexts: (1) following Lefebvre, the urban revolution transforming conditions for workers and low-income people, and politicizing urban inhabitants in new ways; (2) new alliances between labor, precarious urban workers, and right-to-the-city movements that seek to transform these conditions; and (3) the new tactical and creative uses of urban space that these movements frequently deploy. These areas necessarily intersect, of course. Yet, we argue, they are also usefully examined separately. For instance, recalling the three sites that open this chapter, we can think of the Crown Heights Tenants Union, contending as it does with issues of gentrification

8       MIRIAM GREENBERG AND PENNY LEWIS

and the escalating cost of housing, as exemplifying the new struggles of urban inhabitants of the first context. We can consider ALIGN’s geostrategic, coalitional organizing around campaigns like “Fight for $15” as exemplifying the new alliances of the second context. And finally, we can see the tactical and prefigurative transformation of central plazas by the Occupy movement as exemplifying the third. In organizing our text in this way, we argue that these areas need to be understood both on their own terms and in interaction with one another for us to make sense of our current moment, and effectively act within it. The political intervention offered by the book, then, is to encourage and provide multiple visions for such interaction, in both the questions future scholars ask and the campaigns future organizers undertake.

The Urban Revolution As noted, we live in a period commonly referred to as “the urban age.” The evidence typically marshaled to establish this fact is demographic. For the first time in human history, cities are where more than 50 percent of the world’s population lives and works. And with accelerating rates of global migration from South to North, as well as within the South, this figure is set to increase to 75 percent by 2050 (Burdett and Sudjic 2007, 2011).5 The significance of urban areas, however, extends beyond sheer population growth. Indeed the capacity to measure such trends is notoriously difficult since, with the growth of informal settlements and the blurring of boundaries between cities, suburbs, and hinterlands, it is unclear how to identify where “the urban” begins and ends. Rather than looking at cities as finite units, then, urban geographers increasingly focus—following Lefebvre—on urbanization as an ongoing process, and one taking place on a planetary scale (Lefebvre [1968] 2003; Brenner and Schmid 2013). By this is meant the extension of the “urban fabric”—including networked infrastructures of communication, transportation, water, sanitation, food, and energy, and the relative density of human settlement, economic activity, and built environments. With urbanization comes the increasing interaction between the city and the countryside, as well as the progressive spread of “urban society”—in both a political and cultural sense—across the planet. The rapid pace and massive scale of this urbanization, stitching together urban and rural ecosystems, channeling political economic energies, and altering cultural sensibilities, is intertwined with, and a driving force of, contemporary forms of global capitalism and global politics. Cities, of course, have always been essential to capitalist development. They are a crucial motor of production and profit making, through the spatial

INTRODUCTION      9

concentration of manufacturing, services, and commerce within them, as well as via the lucrative markets in finance, insurance, and real estate driven by and driving urban development itself. Yet this role has greatly expanded in the current, globalizing period. Estimates on this dynamic abound. To cite one popular report, by the McKinsey Global Institute, on what the authors call the “City 600,” by 2025 some six hundred cities are set to account for 60 percent of global GDP, with this amount doubling that created in 2007. Moreover, of these six hundred, only 10 percent are the “megacities” with populations of ten million or more that emerged in the 1990s. Instead, 577 fast-growing, relatively unfamiliar “emerging market cities”—from Ahmedabad in India to Viña del Mar in Chile to Shenzhen in China, as well as Chicago in the United States—will contribute half of global growth, and so gain share from and ultimately become megacities themselves (Dobbs et al. 2011). Thus we seem to be experiencing what Lefebvre predicted in the 1960s: an urban revolution, whereby urbanization itself—as in the production and extension of cities and their infrastructures—is occurring at such a rate and on such a scale that it has surpassed industrialization to become the primary engine of economic growth. (Lefebvre [1968] 2003; Brenner 2014). This planetary urbanization brings with it transformations of the global environment—from climate change to habitat loss—akin to the impact of the industrial age. Similarly, we are seeing evidence of what Saskia Sassen (1996) predicted two decades after Lefebvre: that the popular notion that digital technology and offshore production would obviate the need for urban agglomeration would prove false. The highest-growth industries of our age continue to cluster in cities and profit from their growth—including retail, commerce, tourism, media, finance, real estate, and high-end services. Meanwhile, the tentacles of production, distribution, and consumption, facilitated by communications and transportation technologies old and new, link people, places, and supply chains within ever-expanding metropolitan areas and across ever-thickening global networks. Some of the most powerful labor organizations globally—including the SEIU and UNITE HERE in the United States—are based in these industries and take advantage of metropolitan locations in their choice of labor actions, from exurban warehouse districts and logistics headquarters to the hotels and office buildings in redeveloped downtowns (Bonacich 2003). Yet it must be added that production is not the only role for cities within capitalism. Urban neighborhoods have also always enabled what Marx called “social reproduction”—providing the lodging, resources, and communal space for the physical sustenance, conviviality, and cultural connections necessary for everyday people to survive and, ideally, thrive. It is precisely these urban “use values,” found in the streets, houses, schools, cafés, parks, shops, and squares outside the

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gates of the workplace, that were fought for by the early twentieth-century labor movement, and that often provided necessary solidarity for strikers inside the gates. Post-1960s, the role of these place-based solidarities—called “new urban social movements”—grew in power and scope, together with expanding claims on the state. As Manuel Castells framed “USMs” in 1983, their primary demands were for “collective consumption” goods—including housing, health care, education, transit, food, and public space itself. These broad-based demands also tended to create movements that were more inclusive across lines of culture, race, gender, sexuality, and, significantly for Castells, class, as counterposed to the mainstream labor movement.6 As we read it, the urban commons have always been as essential to the well-being of low-income and working people as their wages, hours, and working conditions, even if the former has not always been understood in these terms by the leadership of worker movements. Over the last forty years, the work people find in cities has grown increasingly polarized, with secure, high-end or decent jobs available for a shrinking number of highly skilled workers, often in tech, finance, and real estate, and, for much of the rest, jobs that are degraded and with little promise of a secure future. Global-city scholars have shown how market deregulation since the 1970s, intended to produce an increase in foreign trade, investment, and competition, has also helped produce such unstable and unequal labor markets (Ross and Trachte 1983; Sassen 2011; Buechler 2006). As Simone Buechler describes, in the case of São Paulo, as in so many other aspiring global cities, local efforts to make the city more attractive to global capital have entailed increased attacks on unions and exploitation of low-wage workers, and an extended process of “precaritization” of work itself (2006, 241). However, as Buechler also notes, “global forces are actively embraced, resisted, or transformed by national and local forces and actors.” Or, to quote Andrew Herod in this volume, “social life does not take place on the head of a pin but is, rather, deeply spatially informed and structured.” Here we emphasize the context of neoliberal restructuring of the city within which the restructuring of labor markets and collective consumption has unfolded, albeit in a highly variegated and nonlinear fashion around the globe. In other words, we highlight the role of the neoliberal city in the transformation of, and growing fight for control over, both economic production and social reproduction. In this sense neoliberalism, commonly associated with the policy cocktail of privatization, deregulation, and austerity (Hackworth 2006), should also be understood geographically, in terms of the role of urban areas in the innovation and development of these policies, as well as the profound impact of these policies on urban space and populations. As with the progressive restructuring of the 1930s–1950s that ushered in Fordist-Keynesianism in much of the Global North

INTRODUCTION      11

and South, 1970s-era neoliberal shifts were justified as a necessary response to crisis—in this case the fiscal crisis of the state, concentrated at the metropolitan scale, and often referred to in shorthand as “the urban crisis.” The latter was really a constellation of local crises intertwined with larger macroeconomic events, including deindustrialization, rising energy costs, inflation, and federal retrenchment, as well as the rise of radical urban movements themselves. In the United States, and much of the Global North, they also represented a rising antiurban political sentiment, usually framed in racialized terms, whereby cities and their black and brown, poor and working-class residents were blamed for their own demise and broader social decline. In response to these budget-battering and socially dislocating forces, urban neoliberalism seemed to provide a clean break. Geographers Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell have described the shifts of this era in terms of dynamics of “creative-destruction,” involving two moments of “rollback” and “rollout” neoliberalism. First, in the rollback phase, public-private leaders worked to dismantle the Keynesian-era, “managerial” mode of urban governance that targeted the collective consumption needs of large working-class and middle-class populations (Peck and Tickell 2002; Harvey 1989a). This included the defunding of institutions that served the poor and low-income—from public housing to schools to transit—as well as the dismantling of rent regulations, environmental protections, and wage laws. Unions across the Global North and South were especially hard hit in this rollback. In the public sector, budget-balancing agreements were used to erode collective-bargaining agreements and gut pensions and benefits. Political attacks on the very existence of tax-supported public goods and services have further decimated and destabilized public-sector workers and the unions that represent them. With deindustrialization—a process in which the local state was also heavily involved—private-sector workers saw mass layoffs, as their jobs, and entire blue-collar sectors, were exported elsewhere. Measured by density of organization or by political clout, today’s unions have a fraction of the leverage and power they once exercised. Together, this has meant a pauperization of vast segments of the urban working class (Fletcher 2014). For some cities in the United States, such as Camden (New Jersey), Stockton (California), and Detroit, such restructuring has resulted in economic collapse. Second, political and economic elites, often governing through public-private partnerships, worked over subsequent decades to roll out new, “entrepreneurial” solutions to urban economic decline, and to spur interurban competition (Harvey 1989a). This included the creation of new corporate tax breaks, “enterprise zones,” business-improvement districts, and other incentives to attract speculative investment in urban real estate and economic development. Hip urban redevelopment schemes, from “urban greening” to the “creative city” to “new urbanism,” abound, and are designed to help cities rebrand themselves and attract investment, tourism,

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and more affluent consumers and residents. In combination, rollback and rollout neoliberalism are associated with growing rates of inequality, experienced both in socioeconomic and socio-spatial terms. Urban innovations that signal opportunity for developers, higher-income residents, and higher-end businesses often spell the displacement of those in the middle and at the lower end. This pushes urban populations to suburban or exurban areas lacking services, jobs, or access to urban infrastructure like transit, in a process that exacerbates both uneven spatial development and environmentally damaging urban sprawl.7 Associated with this reshuffling we see the “informalization” of urban housing and economic activity, becoming, according to scholars and the UN alike, the dominant forms of urbanization in the world today (Al Sayyad and Roy 2003; Davis 2006; UNDP 2012). Rapidly expanding urban areas are rarely governed by formal planning processes, but rather are “informally” built and regulated, and precarious in both physical and financial terms. Contrary to popular representations of anarchic and unregulated construction, which are usually focused exclusively on shantytowns in the developing world, such informal development takes forms both high and low, and is found in both the Global South and North (Jennifer Robinson 2011). For the low-income, it means “informal settlements”— from tripled-up apartments in the urban core to shantytowns and squats on the margins. At the high end, it means speculative bubbles of luxury condo and office-tower construction, which can be found in the revalorized urban core as well as in pricy real estate on the periphery, such as on desirable waterfronts vulnerable to flooding. Alongside these makeshift and risky residences are equally makeshift and risky economies—from the informal to the underground, and from the high to the low end, with growth in the freewheeling finance, real estate, and retail sectors matched by that of street vending and day labor. Thus we see multiple features of the “urban revolution,” from the transformation of places of production and work, to that of spaces of social reproduction, the commons, urban nature, and everyday life. In turn we see how these become the basis of new intersections between workers and right-to-the-city movements. Here the city is both the ground and the goal, creating new challenges as well as possibilities for organizing.

New Alliances A second contribution of The City Is the Factory is a sustained examination of new urban mobilizations emerging in the context of the urban revolution, with particular focus on alliances among worker-oriented and place-based groups in which there is a link between “workplace” and “community” issues within a

INTRODUCTION      13

right-to-the-city framework. Following David Harvey, our understanding of the “urban working class” goes beyond traditional conceptions that focus on those centralized through mass production or stably employed. The broader group more often discussed by our contributors resembles the urban workers Harvey describes: “fragmented and divided, multiple in [their] aims and needs, more often itinerant, disorganized and fluid rather than solidly implanted” (2012, xiii; see also Kalleberg 2011). This echoes Latin American urban scholarship on the shifting subjectivity of the “popular classes,” who relate to large institutions no longer as “workers” with social protections but as residents of neighborhoods and other forms of territory, ushering in new forms of social movements and contentious politics (Merklen 2005). To make sense of the organizing undertaken by these groups, our case studies build on literature from labor studies on labor community alliances (Turner and Cornfield 2007; Milkman, Bloom, and Narro 2010; Milkman and Ott 2014), while extending this work by examining the right-to-the-city frameworks within which these coalitions are now embedded. Some of our chapters provide overviews of efforts to organize urban industries that are emerging as dominant around the world, including informal food service, day labor, street vending, and retail work. At the same time, our chapters explore how problems created by widening urban inequality and market-oriented redevelopment have led to allied struggles for affordable housing and rent control, for well-funded neighborhood schools and urban gardens, against the siting of toxics and other hazards, and against police abuse and harassment. Across these efforts we see goals that may include, but also reach beyond, typical workplace issues of hours, wages, benefits, and working conditions. Similarly, place-based issues alone don’t explain the extent of the vision of these alliances. Rather, we find the conditions of urban life are inextricably intertwined with the concerns of workers, the unemployed, and low- to moderate-income people generally, and thus the political power exercised by these coalitions is having its effects on the electoral level as well. In cities such as New York, Pittsburgh, Boston, Minneapolis, and Seattle in the United States, as well as São Paulo, Lima, Seoul, Barcelona, Paris, and London, progressive mayors and city councils have been elected to carry out the demands of the groups whose agitation created the groundwork for their election (Turner and Cornfield 2007; Meyerson 2014). From the perspective of the organized labor movement, we see contemporary city-based campaigns tapping into a spectrum of working-class concerns broader than those frequently associated with the union movement as it was established and developed from the mid-twentieth century onward. In the United States most of all, but to varying degrees in all industrialized countries, it was during that period that organized labor’s social purview tended to shrink toward the concerns

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of the workers who belonged to unions, and the basics of their conditions on the job. Against the “business unionism” of that period, the broad concerns being addressed in the campaigns we examine here reflect what many “social movement unions,” and social democratic and labor parties, commonly identify as their own. But they have older echoes as well, to days before legal rights to unions had been broadly established, and labor organizations were just one of a number of forms that urban workers sought and demands they made. In the United States, for instance, before most private-sector unions won national recognition with the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act of 1935, workers organized as tenants, as food shoppers, as riders of mass transit, in addition to organizing as workers on the job. Rent strikes and meat boycotts, frequently led by marginally employed mothers and new immigrants, helped rein in the power of the landlord and food producer. Workers demanded access to their parks through rallies and control of their streets by defiantly marching through them. Incipient and established unions joined boycotts, fought for public education and health care clinics, united with other civil society organizations to seek redress and progress on an array of local concerns, including sanitation and transportation. At times when national changes seemed beyond the realm of the possible, workers sought to change conditions in their immediate milieus. Like today’s progressive mayors, reform politicians of the “sewer socialist” variety campaigned, and at times governed, according to the principles of these movements, with greater regulation and investment in urban infrastructure—including better-made housing, green spaces, clean water, heat, and electricity—the result.8 Today, political attacks and legal hurdles have made traditional union organizing a near impossibility in many locales. Employers directly resist unionization through aggressive anti-union campaigns in which workers are fired, harassed, and otherwise intimidated in their efforts to form unions. In the United States, over half of the states have passed restrictive “right to work” legislation, which deny unions the ability to collect fees from all workers represented by the union, and the U.S. Supreme Court will likely make such restrictions universal in the public sector. But some U.S. cities remain bastions of union density and centers of community-based organizations; the traditions and institutions in these sites are increasingly recognized as possible sources of power for a renewed, if different, labor movement. Critiquing the business unionism of the recent past, for the past two decades workers’ movements have been experimenting with new forms of organization and new styles of campaigns that reflect the decentralized work lives of city dwellers. One such form is worker centers, which bridge the needs of their members both in and outside the workplace. In the urban context, these organizations typically work within immigrant communities,

INTRODUCTION      15

representing the workplace, community, and legal concerns of their members, fighting for unpaid wages, access to housing and healthcare, and broader immigrant rights. Notably, in many cases these centers are working among populations and industries that labor unions have historically ignored or failed to organize, such as day laborers or domestic workers—and in fact the initial worker centers were frequently formed for this reason (Fine 2007). The organized labor movement has increasingly participated in these efforts, and, within a sizable number of its international bodies, has shifted its focus from a narrow member-focused and collective-bargaining framework to a broader vision of what the “labor movement” could, should, and needs to be. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the AFL-CIO explicitly embraced the idea of “union cities,” pledging a focus on central labor councils and community labor coalitions in its future work. Beginning in 2006, the AFL-CIO created organizational space for worker center affiliation. In its biennial convention in 2013, the AFL-CIO passed dozens of resolutions aimed at creating (as Resolution 5 spells out) “a broad, inclusive, and effective labor movement.” Prisons, immigration, public education, and student debt joined more traditional issues such as collective bargaining, new organizing, and higher wages as key commitments. Vital to this vision were commitments spelled out in Resolution 16, “Building Enduring Labor-Community Partnerships.” The resolution calls for “rooted, dynamic, and abiding” relationships with community partners, established with “a scale, a potency, and an exuberance” commensurate to the common experience and needs of labor and community. The bracing and expansive language of the long resolution reflects some of the work already underway in various sectors of organized labor. A compelling instance of this collaboration was the Chicago Teachers Union’s successful strike of 2012, which was notable for the community support it received. For more than a year before the strike, the union fostered joint discussions and action with families over issues related to students’ learning conditions and curricula, while fighting school closures and criticizing the accelerating privatization of the public schools and the increasing use of high-stakes standardized testing. The union’s commitment to the shared goal of high quality education for students earned it the active and ongoing support of families during the strike itself, as parents who struggled to find childcare nevertheless rallied to the teachers’ cause. Such mutual support has continued, as CTU has continued to engage in the broader community struggles against the pernicious effects of education reform; we have since seen education unions in cities like Seattle and Los Angeles similarly connecting with community concerns. Health care unions have emerged as effective voices for community concerns as well, such as National Nurses United, which, for

16       MIRIAM GREENBERG AND PENNY LEWIS

example, coordinated broad labor support to protest water shut-offs in Detroit in 2014, and coalitions in New York and elsewhere that fight alongside community groups for expanded access to healthcare facilities and against hospital closures. Some building trade locals have joined affordable housing coalitions. While such a “class perspective” or “social movement unionism” is not yet the normal practice among unions, reality is unevenly and fitfully catching up with rhetoric, and it is our sense that efforts along these lines are becoming more common. Unions have further played central roles providing resources for numerous, broad, workers’ rights campaigns, especially around minimum wage and immigration reform. In fact, it is labor’s relatively deeper pockets ­created by ­member dues that have sustained many of the labor-community ­coalitions and other efforts described in this book and across the literature. Unions such as the Service Employees International Union, the United Food and Commercial Workers and the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union are among those at the forefront of such efforts, and cities are ground zero for this new work. Organizers see that strong citywide regulations around wages, benefits, and working conditions—such as living-wage and anti-wage-theft laws—will in many cases exert greater pressure over employers than work-site-specific actions or less robust and poorly enforced national legislation. They grasp, too, that the social space of the city expands the organizing possibility for traditional labor fights and can be a decisive factor when unions are on the defensive. In situations of workplace autocracy and isolation, and where collective-bargaining rights have been repealed, political strategies must transcend the shop floor and go out into community spaces where workers are freer to congregate, and where broader popular pressure can be exerted. Organizations like ALIGN and the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), campaigns for higher minimum wages and paid sick leave, fair and stable scheduling, protective ordinances for day labor—all seek, in urban planning and policy, remedies that in a previous era were more often considered private, labor-management affairs. Inevitably, these coalitions are also informed by, and help influence, real debates occurring around the globe about the appropriate level at which to direct efforts for progressive social change. In the United States in particular, the national state is viewed by many as “captured” by corporate interests or paralyzed by gridlock; as importantly, it has devolved its central authority and limited its central resources, leaving the states and localities overseeing higher education, prisons, and policing, welfare support, housing funds, and more.9 Obviously, there are limits to what can be accomplished at the local level and dangers in privileging this, or any, spatial scale (Leitner, Sheppard, and Sziarto 2008). Nonetheless, in the United States, as well as other countries around the world, local and state governments, under more direct pressure than the national government from labor

INTRODUCTION      17

and place-based movements, have taken the lead in passing innovative legislation on issues ranging from wages, fair scheduling, paid sick leave, domestic-worker rights, affordable housing, and even climate change. As the executive director of LAANE reported to the New York Times, “Given the dysfunction of the federal government, our sense is, in a country as huge and complex as ours, cities should serve as the laboratories for change” (Greenhouse 2014).10

New Spatial Tactics Out of our close examination of emerging movements flows a third contribution of this volume: an investigation into the increasingly sophisticated geographic thinking going on inside labor and right-to-the-city campaigns. Much as the shutdown of the workplace via the strike has been—and continues to be—a central tactic in efforts to leverage capital to do labor’s bidding, shutting down business as usual in the central squares, thoroughfares, bridges, and highways of today’s cities has become the prime tactic of today’s urban social movements. From tactical occupations, barricades, street theater, and squats, to long-term campaigns and broad-based forms of coalition building, urban alliances are finding ways—some new, many drawing on older strategies—to “organize the city” as a means of advancing broader struggles. Here we see how the neighborhoods, streets, infrastructure, and commons of today's cities have joined, if not displaced, the shop floor as the strategic location for new forms of social struggle and solidarity. As we will explore in our chapters, we see this in the case of now iconic urban actions such as the assemblies and highway blockades of Buenos Aires and the occupations of Zuccotti Park, as well as some lesser-known instances, like the squatting in buildings slated for upscale redevelopment in central São Paulo and the daily appropriation of downtown sidewalks by migrant street vendors in Durban, New Delhi, and Los Angeles. As we stated above, these efforts and strategies, while promising, are at root symptomatic of a decline in the power of traditional workplace-based ­organizations, particularly unions, but also the stand-alone community-based organizations representing working-class enclaves that are increasingly fragmented by gentrification and under pressure from unemployment and underemployment. Budget cuts and the privatizing of city services and public goods (such as parks and schools) have caused further erosion of the “public sphere” and “public spaces” of the city. Public police and private security forces compound the problem, as citizens and demonstrators are barred from exercising basic rights in the few places extended to them. Many of the groups and movements we examine here understand that they need to challenge these trends directly and

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claim new places for organizing. Tracing how these places are thought about and used strategically, both at a theoretical level and in concrete campaigns, is the final consideration of this volume. David Harvey argues that the challenge for today’s Left is to tap into the power of those who produce and reproduce the city from the ground up: “It is the metropolis that now constitutes a vast common produced by the collective labor expended on and in the city[.] The right to use that common must surely then be accorded to all those who have had a part in producing it” (2012, 78). Asserting this “right to the urban commons” takes many forms, but we observe that most of these forms share one thing: the tactical use of urban space. In this sense, the streets and neighborhoods of global cities are emerging not only as a preeminent space for production and social reproduction, but also for politicization and for asserting power, that is, for what Mark Gottdeiner has called socio-spatial praxis (1994). Creative new actions target and transform highways and street corners, bridges and downtown plazas. Some urban protesters are interested in staging dramatic forms of civil disobedience. Some are interested in creating prefigurative, utopian spaces, the polis in miniature. All make tactical use of divided urban spaces of the neoliberal city, from the growing centrality of downtown business and tourist districts, to the growing marginalization of outer boroughs and suburbs. The occupations of central squares across Egypt, Spain, Israel, and the United States in 2011; of Gezi Park and massing on Istanbul’s thoroughfares in 2013; of Central Hong Kong in the “umbrella revolution” of 2014; and more recently the mass demonstrations for urban transportation in São Paulo and the fight against labor law reform in the Nuit debout overnight occupations in Paris in 2016—all signify this tactical shift. The direct action of occupation stakes out the public’s power to control urban space, and the prolonged interaction of these demonstrations have helped create networks ushering in new political movements and even parties. In the labor movement, organizers increasingly frame efforts as “wall to wall,” seeing organizing as both sectoral and spatial. The emerging call to “organize the neighborhood” and “organize the city”—by groups as diverse as Crown Heights Tenants Unions and day labor campaigns—engenders tactics that not only link workers across a supply chain or industry, but also link workers and urban residents across diverse communities, seeking to make connections between labor issues and broader, related calls for urban justice. The movements that mass in these public spaces have faced police repression. Police forces and private security have continued in the vein of repression established during the first years of the global justice movement in the late 1990s, executing mass arrests, using water cannons, “kettling” (corralling groups of protesters to control their movement), sound cannons, tear gas, and rubber bullets

INTRODUCTION      19

to constrain urban protesters. Such repression has tended to expand the demands of the protesters to include the very “right to protest for rights,” as Martin Luther King Jr. told striking sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968.

Chapters The interdisciplinary chapters in our volume take up the major themes outlined here—the urban revolution, new alliances, and new spatial tactics— through grounded analyses focused on particular cities or urban comparisons, as well as on particular popular struggles. The first three chapters focus on the challenges facing workers in the low-wage and precarious industries that predominate in our neoliberal urban era. As the chapters make clear, these workers are creating new strategies for organizing across the dispersed and fragmented work sites of their jobs, as well as against neoliberal urban conditions themselves. In chapter 1, “The Street Labor Movement,” Kathleen Dunn explores the workplaces, working conditions, and political climate facing street vendors. She begins with a close look at New York, but develops her discussion to include vendor work and organizations around the globe. She finds patterns of harassment and criminalization, as well as fundamental exclusion, governing state–vendor interaction, patterns intensified among poor and working-class, often immigrant, vendors. This treatment has led to novel forms of street-vendor organizing that “have emerged as paradigmatic right-to-the-city struggles in the United States and globally.” Identifying such campaigns in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, as well as globally in India, South Africa, and elsewhere, these cases belie arguments that the problem of street vending is a technocratic rather than political one. As Dunn says, “It is street vendors’ appropriation of public space that threatens the moral order of neoliberal urbanism, as it flouts the sacred bond between property rights and class dominance.” In chapter 2, “Day Labor Agencies and the Logic and Landscape of Neoliberal Poverty Management,” Gretchen Purser directly addresses some of the strategic and analytic challenges to efforts to organize and regulate low-wage work from below through a close look at day-labor agencies—storefront “labor pools” or “body shops”—where jobless and cash-strapped individuals engage in a congregate clamor for a day’s work. In her chapter, she draws upon extensive fieldwork carried out in the day-labor agencies of Baltimore and Oakland to document the links between these purveyors of low-wage, precarious employment and the geographically proximate “poverty management” institutions from which they recruit would-be workers, revealing the interconnections between homelessness,

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prisoner reentry, and sites of subjugated labor. She argues that these trends require that organizers shift attention away from the labor process of singular, bounded work sites and focus on the processing of labor that takes place both between and beyond work sites. In chapter 3, “Economic Development for Whom? Retail, Neoliberal Urbanism, and the ‘Fight for 15,’ ” Stephanie Luce and Penny Lewis consider the growing prominence of the fast food and broader retail industries in the global cityscape, and with it, the simultaneous urbanization and globalization of the fights to empower these workers. Displacing small businesses, large retailers and franchises have used their size and power to alter zoning laws and shopping and eating patterns, as well as impact labor standards and regulations. Urban coalitions have contested economic development aimed at enticing big-box retailers and shopping malls to their neighborhoods, while other campaigns are successfully challenging the erratic scheduling norms of today’s retail. The Fight for $15 campaign has fused labor, broader movements over inequality (including Occupy and Black Lives Matter), and city-based living-wage efforts in successful pressure campaigns that are having significant legal and political effects. While cases differ, they share a common theme: workers and community partners attempting to claim some democratic voice over—and drawing connections between—wage and hour standards, the use of urban space, and the purpose of economic development. In these chapters we see how the precarious and degraded conditions facing workers across the so-called “informal” and “formal” wage sectors—from street vending to day labor to retail and fast food—are an essential part, and integral to the functioning, of the contemporary city. Thus, the argument is made that working conditions must be a feature of right-to-the-city organizing, and indeed that worker and urban issues cannot be understood in isolation from each other. The following four chapters analyze innovative alliances between low-wage or unemployed worker organizations and community groups, focusing on the conditions under which they emerge, their potential impact, and the challenges they face. Depending on their political context, depth, and breadth, these alliances have met with varying degrees of success, as Els de Graauw and Shannon Gleeson’s contribution to this volume makes clear. In chapter 4, “Context, Coalitions, and Organizing: Immigrant Labor Rights Advocacy in San Francisco and Houston,” they provide an analysis of the organizing and advocacy campaigns for new labor rights laws in these two divergent municipalities. In San Francisco, they trace the successful living-wage and anti-wage-theft campaigns in a city with one of the highest union densities in the country and where labor remains a political force to be reckoned with. They contrast the coalitions and strategies of San Francisco with the more nascent “Down with Wage Theft” campaign in

INTRODUCTION      21

Houston, which seeks to enact a municipal ordinance compelling city officials to dedicate resources to rooting out the illegal labor practices of private-sector employers in the city. In both cases, the low-wage workers who stood to benefit most from higher municipal wages and more stringent enforcement mechanisms were immigrants who toil in the contingent and informal sector. Varying coalitions of (at times unlikely) advocacy groups have lobbied for policy enactment and implementation, highlighting the importance of immigrant nonprofit organizations in advancing change on behalf of noncitizens. The authors argue that these nonprofits—including, but not limited to, worker centers—are of growing importance for labor policy advocacy, yet with roles, tactics, and impacts that vary significantly depending on the local, urban context in which they operate. As noted above, the political power exercised by these coalitions is having its effects on the electoral level. But new electoral victories are only part of the story. As the issues confronted are increasingly understood to be both community and labor concerns, the struggles these coalitions face are also uniting groups that in the recent past were less than united. Thus we have seen in the last two decades a resurgence of coalitional urban social movement organizing. One of the primary fronts of such organizing is around issues of urban environmental justice, issues that have taken on new dimensions in an era of neoliberal forms of “green” urban development, as explored by Melissa Checker in chapter 5, “A Bridge Too Far: Industrial Gentrification and the Dynamics of Sacrifice in New York City.” Following a proposal to raise the Bayonne Bridge to make way for exhaust-spewing supertankers in New York Harbor, Checker explores how neighborhood-based environmental justice activists on the North Shore of Staten Island, New York, understood and challenged the global political and economic forces that threatened the health and safety of their local environments, and also forged novel alliances with truck driver unions whose workers were likewise threatened. Staten Island’s North Shore already hosts waste-producing facilities, toxic contamination, and air pollution, especially from the ships and trucks that served the port. This 5.2-mile stretch of land contains approximately twenty contaminated industrial properties, all of which sit yards away from densely populated neighborhoods, including the borough’s highest numbers of poor, African American, Hispanic, and immigrant households. Checker finds that these spatial arrangements worked in a dialectic, and uneven, relationship with development in other parts of the city. As leaders allocated space in ways that fostered high-end development and that privileged residents in affluent areas, they also moved toxic industries that undermined the health, safety, and livelihoods of blue-collar workers, poor communities, and communities of color. Recent efforts to “green” the city and to promote small-scale, boutique manufacturing businesses have intensified these inequities

22       MIRIAM GREENBERG AND PENNY LEWIS

by further displacing heavy industries to these “sacrifice zones.” In 2013–2014, the controversy over the raising of the Bayonne Bridge brought these tensions and dynamics to light, giving rise to burgeoning alliances between environmental justice activists and unions, as well as to awarness of the contradictions of environmental planning in the neoliberal city. As noted above, we also see neoliberal urbanism associated with declining public investments in urban infrastructure, alongside informal and market-oriented forms of urban redevelopment that reinforce and extend both socio-spatial inequalities and risk. In chapter 6, “Radical Ruptures: Crisis Organizing and the Spatial Politics of Uneven Redevelopment,” Miriam Greenberg explores how these dynamics have made urban populations more vulnerable to economic downturns and disasters of all kinds, from the “man-made” to the “natural.” Yet, with the unequal impacts of disasters compounded by inequitable forms of redevelopment that follow, new solidarities and forms of crisis organizing have arisen, with some of the most innovative and broad-based urban social movements of recent years—from local coalitions to the National Right to the City Alliance—formed in this context. Seeing crises as moments of simultaneous rupture and intervention of great significance for the shape and future of cities, she explores the spatial politics of these moments in all their messiness and indeterminacy. While new movements of grassroots crisis organizers emerge, so too do empowered elite coalitions, as was seen following 9/11 and Katrina. These latter groups restructured disaster aid and redevelopment funding to support long-awaited development ambitions, while shortchanging many of the communities hardest hit, with progressive alliances unable to prevent this. The question becomes how crisis organizers can learn from past disaster moments and movements and act strategically. Greenberg grounds her analysis in a study of post–Hurricane Sandy political mobilization in New York City, which made strides in shifting the narrative frame and “turning the tide” on the top-down disaster regime. Through interviews and observation of coalitions and their campaigns, Greenberg examines how shared visions of the “right to the city” emerged from the wreckage of disaster and from the reconfigured post-crisis political environment. Despite evident bases for solidarity, however, a major challenge facing broadbased urban coalitions are entrenched and class-polarized ideas about who should be participating in them, and to what end. Daniel Aldana Cohen explores these polarities and potential, often unrealized solidarities in chapter 7, “The Other Low-Carbon Protagonists: Poor People’s Movements and Climate Politics in São Paulo.” Scholars and practitioners across the political spectrum agree that catastrophic effects of climate change can be avoided only by t­ ransforming cities. Many estimate that cutting energy demand through urban reforms could play as important a role as decarbonizing the energy supply. The neoliberal consensus is that increasing density and clustering home, work, commerce, and services

INTRODUCTION      23

can both grow urban economies and reduce energy demand. Others agree that density is vital, yet worry that neoliberal efforts will exacerbate inequalities and increase elite consumption, while pushing low income people to peripheries far from jobs, and thus result in little progress in curbing carbon emissions. In his case study of São Paulo, briefly a Global South leader of neoliberal low-carbon policy, Cohen addresses the stagnation of that approach, the ineffectiveness of so many green policy elites, and the potential of popular housing movements to anchor a democratic low-carbon urbanism. He explores why green policy elites failed to work together with low-income-housing movements, even though both groups expressed similar visions for a dense, accessible downtown. The theoretical intuition that collective consumption objectives and urban climate politics could be linked is being tested in struggle. It remains to be seen whether a green-left rhetoric will emerge as one of these popular movements’ dominant frames. Our final group of chapters takes up the ways in which the public space of cities enables and constrains today’s movements and, more broadly, the imagination of labor and community groups within them. As Lize Mogel demonstrates in chapter 8, “The Space of Speech,” state policies constrain the public’s access to, and actions within, varying configurations of social space. Since the 1990s, and especially after 9/11, the policing of protest has given rise to the oxymoronic “free-speech zones” that demarcate where elementary rights to free expression are, and are not, enforced. But today’s movements are once again laying claim to a broader commons, and taking to the streets. Mogel’s graphic illustrations of this dialectic of freedom and repression underscore both the difficulty that social movements face against police repression and the possibilities that the dense urban environment presents for mass action and resistance. In chapter 9, “Spatial Politics and Urban Borders: A Study of Buenos Aires,” Alejandro Grimson addresses the relationship between everyday politics and urban space in Buenos Aires, with a particular focus on uprisings that followed the Argentine financial crisis of 2001. Interweaving ethnographic and socio-spatial analysis, this chapter examines the locations, scales, and spatial relations in and through which everyday politics occur, and which themselves shape and are shaped by these politics and subjectivities. In the case of Buenos Aires, the three concentric circles of the city—from the central capital area to the first and second ring of Greater Buenos Aires—interact with the city’s cardinal points, generating conflict between popular conceptions of the rich “north” and poor “south,” as well as between the powerful center and the industrial periphery. These gradient boundaries meanwhile situate the hundreds of barrios in Buenos Aires, which have historically played an essential role in grounding citizen identity, political organization, and integration within the nation. In the onset and

24       MIRIAM GREENBERG AND PENNY LEWIS

aftermath of the 2001 crisis, and the entrenching of neoliberalism, the inequality between these geographies was exacerbated while the boundaries dividing them were fortified. This infused the political imagination of protest movements, all of which made new, tactical use of urban space to advance their claims on the state. Grimson shows the necessary relationship between local understandings and lived experience of inequality and urban space, and the tactics and vision of right-to-the-city protest movements. In the tenth and concluding chapter, “From Workers in the City to Workers’ Cities?,” Andrew Herod provides a theoretically rich overview of the main concepts at work in this volume, synthesizing and extending the field of labor geography in emancipatory directions. He writes, “In order to understand the potential for working-class people to gain a right to the city . . . we must pay attention to the material geographical contexts within which they find themselves.” Through attention to the interactive history of urbanism and capitalism, and to how class and other conflicts play out spatially, Herod traces the dialectical role played by geographic context—the spaces make possible the struggle, the struggle helps reshape the spaces, tapping into and creating new possibilities for the urban citizen’s capacity to effect change. In short, our chapters point toward the myriad ways in which the ­contemporary city can indeed be viewed as the factory of old: a locus of capital accumulation and the deployment of labor; a space that combines inequalities of power, livelihood, and risk with the commingling of peoples; and a staging ground of possibilities that such concatenation helps create. For, like factories, cities are also sites of resistance to the derogations produced therein. In the face of new conditions—the urban revolution, neoliberal urbanism, informal development, and mounting threats of global climate change—the city’s role in people’s lives and politics, and the stakes of campaigns to alter that role, have increased in magnitude and urgency. Given the increased role of cities in the global economy, the role of cities as critical tactical sites for struggle has increased as well. The fights that take place in cities are not just a struggle in today’s neoliberal order. With the “hollowing out,” or reorientation, of the powers of the nation state, and with the concentration of peoples and powers, cities and urban regions—from the town square to the banlieus—are increasingly where the struggle is at. As we explore throughout this book, the city is not an incidental site for this innovative organizing. Rather, such a focus reflects the political calculation of groups like ALIGN, movements like Occupy, and organizing tactics like the Crown Heights Tenants Union—as well as the growing importance of cities and urbanization processes in contemporary capitalism. For while the seizing of the local might be seen, in our current political landscape, as a retreat to the possible, we support those who argue it is also a crucially strategic, future-facing move.

INTRODUCTION      25

This move is born of a recognition of the peculiarly powerful political and economic role that cities now play, at multiple scales, from the local to the global. How these campaigns strategically navigate and shape the social, political, and physical landscapes of their home cities, and leverage the position(s) that cities occupy in relation to subnational, national, cross-border, and supranational dynamics and processes, thus constitutes a unifying theme of the book. We see this moment as one of enormous possibility, and a number of our essays emphasize successful roads taken. Nonetheless, we don’t intend this volume to be overly optimistic in its analysis. The conditions that structure the new thinking and movements we profile here are daunting. For traditional proponents of workplace-based organizing like unions to see the compelling need to go beyond the workplace and commit resources to do so; for previously i­solated urban movements to find common cause and leverage sufficient power to make real change; for the tactical repertoire of urban social movements to reflect geostrategic analysis and action: all are significantly easier said than done. While urban space does provide a form of leverage, the limitations of “home rule” can shrink the extent to which these local movements can effect change. Legal restrictions and police repression have hobbled efforts to organize and disrupt, and wealth and political power are concentrated at the top at historic levels. Compared to general strikes or revolutionary cities of a century ago, the movements today display an incipient radicalism, a potential for greater solidarity and power—but also the reality of tenuous political and institutional cohesion, saddled with the past history of their own shortcomings, including racial, ethnic, gender, and class-based division. The issues they seek to address—from climate change to housing policy—are often national or global in scale, and so require urban coalitions joining in complex, multi-scalar networks. Meanwhile, the very institutions that have helped previous urban upsurges—unions and political parties most obviously, but also community organizations, and religious and neighborhood associations—are frequently weaker, in flux, on the defensive. Yet for many workers and their organizations, the long odds of success promised by business as usual have prompted experimentation and innovation. It is often through defeats and setbacks that groups, particularly sections of organized labor, have come to appreciate the strategic leverage, new solidarities, and tactical possibilities contained in an analysis of the city as the factory. Taken as a whole, the chapters in The City Is the Factory indicate that the problems encountered by urban workers, residents, and social movements are deeply complex and require a longer view, while the visionary political roles of these various groups have been essential in bringing about social change. The possibilities, and the pitfalls, they face are considered together.

1 THE STREET LABOR MOVEMENT Kathleen Dunn Reading Capital won’t help us if we don’t also know how to read the signs in the street. Marshall Berman, “The Signs in the Street”

In February 2014, twenty-five street vendors were violently evicted from Gangnamdaero street in the gentrifying Gangnam area of Seoul, and the headquarters of one of the city’s two street vendor unions were raided. Video of overturned carts and injured vendors splayed out on the street, as nearby police directed traffic around them, was immediately uploaded to YouTube.1 Responding to the incident, Mayor Shin Yeon-hee asserted that the “area needed to be ‘cleaned up’ in order to make Gangnam more ‘global’ and ‘foreigner friendly’ ” (Kim 2014). In August, the chairman of the Bangkok City Council was arrested for extorting street vendors; he decried his arrest, warning that it would only discourage officials from policing vendors in the future.2 By the end of the year, over twenty complaints of human rights violations were brought by the Nairobi Central Business District Hawkers’ Association; the leader of the Kenyan National Commission on Human Rights confirmed several “irregular acts of violence, to the extent of killing, maiming, or otherwise injuring hawkers” (Ruvaga 2014). Such are the standard occupational hazards of street vending, despite great variance among vendors and the cities in which they work. Because their workplace is urban public space, vendors typically lack both property and labor rights, yet their occupational sector is one of the largest in the global informal economy. Moreover, street vendors tend to inhabit the lower rungs of multiple social hierarchies, whether as women, immigrants, indigenous peoples, the racially marginalized, the elderly, or the young—all groups among whom they are disproportionately represented (Roever 2014; ILO 2002; M. Chen 2001; Gallin 2001). 26

THE STREET LABOR MOVEMENT      27

Governance discourse surrounding street vendors is also remarkably uniform. Vendors are usually described as problematic objects in the street, frequently with racialized overtones: “threats” to revitalization plans (Crossa 2009; Swanson 2007); “encroachments” on streetscapes slated for beautification (Fordham Road BID 2008); “contaminants” to public health (Kirshner 2008; Lyons and Brown 2007); and “aggravating factors” for community governance associations (Galvis 2013). Municipal governments often justify vendor criminalization by proclaiming that street vending is an inappropriate use of public space (Cross and Karides 2007). Indeed, it is street vendors’ appropriation of public space that threatens the moral order of neoliberal urbanism, as it flouts the sacred bond between property rights and class dominance. The problem street vending poses for urban elites is not a technocratic question of congestion and circulation; it is the audacity of workers who don’t know their place. Facing conditions such as these, street vendors have increasingly turned urban public space into a “hot shop,” a workplace from which a street labor movement is claiming a right to the city. Street vendor organizations exist in many forms, from millions-strong trade unions, to nonprofit organizations small and large, to worker cooperatives. In regions where a strong informal labor movement has developed, vendor associations often affiliate with larger coalitions of workers, including trade unions (Celik 2010; Lindell, Hedman, and Nathan-Verboomen 2010). While not all a part of “organized labor,” nearly all such groups constitute some form of labor organization (Milgram 2011; Brown, Lyons, and Dankoco 2010; Celik 2010; Kirshner 2008; Lyons and Brown 2007). Yet instead of struggling against the exploitation of employers, the street labor movement struggles against exclusion by the state, typically municipal government and its policies designed by and for elite urban actors—from real estate owners to multinational corporations. Street vendors’ collective grievances concern how the governance of public space excludes and degrades them through policy and policing. Their demands are class based, and advanced by organizations rooted in poor and working-class communities. As such, they represent a labor movement fighting against criminalization and dispossession as processes mediated through urban space. Their organizing efforts beg further inquiry into how we conceptualize labor, given its precarious and increasingly informal composition, in both what a right to the city entails and the urban process itself. In its explicit challenge to modes of urbanization that subjugate the poor and working class, street labor is a quintessential right-to-the-city movement. Its collective demands to appropriate space and to participate in decision making about space are as fundamental an expression of the right to the city as movements for affordable housing, equitable transit, and quality education. Following Lefebvre (2003, 1992, 1968, 1967), the right to the city is a collective right to inhabit urban space through

28       KATHLEEN DUNN

participation in both its creation and direction. Urban inhabitance entails more than mere residence in the city; it is a creative and collective process of constructing the city through everyday life, eliding divisions between housing and work, or private and public space. The right to the city thus encompasses the spatial practices of work, including appropriation and decision making, which suit the working needs of urban inhabitants. This classe ouvrière shouldn’t be narrowly misread as the working class (Purcell 2002); rather, we might more astutely conceive it as a constructive class: those who directly create the oeuvre or work of the city from the street up. The street labor movement also provides a view into how labor both sustains and challenges the urban process, though clearly not under conditions of its own choosing. Since the return to a political economy of the city in the late twentieth century, urban scholars have done much to elucidate the outsize role of capital in directing urbanization, particularly through innovations in finance and privatizing governance practices that constrain democracy. Yet the role of labor in urbanization, particularly new forms of labor organizing that respond to mass precarity on the job, at home, and in the street, also fuels the urbanization of society. The vast majority of urban migration is labor migration, and the lack of formal work for so many migrants drives an expansion of urban informality that neither state nor capital can manage to contain, try at they might. In asserting its right to the city, the street labor movement grates against the homogenizing ideology of the branded and securitized neoliberal city, eliciting a consistently draconian subjugation of street vendors in cities around the world. The movement against such criminalization is a class-based demand for urban life that illustrates how struggles for workplace justice sit within the constellation of collective rights that constitute the right to the city. Combining original data from three years of fieldwork conducted in New York City with a review of the growing body of street vendor research, this chapter details how street vending campaigns have emerged as paradigmatic right-to-the-city struggles in the United States and globally. First, I discuss common patterns in street vendors’ work, workplaces, grievances, and demands. Next, I analyze street labor campaigns against criminalization in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, global cities that have facilitated growth of a higher-end, “gourmet” food truck industry alongside vigorous policing of lower-income immigrant vendors. Finally, I turn to examples from outside the United States to discuss street labor campaigns that jump from the urban scale to national and transnational scope: a national street-vending labor law recently passed in India, led by the National Association of Street Vendors of India (NASVI); and the World Class Cities for All (WCCA) campaign against the displacement wrought by urban mega-events, led by StreetNet International, a federation of vendor groups in roughly forty countries. Most of my New York fieldwork was conducted with the multiethnic Street Vendor Project (SVP) based in Manhattan, with nearly two thousand members, and VAMOS Unidos, a Latino organization based in the Bronx with

THE STREET LABOR MOVEMENT      29

FIGURE 1.1.  Street vendor protest, New York City, November 2015. The Street Vendors Project rallied to urge the New York City Council to #LiftTheCaps, removing the caps on street vendor permits and licenses. Photo © Kimberley J. Avalos/CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Used by permission.

about five hundred members. I spent nearly two years as a participant observer with SVP and VAMOS. Of the over seventy interviews I conducted with vendors and their advocates, fifteen were conducted among the small but growing number of the city’s gourmet food truck owners, predominantly native-born and upper strata, and far less criminalized than the city’s estimated twenty thousand immigrant vendors.

Street Vending and the Right to the City Street vending entails a rather literal right-to-the-city demand: the right of economically and socially marginalized groups to shape city streets according to their needs. What is most challenging about vending is not the work itself, but the requisite struggle against multiple mechanisms of spatial discipline that prevent the urban “precariat” from appropriating city space. As a result, vendor grievances and demands largely pertain to workplace conditions. Street labor organizing engages with a variety of state practices and processes, from street-level negotiations against police harassment and violence, to establishing or reforming municipal vending policy, to demanding recognition as legitimate workers entitled to labor protections. Despite great variance in the content and location

30       KATHLEEN DUNN

of vending as a form of work, vendors’ collective grievances and demands are remarkably consistent.

The Work While the challenge of how to classify and organize “atypical” workers is an ongoing debate, the highest concentration of these workers, and the most innovative organizing strategies to build their power, are playing out in rapidly urbanizing regions mainly across the Global South. As Demissie (2011) underlines, the mass migration to cities across the Global South in the post-Keynesian era is occurring without social welfare programs or adequate investment in infrastructure, job, or housing creation. Such conditions have rendered informal urbanization and informal work the norm, not the exception. An OECD analysis (2009) estimates that more than half of all jobs in the nonagricultural sector of developing countries are informal, constituting over nine hundred million workers. The International Labor Office’s (ILO 2007) research indicates that street vendors, along with home-based workers, are the two largest subgroups of the informal sector. Street vending connotes the ostensibly noncriminal sale of goods in public space, most commonly everyday commodities, including food. While vendors are an extremely variable occupational group, basic characteristics shape vendors’ working conditions. These include type of goods, location of work, type of vending unit (mobile, market stall, basket or blanket on the ground, etc.), and relationships to other vendors—that is, whether they are working independently, with paid subcontractors or unpaid helpers, or are unpaid helpers themselves (ILO 2002, 50). As Cross (1997) suggests, independence among vendors varies widely. Some scholars characterize vendors as street entrepreneurs (Cross and Morales 2007), but the larger literature frames vendors as workers (Bhowmik 2014; Roever 2014; Milgram 2011; Brown, Lyons, and Dankoco 2010; Celik 2010; Kirshner 2008; Lund and Skinner 2004; Gallin 2001). Members of vendor organizations often characterize themselves as both entrepreneurs and workers, and many other variations of their liminal occupational status; one street vendor federation in Peru translates vendadores ambulantes as “workers of small businesses.”3 An important distinction among vendors as a workforce is whether or not they possess legal authorization to vend. Some municipalities render all street vending illegal, while others have a mixture of authorizations for some and not others, based on citizenship status and location and modality of vending. In a handful of countries, constitutional court decisions force municipalities to allow vending under right-to-work law (Meneses-Reyes and Caballero-Juárez 2014; Swider 2014). In Swider’s (2014) study of vendors in Beijing, the Chinese hukou system

THE STREET LABOR MOVEMENT      31

of two-tiered citizenship allows registered urban citizens to get vending licenses but denies them to migrant vendors, most of whom are women. Most street vendors must contend with some measure of criminalization in their working lives. Vendor criminalization serves to precaritize a group who, in most circumstances, has few if any other viable alternatives for income generation. In New York, nearly all the SVP and VAMOS vendors that I interviewed turned to vending as a better alternative to untenable exploitation in the low-wage labor market, and prize vending’s higher income and greater autonomy, particularly regarding control over one’s time. This is a common finding in studies of immigrant-dominated, semi-independent occupations in global cities, such as taxi drivers and domestic workers (Milkman and Ott 2014; Mathew 2008; Itzigsohn 1994). The time flexibility of street vending is more conducive to sustaining the demands of gendered responsibilities of care and transnational family life than are standard employment arrangements (Chant and Pedwell 2008; ILO 2002). As Moustafa, a Senegalese merchandise vendor explains, “When I had a job, it would pay like $10 hour or $15 hour. Those kinds of jobs won’t support my family, bringing them here from Africa. . . . I work for a year at that job, but I want to go see my wife and my children. They give me like two weeks vacation. But if I sell this merchandise, I can stay there one month, two months, three months.”4 New York vendors often take time off in the winter months, as business slows, to visit their country of origin. For many, vending facilitates an important means of acculturation through interactions with a wide swath of the public. Street vending is labor intensive, requires little technological support, and offers an ease of entry, particular for immigrants whose skills or degrees might not be recognized in the host country (Bhowmik 2010; ILO 2003). Just as in the formal economy, networks—of ethnicity, religion, and gender, to name a few—play an important role in channeling vendors not only into the occupation but into specific product niches and/or physical locations (Lyons and Brown 2007; Stoller 2002; Bhowmik 2010). The main requirement of vending is the appropriation of space, which is vendors’ primary transgression against the process of neoliberal urbanization. While vending has emerged as a vital niche for these marginalized workers, it remains one of the riskiest forms of work in the city. Remarkably consistent across the vending research literature is the primacy of criminalization and state subjugation as the most detrimental aspects of the work; ticketing, confiscation of goods, eviction, arrest, and police violence are pervasive (Roever 2014; Swider 2014; Davis and Morales 2012; IBO 2010; Crossa 2009; Hunt 2009; Swanson 2007). In a five-city study of roughly 750 vendors, the Informal Economy Monitoring Study led by Roever (2014) found that focus groups of vendors in each city cited lack of legal access to public space for vending and abuse of state

32       KATHLEEN DUNN

authority as the largest obstacles to secure workplaces.5 The study also found that street vendors are twice as likely as market vendors to face these insecurities, with abuses against women vendors tending to be underreported.

The Workplace Street vendors don’t own their work space, and relatively few have formal use rights to the space they claim. Indeed, the occupation is fundamentally defined by its location outside of private property. Because street vendors are never fully in control of their space, their working conditions are strongly shaped by policies and priorities governing public space, which tend to reproduce the socio-spatial stratification found within formal labor and housing markets. The workplace itself is thus a primary mechanism through which the work of vending is both defined and subjugated. As many scholars of public space have documented, neoliberal urbanism and its innovations in surveillance and enclosure have rendered city streets less public and less democratic (Sorkin 1992; Davis 1992; Zukin 1995; Mitchell 2003; Low 2000; Low and Smith 2006). The entrepreneurial form of urban governance, which redirects the role of the state from redistribution to competition, has strengthened the influence of corporate interests in shaping the urban landscape (Harvey 1989a). The branding of cities (Greenberg 2008) further reinforces the homogenization of streetscapes, rendering manifestations of difference both more visible and, as urban militarization advances, more threatening (Graham 2010; Davis 1992). Yet few public-space scholars6 have explicitly addressed how governance practices impact the economically marginalized who use public space for work. The overhaul of New York City’s vending regulations in the wake of the 1975 fiscal crisis offers one example. Not long after the Hart-Cellar Immigration Act of 1965 allowed more immigrants of color to enter the United States, the city’s post-crisis efforts to rebrand itself for global capital entailed targeted eviction of poor and low-income people of color from the city’s public spaces (Greenberg 2008; Vitale 2008). The reform of vending laws and regulations created a landscape of scarcity for new immigrants, dramatically reducing legal pathways to autonomous work as a street vendor. At the urging of the Business Improvement Districts formed in the 1980s and 1990s,7 successive mayoral administrations agreed to close the most highly trafficked, lucrative streets to vending. Ownership rights for food and merchandise vendors were capped, though military veterans and eventually artists won important exemptions through litigations.8 These caps remain in effect today: the city issues only three thousand food vending permits (attached to the food cart or truck, not the person operating it)

THE STREET LABOR MOVEMENT      33

and less than a thousand merchandise vending licenses. Wait lists for these authorizations have been closed for twenty years, with few other direct legal options available for would-be vendors. As such, a rental market for food permits emerged, along with a number of informal employment arrangements between merchandise vendors and “helpers,” and military veterans with special access to otherwise restricted streets. Moreover, because the food-handling license to work on a cart or truck in New York remains uncapped, the vast majority of licensed food vendors—as of 2010, almost twenty thousand New Yorkers9—work in some kind of subcontractual agreement with a permit holder.

Socio-Spatial Stratification These limits on space, ownership, and income stability create a dramatically stratified workplace for vendors along the lines of class, race, and gender (Roever 2014; Swanson 2007; Martínez-Novo 2003; ILO 2002). New York City, again, provides an example. Before Mayor Ed Koch imposed caps on the food vending permits in the early 1980s, street vendors were more commonly white ethnics; now, the vast majority of the food and merchandise vendors in New York City are low-income immigrants of color. Those who work in Manhattan are SVP’s main constituency, with ethnic niches shaping certain products and locations (Stoller 2002). Most of SVP’s food vendors do not hold permits but obtain use of them from a shadow class of permit rentiers. Vendors describe rentiers as white ethnics, mainly Greek Americans who no longer vend themselves but instead profit from the permit’s increasing rental value in the underground market. Most food vendors subcontract, some in groups or pairs sharing shifts on the same cart or truck, and sharing a percentage of the profits (usually 30 percent) with the permit holder in addition to paying for the use of the permit. The gendered geography of street vending represents another widespread vector of stratification within the industry (Roever 2014; Jhabvala 2010; Chant and Pedwell 2008; Swanson 2007; Martínez-Novo 2003; ILO 2002; M. Chen 2001; Gallin 2001). Women vendors tend to earn the least and work in the most precarious conditions. Vending in Manhattan’s most moneyed districts is for all practical purposes a boys’ club; but in order to achieve this level of security and income, male food vendors work, one way or another, under the food permit holder. While some Latina vendors work in upper Manhattan or in central subway stations, most women vend in the outer boroughs and are self-employed. They often locate on side streets adjacent to major commercial strips, or work itinerantly where they build a clientele, by schools and construction sites. They can’t afford to pay permit rental fees, but they do enjoy greater control over their time. However, working without permits puts women at higher risk of arrest;

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their mobile working strategies, isolated from a community of vendors, puts them at greater risk of robbery. In contrast with immigrant vendors’ working conditions, the more recently arrived gourmet food truck owners face fewer obstacles. Gourmet food trucking started to take off first in Los Angeles around 2008 and spread across U.S. cities in a short period of time. In New York City, between 2009 and 2012 the $200, two-year permit issued by the city skyrocketed on the underground market, leaping from a going rate of $11,000 up to over $20,000. The hundred or so vendors able to afford the new prices have tended to be highly educated, of a middle- or upper-middle-class background, white, and native-born—though some second-generation immigrants run upscale trucks as well, such as Korean fusion trucks and European dessert and comfort food trucks. Distinguishing this elite niche from the “low end” majority of the industry, gourmet truck owners often do not staff their own truck, but hire (mostly young white) employees. Some own multiple trucks or a truck and a restaurant, while others have used trucks to attract enough investors to open a brick-and-mortar storefront. Formed in 2011, the New York Food Truck Association (NYCFTA) is a trade group that now includes forty-five upscale food truck owners. By 2012, only a year after its launch, the group reported that 40 percent of its members had been able to open a restaurant (Clark 2012). Between SVP’s and VAMOS’s roughly twenty-five hundred street vendors, and SVP’s ten years of existence, staff know of only a handful of members who have accomplished the same. Most tellingly, while the majority of the immigrant vendors I interviewed had at some point been arrested for vending, none of the truck owners had; being able to purchase the food permit offers significant protection from arrest. Indeed, gourmet vendors report experiencing police interactions and fines mainly as a nuisance, not as a criminalizing experience.

The Grievances Street vendor grievances are not with the content of their work—for instance the long hours, exposure to the elements, or the hard labor of own-account work. Rather they are with the conditions of urban society that deny their right to the city—through law, policing, and the refusal to recognize most vendors as rightful economic actors with legitimate political demands (Crossa 2009; Kirshner 2008; Martínez-Novo 2003). Grievances are primarily with issues of criminalization, dispossession, and exclusion from decision making. These interconnected grievances constitute a plain and direct cry for the right to the city as Lefebvre (1968) envisioned it—namely, the right to appropriate space and participate in decision

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making not on the basis of class power or citizenship status, but directly by virtue of inhabiting and creating the city. Criminalization by the police is often the primary street vendor grievance. Criminalization is both confounding and infuriating to most vendors, who view their work as honest, dignified, and legal (see Austin 1994), often contrasting vending to drug dealing, theft, or violent crime. For instance, Elena, a woman from El Salvador and a food vendor in Brooklyn, explains: “For me, street vending is dignified. I am not stealing or killing, and I feel as though I am setting a good example for my children.”10 Yet she and other SVP and VAMOS members find the police view them as the criminals, often ignoring their requests for protection from crime. Most experience excessive policing as nativism and/or racism; particularly among Latino vendors, nativist slurs from police are a common occurrence. Criminalization in its de jure form consists of the outright banning of street vending within city limits; such is the case for sidewalk vendors in Los Angeles and most of Chicago. De facto criminalization occurs in many modalities: through police harassment, raids, and excessive ticketing; through obfuscating laws that increase chances of vendors being deemed out of compliance and thus vulnerable to fines, confiscation of goods, relocation, or arrest; and through harassment from local shopkeepers and community groups (Meneses-Reyes and Caballero-Juárez 2014; Devlin 2010; Swanson 2007; Martínez-Novo 2003). Swider’s (2014) nine-year study of migrant women vendors in Beijing found that at the start of their vending career they tolerated extortion by the chengguan (para-police who monitor urban public space), but as time progressed they grew more resentful. Their rising anger coincided with growing public dissatisfaction with the chengguan, resulting in several large street protests and confrontations, many in support of the harassed vendors. Public support for vendors is often an important resource in vendor organizing campaigns. Dispossessions, the second major vendor grievance, may take the form of sudden and planned evictions and relocations; of expensive fines or, too commonly, extortion—usually by state agents, often but not exclusively the police, as well as shop owners and gangs (Swider 2014; Crossa 2009; Swanson 2007; Martínez-Novo 2003; ILO 2003). Bans on vending in central business districts and relocation to markets where revenues are perceived to (and often do) decline are extremely common grievances (Milgram 2011; Kirshner 2008). The Gauteng Hawkers Association in South Africa successfully pushed back on their eviction from railway stations, protesting the policy as “unjustifiable apartheid-style oppression” (ILO 2003, 14). Some dispossession-related grievances extend beyond the spatial and relate to vendors’ legal status and denial of state benefits.

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National vendor federations in Peru, Chile, and Nicaragua have pressed for access to national health programs. Finally, exclusion from decision making entails being barred from most if not all aspects of the governance process. Most interactions with municipal bodies—beyond everyday interactions with the police—require vendor organizations running campaigns to change municipal laws that precaritize their livelihoods. Such was the case in the Street Vendor Project’s campaign to lower the cost of vending violations in New York. In the Philippines, women vendors in Baguio City organized a successful campaign to overturn city bylaws banning vending in the city center (Milgram 2011). In the least resourced regions, vendor demands for infrastructure investment are common (ILO 2007). Substantive inclusion in decision making to date is quite rare.11

The Demands The street labor movement has a fairly consistent set of political demands in cities around the world: ending vendor criminalization and related dispossessions, and including vendors in the planning and policy process. These demands assert that the state, typically the municipal government, has a responsibility to support street vending as a legitimate industry, a necessary alternative to hyper-exploitation in the low-wage labor market or to the lack of a formal wage labor market altogether. Engaging the state to establish and enforce worker protections is an increasingly common strategy among informal and other precariously employed workers (Milkman and Ott 2014; Agarwala 2013; Gallin 2001). At the same time, the inclusion of a diverse range of strategic allies, from waste pickers and shack dwellers to municipal workers’ unions, is increasingly practiced in collective bargaining and other municipal negotiations large and small. Street labor campaigns advance a right-to-the-city agenda by protesting top-down urbanism and presenting alternative practices of both exchange and everyday urbanisms of the street. Vendor campaigns target exclusionary policies and practices, including the state’s integral role in bolstering the power of multi­ national corporations at the expense of the urban poor and disenfranchised. They also situate vendors as vital contributors to urban society in micro and macro terms: integral local community members and a sector that creates livelihoods and provides affordable goods and services. Promoted through a range of frameworks including human rights, immigrant rights, racial and gender justice, and the right to livelihood and economic justice, street labor demands and defends the appropriation of space by marginalized urban inhabitants, those constructing the oeuvre of urban life on the ground. A look inside several recent

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and ongoing vendor campaigns from a variety of contexts illuminates how and why worker justice is constituent of the right-to-the-city struggle.

Campaigns for Vendor Justice in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City The three most populous cities in the United States are home to sizable immigrant vendor populations and a new upper class of “gourmet” food truck owners, who tend to be native-born and very often white as well. Common to all three municipalities is an abiding criminalization of lower-income, immigrant vendors, alongside a state-facilitated expansion of the higher-end food truck industry. Each city also has separate organizations for immigrant vendors and “gourmet” food trucks—the former are labor organizations, and the latter are trade groups. These clearly patterned contrasts attest to the racialized, nativist, and classed hierarchies endemic to global cities, helping to elucidate why street labor movements have sprung up to combat immigrant criminalization, while the gourmet food truck industry has flourished with comparative ease. Immigrant vendor organizations in these cities—SVP and VAMOS in New York, the East LA Community Corporation (ELACC) in Los Angeles, and the Associación de Vendadores Ambulantes (AVA) in Chicago—press for vendor rights as issues of economic and racial justice, and most centrally as immigrant rights, including the right to work. In Chicago and LA, the current struggle is to make licenses available to lower-income immigrant sidewalk vendors. In both cities most sidewalk vending has been outlawed, while food trucks have been able to lobby and obtain needed authorizations with much success. Operating on the sidewalk or in the street is often a class distinction: carts are dramatically less expensive than trucks, which can cost upward of $50,000 even before they are fitted to comply with city health regulations. While Los Angeles is the birthplace of the gourmet food truck trend, food trucks have been common fixtures since the 1970s, as loncheras run by Latinos offering an affordable and mobile lunch option. The vehicles fall under the jurisdiction of California state law, though municipalities may place additional restrictions to enhance public safety. LA officials have permitted the rise of the food truck economy while constraining sidewalk vending, which has been banned by the city since the 1930s (Vallianatos 2014) and carries a fine of $1,000 and a possible jail sentence of six months—a world away from that of the city’s celebrity food truck chefs featured on reality television shows and opening franchised trucks in other cities. The Southern California Mobile Food Vending

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Association, the largest food truck association in the United States and run by a white, native-born food truck owner, has played a crucial role as a trade group in pressing for reforms to spur growth for the upscale niche of the industry. To battle the inequity between truck and sidewalk policy, the Los Angeles Street Vending Campaign, aided by highly educated and networked second-generation Latino community leaders, has made hay of consumer demand heightened by the gourmet truck trend. The campaign frames immigrant sidewalk vendors’ rights as a class demand while appealing to the celebrated trope of immigrant entrepreneurialism, as well as California’s fetishized “start-up” culture. The East LA Community Corporation hosted a series of educational town halls prior to launching a legislative campaign for the city council to enable sidewalk vending. Many stakeholders have signed on to the campaign, helping to keep the campaign in the news and social media. In 2013 and in partnership with Leadership for Urban Renewal, ELACC won a $100,000 grant from LA2050, a group of young professionals and academics (many of them second-generation Angelenos) with expertise in urban planning and policy. Backed by the Goldhirsh Foundation, LA2050 is creating a “Venture Capital for the ’Hood Fund.” The goal of the fund is to support low-income entrepreneurs and “bridge the gap” between street vending and brick-and-mortar businesses. While ELACC is a community development group, the funders of LA2050 and the Los Angeles Food Policy Council bring both business- and consumer-oriented perspectives to the initiative. A bill introduced in 2013 by two council members remains stuck in committee deliberations, though the campaign continues to push for the bill to come up for a vote before the full city council. In Chicago, twenty years of effort from Latino vendors living on the city’s south side finally resulted in a 2015 victory to provide sidewalk vending licenses. Nearly all sidewalk vending in Chicago had been illegal, save for prepackaged frozen food in individual wrappers (ice cream and frozen treats) or raw, unprocessed produce and a small number of fruit stands and kiosks owned by corporations. In recent years, both the city’s immigrant vendors and gourmet food truck owners have been buoyed by the efforts of the Institute for Justice (IJ), a libertarian legal advocacy group. IJ’s role for both food trucks and sidewalk vendors consisted, ironically enough for a libertarian organization, of pushing the city to create regulations for both groups to operate legally and helping to draft a proposed ordinance to that end. In contrast to the twenty-year struggle of the Associación de Vendadores Ambulantes (AVA), Chicago’s food truck owners have been able to obtain, within only a few years, a small number of permits for preparing food on their trucks, though the city is slow to release these permits, and costly penalties remain a serious problem. Instrumental to this effort was the formation of the Illinois

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Food Truck Association, led by a second-generation Vietnamese chef, Amy Le, who has since gone on to open a brick-and-mortar restaurant and expand into private catering. IJ also helped the food truck association file a lawsuit against the city’s “two hundred foot rule,” which bans food trucks from parking within two hundred feet of any brick-and-mortar restaurant. IJ then connected with AVA, ultimately helping to secure passage of the sidewalk vending bill. Since then, however, several city council members (aldermen) have taken steps to ban sidewalk vending in their districts, effectively (and almost instantaneously) constraining the reach of the municipal law. In New York, the issue of permits and licenses is a much bigger political battle, given how deeply entrenched business improvement districts (BIDs) are in the governance of public space. SVP chose instead to launch the “Lower the Fines” campaign in collaboration with VAMOS, running from 2009 to 2013, to combat the rate and size of fines for administrative (not health-related) vending violations. A 2012 study found an annual average of approximately 25,500 administrative vending violations have been issued since 2006 (Davis and Morales 2012). However, of the $15.8 million in fines assessed in 2008 and 2009, $14.9 million were not paid (IBO 2010). This is likely because unlicensed vendors (who presumably accrue the most fines, in number and cost) have the least incentive to pay them, as they have no license to keep in good standing. With the help of a Brooklyn council member, SVP introduced two bills in the New York City Council, one to reduce the maximum fines and the other to restructure how fine escalation is measured. Working with VAMOS Unidos to turn out large numbers of their members at campaign demonstrations and protests, SVP staff enlisted their members to lobby council members, give testimony at an array of public hearings, and run a public awareness campaign through street actions and press coverage. Eventually the group amassed a veto-proof majority, and the bill was passed into law in 2013. Since that time, SVP has begun an unquestionably longer and more difficult campaign to lift the caps on food permits and merchandise licenses, hoping to capitalize on the new mayoral administration’s commitment to reduce the city’s high levels of inequality. Indeed, given the overrepresentation of immigrants in the informal economies of global cities, it is hardly surprising that the street labor movement in such places draws strength from several sectors of the immigrant rights movement. The work and goals of these immigrant vendor groups are quite distinct from those of the higher-end food truck associations. NYCFTA, like most food truck associations, has pursued a cozy relationship with the city government, public-private partnerships, and corporate clientele. According to David Weber, the president of the NYCFTA, the group consciously chose to approach city hall in a less “antagonistic” manner than SVP: “There’s an opportunity to have a fresh start. We can tell a story

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about economics to a mayor [in 2011, Michael Bloomberg] that is a businessman. It just [makes] for a clean dialogue in a way we thought would mitigate risk.”12 The NYCFTA did submit a letter of support in SVP’s Lower the Fines campaign, but overall their members’ myriad class and race privileges give them a distinct advantage to obtain permits and evade punitive levels of policing. Gourmet food truck associations do not organize on the basis of justice but on ideals of efficiency and fair market competition. As noted on LA’s Southern California Mobile Food Vendors Association website, “If a city has anti-competitive regulations, they should really re-think their model.”13 While many truck associations have worked with great success to lobby city governments for laws to allow food truck vending, their more quotidian functions entail marketing, facilitating corporate truck rentals, and private catering. The libertarian Institute for Justice has therefore easily made inroads with many food truck groups, as they share a view of “justice” defined in terms of free-market competition. In contrast, the immigrant vendor organizations of New York, Chicago, and LA are exploring formation of a national vending coalition, inspired by the success of such models as India’s NASVI and StreetNet International.

Beyond the City: Scaling Up Street Labor Demands in India and South Africa Scaling up street labor demands from the city to national and transnational scales unites allied constituencies among the urban dispossessed, asserting the collective rights of these groups to inhabit urban space on their own terms. In countries where the informal labor movement has amassed more associational and political power, street vendor groups often pursue coalitional strategies to make street vending rights a national and international policy priority. In many cities, vending regulations don’t exist, and vendors are policed on an entirely ad hoc basis without any recourse to state protection. In others, regulations exist but are enforced inequitably, with extortion and other forms of corruption being commonplace. The piecemeal nature of much vending oversight intensifies income and physical insecurity. Appealing to higher scales of governance is one method of creating political pressure for individual cities to regularize vending oversight, as is the case with India’s national street vending law. Targeting international mega-events, which are courted by urban elites to increase global-city cachet, provides an opportunity to frame vendor criminalization and displacement as a matter of equitable development. Transnational campaigns against mega-events illuminate the vast disparity between the benefits the state provides to corporate sponsors and the myriad dispossessions of the urban poor that these subsidies entail.

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India’s Street Vendors Act of 2014 The first legislation of its kind, India’s Street Vendors Act, built on the preexisting constitutional right to work established in 1989. In May 2014, a decade after an initial national-level policy was introduced, the Indian government enacted the Street Vendors Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending Act as law (India Code No. 7, 2014). The initial policy written in 2004 went through several commissions and ministries until revised in 2009, and in 2010 the Indian Supreme Court called for state and local governments to enact the policy. From 2011 on, the bill underwent several rounds of additional negotiations with vendor groups and subsequent revisions before finally being passed in 2014. While the law will doubtlessly face many obstacles on the path to implementation and enforcement, its passage is historic in legitimating the right of vendors to work in city streets at the national scale. The major forces behind the passage of the law were the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) and the National Association of Street Vendors of India. NASVI was founded in September 1998, subsequent to the 1995 Bellagio Conference, the first major international conference of street vendor organizations from five different continents. A coalition of trade unions, community-based organizations, and nongovernmental organizations, NASVI comprises over 250 groups across twenty states, representing nearly 170,000 of India’s estimated ten million street vendors (Bhowmik 2014). NASVI is but one of dozens of national unions that arose in the Global South since the 1990s to represent marginalized but populous occupations within the informal economy, such as waste pickers and home-based workers. The first and most influential was SEWA, founded in 1972, which now represents nearly two million women in a country where over 90 percent of employed women work within the informal sector. SEWA has become a powerful NGO with global reach, playing a decisive leadership role in legitimizing both women’s labor and informal worker organizing overall (Roever 2014; Jhabvala 2010; M. Chen 2001; Gallin 2001). The law calls for the establishment of town vending committees (TVCs) in every municipality, to be composed of representatives from municipal agencies including health and police. At least 40 percent of each TVC must also be composed of street vendor representatives, and 33 percent must be women. Based on estimates that 2–2.5 percent of urban populations work as vendors, each TVC must create licenses for 2.5 percent of the city’s population. Vendors can register with biometric data (a stipulation pressed for by NASVI, given that many vendors do not possess any official documentation), and remaining vendors not covered by the 2.5 percent of licenses allotted must be accommodated in nearby municipalities. No vendors may be evicted if they register with the TVC; if they

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do not register, they will be given a month’s notice prior to eviction. The law also mandates that natural market areas (places long inhabited by a vending community) cannot be destroyed or displaced. Licenses will carry a onetime fee of two thousand rupees (roughly US$32). To date, implementation of the act has proceeded unevenly and contentiously, with vendor protests in several cities. In December 2014, the High Court of Delhi found police and municipal authorities charged with implementation of the act in contempt, in light of evidence of continuing harassment, extortion, and eviction of street vendors.14 Nonetheless, what is remarkable about the Street Vendors Act is that it has secured, through a democratic legislative process, a national mandate that urban public space can and should be used to generate livelihoods for the economically marginalized. NASVI and SEWA pressed for passage of the law by framing vending not as an urban problem for individual cities to manage, but as a legal right to work for one’s livelihood, to be protected at the national level. As one of India’s leading street vendor scholars and advocates, Sharit Bhowmik, argues, “The urban poor benefit from street vendors’ services. . . . One section of the urban poor [street vendors] subsidizes prices of essential commodities for other sections of the urban poor, something that the state should have done” (2014, 2). Bhowmik also notes that the law will help reduce rent extraction and extortion from municipal officials and mafia; protect vendors from the standard problems of displacement, eviction, arrest, and confiscation of goods; and increase access to reasonable and legal loans.

StreetNet’s World Class Cities for All Campaign The transnational World Class Cities for All campaign, organized by StreetNet International, targets the mass evictions wrought by mega-events, such as the FIFA World Cup. StreetNet is a coalition of forty-eight membership-based street vendor organizations from forty countries (including SVP from the United States), representing over three hundred thousand street vendors. Founded in 2000, StreetNet is closely connected to two informal women’s workers’ unions, SEWA and SEWU (Self-Employed Women’s Union in Durban, South Africa), and two New York–based groups, Women’s World Banking and the International Coalition of Women and Credit. A commitment to gender analysis and a philosophy of inclusivity distinguish StreetNet’s organizational culture. StreetNet works to build solidarity within vendor organizations, across them, and across a broad range of strategic allies in diverse labor, urban, and human rights movements. It has forged alliances and coalitions with a broad range of organizations, including national trade unions, UN agencies such as HABITAT and the International Labor Organization, and countless informal

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workers’ groups and community organizations representing diverse constituencies among the urban poor. It provides organizing resources and support to membership-based vendor organizations, and works to craft international policies and campaigns that support the human, economic, and social rights of street vendors and other marginalized urban inhabitants. The group launched the ambitious World Class Cities for All Campaign (WCCA) in 2006 as a direct counter to corporate mega-events and the city governments that court them in their efforts to attain global-city status. Mega-events notoriously displace all manner of the urban poor—street vendors and shack dwellers chiefly among them, who are often one and the same constituency—in an effort to present a modernized, Westernized aesthetic to upper-strata tourists, corporate event sponsors, and potential foreign investors (Samara 2011). FIFA specifically demands such evictions in order to prevent what it terms “ambush marketing, counterfeiters, and unauthorized traders”; its “corporate rights holders” are promised “immunity from all competition within all the demarcated zones of the host cities” (Lindell, Hedman, and Nathan-Verboomen 2010). Beginning with the buildup to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, WCCA worked to stop the eviction of the urban poor from the areas surrounding the games, and to demand that cities include these constituencies in the planning process around the event and in its aftermath. To do this, StreetNet built alliances with most of South African’s major trade unions and connected these groups with organizations of the urban poor beyond street vendors, such as sex workers, landless people, and street children (Celik 2010). By engaging union members responsible for carrying out the construction and implementation of Johannesburg’s “global city” infrastructure, StreetNet was able to leverage their visibility and political power to protest and even block the displacements and evictions of the poor in preparations for the event. These alliances in turn generated considerable pressure on several levels of government, bringing them as well as FIFA itself to the negotiating table. Some of the campaign’s demands, such as inclusion in the planning process and lessened evictions, were met; and while FIFA never signed the proposed framework agreement, StreetNet’s success in elevating the political power of a diverse group of urban precariat by creating solidarity with the country’s most powerful unions remains remarkable nonetheless. As Celik (2010) argues, StreetNet’s vision is influenced by and constitutive of “social movement unionism” (Clawson 2003; Voss and Sherman 2000), a model of organized labor that moves beyond immediate benefits to members and seeks to advance social and economic justice of the dispossessed more broadly defined. In countries where social movement unionism has flourished, informal workers, women, migrants, and other marginalized groups have gained both voice and power. Such struggles are urban in context and content; the scale of urban

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labor migration, combined with insufficient formal labor markets for incoming migrants, has pushed the question of who may fully inhabit urban life to the forefront of urban politics. The growing challenge of access—to home, to work, to dignity, to political and cultural recognition and participation—necessitates collaboration between the excluded and the exploited to push back against the modes of neoliberal urbanism that normalize such marginalization.

The Challenge A slogan emerged among the members of the grassroots organizations involved in the South African WCCA campaign: “Nothing for us without us” (Lindell, Hedman, and Nathan-Verboomen 2010). Against neoliberal urbanization, inclusion and participation are radical demands. The street labor movement asserts that the most marginalized of city dwellers have a right to shape the urban process. Accordingly, street labor connects struggles against eviction and displacement to struggles against the criminalization of the poor and people of color to informal worker demands for state recognition and protection. What is asked of the state varies widely; in global perspective, the strongest vendor campaigns occur where informal workers constitute a large share of the labor force and their associations have a long history of building coalitions. The incremental legislative approach pursued by U.S. street vendors is more limited in scale and power, reflecting a much smaller share of the workforce and the legal orientation of the nonprofit worker center model of organizing (Fine 2006). Nonetheless, the organizations all claim a collective right from and for the street itself, challenging its subjugation to the exclusive needs of capital. The wide variance in political and historical contexts among vendors makes the commonalities in their conditions and grievances all the more remarkable. The widespread criminalization of street vendors underscores how necessary forceful dispossession is to maintaining the project of neoliberal urbanization, not only in the spheres of housing and public space but also that of precarious work. The force deployed against street vendors is without coherent strategy, costly, and entirely ineffective; yet there is little to no policy debate among elites in search of more viable alternatives to criminalization. However, the emergence of the billion-dollar gourmet food truck industry provides ample evidence of municipal governments’ capacity and enthusiasm for street commerce. This is because while they seem novel, upscale food trucks are actually urban entrepreneurialism as usual: the bourgeois commodification of a classe ouvrière practice. The gourmet food truck trajectory reveals that it is less the actual practice of street vending that vexes urban elites and more the audacity of the poor and

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marginalized creating and controlling spaces of exchange that reflect their needs and desires. These needs and desires to live an urban life are a powerful driver of worldwide urbanization. Urban migration is labor migration in a double sense; most who migrate to cities do so in search of securing their livelihood, and they do so because they have no other tenable choice. Given the lack of formal employment options, or the insufficiency of hyper-exploitative conditions, hundreds of millions are creating their own work and, in so doing, creating cities of their own from the ground up. The street labor movement works to claim and defend space for these practices, both materially and politically, raising serious questions about how observers might better grasp the role of labor in urbanization at multiple scales. Given that labor is central to the oeuvre of urban life, yet prevented from fully inhabiting it (Kuymulu 2013b), our conception of the right to the city must include access to and control over spaces of work and exchange beyond those controlled by property and ownership relations. As finance capital and its instruments render the technologies of accumulation more obscure, new forms of urban labor and labor movements bring a host of interconnected dispossessions into plainer view. The street labor movement affirms that in the struggles to access urban life, the exploited and the excluded have found, and are likely to continue to find, common ground. For the urban majority to direct urbanization, we will need to conceive of a right to the city directly informed by the material realities and worldviews of those who create and sustain urban life against the odds. We should still read Capital, and we still have much to glean from the signs in the streets.

2 DAY LABOR AGENCIES AND THE LOGIC AND LANDSCAPE OF NEOLIBERAL POVERTY MANAGEMENT Gretchen Purser

“You should see our bathroom!” Tanesha exclaimed as she stepped out into the trash-strewn parking lot, after more than two bleary-eyed hours spent waiting for work inside the fluorescent-lit dispatch office of a day labor agency that I call InstaLabor (and that Tanesha and many of her coworkers resolutely and pejoratively refer to as “InstaSlave”).1 I had interviewed Tanesha, a forty-one-year-old African American mother of four, the week prior, and she seemed eager for this renewed opportunity to express her indignation: “It’s like half the time we don’t got no toilet paper, half the time we don’t got no light! The door, we gotta keep it unlocked because otherwise we get locked inside. And the bathroom’s actually covered in shit! I mean, excuse me, but that’s how it is. There’s no seat to speak of, and there’s feces all over the toilet. The bowl’s so brown, I’m telling you, it’s actually hard to imagine it could’ve ever been white!” Tanesha let out a halfhearted laugh. “So what we do,” she continued, as she started walking across the parking lot and toward the street, “is we go over to the [homeless] shelter over there and use their bathroom.” Tanesha’s rant about the bathroom of this Baltimore-based day labor agency is illustrative. It reflects, most straightforwardly, the widespread neglect experienced by the men and women who congregate here each morning in search of work, just one of many indicators that InstaLabor dismisses their most basic needs as well as their comfort and safety. Indeed, it might be said that the missing toilet seat and lack of toilet paper simply acclimate workers to the striking neglect they will go on to encounter if and when they are dispatched for a day’s work, toiling anonymously and without training in any number of workplaces in and around 46

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the city: construction sites, warehouses, stadiums, factories, or big-box retail stores. The “shit-covered” toilet also serves as an apt metaphor for the agency’s overall role as a dumping ground for the “refuse” or “discards” of society—the homeless, the formerly incarcerated, the chronically unemployed—populations whom the agency recruits and processes into cheap and hyper-disposable “on demand” labor. Finally, and most relevant for the analysis presented in this chapter, is Tanesha’s strategy for evading the bathroom, which sheds a spotlight on the well-trod pathway from day labor agency to homeless shelter and back again, a pathway that not only highlights the conjoint hardships of precarious work and precarious housing, but illustrates the tight circulation, and explicit cooperation, between these geographically proximate institutions. Jeff-a white, precariously housed, formerly incarcerated fifty-three-year-old man who has been working for (or, as he more aptly explained it, “used temporarily by”) InstaLabor for over six years-summarized the predicament of the workforce in these terms: “The majority of the people that you see down here are what you call, you know, like, street people, people that been locked up, people that’s out here strugglin’. I mean, you don’t see people down here that, like, got jobs and got the shit they need. It’s a low class people and, personally, to me, I think they abuse the shit out of us. They do! They shit on us! It’s like yeah, yeah, like, we gonna give you this, take this bone, just so you ain’t out there robbin’ and stealin’. It’s sickening, but what can we do? Really, what can we do?”

The Processing of Labor In his book on the degradation of work, Marc Doussard (2013, viii) writes, “Day labor draws our attention because it dramatizes a series of surprisingly widespread threats to the experience of work as it has long been understood.” While actually referring to the highly visible informal day labor market, composed of street-corner “shape-ups” where predominantly undocumented immigrant men stand shoulder to shoulder and solicit work from passing vehicles, Doussard’s statement rings equally true for the far less visible formal day labor market, composed of storefront “labor pools” or “body shops” where jobless and cash-strapped individuals like Tanesha and Jeff engage in a congregate clamor for a day’s work. Making up the bottom and fastest-growing segment of the highly diversified temporary staffing industry, day labor agencies are dramatically restructuring the labor market opportunities and work experiences of the urban poor. They exemplify two of the most characteristic and consequential features of contemporary employment relations: on the one hand, the flexibilization, or precaritization, of work (Barker and Christensen 1998; Kalleberg 2009; Standing

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2011), and, on the other, the proliferation of labor market intermediaries and the consequent fracturing or fissuring of employment (Benner, Leete, and Pastor 2007; Enright 2013; López-Sanders 2014; Osterman 2004). These trends, I argue, necessitate that we shift our attention away from the labor process of singular, bounded work sites and focus on the processing of labor that takes place both between and beyond work sites. This chapter does precisely that by situating day labor agencies within the broader urban landscape of poverty management. It highlights the circulation and collaboration between day labor agencies and, specifically, homeless shelters, with the aim of developing our understanding of the “saprophytic relationship” (McTague and Jansen 2013, 2) between these street-level institutions as they shape and circumscribe the lives of the poor.2 In what follows, I position the day labor industry, operating as employer of last resort for employees of last resort, as a critical, though overlooked, partner in the multifaceted project of neoliberal poverty management, plying a profitable and parasitic trade in broke and brokered bodies (or, as one worker repeatedly put it, “the poor and the pimped”). I then return to Jeff ’s question-“What can we do?”-and discuss the implications of this analysis for efforts to stem the flagrant “lumpen abuse” (Bourgois 2011, 7) at the very bottom of the labor market.3 Ultimately, this chapter reveals the considerable challenges to organizing such a “liminal” workforce, which is made to straddle the increasingly blurry line between employment and unemployment, work and job searching. But I nevertheless suggest how and why a broad “right to the city” approach to organizing holds promise for addressing the multiple and interconnected conditions—of homelessness, lack of transportation, criminal history records, racial discrimination—that replenish the labor pool day after day by rendering so many of the urban poor reliant upon, and vulnerable to, these exploitative, parasitic institutions. This chapter emerges out of a broader research project situated at the juncture of the long-standing sociological traditions of both urban and workplace ethnography. I conducted thirty-two months of intensive participant observation working as a day laborer for InstaLabor, a leading day labor company with hundreds of offices nationwide. I conducted this fieldwork in the company’s branch offices in Oakland and Baltimore, two major port cities located on opposite coasts. Though Oakland’s population is far more racially diverse than Baltimore’s, both cities are plagued by extremely high rates of poverty (with fully one-fourth of the population living below the official poverty line). Both also lay claim to the dubious honor of being ranked among the top ten most dangerous cities in the United States. Whereas InstaLabor is the only formal day labor agency in Oakland, there is considerable intra-industry competition in Baltimore, with-at the time of my research-seven day labor staffing companies operating a dozen different hiring

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FIGURE 2.1.  Outside a day labor agency, Baltimore. Photo by Joe M. Giordano.

halls that together have been estimated to dispatch between seven thousand to ten thousand workers each year (HPRP and CASA 2004). In order to gain a better understanding of the industry as a whole and to address the implications of this intra-industry competition, I conducted an additional five weeks of targeted observation in six competing day labor companies in Baltimore, including “Central Temps,” “Hard Hat Enterprises,” “Hire Options,” and “P&P Staffing.” In both cities, I conducted interviews with each of the set of actors who make up this triangular employment relationship-day laborers, agency dispatchers, and on-site employers-as well as representatives of nearby poverty management institutions. Finally, I gathered and analyzed corporate documents, industry reports, and news articles related to the day labor staffing industry. This chapter weaves together both the institutional discourse and practices of day labor agencies—the “agency of agencies” (Coe, Jones, and Ward 2010)—as well as the experiences and perspectives of day laborers themselves.

Neoliberal Poverty Management Poverty management refers to the “organized responses by elites and/or the state, directed generally at maintaining the social order and more particularly at controlling poor people” (Wolch and DeVerteuil 2001, 150). The neoliberal regime of poverty management, ascendant since the 1980s, draws on an array of

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interventionist policy initiatives, most notably the recomposition of welfare as entitlement into paternalist, means-tested “workfare” and the expansion of penal practices and apparatuses. These policies are geared not toward redressing poverty, but toward managing poverty and its multifold effects. Fueled by a cultural obsession with individual responsibility, these initiatives target what are deemed to be the moral and behavioral pathologies of the poor (e.g., welfare “dependency,” delinquency, substance addiction, shelter resistance, etc.). Together, they work to subject the poor to the “dictate of flexible work as de facto norm of citizenship” (Wacquant 2009, 294). In short, neoliberal poverty management is driven by disciplinary strategies to coerce people into work and to create subjects compliant with the demands of the market (Maskovsky 2001; Peck 2001; Soss, Fording, and Schram 2011; Wacquant 2009). Urban ethnographers have increasingly turned their attention to the front lines of poverty management institutions, as they operate on the ground in specific local settings. These are the various institutions charged with the day-to-day management of poor populations: their concealment, containment, monitoring, reentry, recovery, and/or punishment. Gowan (2010), for example, examines San Francisco’s “homeless archipelago” and its role in containing the poor and spreading authoritarian medicalization as the dominant technique for their management. Fairbanks (2009) investigates Philadelphia’s unlicensed and unregulated recovery houses as sites of collective poverty survival and welfare state restructuring, and of “recovery” programs as mechanisms of moral conversion and employment restoration. Stuart (2014) focuses on skid row policing practices, anchored in an approach that he calls “recovery management,” which aims to “reprogram” homeless individuals to make good choices and transform themselves into sober, responsible citizens. Given the increased privatization and fragmentation of social service provision, DeVerteuil (2003, 361) argues that neoliberal poverty management is increasingly characterized by the circulation of poor people across a diverse array of unrelated settings, including “SROs [single-room occupancy housing], shelters, jails, prisons, hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and the street.” Employers, however, are strikingly absent from this list and from the broader discussion. If addressed at all—as they are, for example, in Collins and Mayer’s (2010) compelling investigation of women’s “contractual citizenship” in the wake of welfare reform in Milwaukee—they are positioned as the mere beneficiaries of neoliberal policies of punitive work enforcement. Yet day labor agencies, I argue, are active and deeply embroiled organizational anchors in local landscapes of urban poverty management, constituting a commonplace stop in the institutional circulation of poor people and, importantly, a key site for the (re)socialization of the urban poor to precarious and pitifully paid employment.4

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In many respects, day labor agencies—these for-profit labor brokers and storefront hiring halls—frame themselves and operate as street-level poverty management institutions. They espouse the discourses of self-transformation and self-responsibilization and employ the strategies of warehousing and surveillance that are common features of the homeless shelters, recovery houses / rehabilitation programs, and prisoner reentry offices from which they recruit their workforce and upon which they rely for the goods and services that reproduce that workforce (Purser 2012b). Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that these are not merely “organizations that operate on the margins of society” (Bartley and Roberts 2006, 55). Rather, they are organizations whose explicit function is to broker between the socioeconomic margins of labor supply and the socioeconomic core of labor demand. They are thus extraordinary sites in which to examine, as I go on to show, “how marginalization is transformed into exploitation” (Mayer 2010, 98).

A Profitable and Parasitic Trade Day labor agencies provide highly disposable and immediately dispatchable workers to employers for their “just-in-time” labor needs, predominantly in the sectors of construction, warehousing, manufacturing, and service. Like all staffing arrangements, day labor is a triangular employment relationship, characterized by asymmetric uncertainty and structural ambiguity, in which the agency, the de jure employer, sells to the client, the de facto employer, laborers by the hour, profiting from the difference between what they charge clients and the minimal amount they pay workers. As one dispatcher I interviewed matter-offactly summarized this lucrative business: “We’re in the labor industry. You might say we rent people. I mean, we do it legally. We rent people. We don’t rent appliances.” This reduction of people to marketable, tradable objects is made even more apparent by the everyday language that characterizes this “flesh peddling” trade, where clients place “orders” for “delivery” of a “product” and where dispatchers speak of “working people,” as in the oft-repeated question, “You wanna be worked?” As Robert Parker (1994) noted, “The calculating manner in which modern temporary companies transform workers into dispensable, interchangeable commodities has few parallels” (53). Unlike other kinds of staffing arrangements, however, the day labor employment relationship is pre-terminated at the end of the day, meaning that on any given day, individuals may succeed in getting work, but will be again out of work or unemployed (or, in the agency’s curious terms, “deemed to have quit”) by sundown. In this respect, day laborers are forced to compete on a daily basis for

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an always unpredictable and indeterminate number of jobs, never knowing from one day to the next whether or not they are going to find work. Agency dispatchers, who function as brokers, are charged with handling the often contradictory demands of, on the one hand, pleasing their clients and, on the other hand, managing their “on demand” workforce, whose economic urgency and psychological suffering—subjected as they are to such extreme uncertainty and conditions of relentless poverty—are tremendously palpable. Moreover, unlike other staffing arrangements, day laborers must physically report to the hiring hall in order to be considered for the opportunity of employment. This results in a daily, predawn routine that consists of waiting, waiting without pay, waiting for an indeterminate amount of time, and waiting without ever knowing if the wait will be worth the while, all in the hope of securing a day’s work and all while under the watchful eyes of their would-be employer. In this sense, day laborers are subjected to what can most aptly be termed flexploitation. They are flexibly exploited, sometimes superfluous and sometimes indispensable vis-à-vis the needs of capital. Flexploitation is “a mode of domination of a new kind based on the creation of a generalized and permanent state of insecurity aimed at forcing workers into submission into the acceptance of exploitation” (Bourdieu 1998, 85). With painted window signs and wooden curbside sandwich boards that announce “Work Today, Ca$h Today,” “Everyday Is Payday!” and “Drivers Earn Extra Cash!” day labor agencies resemble a host of other inner-city establishments, like check-cashing businesses, payday lenders, and pawnshops, luring passersby with brazen offers of quick, though ultimately costly, cash. Day labor agencies are, to borrow geographer David Wilson’s (2011) concept, “neoliberal-parasitic institutions,” premised upon the exploitation of poor, spatially bound people. Intensely attuned to local geography, day labor agencies deliberately locate in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty and joblessness, often in or near social service corridors catering to the homeless, or landscapes of urban poverty management. As Peck and Theodore (2001) explain, “business viability for these agencies turns on their ability to efficiently exploit depressed, inner-city labor pools” (473). Indeed, particularly important recruitment sites are homeless shelters and soup kitchens, which nearly all dispatchers I interviewed admitted to viewing as sites through which to “drum up bodies.” “Why wouldn’t I work ’em?” asked Caroline, a harried InstaLabor dispatcher. “They don’t need to be thrown out!” Tamara, the dispatcher of P&P Staffing, matter-of-factly explained her recruitment strategy in these terms: “We go to the shelters and soup kitchens . . . anywhere where people’ve got a bit too much time on their hands.” Her agency, like several others, even has what looks like a menu posted on the wall behind the counter that lists all the various and sundry personal hygiene items (deodorant, socks, toothpaste, razors, etc.) that homeless workers might be prodded to

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buy and use prior to being dispatched for a job, the inflated costs for which are deducted from the day’s paycheck. Carl, the dispatcher of Hard Hat Enterprises (which is located within one block of a soup kitchen, a bail-bond office, a prisoner reentry program, two transitional housing programs for the homeless, and two methadone clinics), explained his recruitment practices in these terms: Definitely a lot of it’s word of mouth because of the area we’re in and the areas all of our branches are in . . . basically everybody knows it’s here. And with the soup kitchen across the street, a lot of it is word of mouth. . . . When we need to drum up a lot of bodies, ya know, we’ll use the employment guide. We’ll go out flyering. And we’ll target specific neighborhoods where we know people are out of work and down on their luck. We target Section 8 neighborhoods, because the Section 8 people are always looking for work. When we need to do some heavy recruiting, we’ll also go down to the homeless shelters and, actually, all the shelters, the ones that are involved with churches, the women’s shelters, the men’s shelters, and the family shelters. All of ’em that are around town. Most of ’em, ya know, if you go around, you’ll see that most of ’em have our flyers hanging up anyway. And I’d say probably about half of our people are living in one of the shelters around here. Referencing not just the circulation but the complementarity and collaboration between these institutions, Carl went on to suggest that his agency—which, in turn, posts listings of nearby shelters, soup kitchens, and food pantries for the benefit of its precariously employed workers—operates as a day shelter of sorts. He framed his day labor agency as a place where the homeless can turn the burden of, as Tamara put it, “time on their hands”—time when they have to be out of the shelter—into productive waiting-for-work, an example of what Guy Standing (2011) has theorized as “work for labor.” “They can be out there wandering the streets, bothering everyone,” Carl chuckled. “Or they can sit in here, hope for a job, and bother me!” In light of such targeted, and yet indiscriminate, recruitment practices, it is not uncommon to see signs on the walls of labor pools that define the space in question and dictate the activity that is to take place within. At the InstaLabor office in Oakland, for instance, there was a handwritten sign, triple-underlined in red and posted on the wall, which declared: “This is a WORK HALL! Not a hang out! If you are not waiting for work, leave the premises immediately!” John, a branch manager of Hire Options and former branch manager of InstaLabor, confirmed that the location of day labor hiring halls is the result of strategic calculation, aimed to ensure proximity and accessibility to a sufficiently

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pliable, “needy,” and spatially bound source of labor: “There’s a software program that we use that’s very basic. It’s like the one used by McDonald’s, that tells you where a location should be put. It’s based on average income of that particular area, bus lines, transportation lines, things like that. Ya know, it’s not like we just drive down the street and go ‘Oh, this looks like a great place to be.’ We do our research to figure out where we’re needed. And if you’re doing your research, then I bet you’re probably pretty much up on the fact that most of America is going this way these days.” As David Wilson (2011) has argued, the practices of neoliberal-parasitic institutions, like day labor staffing agencies, “have to be made as not only permissible but legitimate and community-serving” (692). This quest for legitimacy, for the naturalization of their existence, Wilson writes, is “non-stop,” “fervent,” and “rhetorically-charged” (708). John’s claim about “figur[ing] out where we’re needed” highlights the way in which day labor agencies frame themselves—like homeless shelters and soup kitchens—as benevolent and critically needed service-providing agencies for the poor.5 They do so by exploiting the ambiguity of the triangular employment relationship, downplaying their role as profit-driven and “market-making” employers and emphasizing their role as supposedly altruistic labor market intermediaries for the chronically jobless and hard-to-employ.6 For instance, peppering the industry’s promotional materials and hovering around the hiring halls is the ubiquitous rhetoric of “opportunity,” as in the claims of “we give you a chance” or “we give you an opportunity to prove yourself.” This trope of opportunity, which frames day labor agencies as the key to unlocking the door of a hostile and otherwise impenetrable labor market, presumes a set of moral and behavioral deficiencies of its target workforce, a workforce deemed to be incapable of holding down a regular job and—in keeping with the goals of neoliberal poverty management—in need of reeducation in such things as punctuality, deference, presentability, accountability, honesty, and responsibility. Offering this “chance” to a population largely barred from chances transforms what is being offered—that is, the “opportunity to prove oneself ”— into a service, a charitable gift, rendering not just permissible but legitimate and community-serving the deplorable pay and working conditions that nevertheless typify day labor. Thus, while day labor companies as employment agencies are, as Hasenfeld (1972) pointed out nearly a half century ago, prototypical “people processing institutions,” aimed to alter status, they claim to function as “people-changing institutions,” aimed to alter behavior. In its marketing materials, for example, InstaLabor claims to fuel “individual and business growth” in a “win-win situation,” positioning itself as making important economic and cultural interventions. It purports to have a real social mission of “putting people to work” and

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“changing lives,” thereby contributing to moral uplift, on the one hand, and social order and discipline, on the other, by offering what it advertises to be “an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work” to those who would otherwise be mired in the informal and/or illegal activities of the street economy. The chief executive officer of one leading day labor company publicly proclaimed, “If they weren’t working with us, they’d be on welfare or loitering around, causing trouble” (Grow 2003). Another company spokesperson similarly declared, “Without such services, a whole class of workers would have few other opportunities for legal employment. What we do has enormous social value. When people work for us, they are not working in the underground economy” (Zaske 2002). A prominent sign on the wall in InstaLabor’s Oakland office, directed at prospective workers as they wait for work—and, it bears repeating, as they wait for work for an indefinite period of time without ever knowing if the wait will be worth the while—announces: “When you cooperate with the process of change, change will come.” Similarly, a sign on the wall of Central Temps—which would seem entirely banal if it were not so ironic—reads: “On the Path to Success ⇒ One Day at a Time.” Such signs construct day labor—the very definition of degraded and degrading dead-end work—as a conduit for personal transformation, as a route to social mobility, and as a setting for the production of responsible, work-oriented subjects. In this respect, day labor agencies are critical partners in the project of neoliberal poverty management, promoting, at one and the same time, the responsibilization of the poor and the resacralization of work, however precarious, perilous, and poorly paid. They feed extreme poverty and dispossession, by paying workers—when they are lucky enough to be dispatched to work—minimum and what more accurately amounts, once an assortment of fees are deducted, to subminimum wages (Roberts and Bartley 2004). So, too, do they feed off of extreme poverty and dispossession, relying upon the publicly subsidized infrastructure of street-level poverty management institutions to provide for the needs—most notably, food and shelter—of their “just-in-time” inventory of workers. And these poverty management institutions, in turn, help to accommodate workers to the unstable conditions of working for (that is, being “worked by”) day labor agencies. Tanesha—the day laborer quoted at the beginning of this chapter who revealed that, in light of the unhygienic conditions of the bathroom in the hiring hall, workers regularly used the bathroom of the homeless shelter during their lengthy wait for work—highlighted several other ways in which the shelter collaborated with the agency, compensating for its failure to provide adequate wages and necessary services: Who else gonna take us on? Can’t nobody live off of that [day labor]. At the shelter, you ain’t gotta pay rent, you eat for free. . . . If they [staff

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at the homeless shelter] know you’re goin’ to work, they give you sandwiches in the morning to bring for lunch. Then, they also have a vehicle—you heard about that?—that’ll pick you up when you have no money. Ya know, pick you up from the job site. One time, me and this guy were workin’ at this warehouse and we was stranded. We didn’t have no money to get home and we was way out there with no way to get back. We called down [to InstaLabor] and they [the dispatcher] was like, “Well, ain’t no one comin’ to get ya!” So we called down to the shelter and they came out and picked us up in the van. The managers of day labor companies obscure the parasitic quality of these companies, professing a commitment, in part through their dense associations with neighboring poverty management institutions, to “making a difference” by “helping people” who have “made bad choices” or who are, more generously framed, merely “down on their luck.” They construct day labor staffing as a service for the discouraged and the dispossessed, suggesting that menial, precarious, low-wage labor is the mechanism through which “lives are changed.” In so doing, they obscure the role that precarious, low-wage labor plays in the actual production and reproduction of workers’ poverty and homelessness. It is clear that some workers, at least initially, do tend to see the agencies as “services” for the downtrodden, as opposed to as employers with a vested interest in expanding the scope of contingency, on the sides of both supply and demand. “Because,” as a worker named Joseph explained, “they portray it to be, like, we’re here to give the people—the community—an opportunity to work, to go out and earn an honest day’s pay.” Or as a worker named Sandra complained to the dispatcher, after waiting four long days for what amounted to an elusive hope for a day’s work: “I thought this was a jobs program. I thought you were s’posed to be helpin’ us get back on our feet?” Nevertheless, they are under no illusion that day labor can lift them out of poverty, let alone afford them a measure of dignity. “It beats a blank,” is the resounding phrase uttered by workers, who view day labor as but a source of “slave wages,” mere “chicken-wing money,” “pocket change,” or “kibbles ’n’ bits.” As a worker named John once put it, summarizing the degraded and degrading character of the work, “There’s the totem pole and there’s the low man on the totem pole. Well, we’re not even on the totem pole.” Eduardo, a thirty-one-year-old worker who had been working for InstaLabor since his release from prison four years prior, articulated what he sees as the “perfect design” of landscapes of urban poverty management, trapping him within the cycle of day labor and homelessness in which he now finds himself: “I mean it’s just, it’s just crazy. Because they have it designed perfectly for InstaLabor to be right there, the shelter to be right there. They act like I don’t know that. It’s just

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sad because it’s like this town [Baltimore] really wants you to be fucked up. For real. Oh, they ‘tryin’ and tryin’’ to help you. But it’s just everything in the city’s all backwards. It’s just crazy.”

Organizing beyond the Workplace The increasingly precarious nature of work and the steady erosion of labor standards—manifest in the resurgence of day labor—have been met with resistance, spurring new, innovative forms of organizing. As Peck and Theodore (2012, 743) have noted, the contingent economy has become a site of “radicalizing reform and political possibility.” A particularly vibrant site for the enactment of “contingent labor politics” (743) has been the informal day labor market, comprising highly visible street-corner “shape-ups” that are not just emblematic of labor flexibilization and work degradation, but are intrinsically embroiled in the contentious politics of both gentrification and immigration (Esbenshade 2004; Purser 2009; Rai 2011; Varsanyi 2008). The affiliates of the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, a formal partner of the AFL-CIO since 2006, have been at the forefront of efforts to organize and mobilize immigrant day laborers. They have worked to contest municipal anti-solicitation ordinances and to provide services and legal remedy to abused and aggrieved day laborers. Most importantly, they have established nonprofit day labor worker centers that, operating as informal hiring halls, ensure greater transparency and accountability on the part of employers (in what is otherwise an anonymous and unregulated exchange) and promote collective solidarity on the part of workers (in what is otherwise a competitive and individuated job market). While these are important developments that have led to some remarkable achievements, they have done little to stem the steady spread of parasitic formal day labor agencies in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty or to ameliorate the conditions faced by the predominantly homeless, formerly incarcerated, African American population of labor pool workers, many of whom feel confined to, and dependent upon, these agencies. This sense of dependency results from multiple factors. First and foremost is the discrimination that they experience in the rest of the labor market on account of race and criminal history record. Second is the extra-economic pressure many are under to show evidence of gainful and legitimate employment, whether as a condition of their parole or as a condition of the “recovery” or social service programs in which they participate (see Purser 2012b).7 Although the formal day labor industry has been a far less robust site for “contingent labor politics” (Peck and Theodore 2012), a couple of states—Illinois (in 2006) and Massachusetts (in 2013)—have passed legislation

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regulating the temporary staffing industry by prohibiting the most egregious forms of abuse therein, like the charging of fees for safety equipment, transportation, and cashing one’s paycheck at the end of each day, all of which combine to bring workers’ net pay to an amount well below the minimum wage. The workers I worked alongside in Baltimore and Oakland support such legislation but are nevertheless skeptical about efforts to regulate these agencies—to “tame” these “employment sharks” (Freeman and Gonos 2008)—by simply banning certain of their formal practices. As a fifty-year-old, formerly incarcerated African American worker named Richard dubiously declared in reference to such efforts: “It doesn’t stop! Exploitation is still exploitation. The poor is always gon’ be exploited. It doesn’t stop just ’cause you take the [check-cashing] machine out.” Pointing out the tight loop of homelessness and precarious day labor in which he, like so many others, is embroiled, Richard continued: “It’s a system that needs to be attacked! But how do you do it? We as a people need to find a way to get out of it. Really, really get out of it. But the thing is,” he added with a tone of evident despair—his awareness of exploitation tempered by his recognition of dependency—“if you get active, some of us’ll have nowhere to work.” For Richard, it’s not just the formal practices of the agencies that need to be regulated, but the “system” of neoliberal poverty management through which such parasitic practices are reproduced and legitimated. How is such a system to be attacked? Or as Jeff put it in the opening paragraphs of this chapter: “What can we do?” A central argument of this chapter is that understanding day labor agencies’ embroilment within the broader logic and landscape of neoliberal poverty management is an important first step in identifying some of the challenges as well as opportunities for organizing. And there are, indeed, numerous challenges, not the least of which is the great lengths to which these agencies go to mask exploitation and promote themselves as social service agencies for the poor. It is vital that we unmask this flexploitation and challenge this discourse by documenting the way in which the day labor industry lowers labor standards and normalizes conditions of extreme precarity, thereby contributing more broadly to the degradation of work. The other obvious challenge is the economic urgency felt by day laborers who are subjected to the threat of blacklisting by agency dispatchers and for whom work is, from one day to the next, never a guarantee. An InstaLabor worker named Hubert explained this challenge in these terms, elaborating on the earlier referenced phrase of “it beats a blank”: See this is what desperation does. They ain’t goin’ nowhere. The coffee’s here, the water’s here. This is what I’m sayin’. This is where you, you break a man’s spirit for him to rebel. His lifestyle is at the point where he

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says look ain’t nothin’ I can do, I gotta take this shit because I need the money. But this is when you know a man’s spirit’s been broken. I mean, really, really broken. . . . What does rights have to do with a hungry man? I’m hungry! What you doin’ talkin’ about rights? I’m not sitting around talking ’bout no rights. I’m desperate. There’s no work! I’m desperate and I ain’t goin’ another day with bein’ completely broke. I just ain’t. Here, Hubert frames as a primary challenge to organizing the brute desperation of the workforce—their need to fulfill, on a daily basis, their most immediate material needs. Despite these and other challenges, the growth of the formal day labor business, its increased stranglehold over access to jobs at the bottom of the labor market, and its “fissuring” of the employment relationship point toward the opportunity—indeed, the necessity—for moving beyond traditional workplace-based organizing. The plight of these workers and their relentless circulation thro­ugh street-level poverty management institutions highlight the need for forging stronger alliances between labor, antipoverty, and right-to-the-city activists. On this note, there have been a number of instructive, if ultimately unsuccessful, efforts to organize labor pool workers, two of which I summarize here. In Cleveland, for example, labor pool workers came together in the year 2000 to form the Low Wage Workers Union, which would later be renamed the Day Laborers Organizing Committee (DLOC). As Daniel Kerr and Christopher Dole (2005) explain, the DLOC pursued three goals. First, it sought to sever the close relationship between the Salvation Army and the city’s myriad day labor agencies. To do so, it organized a petition drive among residents of the shelter demanding that labor brokers who wished to recruit inside the shelter would have to first agree to a strict agency code of conduct. This led the Salvation Army and the women’s shelter to eventually ban labor brokers from recruiting inside their facilities. Activists also pushed to bring an end to Cuyahoga County’s referral of welfare-to-work participants to the day-labor agencies and to sever their link to the Food Bank. Second, the DLOC worked on drafting municipal legislation to regulate the industry, requiring that agencies be licensed, prohibiting agencies from charging day laborers fees, mandating that agencies provide job descriptions and compensate for the time spent traveling to and from the work site, and prohibiting all forms of retaliation against workers who report violations of the ordinance. Finally, the DLOC pushed for the creation of an alternative nonprofit hiring hall that would compete with the for-profit agencies and offer workers higher wages, benefits, and training programs. With the support of a variety of social service agencies and organized labor (SEIU Local 47 and HERE

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Local 10), the hiring hall was established and started dispatching workers in 2003. But, given the lack of support from both the county and the city, the ordinance was never passed, and the alternative hiring hall shuttered its doors soon after opening, leaving workers once again reliant upon and vulnerable to the for-profit “body shops.” Cincinnati has also seen significant organizing around day labor agencies. Colleen McTague and Per Jansen (2013) highlight the work of the Day Labor Organizing Project (DLOP), which brought together advocates from the Cincinnati Interfaith Workers Center and the Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless. The goals of the DLOP were to organize day laborers, educate them concerning their rights, and resolve their work-related complaints. The DLOP held weekly recruitment meetings at a neighborhood food pantry but quickly discovered that day laborers were reluctant to speak out publicly, fearing retribution from the agencies on which they depended. A few day laborers who were working at the city’s recently privatized recycling facility—hand-sorting trash from recyclables—eventually raised a number of grievances with respect to paycheck deductions, health and safety issues at the plant, and violations of the city’s living-wage ordinance, which applied to the recycling plant. The DLOP, joined by the Blue-Green Alliance, a national coalition of labor unions and the Sierra Club, launched a campaign to demand from the City of Cincinnati both increased recycling efforts and contractor compliance with the living-wage ordinance. As a result of the escalated campaign, the Cincinnati City Council required that language be included in the upcoming renewal contract guaranteeing that all hourly employees at the recycling facility be paid in accordance with the living-wage ordinance. Additionally, the day labor company agreed to make paychecks available in a timelier manner, to repeal mandatory transportation in the company van to and from the recycling facility, and to stop charging fees for mandatory safety equipment. Yet six months after the salary increase, the day laborers were laid off as the recycling plant shut down in preparation for switching to a new automated sorting system. Although the company promised that the temporary positions would be converted to full-time positions, only fourteen full-time positions were created. The vast majority of day laborers who applied for the newly created jobs were told that they were not qualified for the positions, and ultimately thirty temporary jobs were lost. The next year, in a somewhat surprising twist, given its strategic geographic proximity to the poverty management institutions, the day labor agency simply shuttered its doors and moved three miles away, across the Ohio River to the state of Kentucky, where there is no living-wage law and where the minimum wage is lower, “leav[ing] day laborers in a more precarious position than before” (McTague and Jansen 2013, 19).

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In both these cases, organizing took place beyond the workplace—in nearby homeless shelters and neighborhood food pantries—and brought together diverse labor-community coalitions to target the practices of day labor agencies and/or their employer clients. Thus, the ultimate failure of these campaigns pre­ sents a cautionary tale about the daunting challenges presented by the ongoing restructuring of the labor market and the intensified flexploitation of the urban poor. Nevertheless, a right-to-the-city approach to organizing holds the poten­ tial of targeting not just agency practices, but the multiple and interconnected conditions that make possible its very product—that is, cheap and disposable “on demand” labor—and, hence, its ability to turn a profit.

3 ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT FOR WHOM? Retail, Neoliberal Urbanism, and the “Fight for 15” Stephanie Luce and Penny Lewis

You’ve noticed it by now: New York City’s small businesses are disappearing, and fast. The storefronts of the mom-and-pop shops, dive bars and beloved neighborhood eateries that once characterized New York’s streetscape are being filled with national franchises, big retail stores and bank branches. And gradually, the very feel of New York is transforming into something different, something other. Something sanitized. Giula Olsson, Indypendent

In 2013, Dunkin’ Donuts opened its 500th store in New York City. That amounts a franchise increase of 47 percent since 2008, when the company had 341 stores in the city (González-Rivera 2013). Also in 2013, tailors on the historic Savile Row in London protested when the American retailer Abercrombie & Fitch made plans to open a children’s clothing store on the street, which had primarily housed skilled tailors for over two centuries. The tailors hoped to keep chain stores out to retain the historical character of the street, and also to prevent rents from rising—but in the end, the international chain opened its branch (Bishop 2013). In recent decades, neoliberal policies have resulted in financial markets and industry reregulation that allow corporations to restructure and expand. Many sectors, including retail, have seen mergers and acquisitions that have resulted in fewer large corporations controlling a larger share of the market. As a result, in just a few decades, massive global retail corporations have emerged. They operate in multiple countries and employ hundreds of thousands of workers. Their chain stores are taking over cities at a rapid pace, raising heated debates about the purpose and character of urban development. Displacing small businesses, large retailers—including apparel, fast food, and home and office supply stores—have used their size and power to alter zoning 62

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laws and shopping patterns, as well as impact labor standards and regulations. Many of these large corporations have even managed to force changes in national laws, and enter cities at taxpayer expense, with the promise of job creation and urban renewal. Big retail’s expanded presence in the world’s cities represents just one part of a contest over urban space and living standards being waged under a larger banner this book describes as the “right to the city.”Workers, consumers, labor-community alliances, and local politicians are combating the myriad negative local effects of large retail’s dominance—rising rents, bad jobs, small-business displacement, big-footprint stores that attract car traffic—through local efforts. The retail sector depends for its success on an urban labor supply, local regulations and zoning ordinances, and local shoppers for its brick-and-mortar presence: labor and community groups recognize the peculiar power this situation affords their own organizations in their cities. As we describe below, it is at the municipal scale that the prerogatives of retail have been creatively challenged. Embedded in the retail issue is a range of complex questions: What kinds of jobs do city residents want, and what is a fair wage? What models of shopping and consumerism work best for meeting local needs without losing the local character? Which urban residents benefit from various models of retail development? Intersecting with these questions are considerations of leverage and strategy: Can, and should, big retail be blocked? Regulated? Organized? This chapter examines trends in the global retail industry, focusing on the ways in which the growing prominence and power of global retailers have intersected with urban politics in global cities. In particular, we examine a continuum of campaigns aimed at asserting workers’ and communities’ prerogatives over their local retail sector, spanning from those that have attempted to challenge the spread of multinational retailers to those that attempt to regulate their wages and working conditions. Urban coalitions have contested economic development aimed at enticing big-box retailers and shopping malls to their neighborhoods. Some of these coalitions have sought to bar entry to the giants, citing their low wages and poor working conditions, as well as environmental and public health impacts, negative impacts for small businesses, and the “mallification” of urban space. In these campaigns, organizers have demonstrated, with some success, the power of the community to assert a vision of urban development different from that on offer through the big-retail model. Other campaigns engage those firms that have already saturated so much of the urban market. Most notably, in recent years labor unions and living-wage organizers in the United States have made use of metro-organizing strategies in their efforts to raise the minimum wage—including the movement to raise wages to $15 an hour, commonly known as the “Fight for 15”—while other labor organizations are successfully waging

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citywide campaigns for fair scheduling, increased hours, and additional benefits for retail workers in a given locality. In these campaigns, citywide organizing across a variety of retail outfits has successfully shifted worker expectations, workplace practices, and, increasingly, government policy. Many of these efforts are too new for us to be able to deeply evaluate the extent of their success, or their longer-term outcomes. Certainly, together they indicate the galvanizing role of global retail in local right-to-the-city struggles, while underscoring both the possibilities and constraints of city-based efforts. For, in a way that is perhaps more pronounced than in many other urban-based community-labor struggles, the problem of scale besets the fight against the retail behemoths that dominate the job market and streetscape of these cities. Retail is a hyper-globalized industry that depends on a global supply chain (whose own terms it increasingly controls), international trade policies, and nationally and internationally recognizable brands. As we illustrate in our discussion of the industry below, the power of the retail giants stems from their global concentration and size, as well as national laws that govern their operations in addition to the many local supports they receive. How and to what extent the various models of local organizing we detail here can, or do, produce leverage that can be brought to bear at these greater scales is the final issue we explore.

Trends in the Retail Industry Retail is one of the largest sectors in many national economies and is a growing segment in the global economy. The industry accounted for almost $22.5 trillion in global revenue in 2014 and is expected to reach $28 trillion by 2018.1 Retail employment generally accounts for 10 to 15 percent of total employment in wealthy countries; it is more difficult to measure its share of employment in countries with large informal sectors (ILO 2011).2 Retail also accounts for a significant share of GDP in many countries, ranging from 8 percent in the United States to 14 percent in India, and has, on average, been growing as a share of the total economy for most countries.3 Retail has been growing more quickly in Global South countries, and retailers are looking at Global South cities as key to higher profit margins where markets are less saturated and there is a growing middle class and a young population of shoppers (Deloitte 2014). In recent decades the industry has seen mass restructuring and consolidation. While small stores are still prominent in some regions, the industry is increasingly concentrated, as large corporations have bought out smaller companies, and retail chains have replaced small independent stores (Zentes, Morschett, and Schramm-Klein 2011; Kalliappan et al. 2008). Chain stores have been replacing

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independent stores for decades, but the speed and scope intensified in the United States since the 1990s. For example, three new office supply stores—Staples, Office Max, and Office Depot, opened in the late 1980s and now control the vast majority of the market, with small and medium-size office supply stores retaining only about 5 percent (S. Mitchell 2007). This expansion is occurring overseas as well. For example, between 2002 and 2004, more than three thousand of twenty thousand small businesses closed in Kraków, Poland, as large international retailers moved in (S. Mitchell 2007). One observer noted that Britain is witnessing the slow death of independent businesses and the emergence of “a new retail feudalism” (S. Mitchell 2007, 19). On a global scale, large firms are controlling a greater share of the market. In 2012, the top 250 retail firms accounted for approximately 30 percent of global retail revenue, and by 2014 the average large retailer had revenue of $17.9 billion (Deloitte 2012, 2016). By comparison, the top 250 firms accounted for approximately 27 percent of global revenue in 2005, and the average large retailer had revenue of $13 billion. Furthermore, the top ten retailers dominate the industry. Walmart continues to lead, with 2012 revenue over four times greater than that of the second-largest firm, Costco (Deloitte 2016). Walmart has been aggressive about its growth. In the late 1990s, its CEO David Glass remarked, “Our priorities are that we want to dominate North America first, then South America, and then Asia and then Europe” (S. Mitchell 2007, 16). Walmart has succeeded in its plans—in part by opening new stores, but in large part by buying up existing indigenous chains. Although Walmart is far and away the largest global retailer, other large retailers are growing as well. Increasing industry concentration has resulted in a few companies controlling large market share in many countries. For example, the top five retailers dominate 88 percent of food sales in Sweden, 85 percent in Denmark, and 84 percent in Finland; the top four supermarket chains control two-thirds of grocery retail in the UK; and the four largest discount stores control just over 86 percent of the market in South Korea (Felstead et al. 2011; Lee 2012). The industry has grown and changed in part because large retailers based in wealthy countries have reached some level of domestic market saturation, and industry consolidation provides greater capacity for global expansion. But equally important are national and international policy changes that have allowed this transformation to occur. Kalhan and Franz (2009) write, “It is the pull factors at work like the rapid liberalisation of retail policies in emerging markets that seem to be more important. . . . The liberalisation agenda itself seems to have been vigorously promoted by the governments and agents of these giant retailers” (57). They note at least seven categories of regulations that impact retail: (1) competition laws, (2) restrictions on the amount and size of land and property that can be owned by individual entities, including foreign, (3) restrictions

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on foreign direct investment, (4) zoning laws, (5) municipal business codes, (6) environmental laws, and (7) labor laws. Yet retail has also grown with the assistance of government subsidies at the urban scale. This is happening globally but particularly in the United States, where cities use economic development incentives to attract or retain retailers in order to increase sales tax revenues, reduce urban “blight” or gentrify a neighborhood, and bolster the tourism industry (Hackworth and Smith 2000; Eisinger 1988; Hackworth 2006). The kinds of subsidies provided included incentives for developers (such as for a mall), as well as tenants (retail shops and restaurants). These could include reduced prices for land; waived or reduced fees; property tax abatements and/or shares in the net sales and property taxes; reduced or reimbursed payments for special assessments. In addition, a city may offer to cover or share in the costs of necessary infrastructure, such as new traffic lights, streetlights, street maintenance, increased security, and parking structures. Both cities and counties use various incentive programs, such as “business improvement districts,” “tax increment financing” (TIF) zones, enterprise zones, and others. Some programs provide tax breaks to businesses that locate in a specific geographic area, such as for the purposes of developing a “blighted area.” In some cases these initiatives encourage municipalities to use a broad definition of “blight” in order to make regions or developments eligible for subsidies. For example, according to Gordon (2003), one town “declared a thriving shopping mall ‘blighted’ in 1997 because it ‘was too small and had too few anchor stores,’ and more specifically, because it didn’t have a Nordstrom’s.” By designating the mall as blighted, the town could award a $30 million TIF deal to attract upscale retailers like Nordstrom’s to the mall. Often these programs offered benefits with few strings attached; businesses can strike a deal with only vague promises of large-scale job creation and sales revenue. Some arrangements allocated millions of dollars to yield only a handful of jobs, or relocate existing jobs from one city to another. Firms might go out of business or move again in a few years and are rarely required to pay back the public money that subsidized their venture (e.g., LeRoy 2005; Mattera, Tarczynska, and LeRoy 2013). Initially, sales tax and other benefits from retail development may have been enough to outweigh the value of the subsidies, but over time, more and more cities began to compete, giving retailers leverage to bargain for better deals. For example, one study found that General Growth Properties, the second-largest shopping mall owner and operator, had received over $200 million in revenues from city and county governments across the country as of 2007 (Mattera, Lack, and Walter 2007). Walmart has received over $1.2 billion in assistance as of 2013 (Mattera, Tarczynska, and LeRoy 2013). Not all this development takes place in

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urban centers: in fact, many of the largest developments are in suburbs and rural areas. But large cities are pulled into the same dynamic, particularly for large mixed-use developments. Examples include the $84 million subsidy for Gallery Place in Washington, DC; $40 million in tax breaks for retail/office development in Phoenix; an $11 million subsidy for a Hyde Park development in Chicago; and $23.9 million for the Clackamas Town Center in Portland, Oregon (Mattera, Lack, and Walter 2007; Hackworth 2006). While the developments often do create jobs, the jobs were primarily low wage, part time, and provided few or no benefits or job security. Furthermore, the total cost of subsidy per job created or retained usually shows a poor use of funds.

Retail Jobs Municipal politicians want to be seen as fostering job creation and economic activity, and a new shopping mall or district is a great way to do that. City leaders have touted redevelopment projects such as the Inner Harbor area in Baltimore, or the Atlantic Terminal and Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, New York, as symbols of the revitalization of urban areas. But the reality is not so positive. These kinds of developments create some higher-wage construction jobs for the initial phase, but after that the vast majority of jobs are low wage and part time. These include retail, restaurant, hotel, janitorial, and security jobs. Here we focus on retail jobs, but the basic characteristics are similar for each of these sectors. The major retail jobs are cashier, combined food preparation and serving workers, salesperson, stock clerk, and first-line supervisors and managers. In 2014, U.S. employment in these occupations totaled just over fifteen million—or about 10 percent of total employment. The Department of Labor projects retail salesperson as the top occupation in terms of job openings by 2024—with 1.9 million jobs; followed by fast food and counter workers with 1.7 million jobs, then cashiers with 1.5 million.4 This is in part a measure of retail growth, but it also reflects exceptionally high turnover in these occupations. Four of the five occupations have median hourly wages below the national average. In addition, the average hours worked per week in retail is only thirty for nonsupervisory workers and thirty-one for all workers, which means the median annual incomes for four of the occupations are less than half the national average (see table 3.1). Retail workers are more likely than the average to be working part time, and also more likely to be involuntarily part time, meaning they want to work full-time hours but cannot get them (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2008; Luce and

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TABLE 3.1.  Employment, hourly wages, and annual wage for retail occupations, 2014 OCCUPATION

2014 EMPLOYMENT

MEDIAN HOURLY WAGE

MEDIAN ANNUAL WAGE

Retail salesperson

8,739,300

$13.96

$21,780

Cashier

3,437,500

$12.38

$19,320

Stock clerks

1,878,100

$14.88

$23,220

Fast food and counter

3,640,900

$12.15

$18,960

1,537,800

$24.56

$38,310

150,539,900

$17.40

$36,200

workers First-line supervisors of retail sales workers All occupations

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment Statistics, 2014. Note: Median hourly wage calculated by dividing annual wage by average hours worked per week, fifty-two weeks per year, for the occupation.

Fujita 2012). Retail workers have a lower-than-average unionization rate, which contributes to the fact that they are less likely than the average worker to receive benefits on the job such as paid vacation, health insurance, and retirement. One survey of New York City retail workers found that only 29 percent receive health insurance from their retail job. A quarter of respondents said they relied on government-provided health insurance, and 18 percent simply went without health insurance altogether (Luce and Fujita 2012). In addition to involuntary part-time hours, retail workers are increasingly facing the challenges of irregular scheduling, or what Susan Lambert (2008) has called “just-in-time scheduling.” In order to boost profits, retailers have turned to sophisticated workforce scheduling based on sales volume, weather, and customer flow. Employers may hire far more workers than they actually need and schedule those workers for on-call shifts—meaning the employees are scheduled to work but must call the night before, or even up to two hours before the scheduled shift, to see if they should actually come in to work. If they are not needed, they are not paid—similar to those working as day laborers or temp workers. In a sense, retailers have figured out a way to have a full-time pool of day laborers on hand without having to promise work or incur the costs of job search and hiring. In addition, employers may send workers home early before their shift ends if sales are slow. A handful of states have reporting-pay laws that mandate workers be paid for a minimum number of hours, but many workers do not know their rights, and employers violate the laws, meaning, for example, that a worker could be scheduled to work four hours but get sent home after two, and receive pay for only those two hours (Luce and Fujita 2012).

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This is not only a U.S. problem. Irregular scheduling and low hours appear to be on the rise in other countries. For example, data from the United Kingdom show a huge increase in “zero-hours contracts”: 583,000 workers who were forced to sign employment contracts that provided no guarantee for hours worked (Watt 2014). Rather than using public money to create high-wage stable jobs, municipal policy makers have instead changed local laws and leveraged economic development funds to promote low-wage, unstable, unsustainable jobs in the retail sector. In fact, the result is perhaps a double hit, as many of these low-wage workers then rely on federal and state government programs such as food stamps and Medicaid to make ends meet. For example, one study found that Walmart’s reliance on public services cost taxpayers from $900,000 up to $1.75 million a year for each three-hundred-employee Walmart superstore. Another study estimated that Walmart gets more than $7.8 billion per year in total federal tax breaks and taxpayer subsidies (Democratic staff of the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce 2013; Americans for Tax Fairness 2014). McDonald’s came under fire in recent years for sharing personal budget advice with its employees that assumed a second job and excluded meaningful costs like food, heat, and gas; it later provided hotlines for its workers—“McResources”—that encouraged them to seek out food stamps and Medicaid. Meanwhile, over half of front-line fast food workers were found to be collecting public assistance in 2013, at the cost of nearly $7 billion (Allegretto et al. 2013). Urban redevelopment projects can include mixed-use developments that include retail, and while some of these retailers may be small, or even local, the bulk of benefits go to large national chains. These chains have more leverage to demand assistance from cities. They also have full-time staff to work with cities and take advantage of tax breaks and assistance programs—including formal policies like McResources designed to get store employees enrolled in government health care and housing programs. Small local stores are then competing in the same market as large subsidized firms, making it challenging to match their low prices. One study found that municipalities in the St. Louis metro area had used over $5.8 billion in public dollars to subsidize new development over a twenty-year period, with the vast majority of that going to build new shopping developments and chain stores. However, more than six hundred small retailers closed in the same period. The end result was no net change in jobs, and no increase in retail sales per capita (East-West Gateway Council of Governments 2011). Complicating matters, many cities and states do not require full disclosure and transparency about the development deals they fund, or the resulting outcomes.

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Most cities have public-private entities that combine private investor dollars with public monies to underwrite new developments. In many cases, the financial deals are lopsided: any benefits from projects accrue to the private investors and developers, but losses are borne largely or in part by the municipality. Municipal courting of retail investment has its roots in the economic crises and restructuring of the 1970s (described in the introduction to this volume). As support for federal programs waned by the late 1970s, federal funding dried up, leaving cities in financial distress. To survive in this new, hypercompetitive environment, cities began to assert more of a role in local economic development, designing programs primarily to attract investors and revenue—rather than to assist low-income residents. As part of this, cities rushed to convert public space to private space, often pushing out low-income housing and small businesses in favor of luxury high rises, office space, and retail. This represented a new scale and form of gentrification. From more sporadic and ad hoc efforts primarily financed by individual investors, to larger-scale projects backed by the state and involving transnational corporate developers, we have seen the transformation of “downtown” and “main street” in cities in the United States and around the world. In sum, the move toward subsidizing large urban retail projects has provided not only poor-quality jobs, but also pushed out local small businesses and longtime residents who cannot afford higher rents, while shifting many of the costs and the risks of investment onto the public. As cities have encouraged a “back to downtown” movement that brings retail and luxury housing in, existing small businesses and residents have been pushed out, unable to afford increasing rents. The storefront cityscape presents alternating high-end specialization and mid-level giant retail homogeneity. Communities are similarly emptied of their class and ethnic diversity, as former urban residents are increasingly pushed out to suburbs, away from the “good life” that generations sought in the city and to where public transportation and other support services needed to help them access good jobs are inadequate (Leigh and Blakely 2013).

Workers and Communities Fight Back Retailers and developers have expanded their influence rapidly, but this has not gone without challenge. Workers, unions, community and faith-based organizations, small business owners, and residents have come together in campaigns and coalitions aimed at either stopping certain developments altogether or attaching wage standards and community benefits to these projects.

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FIGURE 3.1.  Fight for $15 an hour and a union: Oakland, California, December 2014. Photo by Annette Bernhardt.

Blocking Access, or Negotiating New Terms in Community Benefits Agreements Given the negative consequences of big retail’s rapid expansion, right-to-the-city oriented activists have chosen to pursue a range of strategies, including barring entry to an urban market, or forcing transformative terms regarding footprint, capacity, and workplace practices as conditions for entry to the urban market. For example, when Walmart announced its plans to develop a “smaller footprint” store format to more easily enter the urban market, activists in the United States took note and began preparing to battle the corporation from entering their cities. In New York City, activists produced a report, The Walmartization of New York City, which predicted job loss, destruction of small businesses, and wage depression if the city allowed Walmart to enter—and appealed to the city council to deny the store permission to enter (Walmart depends on zoning approval and city subsidies to build new stores).5 The council agreed, and the council speaker announced, “As long as Wal-Mart’s behavior remains the same, they’re not welcome in New York City. . . . New York isn’t changing. Wal-Mart has to change.” The mayor of Boston also declared that Walmart was not welcome; and residents in Inglewood, California (a section of Los Angeles), launched a public referendum and voted to keep the store out.6

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At the most local level, activists have challenged large retailers over land use. In particular, activists have attempted to preserve public space from being converted to retail or mixed-use developments. A notable example took place in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2013. The city planned to allow a large developer to convert Taksim Gezi Park from green space into a development with a shopping mall and luxury apartments. Protesters organized, and eventually they occupied the park to save it from bulldozers. The government raided the encampment, leading to widespread protests on a broad set of issues, but the underlying concerns about economic development versus public space remain (Kuymulu 2013a). As of this writing Gezi Park remains a park, though the Turkish government continues to raise the specter of development. Similarly, residents in Stuttgart, Germany, staged massive, ongoing protests in that city against plans to demolish a historic train station and replace it and a park with retail and a high-speed rail hub. Activists were concerned about the environmental impacts and large costs, and many objected to the top-down manner in which the development was set to happen. Protests went on for many years, including rallies, marches, referendums, but eventually construction began in 2010. In the early 2000s, living-wage activists began to promote “community benefits agreements” (CBAs), which aimed at winning greater benefits from developers that would impact other constituencies as well. Activists lobbied their city governments to deny zoning permits and economic development subsidies for developers who were not willing to provide tangible benefits for the immediate community. These benefits might include conducting environmental impact studies, building public parks, or attaching child-care or affordable-housing units to new developments. Organizations pushing CBAs have made the case that the strategy can be an effective one for targeting large-scale development projects, particularly those that result in many low-wage service-sector jobs. Unions have struggled to organize these low-wage retail or fast food workers by other means, so the CBA can be one handle to open the door for union neutrality or card-check agreements between the employer and union, where the employer agrees to remain neutral during a unionization effort or agrees to accept a union in the workplace based on a majority interest in the union, rather than requiring a union election. For example, in 2001 a coalition of organizations won an agreement from a Los Angeles developer around the NoHo Commons, a retail, office, and residential project in North Hollywood. The coalition agreed to support the developer’s request for $31 million in public subsidies and loans in exchange for an on-site child care center with spaces reserved for at least fifty low-income families; a local hiring system; seed money for a job-training program for day laborers; and

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a commitment that at least 75 percent of jobs in the development pay the living wage (Public Law Center 2011). Subsequent CBAs, in Denver, Pittsburgh, New Haven (Connecticut), and more, include other community benefits, such as a developer’s promise for programs to reduce the percentage of employees who drive to work; commitment to create affordable housing; donations to city youth programs; commitment to union neutrality; and more. Not all CBAs cover retail developments—some cover sports arenas, hospitals, and airport expansions—but the basic concept remains: local coalitions are beginning to demand that in exchange for city support, developers must promise concrete benefits for workers and community members. There are challenges to the CBA strategy. Such strategies primarily target one development at a time, and the campaigns can take many years from the time the development is proposed to the point where businesses hire workers and workers can unionize and win a contract. CBAs also rely on strong coalitions: in fact, in some cases coalition partners have made their own side agreement with the developer and dropped out of the coalition. For example, in New Haven, building trades unions negotiated so that a hospital expansion would be built with union labor, leaving the rest of the coalition members to fend for themselves (Simmons and Luce 2009). While in other instances these unions have engaged in “good faith,” longer-term community coalitions, the instances of “betrayal” such side agreements represent have had negative consequences for how unions are perceived as community partners. What these conflicts make clear are the real limits to the partial, member-oriented responsibilities and outlook of unions and the broader goals and needs of urban communities. As we explore in the next section, unions are also grappling with new kinds of campaigns and forms that provide partial resolution to this contradiction of members versus community, campaigns that then raise new dilemmas for longer-term power.

(Re)regulating Retail Another citywide strategy for labor and community organizations is to reregulate retail. San Francisco passed the “Formula Retail” law in 2006, setting in place restrictions on how “formula” or chain stores (or restaurants) can enter the neighborhood business districts in the city. Under the law, a firm must undergo a public hearing and get permission from the planning commission. “Formula” is defined as a retail sales activity or establishment with more than ten other establishments throughout the United States and two or more of the following: “a standardized array of merchandise, a standardized façade, a standardized décor and color scheme, a uniform apparel, standardized signage, a trademark or a

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servicemark” (San Francisco Planning Department 2014). The law currently puts in place barriers for these kinds of stores to enter the city, and labor and community activists are looking at strategies for establishing a higher wage for these employers as well. In 2014, the city passed the “Retail Workers Bill of Rights,” which went into effect in 2015. The bill requires formula retailers to provide retailer workers fourteen days’ notice on scheduling, penalizes last-minute schedule changes and on-call shifts, mandates that part-time workers get the same treatment as full timers, and requires companies to offer current part-time workers the chance for full-time work before hiring new employees. In some cases, retail regulations are found at the national level. For example, South Korea requires big-box retailers to get consent from local merchants before opening a store. They are also restricted in terms of the items they can sell, and cannot sell certain food items that are sold by local merchants. South Korea, as well as France and Germany, maintains strong zoning laws that prohibit large retailers from opening near existing markets (Castro 2012). Many countries still restrict the hours and days of the week that retailers can operate. Indonesia has implemented new regulations aimed at foreign retailers. This includes stronger government intervention on retail zoning that favors smaller stores, and a limit on the number of stores that a foreign franchiser can own. Foreign retailers and restaurant chains are also now required to carry at least 80 percent “local content” (Kearney 2013). These examples do not target cities in particular, but they challenge general neoliberal orthodoxy that says governments should deregulate rather than regulate, and that the key to economic growth is through easing burdens for foreign investors.

Living-Wage and Local Minimum-Wage Campaigns, and the Fight for $15 Labor-community coalitions in U.S. cities have been trying to raise wages for all workers for several decades. Because they lacked the political power to raise the federal minimum wage, activists turned to the local level, where they had greater leverage. Initially, this took the form of municipal living-wage ordinances that mandated city contractors pay a higher wage. But activists knew that most low-wage jobs are in retail, and that any effort to seriously raise wages had to apply to the retail sector. Furthermore, they argued that since these retailers almost always get major economic development assistance and special zoning allowances, they should contribute to the well-being of workers by paying employees a living wage. Initial efforts to establish a higher wage rate for particular parts of the industry, such as big-box retailers, failed, including one in Chicago and one in Washington, DC. In both cities, the majority of residents supported the bills, which were passed by city councils but then vetoed by Democratic mayors.

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Another effort to apply a living-wage requirement to a developer and retail tenants at the Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx also failed. Other cities have applied living-wage requirements to firms that receive economic development assistance subsidies and firms operating on city-owned properties such as airports. For example, retail firms and fast food restaurants such as McDonald’s in the Los Angeles International Airport must pay their employees the living wage of $10.91 per hour if they provide health benefits, or $15.67 if they do not. In the same city, developers that receive economic development assistance must pay the living wage, which includes retail tenants when the project is built on publicly owned land. For example, the policy covered the development of the Plaza Pacoima Shopping Center (Spivack 2011). Activists also tried to raise wages for all workers in a municipality. In the early 2000s, they had some success in a handful of cities, including San Francisco and Santa Fe—but in some cases, state legislatures stepped in to pass laws outlawing municipal wage laws and overturn citywide minimum wages in cities like New Orleans and Madison, Wisconsin. But in 2012, fast food workers in New York City, working with SEIU and community groups, engaged in a one-day strike, demanding $15 an hour and a union. Over the next two years the campaign spread, and by December 4, 2014, fast food workers struck in 190 cities across the United States. The strikes primarily targeted McDonald’s and Burger King initially, but workers from Wendy’s, Domino’s, KFC, and others took part. In addition, workers from other sectors joined the strikes, including dollar stores, convenience stores at gas stations, airport workers, and care givers (Margolin 2014). In April 2015, the “National Day of Action” for the Fight for $15 yielded sixty thousand striking workers in over two hundred cities in the United States. As a result, by early 2016 over thirty cities and counties across the United States had established new minimums. The wages range from $8.60 per hour in Albuquerque up to $16 an hour in Emeryville, California. Eight cities and counties have adopted $15 hourly rates (to be phased in over several years), including Seattle and the small nearby airport city of SeaTac, Washington, two cities where campaigns were the first to aggressively embrace the call for $15 an hour minimums. Some large employers, a few of which have been the targets of union campaigns and direct action, such as Zara, IKEA, and McDonald’s, and others who are positioning themselves as responsive to the broader movements, like GAP, have raised their lowest wages since 2012. And in April 2016, California and New York State agreed to raise their statewide minimum wage to $15 per hour, phased in over several years. The breakthroughs represented by the “Fight for $15” movement in the United States, while still emergent and uneven, have nevertheless been nothing short of

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astonishing. An organizer with New York City’s Brandworkers, a nonprofit organization that represents retail and food workers, described the difference felt by workers today: “Two years ago, the workers I was organizing said they thought they might see $10 an hour wages within five years if they were lucky. Today they are saying, $18 is what we really need!” A confluence of factors has given rise to the current success of these efforts. The Occupy movement of 2011 elevated the problem of income disparity and prevalence of low-wage work and directly energized hundreds of thousands of new activists who joined the movement of the squares. Unions and other worker organizations were similarly inspired, and some seized on the opportunity of the shifts in the discourse and rediscovered use of direct action. The rapidly rising cost of living in gentrifying cities heightens the devastating impact of stagnant wages. Workers were being priced out of their homes and neighborhoods, while the minimum wage actually fell, in real terms. The Fight for $15 campaign has linked activists in multiple cities in the United States and internationally. The campaign has sponsored multiple strike days where workers in hundreds of cities coordinate nearly spontaneous job actions. In addition, the campaign has pursued an organizing strategy that does not focus exclusively on a specific firm, or even industry-specific leverage. While the initial campaigns targeted fast food workers, particularly those at McDonald’s and Burger King, the effort soon expanded to demands to raise wages more broadly, and the inclusive citywide approach, represented best in places like Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago, taps into generalized grievances among low-wage workers and broad community support for wage increases. One rank-and-file organizer in Chicago commented on the efforts at creating a citywide union there: “Had the campaign been run shop by shop, it would have been too easy for the bosses to isolate us” (Kahle 2013). This community-based approach has also helped forge connections between the movement for a living wage and the Black Lives Matter movement, which has highlighted the persistence of state violence and repression against African Americans and the lack of meaningful economic opportunities for millions of urban blacks across the country. In San Francisco, local Black Lives Matter activists endorsed the November 2014 wage protests in a statement explaining, “Black Lives Matter Bay Area joined this day of action because when more than half of all Black workers make less than $15 an hour we have to take a stand to say Black Lives Matter at work, too.” A child care worker from Atlanta described the natural “intersect” between the two movements: “It’s black and brown communities that suffer the most. I believe that once we have better wages and our wages are increased, parents won’t have to work two and three jobs to make ends meet. They’ll have more time with their children. Our communities will be a better place” (K. Lerner 2016).

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The Fight for $15 may help contribute to efforts to change the legal framework governing labor relations at franchises. In recent cases the National Labor Relations Board has declared parent companies of franchises “joint employers,” who may then be liable for working conditions and violations at the level of their franchisees. The most important of these cases, under appeal as of this writing, concerns McDonald’s, which, if its “joint employer” status is upheld, could be forced to negotiate with unionized franchise employees. Fight for $15 efforts have also intersected with state and national campaigns. Although the main union behind the campaign, SEIU, endorsed Hillary Clinton for president in 2016, many Fight for $15 activists mobilized instead in support of Bernie Sanders, because of his strong support for the $15 minimum wage. Yet as of 2016, the Fight for $15 movement has not resulted in any new unions formed or bargaining units recognized (though some workers have in fact unionized as an outcome of living-wage campaigns). Further, the campaign is criticized by some as being more media relations than deep organizing (Gupta, 2013; Uetricht, 2013). While the wage increases are real and broad, what else will persist beyond a minimum wage increase remains to be seen. It is possible that employers will use the higher wages as an excuse to lay off workers and scare them away from unions. It is also possible that the momentum created through the movement will form the basis for solid political coalitions of workers across industries and among youth, community, and faith-based activists—coalitions that could continue to press for other reforms, unionization, and political change of a deeper sort. For now, unions like SEIU that are supporting the broad minimum-wagehike efforts appear to have a longer time horizon in mind, which is a heartening orientation for a labor movement under immediate stress. As we saw in some community-benefit agreement conflicts, when unions make deals for short-term gains for their members and organizational sustenance, solidarity is undercut. When unions prioritize gains for members and nonmembers alike, as in these minimum-wage campaigns, solidarity across a broader labor movement is maximized. Yet the reality for unions embracing a wider class-and-community approach is that shrinking member resources are expended in these campaigns, and the shorter- and even medium-term prospects for institutional growth are not necessarily improved. Figuring out how to both raise the floor and increase union representation at once is a challenge still being addressed by these movements. But within particular cities, the coalitional integrity demonstrated across labor and community is a boon to grassroots strength. What has become clear across these efforts to limit, reregulate, and reform retail’s power in local consumer and labor markets is that citywide organizing is at once a necessary scale for success and an insufficient one. Coalitions in cities like Los Angeles and New York that were able to forge community-benefit

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agreements with developers were precursors to successful efforts for a $15 minimum wage. The strength and duration of CBAs and wage gains are themselves dependent on the ongoing pressure and vigilance of the labor community coalitions that fight for them. But as we outlined at the top of the chapter, retail’s power is national and international; cities are currently the only place where its dominance is being challenged. How this ratio of local resistance to global institutions shapes up will be one important measure of the power that city-based social movements ultimately have in today’s economic order. Legally, for example, cities are often restricted from exercising “home rule” over issues like wages or rents, which may be governed instead by state or federal policies. Advocates for increased home rule have argued that cities have a proprietary interest, however, in being able to regulate the terms of development and employment in projects in which they are engaged, and as such should be able to set citywide policies regarding retail development or minimum wage. For example, when the city has a proprietary interest in the revenue of a particular development project, it has an incentive to maintain peaceful labor relations and avoid a strike. This means the city can legally give preference to firms with a history of peaceful labor relations (or deny contracts or subsidies to those who have a history of violating labor laws). To the extent that such home rule strategies are able to harness the power of local coalitions, the result may be increasingly empowered cities negotiating with greater autonomy against sprawling retail corporations. To the extent that institutions like unions link city to city, it is possible to see in the Fight for $15, for instance, what a coordinated campaign linking autonomous cities and regions could look like in the future. Local organizing could provide the building blocks for leverage and supra-local scales: these fights against retail development and the low-wage jobs they offer are key sites to trace the success of these efforts.

Conclusion Retail is a key, and growing, foundation of the neoliberal city. Neoliberal urban planning attempts to move away “from redistributive policies, welfare considerations, and direct service provision” toward “more market-oriented and market-dependent approaches aimed at pursuing economic promotion and competitive restructuring” (Swyngedouw, Moulaert, and Rodriguez 2002, 552–53). In city after city, policy makers help convert public space into fully privatized, or public-private space centered on commerce. In addition, tax rates for the wealthy and on corporations have declined, as has federal funding, leaving city managers to increasingly rely on the more regressive sales tax for revenue. This has pushed policy makers to encourage the growth

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of retail, food service, and tourism industries. These bring in not only sales and related taxes, but outside consumer dollars. Finally, intense competition and restructuring in the retail sector has resulted in large, profitable global corporations that have developed sophisticated strategies for negotiating with cities for major subsidies and prime real estate. Retailers are eager to gain access to large and growing urban markets. In the United States, big-box stores have almost saturated the suburban markets, leaving the urban centers as the destination of choice. As one industry analyst put it, “Urban is one of the few remaining areas available for retail development by the national chains. It’s a matter of who gets there first, and who gets the prime real estate” (Soltes 2013). In the Global South, retailers see “emerging markets” as the key to growth, particularly in urban areas where there is a growing middle class ready to spend. In high-income cities, however, the urban middle class has itself faced pressures because of the explosive growth of low-wage work—most of which is created in these exact retail sectors. The very forces that pull retail to the city center push small businesses and retail workers out, as rental and housing costs soar while wages stagnate and sink. The result tips urban development and demography toward a balance unlikely to be sustained—centers of multi-tier consumerism with shrinking numbers of residents able to afford such consumption. But the “mallification” of urban space has not gone uncontested nor the “low-wage nation” unchallenged. Activists have challenged retailers’ right to public space, and some municipalities and national governments have attempted to regulate large retailers directly through targeted labor policies or indirectly through minimum-wage campaigns. Others have pushed to keep out large chains altogether, or to place wage standards and other requirements on retailers who enter the city. While these forms of resistance differ, they share a common theme: activists attempting to claim some democratic influence over the use of urban space and the ultimate beneficiaries of economic development. In hundreds of cities around the globe, coalitions of city leaders and developers have attempted to push through new retail/mixed-use projects under the premise that retail is a core necessity for the modern city. Labor–community coalitions would likely agree with that sentiment, but they would add the necessity of worker rights, a living wage, and a voice in development decisions. A “modern city” cannot be built on profits and consumerism but must be just and equitable.

4 CONTEXT, COALITIONS, AND ORGANIZING Immigrant Labor Rights Advocacy in San Francisco and Houston Els de Graauw and Shannon Gleeson

In 2000, a broad coalition of immigrant and worker advocates secured passage of a strong living-wage ordinance in San Francisco. Over the next decade and a half, under the banner of social and economic justice for all low-wage workers, they achieved other significant reforms, including a municipal minimum wage, paid sick leave, universal health care, wage theft prevention legislation, and the creation of a local bureaucracy tasked with enforcing these policies. Throughout this period, the local business community unsuccessfully lobbied against these policies, arguing that they would poison the city’s business climate. Meanwhile, immigrant and worker advocates took up a similar fight for stronger labor protections in Houston. Their ballot campaign for a living-wage ordinance failed dramatically in 1997, but they succeeded in getting the city council to enact an anti–wage theft ordinance in 2013. This relatively modest policy change created local mechanisms to enforce the federal minimum wage. Unlike in San Francisco, where labor and business interests remained opposed to each other’s agendas, advocates in Houston benefited from the support of local business leaders, who have backed the ordinance in an attempt to root out unfair business competition. The San Francisco and Houston experiences underscore that cities are increasingly important venues for organizing for the labor rights of marginalized populations, but they also show that not all cities are created equal. Labor rights advocacy is easier and more successful in some cities than in others. This is

The authors are equal coauthors. 80

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due to differences such as in the history and legacy of past labor rights struggles, local economic, political, and demographic dynamics, the presence and strength of advocacy organizations and other supportive institutions, and the relationships between cities and their respective regions and states. Thus, in studying the significance of cities for campaigns to expand the labor rights of marginalized populations, it is important to realize that there is no singular urban context in which such campaigns take place. Urban contexts vary, and to understand how advocates today organize at the urban level, form local coalitions, and pitch their policy reforms to local policy makers, we need to understand a city’s historic trajectory and its current economic, political, and demographic situation. This chapter contrasts recent wage and labor rights campaigns in San Francisco and Houston, focusing on how similar local advocacy organizations in both cities strategically engage with their respective city contexts to promote their policy goals. We examine advocates’ motivations to push for better wage and labor rights for immigrants and other low-wage workers. We also investigate advocates’ coalitional strategies, issue-framing decisions, challenges in advocating with local government officials and business leaders, and impact on the local policy-making process. San Francisco, located in a state with labor protections that exceed federal standards, has a progressive political culture, a strong labor movement, a mature and well-developed infrastructure of immigrant rights organizations, a large foreign-born Asian population, and a legacy of successful community organizing. Despite opposition from the business community, advocates successfully campaigned for comprehensive changes in local wage and labor laws. In Houston, in contrast, immigrant and worker advocates have focused instead on local enforcement mechanisms of existing protections. Located in a state that merely replicates the minimum protections provided under federal labor standards, the city is also more politically divided between Democrats and Republicans, has a weaker labor movement, a less dense and more nascent infrastructure of immigrant rights organizations, a large foreign-born Hispanic population, and a history of notable community advocacy losses. Business interests defeated the living-wage campaign in 1997, but their support helped immigrant and worker advocates to secure a municipal anti–wage theft ordinance sixteen years later. In the pages that follow, we first situate immigrant labor rights struggles in scholarship on the “right to the city.” We then present San Francisco and Houston, focusing on their immigration histories, current demographic profiles, and contexts for advancing immigrant labor rights. We next describe the parallel types of organizations that have advocated for stronger wage and labor rights in San Francisco and Houston and the similar principles that have motivated them to advocate with local government. In discussing the wage and labor rights campaigns in each city, we draw out key differences in the policy changes that advocates have

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realized, the coalitions they formed to do so, and the issue frames they adopted in the process. The conclusion underscores the need for more research on how, and to what effect, advocates are mobilizing for immigrant labor rights in cities with different historical, economic, political, and demographic contexts. This chapter is based on five years (2005–2009) of research in San Francisco and Houston. We conducted ninety-two semi-structured interviews, thirty-five of them in San Francisco and fifty-seven in Houston, with elected and nonelected local, state, and federal government officials, consular officials, union representatives, and leaders from immigrant rights organizations, churches, and business organizations. Our evidence also draws from organizational documents, city council archives, recorded and televised hearings on the various policies we studied, and media coverage of local wage and labor rights campaigns.

Low-Wage Immigrant Workers and the Right to the City Since the 1970s, deindustrialization, labor law deregularization, and a globalizing world economy have made American cities increasingly polarized places, marked by growing economic and social inequality. These changes have coincided with the post-1965 influx of immigrants from Asia and Latin America, who have become the backbone of the low-wage service sector at the bottom of urban postindustrial and de-unionized economies. The declining density and influence of labor unions have led to a concurrent rise of new organizations focused on serving, organizing, and advocating for immigrants and other low-wage workers (Fine 2006; Valenzuela et al. 2006). With this new groundwork for social unrest, worker rights campaigns are increasingly pressuring municipal governments to make labor and employment practices more inclusive and equitable. Critical urbanists and urban citizenship scholars have long argued that cities are important staging grounds for marginalized individuals, including those without formal citizenship or legal status, to (re)claim their sociocultural, economic, and political rights. Their research documents community organizing campaigns that have expanded the rights and benefits of immigrants and other marginalized populations in areas such as health care and public education (Rocco 1999), employment (Pincetl 1994), and voting (Coll 2011; Hayduk 2006). These studies, however, often do not address how variation in city context influences rights campaigns. Also, many fail to account for the critical role of civil society organizations in urban struggles for greater economic and political equality (Smith and McQuarrie 2012).

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An array of civil society organizations have worked toward building power for low-wage workers, especially in service industries that include large numbers of immigrants, minorities, and women. Labor unions have been at the vanguard of many of these campaigns, but they have not followed a singular or unified path in support of immigrant worker rights. In 1986, for example, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) supported the employer sanctions included in the Immigration Reform and Control Act, characterizing undocumented immigrants as job competitors and threats to union power. However, the AFL-CIO officially reversed its position on immigration in 2001 when it issued a statement calling for amnesty for undocumented immigrants and repeal of the 1986 employer sanctions. It did so largely in response to local dissension from central labor councils in the San Francisco Bay Area (Dean and Reynolds 2009) and the long-standing organizing efforts of new “immigrant unions” (Grenier and Nissen 2000). Beyond unions, other key labor advocates have included worker centers, immigrant rights organizations, religious institutions, and other types of civic groups (e.g., Fine 2006; Gleeson 2012; Luce 2004; Nissen 2004). They have joined forces with unions to organize new union members, build new forms of worker representation, and push for local legislation to promote the rights of immigrants and other low-wage workers. These diverse coalitions often seek strategic alliances with other local power brokers within and beyond government. These alliances can lead to conflict but also create unique opportunities to influence the local policy-making process. Coalitions of unions and community organizations have proliferated across the country, and increasingly they are targeting city and county officials to bring about policy change. From one municipality to the next, however, they vary both in terms of the constituents they represent, their organizational structure, and the resources available to them. Coalitions consequently can be conflict-ridden, but strategic alliances can also bolster advocates’ impact on the policy-making process when no one group has sufficient power or resources to act alone. Varying political contexts further shape how immigrant and worker rights coalitions operate and what they advocate for or against, including political change (e.g., local mayoral and city council elections and ballot initiatives), economic need (e.g., austerity during economic crises), or shared ideologies or identities (e.g., immigrant rights, worker rights, and women’s rights) (Van Dyke and McCammon 2010). As we will show, immigrant and worker allies in San Francisco—compared to Houston—have been able to advocate for a range of new wage and labor policies, as the city’s historical, economic, political, and demographic context has made it relatively easier for them to do their work.

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Differences in historical, economic, political, and demographic contexts also shape how advocates can frame their agenda and suggested policy reforms. Key decisions include how to justify the creation of new worker protections, how to articulate key beneficiaries, and how to assess the costs and benefits of taking a particular course of action. Immigrant and worker advocates can also adopt a range of justifications, including framing the issue as a moral or religious imperative (McCartin 2009), a human rights issue (McIntyre 2008), or a matter of basic democracy (Lichtenstein 2002). As we will show, the view that new labor rights protections are a matter of social and economic justice has predominated in San Francisco, while an emphasis on fair market competition and economic necessity has resonated more in Houston.

Immigrant Labor in Global Cities: Comparing San Francisco and Houston San Francisco and Houston are two large immigrant destinations, with markedly different immigration histories and compositions of their foreign-born populations. San Francisco has a long and continuous history of immigration dating back to the nineteenth century, and in 2012, 36 percent of city residents were born abroad. The majority of immigrants hail from Asia (63 percent), followed by Latin America (20 percent) and Europe (14 percent). The city counts many noncitizens—41 percent had not acquired U.S. citizenship in 2012—and an estimated thirty thousand to forty-five thousand undocumented immigrants (Hill and Johnson 2011; Migration Policy Institute 2014). Houston experienced mass migration only after World War II, and 28 percent of Houstonians were foreign-born in 2012. The largest share of its immigrants come from Latin America (71 percent), followed by Asia (20 percent). Reflecting Houston’s more recent experience with mass migration, a larger share of immigrants (71 percent) are not U.S. citizens. About 390,000 individuals in the Houston metropolitan area were estimated to be undocumented in 2004, approximately 45 percent of the foreign-born population (Fortuny, Capps, and Passel 2007). In both cities, though, immigrants have mixed educational profiles, and the majority struggle with the English language, although Houston’s immigrants have somewhat more disadvantaged human capital profiles. Both cities have classic postindustrial economies, where large numbers of immigrants from Asia and Latin America work in low-wage jobs at the bottom of the hourglass economy. Densely populated with 826,000 residents concentrated on just forty-nine square miles (U.S. Census Bureau 2012), San Francisco has workers concentrated in high-end service jobs in banking and management

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and low-end service jobs in the hotel and restaurant industries. With over two million residents on a sprawling area of six hundred square miles, Houston has generated enormous wealth with an economy built on a booming medical and energy sector, as well as ever-growing construction and service industries that employ the vast majority of low-wage workers. Besides differences in their immigration histories, demographics, and local economies, San Francisco and Houston also differ with regard to labor power and state labor context. San Francisco has a strong union movement, and the greater Bay Area boasts union membership rates of 9.5 percent in the private sector and 57 percent in the public sector, compared with rates of 6.7 and 35.3 percent nationally, respectively (Hirsch and Macpherson 2012). San Francisco is located in a state that offers labor protections that surpass federal standards, and in 2000 it created its own Office of Labor Standards Enforcement to enforce all wage and labor laws adopted by local legislators and San Francisco voters. San Francisco is one of about thirty U.S. cities with legislation governing local wages, and in July 2016 the city’s minimum wage was $13, higher than the state ($10) and federal standards ($7.25). Labor power is notably weaker in Houston. Union membership for the Houston–Baytown–Sugar Land region is low, even compared with the national averages, with 2.6 percent for the private sector and 19.1 percent for public-sector workers. Houston has no local legislation governing wages, and Texas labor law generally only replicates federal minimum protections. Although former Republican governor Rick Perry signed into law key worker protections, the Texas Workforce Commission operates centrally out of the capital of Austin, with no state offices to enforce wage theft in Houston, the largest city in Texas.1 The current governor, Greg Abbott, has further advocated for policies that would limit labor union power, and he is opposed to efforts to raise the Texas minimum wage. These two cities also vary in their political culture and the welcome extended to immigrants. San Francisco is deep blue politically, and more than three-quarters of San Francisco voters have supported Democratic candidates for the presidency in recent elections. In recent decades, San Francisco officials have enacted various immigrant-friendly policies. The city was one of the first to declare itself a “sanctuary” for undocumented immigrants (1985), to enact language access legislation to make services more accessible to limited English proficient immigrants (2001), and to issue municipal ID cards to undocumented immigrants (2008) (de Graauw 2015, 2016). In October 2013, the city adopted the Due Process for All Ordinance barring local law enforcement officials from honoring most federal immigration hold requests issued through the Secure Communities program (McMenamin 2013). San Francisco also has two municipal agencies with specific immigrant-related mandates: the Immigrant Rights Commission, established by

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ordinance in 1997, and the Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs, which in 2009 consolidated a handful of city administrative positions and offices responsible for immigrant integration programs. Houston is politically more divided than San Francisco, with the balance of power often swaying between Republicans and Democrats. During the 2012 presidential election, half the voters in Harris County (which encompasses most of Houston) supported Barack Obama for the presidency, with slightly higher percentages of Republican voters in surrounding suburbs. Houston also is more of a mixed bag with regard to immigrant rights. In 2013, Mayor Annise Parker signed an executive order to improve language access for the city’s limited English proficient residents. The Houston Police Department rejected a proposal to partner with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to permit police officers to apprehend and detain undocumented immigrants, but Harris County has had a partnership agreement in place since 2009. City officials have consistently eschewed Houston’s label as a “sanctuary city” and pushed aggressively to limit services and benefits to the city’s immigrant residents. Houston’s three day labor centers have all been defunded following charges from key conservative city councilors that they promote “illegal labor,” and the city’s immigrant affairs office subsequently removed from its mission statement inclusive language that appealed to city residents regardless of citizenship and legal status (Gleeson 2012). Additionally, the San Francisco metropolitan area has twice as dense an infrastructure of civil society organizations, with twenty-five registered nonprofit organizations per ten thousand residents, compared with the Houston metropolitan area’s eleven registered nonprofits per ten thousand residents (National Center for Charitable Statistics 2012). Owing in large part to its longer immigration history, San Francisco has more organizations focused specifically on immigrant rights, estimated at over two hundred (de Graauw 2016). Immigrant rights organizations in San Francisco also have more experience working together in advocacy coalitions, which over the years have included the Northern California Coalition for Immigrant Rights, the Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition, Deporten a la Migra (Deport INS/ICE), the San Francisco Immigrant Legal and Education Network, and the Bay Area DACA Collaborative. Immigrant rights organizations in San Francisco have a relatively longer history of organizing, with several notable wins, on issues including affordable housing, education, language access, urban growth, voting rights, and immigration. Finally, both cities have several influential business organizations. In San Francisco, these organizations have faced tough battles in advocating with the city’s mostly Democratic officials, especially since the city took a firm stance against rapid and uncontrolled urban growth in the 1980s. Houston, in comparison, is considered a darling for business

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because of its lack of a zoning code, its generous business incentives, low cost of living, low union density rates, and weak labor and employment protections.

The Organizational Landscape of Immigrant Worker Advocacy The organizational landscape of immigrant worker advocacy in San Francisco and Houston has been similar, including a diverse group of labor unions, worker centers, immigrant advocacy organizations, and faith-based institutions. While motivated by similar goals to expand and strengthen the labor rights of immigrants and other low-wage workers, these organizations have pursued different policy objectives in the two cities, strategically adapting to the characteristics of the specific urban context in which they operate. In both cities, labor unions have advocated for immigrant worker rights, but to different degrees. Reflecting their long history of labor organizing, San Francisco unions in recent years have allied with boycott campaigns to organize local hotel workers, and the city’s strong public employee unions have staged regular strikes during stalled contract negotiations. The San Francisco AFL-CIO has also pursued campaigns of national import for immigrant workers, including litigation that challenged both the Social Security Administration’s No-Match Letter program and the rollout of the federal Secure Communities program. In Houston, the Harris County AFL-CIO and its member unions operate with significantly fewer resources and in a more hostile political context, making it much more difficult for them to bring about comprehensive policy changes. However, several union victories in Houston have been monumental for the labor movement. These include winning a contract for the Houston Hilton Americas, the state’s second unionized hotel, and the success of the Justice for Janitors campaign. Unions, however, rarely have acted alone in local wage justice campaigns. With union membership dwindling across the country, worker centers have emerged as important new institutions for organizing, serving, and advocating on behalf of immigrants and other low-wage workers (Fine 2006). In San Francisco, worker centers such as People Organized to Win Employment Rights, Young Workers United, La Raza Centro Legal (the People’s Legal Center), and the Workers Organizing Center of the Chinese Progressive Association have played key roles in advancing several new wage and labor policies in recent years. There are fewer worker centers in Houston, but the Fé y Justicia (Faith and Justice) Worker Center and, more recently, the Restaurant Opportunities Center have played central roles in the campaign to end wage theft. In fact, these groups have been at the helm of labor rights advocacy benefiting low-wage immigrant workers beyond the union context.

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In both cities, various immigrant rights organizations have worked with unions and worker centers to advocate for stronger wage and labor protections. These organizations have grown more numerous and diverse in recent decades and provide a variety of services to needy immigrants, including immigration and naturalization services. They also frequently advocate for the unique interests of immigrants, including language access and immigration reform, as well as housing, health care, and labor rights. In San Francisco, a traditional immigrant gateway city with a dense and well-developed infrastructure of immigrant rights organizations, those active with immigrant labor rights advocacy have included the Northern California Coalition for Immigrant Rights, the Chinese Progressive Association, Mission Agenda, and the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition. Houston has fewer immigrant rights organizations, which have focused largely on Mexican and Central American immigrants and, to a lesser extent, the Vietnamese and Chinese communities. Key immigrant rights organizations include the Centro de Recursos Centroamericanos (Central American Resource Center), the newer Alianza Mexicana (Mexican Alliance), and the more education-focused Familias Inmigrantes y Estudiantes en la Lucha (Immigrant Families and Students in the Struggle). Immigrant labor rights advocacy campaigns in San Francisco and Houston have also drawn support from faith leaders across different traditions. Capitalizing on their moral capital, priests, rabbis, ministers, and imams have participated in actions to demand fair restitution from employers and to testify before governing bodies on the importance of protecting worker rights. In San Francisco, over seventy-five interfaith leaders came together in a large committee called Clergy for a Just Living Wage. With support from the Catholic archbishop and an Episcopal bishop, this committee advocated in support for living wages for immigrants and other low-wage workers. The Down with Wage Theft campaign in Houston has similarly drawn support from the Catholic Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston and the Houston Dominican Sisters. These faith leaders, along with the Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, have been key supporters of the Justice and Equality in the Workplace Project, a pioneering effort to safeguard the labor rights of immigrant workers through the coordinated efforts of federal labor enforcement agencies and foreign consulates (Karson 2004). The Fé y Justicia Worker Center also has strong faith roots: it initially was sponsored by the Houston Mennonite Church and currently has its office at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church. These immigrant and worker advocates have increasingly mounted campaigns to both enact new wage and labor protections and implement existing ones at the local level. In San Francisco, advocates pursued a more comprehensive agenda aimed at restructuring the city’s low-wage labor market. They

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successfully campaigned for living-wage, minimum-wage, universal health care, paid sick leave, and anti–wage theft legislation. Here, advocates worked with the San Francisco Office of Labor Standards Enforcement to expand the office’s enforcement powers and outreach efforts. In Houston, in the long shadow of a failed living-wage campaign a decade prior, and in a city with no local worker protections or an agency to enforce them and weaker union power, advocates had to pursue a more modest agenda focused on preventing theft of the federally mandated minimum wage. They pushed the police department to fulfill its mandate to pursue “theft of services” claims and ultimately for the creation of a city administrator who could bar offending employers with outstanding claims from operating in the city.

Different Urban Contexts, Different Paths to Immigrant Worker Justice While motivated by the similar principle of promoting immigrant worker justice, campaigns in San Francisco and Houston promoted different policy goals, struck different alliances, and developed different narratives to support their causes. San Francisco has a longer history of successful community organizing, strong labor unions with significant political clout, and progressive politicians who have enacted other policies benefiting disadvantaged immigrants. It is also located in a state with labor protections that exceed federal standards. Consequently, advocates in San Francisco have been able to pursue ambitious and comprehensive local policy changes under the banner of social and economic justice for all without support from the business community. In Houston, in contrast, community advocacy does not have a long a history or record of success, labor unions are weak, and local politicians include a number of Republicans critical of immigrants and especially the large number of undocumented Hispanics in the region. Houston also is situated in a state that offers less generous wage and labor protections. As a result, advocates there could pursue only modest policy change under the banner of rooting out unfair business competition, and they had to rely on critical support from the business community.

Different Policy Agendas Since the late 1990s, organizations in San Francisco have advocated for several ordinances that expand the labor rights of immigrants and other low-wage workers. In 2000, amid concerns over rising living costs that affected immigrants and low-wage workers most visibly, they pushed the Board of Supervisors (i.e., local

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legislators) to adopt the Minimum Compensation Ordinance (popularly known as the living-wage ordinance). Initially, there was no majority support for the ordinance among board members, and Mayor Willie Brown was under pressure from his allies in the business community to oppose it. Advocates, however, threatened to put the issue on the November ballot, which forced local legislators and the mayor to adopt a compromise ordinance. Advocates’ original proposal called for a living wage of $14.50 at a time when the federal minimum wage was $5.15 and the California minimum wage was $5.75. The Board of Supervisors ultimately enacted a $9 hourly wage, which has benefited an estimated twenty-two thousand low-wage workers employed in businesses with city service contracts (Reynolds 2004).2 In 2003, buoyed by their living-wage victory, advocates went a step further and put the Minimum Wage Ordinance on the ballot, which was approved by 60 percent of San Francisco voters. The ballot strategy allowed advocates to shape the content of the ordinance at a time when the San Francisco economy was in a downturn and the business community opposed another wage hike as an additional burden on their businesses. This ordinance created an indexed citywide minimum wage—initially $8.50, $13 in July 2016—that far exceeds California ($10) and federal ($7.25) standards. At the time of enactment, it was estimated that the ordinance would result in direct and indirect pay raises for more than fifty-four thousand workers (12 percent of San Francisco’s private and nonprofit sector labor force), particularly benefiting many immigrants, native-born minorities, and workers under the age of twenty-five (Reich and Laitinen 2003). San Francisco advocates also focused on implementation and enforcement of the Minimum Wage Ordinance. They pushed for an administrative enforcement mechanism through the city’s Office of Labor Standards Enforcement (OLSE), as well as a private right of action that allows unions and community organizations to file wage claims on behalf of aggrieved workers. They won a requirement for every workplace to post official bulletins announcing the current San Francisco minimum wage in English, Spanish, Chinese, and any additional language spoken by more than 5 percent of the workforce. Finally, they achieved strong anti-retaliation language that prohibits employers from discriminating against workers (including undocumented workers) who exercise their rights under the ordinance. Each of these provisions aimed particularly at protecting the rights of vulnerable immigrant workers, who are frequently targeted for abuse and—owing to unfamiliarity with government agencies, undocumented status, or limited English proficiency—are less likely to contest labor law violations and speak up against unscrupulous employers (Gleeson 2012). Immigrant and worker advocates have achieved subsequent local labor rights victories, including the enactment of universal health care, paid sick leave, and

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wage theft prevention policies. A small group of worker centers and immigrant rights organizations have also gone on to collaborate with OLSE to hold noncompliant employers accountable through targeted monitoring of the Minimum Wage and Health Care Accountability Ordinances. These organizations have reached out to immigrant workers, documented instances of wage violations, and then encouraged aggrieved workers to turn to OLSE for help. With input from these organizations, OLSE helped immigrants and other low-wage workers to recover $6.5 million in back wages between 2004 and 2013 (OLSE 2013). In Houston, the goals of immigrant and worker advocates have been more modest. Here, advocates operate strategically, with full knowledge of a previous failed campaign. In 1997, there was an aggressive living-wage initiative on the ballot to raise Houston’s minimum wage to $6.50 at a time when the federal minimum wage was $4.75. The Harris County AFL-CIO spent $20,000 on the ballot campaign but faced steep opposition from business leaders, who spent $1.3 million to stop the initiative (Dyer 1996; Luce 2004). Defeated by 77 percent of the vote, the initiative lost citywide but won in low-wage neighborhoods (Levi, Olson, and Steinman 2002; Reynolds 2002). Following this massive defeat, advocates shifted their attention to the growing problem of wage theft and particularly the abuse experienced by many immigrant day laborers. During the 2000s, advocates convened a Day Labor Taskforce to advise the city council. The task force successfully pushed for the creation of three day labor centers, which were supported by federal Community Development Block Grants. Each, however, was ultimately defunded amid accusations that the centers served as magnets for illegal workers. The task force next focused on pressuring the Houston Police Department to carry out an existing mandate to enforce “theft of services” claims. Police officers, however, resented taking on additional duties that detracted from their efforts to fight violent crime, and they had little cooperation from the district attorney. Other publicly funded entities that had served as resources for aggrieved day laborers, including the Harris County Dispute Resolution Center and the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs, also withdrew their support for immigrant labor rights initiatives amid public criticism (Gleeson 2012). Advocates renewed their efforts to seek local support for immigrant worker rights in 2006 in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when thousands of day laborers left for New Orleans to help with reconstruction efforts under precarious wage and safety conditions. The newly created Houston Interfaith Worker Justice Center (HIWJC) helped shepherd workers through the process of pursuing a workplace violation claim and advocated for policies to safeguard the rights of low-wage workers. Prior to HIWJC, which in 2012 incorporated as an independent nonprofit worker center and was renamed the Fé y Justicia Worker Center,

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there were few to no resources for workers seeking assistance with workplace violations. Houston’s only major legal aid center, Lone Star Legal Aid, did not offer services for labor and employment issues, and it was unable to serve undocumented clients owing to federal funding restrictions. Ultimately, the police department appointed a community liaison officer, who has worked closely with the Fé y Justicia Worker Center to address community concerns. In 2011, HIWJC went a step further with the creation of the Down with Wage Theft campaign. Citing an estimated cost of $753 million per year for wage theft, the campaign pushed for a city ordinance that would suspend and possibly revoke business permits from offending employers who refused to pay up (HIWJC 2012). Specifically, the Wage Theft Prevention Ordinance provides workers with a formal complaint process. Businesses convicted of wage theft will be listed in a publicly accessible city database and become ineligible for city (sub)contracts. Those criminally convicted will be barred from receiving any business permits and licenses in Houston for five years. Complaints related to city contracts are handled by the city’s Office of Inspector General, with others referred directly to the Texas Workforce Commission for processing. In all cases, claimants can still pursue their case in court (Perez-Boston 2013a).

Different Alliances These varying policy agendas have led advocates in San Francisco and Houston to pursue different alliances with other local power brokers within and beyond government. In San Francisco, the coalitions backing the living-wage and minimum-wage campaigns have been large and diverse and have involved several progressive members of the Board of Supervisors. They included labor unions, and most importantly the San Francisco Labor Council (which operates as the countywide federation of local unions within the AFL-CIO), SEIU Locals 250 and 790, and HERE Local 2. Because these unions have large memberships, significant financial resources, and enjoy significant political clout, they had sway with the Board of Supervisors as well as Mayors Willie Brown and Gavin Newsom, whose electoral fates depended on union support. The coalitions also included community organizations representing Asian and Latino immigrants, most notably the Chinese Progressive Association and La Raza Centro Legal. These and other immigrant rights groups injected the campaigns with high levels of grassroots energy, expertise from prior advocacy campaigns, and community legitimacy that unions often lacked. The coalitions also included a large cadre of interfaith leaders, whose moral and religious capital helped to smooth over tensions that at times built up within coalitions. Finally, the coalitions included community organizations representing poor and black

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San Franciscans, including the Coalition for Ethical Welfare Reform, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), and People Organized to Win Employment Rights. These latter organizations underscored that the negative effects of low-wage work affected a broad cross-section of city residents. A broad Living Wage Coalition of more than twenty labor organizations, twenty-eight religious leaders, forty-five community organizations, and ten immigrant rights organizations advocated for the Minimum Compensation Ordinance. They faced steep opposition from the business community—and especially the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and the Golden Gate Restaurant Association—which opposed the initial $14.50 wage proposal and argued that wage increases would result in cuts in low-wage jobs and create a hostile business climate in the city. Businesses expended great resources in lobbying the Board of Supervisors and Mayor Brown to stall action on pending living-wage legislation. To underscore the economic cost of wage increases for restaurant owners in particular, the executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association repeatedly testified against wage increases at public hearings in City Hall by waving an empty piggy bank in the air. The success of the San Francisco Living Wage Coalition ultimately did not depend on the support of business leaders, but advocates did have to act strategically to neutralize the power of the business community over especially Brown and his supporters on the Board of Supervisors. Brown, a moderate Democrat by San Francisco standards, drew his political support from both labor unions and the business community. However, he did not want to support a living-wage ordinance as long as unions were tied to Tom Ammiano, his progressive rival on the Board of Supervisors who was the lead sponsor of living-wage legislation and who ran against him for mayor in 2000 (Epstein 2000). Upon learning that there was no majority support on the board for Ammiano’s $11 wage proposal, the Living Wage Coalition moved to qualify the proposal for the November 2000 ballot via a signature campaign paid for largely by unions (Lelchuk 2000). This ballot threat forced Brown and the business community back to the negotiating table. The final negotiations between Ammiano and the Living Wage Coalition, versus Brown and the business community, eventually produced the $9 compromise legislation enacted as the Minimum Compensation Ordinance. The advocates who led the charge for a living-wage ordinance regrouped as the Minimum Wage Coalition in 2002 to advocate for a citywide pay raise for all low-wage workers in San Francisco. This time, however, they decided to put the issue on the ballot and not work through the Board of Supervisors. This tactic deprived the business community of the opportunity to influence the deliberations between the mayor and the Board of Supervisors. With a ballot campaign

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calling for an $8.50 minimum wage, immigrant and worker advocates put the issue directly before the voters, who could vote themselves a raise at a time when the local economy was in a downturn and the business community opposed another wage increase. The Minimum Wage Coalition developed an empowering electoral strategy targeting lower-turnout neighborhoods of working-class people, immigrants, and people of color who would benefit most from the ordinance, including Chinatown, the Mission, and Bayview. In the November 2003 election, 60 percent of San Francisco voters approved Proposition L, the Minimum Wage Ordinance, making San Francisco one of the first of a growing number cities with their own minimum wages. In Houston, the alliances in support of worker initiatives have been more bipartisan, and, unlike in San Francisco, immigrant and worker advocates could not eschew potential partners in the business community. In 1996, the main opponents to the city’s proposed living-wage ordinance predictably emerged from the business community. Powerful business associations, including the Greater Houston Partnership (Houston’s chamber of commerce), the National Restaurant Association, and the Greater Houston Hotel and Motel Association, formed the Save Jobs for Houston Committee, which capitalized on residents’ fears that jobs would leave the city and consumer prices would rise (Reynolds and Kern 2001). Following their cue, the media also warned that the initiative would result in mass layoffs for city police and firefighters, higher taxes, and price hikes (B. A. Smith 1996). Democratic Mayor Bob Lanier was ultimately swayed by business concerns about rising taxes and the growth of big government, and no city councilor actively supported the measure. In the end, the ballot measure failed at the polls with just 23 percent of voter support (Reynolds 2002). The more modest efforts to pass a local ordinance to address rampant wage theft in Houston has relied on many of the same union, worker center, immigrant rights, and religious allies as in San Francisco. Donning the campaign’s iconic yellow and blue T-shirts, supporters of the Down with Wage Theft campaign testified at various city council hearings and staged protests in front of City Hall. They also targeted public entities like the Capital Improvement Projects Commission and the Houston Independent School District, which contracted building projects to companies accused of wage theft and other egregious occupational safety and health violations (Fé y Justicia Worker Center 2012; Down with Wage Theft Campaign 2013b). City councilors initially opposed the Wage Theft Prevention Ordinance, arguing that it would duplicate existing state law (Kaufmann 2012). However, the campaign ultimately won the support of Mayor Annise Parker, a Democrat who played a key role in city council matters. Eventually, and to the surprise of many, the ordinance passed unanimously in November 2013.

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Different Issue Narratives Immigrant and worker advocates in San Francisco and Houston also framed their campaigns differently. In San Francisco, advocates framed the living- and minimum-wage campaigns around the theme of social and economic justice for low-wage workers, who had not been sharing in the city’s dot-com boom. San Francisco is a progressive city where Democrats dominate local politics, unions have significant political clout, and the business community has been under siege since the slow-growth movement of the 1980s. Here, advocates could afford to focus their message on improving workers’ plight without having to placate the business community. However, each group of advocates articulated its own motivations for fighting for social and economic justice in the living- and minimum-wage campaigns. Unions emphasized the potential to organize new low-wage workers, particularly at San Francisco International Airport and in the home-care industry. “The living wage provided a useful context for organizing,” an organizer with OPEIU Local 3 commented, “especially among airport baggage screeners, retail workers, and security guards.” Unions also were excited about opportunities to educate low-wage workers about their rights and get them activated in the labor movement. “About 80 to 90 percent [of home-care workers] are immigrants, and many were skeptical of this whole living-wage thing and didn’t understand what social responsibility was or government accountability,” an organizer with SEIU Local 250 explained. “We wanted them to come on board so they could learn to better advocate for themselves.” Finally, unions welcomed the opportunity to build ties with community organizations, especially those serving immigrants. For immigrant rights organizations, the living and minimum campaigns provided opportunities to educate San Francisco officials and the larger public about the difficult economic situation of especially many immigrants. “We always had a sense that the lowest-paid workers in the city were immigrant workers,” an advocate with the Northern California Coalition for Immigrant Rights commented. “In fact, [immigrants] often work more than one job, and they’re still having a hard time surviving. . . . We wanted [city officials] to see that there’s something very wrong with that picture.” Other organizations talked about the opportunities that the wage campaigns created to build their bases and organize marginalized communities. An advocate with Mission Agenda commented that the minimum-wage campaign was a good tool to train single-room-occupancy hotel tenants in the skills necessary to conduct a campaign. A staff member with the Day Labor Program similarly explained that “organizing workers is the only way we’re going to make systemic change, especially if the laws are meant to benefit them. That’s why we got our day laborers involved with the campaign.”

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Finally, religious leaders talked about living and minimum wages as issues of basic morality and human dignity. Father Peter Sammon, a member of the Living Wage Coalition, commented that it was a disgrace that “poverty-level wages” were paid to “thousands of workers in a wealthy city” like San Francisco. He urged city officials to adopt a living-wage ordinance that would allow people “to survive on what they earn and support their families without relying on public welfare for emergency health care and food stamps and other public assistance” (Sammon 2000). San Francisco’s Archbishop William Levada, who rarely participated in mobilizations, even published his plea for living wages as an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle (Levada 1999). As in San Francisco, members of Houston’s Down with Wage Theft Coalition challenged city government officials to prove their support for the city’s low-wage workers. The campaign mobilized state and federal law as well as moral and human rights imperatives to argue against the practice of wage theft. Two of the top campaign values were that “all work is sacred and deserves respect” and that “workers have the right to be paid for all the hours they work, to be treated fairly on the job, and to provide for their families with dignity.” Supporters frequently appealed to the commandment that “thou shalt not steal” and other scriptural texts, and they featured prominently the support of leaders from across faith traditions (HIWJC 2012). According to the director of the Fé y Justicia Worker Center, it was important to frame wage theft as a moral issue. Doing so, she commented, allowed the Down with Wage Theft Coalition to garner broad-based support for the Wage Theft Prevention Ordinance. Additionally, free-market and small-government logics were crucially important for policy success in Houston, a city with a larger Republican and pro-business base than San Francisco. While cost-benefit analyses did not necessarily eclipse the moral and social-justice narratives, advocates had to embrace economic arguments as well in their messaging to build a winning coalition in support of anti–wage theft legislation. As a result, the fight against wage theft became a moral imperative as well as one that was crucial to fair market competition and economic growth. Several big and small companies in Houston argued that companies that engaged in wage theft challenged their right to fair market competition, and they became crucial allies in the thirty-four-member Down with Wage Theft Coalition (Down with Wage Theft Campaign 2013a). While several influential business groups campaigned against passage of the ordinance, as they had done in San Francisco, other powerful business interests publicly supported the cause, even as their immediate economic interests were distinct from the moral and human rights focus of faith leaders, immigrant rights activists, and union representatives. Organizations tied to the housing development industry, like the Houston Apartment Association, spoke out

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in support of the Wage Theft Prevention Ordinance. Even the Greater Houston Partnership argued that the ordinance was vital to creating a more level playing field for business owners (Morris 2013; Perez-Boston 2013b). Construction businesses, organized under a group called Construction Citizen, emphasized that the ordinance would help build a more socially responsible and sustainable construction industry (Construction Citizen 2013). This group also lobbied against the misclassification of independent contractors, a practice commonly used by unscrupulous employers in the construction industry to avoid paying taxes and deductions required by law. They also opposed immigration employer audits, striking another key alliance with immigrant advocates. With the support of these business interests, the Wage Theft Prevention Ordinance ultimately passed the city council with unanimous support. The ordinance was lauded as a victory for both businesses and workers in the city.

Conclusion The San Francisco and Houston experiences highlight how different cities provide different contexts for local labor rights campaigns. These two cities have, among other things, different immigration histories, different community advocacy legacies, different densities of civil society organizations, different partisan political cultures, and different state labor laws that influence city labor right dynamics. As a result of these differences, labor rights advocacy organizations need to adopt different strategies to navigate the particulars of an urban context. Advocacy groups in San Francisco and Houston not only set different policy agendas, but they also formed different alliances, adopted different issue frames, and ultimately secured different outcomes. The larger lesson for “right to the city” scholars is that while “the urban” has become a more prominent scale of organizing for marginalized populations, it is necessary to understand that city contexts differ and provide different opportunities and challenges for organizing. In other words, not all city contexts are the same. San Francisco has a relatively strong labor movement and a denser infrastructure of civil society organizations, including those serving immigrants. This means there are more resources to launch campaigns and more opportunities to push for local policy overhauls. Conversely, Houston is a city with a weaker labor movement and a relatively sparse and underdeveloped infrastructure of immigrant rights organizations. Here, advocates must fight harder to influence the local policy-making process on behalf of immigrants and other low-wage workers, and as such, the policy agenda has been far more constrained, focusing primarily on more stringent enforcement mechanisms for existing laws.

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Debates surrounding immigration enforcement, worker rights, and government economic oversight also have taken on different tones in each city, influencing the alliances that labor rights advocates in San Francisco and Houston could form. In San Francisco, a Democratic majority city favorably disposed toward immigrants and workers, there was a predictable polarization between worker advocates and business interests. Given strong support for stronger worker protections advocated by the Living and Minimum Wage Coalitions, immigrant and worker advocates had direct influence with supportive policy makers, which made an alliance with the business community unnecessary. Conversely, advocates faced more contentious battles in Houston, a city politically more divided than San Francisco. Here, powerful business interests became an important asset for the Down with Wage Theft campaign, and they spoke to the concerns of several conservative city councilors with whom immigrant rights organizations and unions had relatively little clout. Finally, differences in urban context influenced how advocates could frame policies to address wage justice issues for immigrants and other low-wage workers. In San Francisco, the issue of proper compensation for working families was pitched primarily as an issue of social and economic justice. In Houston, the Down with Wage Theft campaign came to fruition through the efforts of grassroots organizing by workers who viewed the need for local protections against wage theft as a human right. The coalition, however, also had to allay fears of big government imposing unreasonable restrictions on employers. As such, the narrative that wage theft was an issue of unfair business competition that penalized responsible employers and small businesses became a powerful message in Houston. Our examination of the wage and labor rights campaigns in San Francisco and Houston highlights the need for additional research on how city contexts influence advocacy to advance the rights of marginalized populations. For example, additional research is needed to understand how advocates strategize to promote the labor rights of immigrants and other low-wage workers in newer immigrant destinations where the low-wage workforce has fewer immigrants, the density of immigrant rights organizations is low, and union strength is minimal. Also, additional research is needed to understand how advocates in different cities can take advantage of the particulars of an urban context to grow their organizations, to tend coalitions and cement alliances, and to develop other effective frames and issue narratives that can influence policy makers. Finally, more research is needed to understand how successful organizing at the city level can be scaled up to influence similar organizing for labor rights at the state and national levels.

5 A BRIDGE TOO FAR Industrial Gentrification and the Dynamics of Sacrifice in New York City Melissa Checker

On a bitter Sunday morning in early February 2013, a handful of residents from Staten Island’s North Shore braved the cold and walked to the midpoint of the Bayonne Bridge, where they met a group of marchers coming from the bridge’s opposite side in Bayonne, New Jersey. The marchers held handmade signs that read, “We Want an Accounting” and “People Live Here—No More Trucks!” Their slogans referred to an upcoming project to raise the Bayonne Bridge from 151 to 250 feet. Construction on the bridge would take place twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week over a multiyear period. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ) was in a hurry to finish the job in time for the widening of the Panama Canal in 2017. The canal was too narrow to accommodate the enormous cargo container ships or supertankers that were fast becoming standard in the global shipping industry. But those huge ships were also too tall to clear the Bayonne Bridge. According to the PANYNJ, if the ships got through the canal but bypassed New York ports, 250,000 port jobs and more than $2 billion in annual tax revenues would be lost.1 Politicians across both states, including political rivals as bitter as New Jersey’s Democratic U.S. senator Frank Lautenberg and Republican governor Chris Christie, joined forces to rally for the proposal,2 and in 2012, the Obama administration made the bridge-raising part of its “We Can’t Wait” initiative.3 But the activists who met on the bridge that February morning believed that the project put the environmental health of thousands of local residents, truck drivers, and port workers at risk. Not only would the construction process emit copious pollutants, but the project plan also involved digging up land that was 99

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contaminated with lead and other heavy metals. Once the project was completed, the problem only grew worse—studies showed that the supertankers spewed as much pollution as fifty million cars every year (Cannon 2008). These contaminants only added to already poor air quality around the New York port and the heavily industrialized neighborhoods on either side of the bridge. At the very least, protesters demanded a thorough environmental assessment and plan to mitigate environmental risks. On a more global level, the need for massive container ships grows out of the ever-expanding production and circulation of cheap goods, which in turn exacts heavy costs on ecological and human resources across the world (Harvey 2006, 2014, Hornborg 2001; N. Smith 2008). In this essay, I detail the very local implications of these global economic trends by focusing on how they affected the communities living near the Staten Island side of the Bayonne Bridge. I am especially interested in the ways that historic and contemporary political and economic decisions arranged, and rearranged, industrial and residential space. I find that these spatial arrangements worked in a dialectic and uneven relationship. As city leaders allocated space in ways that fostered neoliberal development and privileged affluent residents, they also sacrificed the health, safety, and livelihoods of blue-collar workers, poor communities, and communities of color. More specifically, as the city shifted from a manufacturing to a service-based and real estate–dependent economy, neoliberal policies that emphasized unfettered economic growth displaced manufacturing properties in order to allow commercial and residential development to overtake more and more of the city’s formerly industrial zones. This industrial displacement further pushed environmental burdens into neighborhoods considered unsuitable for economic development. The simultaneous decline of wages, benefits, and public services under neoliberal regimes made it nearly impossible for low-income people to move out of these polluted neighborhoods. As I argue here, in the early 2000s, the rise of two types of gentrification—environmental and industrial—further intensified these conditions. Indeed, by the early twenty-first century, New York was a city marked by uneven geographies of capital accumulation and sacrifice. The notion of urban sacrifice zones dates back to the Cold War era. U.S. government officials designated certain geographic areas for nuclear weapons manufacture and testing, sacrificing these areas’ ecological and human health (S. Lerner 2010). More recently, urban scholars have used the term “sacrifice zone” in conjunction with depictions of environmental racism (Little 2012). The latter term refers to the fact that African American and Hispanic neighborhoods are twice as likely as white neighborhoods to host toxic waste–producing facilities (see Bullard et al. 2007; EPA Office of Inspector General 2004, 2006). In addition, federal and local agencies are more likely to enforce environmental

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regulations in white neighborhoods (U.S. GAO 1983). The reasons for environmental racism are embedded in a host of historic and contemporary policies, practices, and institutions that privilege white neighborhoods at the expense of black communities. For instance, despite civil rights reforms, fair housing studies routinely show that real estate agents steer African Americans toward other black neighborhoods, and minorities with the same resources and credit cards as whites are denied mortgages twice as often as whites (Massey and Denton 1993; Hannah-Jones 2012). Elsewhere, I argue that recent trends to “green” the city exacerbate the production of sacrifice zones. That is, I show how environmental improvements such as parks, open spaces, bike lanes, and other environmental amenities, and reductions in polluting facilities, are aligned with, and facilitate, high-end residential redevelopment (Checker 2011, 2015; see also Gould and Lewis 2012; Hagerman 2007). Not only does this environmental gentrification displace low-income residents; it also displaces heavy industries to non-gentrifying neighborhoods (see Checker 2011; 2015). In this essay, I expand on my definition of environmental gentrification to identify a related process that I refer to as “industrial gentrification.” Briefly, industrial gentrification is based on city initiatives that incentivize and promote small-scale, boutique, clean and green-tech manufacturing businesses. By tracking the geographic distribution of these initiatives, I find that in nearly every case, they are adjacent to gentrifying neighborhoods. I argue that not only does this process gentrify manufacturing businesses themselves; it also provides another mechanism for shifting heavy manufacturing businesses to sacrifice zones. This holistic look at the spatial dynamics of industrial development provides a unique vantage point for considering the “city as factory” and “right to the city” concepts described and illustrated by the authors in this volume. As Greenberg and Lewis write in this volume’s introduction, “the city is indeed the factory of old: a locus of capital accumulation and the deployment of labor; a space that combines inequalities of power and exploitation with the commingling of peoples, and the possibilities such concatenation helps create.” Similarly, this chapter extends the traditional factory/labor relationship to include the spatial dynamics of neoliberal economic development, gentrification, exploitation, and sacrifice that take place in today’s cities. Just as the bodies of traditional workers were exploited for the industrial capitalist project, the health of people who live and work in industrialized zones is sacrificed for the sake of real estate capital. New York City is the perfect place to study the transformation of industrial landscapes and the spatial dynamics of accumulation and sacrifice. In particular, during Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s tenure (2002–2013), one-third of New York City was rezoned. Manufacturing zones were redesignated as residential or

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commercial, and restrictions were lifted on building heights in order to make way for a massive increase in high-rise and high-end residential buildings (Furman Center 2009). In particular, the Economic Development Corporation provided millions of dollars in subsidies to waterfront development in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. Seeking to cement New York’s brand as a “luxury city,” Bloomberg transformed these former manufacturing zones into loft, condominium, and commerce-filled zones that catered to the lifestyles of upwardly mobile professionals, suburbanites, conventioneers, and tourists (Brash 2011; Greenberg 2008, 2014; Larson 2013). The consequences of the luxury city have been staggering. According to a report by the city’s Comptroller’s Office, from 2000 to 2012 median apartment rents in New York City rose by 75 percent. Moreover, the city lost approximately four hundred thousand apartments that rented for $1,000 or less (Office of the Comptroller 2014). I argue that sustainability initiatives (including the installation of environmental amenities, the cleanup of toxic properties, and the incentivizing of green manufacturing) were closely tied to the luxury city brand both symbolically and geographically (see Checker 2011, 2015; Greenberg 2015). At the same time, I contend that the building of the sustainable, luxury city had significant environmental consequences for low-income communities (see Angotti 2008; Checker 2011). By focusing on this dialectical relationship, I show how, as rampant neoliberal green redevelopment churned through the city, its landscape polarized, creating sites of capital accumulation and sites of sacrifice. Importantly, these transformations were not without contestation. As the authors in this volume show, over the last decade a host of urban social movements have asserted their own rights to the city. These coalitions often use urban space itself to claim their right to access urban resources such as affordable housing, fair wages, and healthy environments (see Greenberg and Lewis, this volume; Harvey 2012). The protest on the Bayonne Bridge represented one such “right to the city” action, and it reflected a growing awareness of the degree to which the fates of communities that live and work on industrialized waterfronts are linked. As I demonstrate, this awareness gave rise to new collectivities that contested the sacrifices that late capitalism demanded and that fought for the rights of low-income and working-class communities, including people of color, to live in an environmentally, economically, and socially just city. In the sections that follow, I show how the Bayonne Bridge case provides an excellent forum for exploring the dual notions of the city as factory and the right to the city. I begin by describing the North Shore’s contemporary environmental and demographic conditions, as well as the history that created these conditions. I then show how in the 1960s, city leaders responded to globalization, deindustrialization, and the onset of neoliberalism by deliberately rearranging urban space

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to foster the growth of finance, insurance, and real estate economies (FIRE) while deprioritizing and displacing industrial development (Fitch 1993). As manufacturing industries were confined to smaller slivers of the urban land, environmental resources in such areas degraded, as did the lives of low-income communities, people of color, and industrial workers. I next turn to the administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who took real estate development to an unprecedented level through the rezoning of formerly industrial areas for high-end condominiums, co-ops, and commercial properties (Brash 2011; Gotham and Greenberg 2014; Greenberg 2015). Rampant gentrification in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and parts of Queens pushed even more industrial operations to parts of the outer boroughs that already housed a disproportionate number of polluting facilities. Looking beyond residential real estate, I explore the environmental and social implications of contemporary efforts to boost the city’s small-scale manufacturing economy (i.e., clean tech, green tech, handicrafts, and artisanal food and beverages).

FIGURE 5.1  Bayonne Bridge. The bridge spans the Kill Van Kull tidal strait, linking Bayonne, New Jersey, and Staten Island’s heavily industrial North Shore. In 2013–2014, a controversy emerged over the raising of the bridge, owing to the air and water pollution the dredging, construction, and increased supertanker traffic would cause. This led to new coalitions being formed between local residents, truck drivers, port workers, and environmental justice organizations. Photo by Melissa Checker.

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In so doing, I look at the economic realities behind popular narratives about manufacturing jobs. I conclude by discussing how environmental justice activists and port workers challenged the ecological, human, and health-related costs of uneven urban spatial arrangements. I base my findings on ethnographic and archival research conducted with grassroots environmental justice activists on Staten Island between 2009 and the present. Specifically, I have participated in and observed dozens of public meetings, hearings, and events, as well as private meetings and strategy sessions over the past six years. In addition, I have conducted twenty formal interviews with activists from across the island, and I have had innumerable informal conversations with them, both online and in person. Finally, I draw on archival data such as historic documents, news articles, reports, and academic publications.

“Industry Gone Wild”: Staten Island’s North Shore “It looks like an industrial Girls Gone Wild,” said Beryl Thurman, president of the North Shore Waterfront Conservancy of Staten Island (NSWC), as she took me on a toxic tour of her neighborhood. Thurman drove me along Richmond Terrace, a winding two-lane road approximately seventy feet in width. On one side of the Terrace, the North Shore’s single-family homes, apartment buildings, and strip malls housed and served parts of New York City’s fastest-growing immigrant populations (see Mansour 2012). On the other side, a strip of industrial properties lined the banks of the Kill Van Kull, a narrow tidal strait that divided the North Shore from Bayonne, New Jersey. Along a 5.2-mile stretch of Richmond Terrace, Thurman pointed to twenty-one properties with unregulated contamination, including two private waste transfer stations, a Department of Sanitation garage, a sewage treatment plant, an industrial salt company, and several bus depots (NSWC 2007). Seven of the area’s sites were scheduled for state-sponsored remediation, and another four had been listed on the federal Superfund list. What’s more, the kill often overflowed its banks in heavy rains, its waters sometimes reaching all the way across Richmond Terrace. As sea levels rose and storms increased, such floods occurred more and more frequently. Thurman explained that not only could floodwaters potentially dislodge chemicals from contaminated properties, but the water itself was highly polluted. Each year, the Port Richmond Wastewater Treatment Plant discharged millions of gallons of storm overrun into the Kill Van Kull. In 1984, after the EPA found a variety of hazardous substances including dioxins, PCBs, mercury, DDT, pesticides, and heavy metals in the kill, it was listed as part of a massive underwater Superfund Priority Cleanup.4

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Finally, hundreds of ships traveled through the kill each day, spilling oil into its waters (Checker 2009). Many of those ships were headed for the New York Container Terminal (NYCT), which had one of the highest-volume cargo capacities of any facility in New York Harbor.5 An estimated seven thousand trucks traveled to and from the port per day. Not only did their emissions add to extremely high air pollution levels created by the container ships, but truckers often traveled across local streets and idled for hours (I discuss these issues in greater detail in a later section). Raising the bridge was estimated to increase cargo volume by 44 percent, which in turn would increase the number of trucks distributing that cargo.6 What’s more, the bridge raising prompted the NYCT to propose another construction project, which would expand the port into an existing freshwater wetland. In 2013, NYCT had already increased its capacity as a waste transfer station and began transferring containerized waste (brought in on barges from other boroughs) to the newly revived Staten Island Railway.7 The Flagg Container Terminal also proposed to expand its facility to treat dredged soil from across the five boroughs. In sum, despite the fact that the North Shore already hosted more than its fair share of polluting facilities, industrial operations there continued to multiply. North Shore environmental justice activists challenged each new proposal and continually demanded that the city clean up toxic properties, enforce air-quality regulations, and install better barriers to protect them from contaminated floodwaters. However, for the most part, their calls went unheeded. For them, their lack of political clout was directly related to their demographics. As Staten Island’s most economically, racially, and ethnically diverse area, the North Shore hosted substantial populations from Liberia, Sri Lanka, Albania, Pakistan, China, and Mexico (Mansour 2012). According to the Department of City Planning, 40 percent of households on the North Shore were white non-Hispanic, 22 percent were African American non-Hispanic, 29 percent were of Hispanic origin, and 7 percent were Asian (NYC Department of City Planning 2012). Along with its ethnic and racial diversity, per capita incomes on the North Shore were 12 percent lower than the borough average and 15 percent below the city’s average. In 2010, unemployment rates were 13 percent higher than on the rest of the island (NYC Department of City Planning 2011). The North Shore’s disproportionately high numbers of people of color and environmental hazards led the EPA to name it as one of ten “Environmental Justice Showcase Communities” in 2007. This dubious distinction singled out ten communities in the United States that suffered from multiple sources of contamination and political, economic, and social marginalization. In the next section, I show how, as the city’s economy shifted during the twentieth century, so did arrangements of industrial, commercial, and residen­­­­

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tial space. These spatial arrangements relegated industrial uses to poor and minority communities while protecting affluent, white neighborhoods from env­­i­­ ronmental harm.

Industrial Arrangements: The Making of a Sacrifice Zone Until the late nineteenth century, Staten Island was primarily covered by farmland, except for the resort homes that lined its shores and provided New York City’s elite residents with respite from increasingly crowded urban environs. But by the turn of the century, the North Shore’s quiet, bucolic landscape would cease to exist, as the waterfront became a hub for maritime activity and the city’s burgeoning industrial revolution. Certainly, geography had something to do with it. The Kill Van Kull provided a passage for marine traffic traveling down the East Coast via the Upper New York Bay. In 1860, a new local rail system connected the North Shore to the B&O Railroad, linking the products and raw materials that went through the port to manufacturers and merchants throughout the mid-Atlantic region. Then, in 1914, the Panama Canal opened, allowing ships from the Pacific Ocean to travel through the canal to New York and New Jersey ports. The opening of this route, along with Europe’s entrance into what would become a global war, would eventually triple import/export traffic to New York’s ports (Bennett 1915; Greene 2009). By the early twentieth century, the North Shore’s waterfront hosted (among other things) several ship repair and building yards, the Jewett White Lead Company, US Gypsum manufacturing, a Procter & Gamble plant, and an Archer Daniels Midland linseed oil factory (NSWC 2007). Meanwhile, a steady stream of European migrants seeking factory work settled in cheap housing nestled in among these factories. In geographic terms, in the early 1900s the North Shore comprised roughly one-third of Staten Island’s landmass but was twice as densely populated as the rest of the island (Kramer and Flanagan 2012). This explosive immigrant population growth and industrial expansion mirrored similar patterns across the rest of the city. At the same time, the introduction of motorized trucks freed heavy industry from railroad stations and docks, allowing manufacturers to find cheaper land in residential districts. In addition, motorized passenger buses allowed urbanites to travel throughout the city, opening new possibilities for residential real estate development (Fischel 2004, 7). Wealthy homeowners who had left the city’s crowded downtowns now realized they were no longer safe from invasion by immigrants, apartment complexes,

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and industrial and commercial properties. In addition, new subway lines in the outer boroughs gave rise to the building of housing that was affordable to skilled laborers, clerical workers, and other residents with “light blue”-collar jobs (Fischel 2004, 248). Clearly, real estate development was becoming a robust business in New York City. Those developers, however, worried that haphazard commercial, industrial, and low-income residential development threatened new property values. With developers and homeowners alike calling for land-use control, New York City’s Board of Estimate issued a comprehensive set of zoning laws in 1916. The first zoning laws in the country, they divided the city into three kinds of use districts—residential, commercial, or unrestricted. The first two of these were further subdivided into five height classes and five area classes, thereby limiting the height and width of new buildings (see Larson 2013). While individual residential properties could be built in any zone, a residential district could contain only residential properties. Commercial districts could include both residential and commercial uses. And, as the name suggests, unrestricted districts were restriction-free. Vast amounts of space in Manhattan as well as the outer boroughs were designated as “unrestricted,” allowing manufacturing uses to continue without limitations.8 On Staten Island, for instance, nearly half (40 percent) of the borough’s sixty square miles was zoned “unrestricted” (Sussna 1970, 481). To provide a readily available labor force for the industrial businesses in these areas, city leaders built massive public housing projects in unrestricted zones. According to historic records, the rationale for mixing housing and industry was that it gave public housing residents “advantageous opportunities for walking to work” (New York City Planning Commission, Division of Master Plan, 1940, p. 5, as quoted in Maantay 2002, 70). While this might have been the case, it also exposed those residents to hazardous chemicals and other pollutants on a constant basis—at home and at work. Thus, zoning laws mainly protected the property values of affluent residents and promoted real estate interests. In the meantime, they left poor residents to live in noxious industrial zones (Sze 2006, 43). By the 1940s, over half the city’s inhabitants lived in unrestricted districts (45). With no required buffer zones, residential, commercial, and industrial properties butted right up against each other. The failure of early zoning codes to accommodate the city’s growing population and shifting needs was becoming all too apparent. The next section shows how changes to the 1916 zoning codes in the early 1960s reflected new economic priorities and further exacerbated uneven development and environmental injustices.

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Deindustrialization by Design New York’s industries began declining around the early 1950s, owing to a complex set of factors that included automation, globalization, and the fact that organized crime had come to dominate two of the city’s primary industries—printing and apparel (Levinson 2008; Malanga 2001). As well, the rise of the trucking industry and containerization made rail and maritime transportation hubs less essential. Ports in Manhattan and Brooklyn especially were too shallow for the new container ships, which began traveling to New Jersey and Pennsylvania instead. Importantly, despite protests by port workers and local politicians, the Port Authority chose to invest in the World Trade Center rather than in deepening the city’s ports. Easy access to cargo was an essential part of the city’s appeal to manufacturing businesses—without the ports, manufacturers had fewer reasons to stay (Levinson 2008). But New York City had another niche economy up its sleeve. Since 1945, New York had been the center of the capitalist world system, headquarters to 140 of the nation’s 500 largest industrial corporations (Freeman 2001). Beginning in the 1960s, city leaders made a concerted effort to cement New York’s primacy in the FIRE economy. As historian Robert Fitch states, “By 1970, the city rid itself of everything that blocked its potential to become the biggest and best FIRE and producer services city in the world” (1993, 13). Zoning changes provided a mechanism for removing one of those blocks—the fact that manufacturing businesses were dispersed throughout prime locations for FIRE services. In 1961 zoning regulations did away with “unrestricted” districts and instead divided the city into residential, commercial, and manufacturing districts. Each of these was subdivided into gradations of low, medium, and high density, with specific uses allowed in each subdistrict. The allotment and geographic distribution of those uses crystallized the city’s shifting economic strategy. For instance, the new codes allowed for more skyscrapers in downtown Manhattan in hopes of attracting more corporations. Nearby, they allocated new residential districts to house the professionals who would work in those buildings (see Fitch 1993). To this end, light manufacturing operations, previously dispersed throughout Manhattan’s unrestricted districts, were now restricted to the edges of Manhattan. Heavy manufacturing operations (M-3 zones) moved off the island altogether (Curran 2007; Zukin 1989). Although the 1961 codes could not require existing properties to adapt to new spatial arrangements, they did allow property owners to convert to conforming uses “as of right,” or without requiring any special permits (Zukin 1989, 41). Going further, in Manhattan, city officials looked the other way as landlords illegally converted manufacturing spaces to residential lofts (see also

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Curran and Hanson 2005; Marcus 1991). Planners also used landmark status, tax breaks, and subsidies to facilitate the conversion of industrial buildings to residential uses (Buck et al. 2005; Curran and Hanson 2005; Curran 2004; Harvey 1985; Marcuse 1986). Finally, strict noise constraints and other regulations helped to displace manufacturing firms and make way for more conversions (Zukin 1989).9 Between 1967 and 1976, New York lost a fourth of its factories and one-third of its manufacturing jobs (Levinson 2008, 99). Policies and practices that deliberately discouraged manufacturing businesses from locating in Manhattan and other areas slated for residential and commercial development debunk tropes about deindustrialization that portray it as a more passive process, the inevitable outcome of globalization and technology (N. Smith 1990, 1996; see also Brown-Saracino 2010; Lees, Slater, and Wyly 2013; Rast 2001; Rosa 2012; Zukin 1989). Less well discussed is the fact that industries did not disappear from the city completely. On the North Shore, for example, the US Gypsum Company closed its sizable waterfront plant in 1976, and Procter & Gamble soap manufacturing (which employed fifteen hundred people at its peak) moved operations to Mexico in 1991 (Kramer and Flanagan 2012). Yet other facilities took the place of large manufacturing plants. For instance, an oil tank storage facility became the Port Richmond Wastewater Treatment Plant, and a lead paint manufacturing facility became a Sedutto’s Ice Cream factory. Dozens of smaller companies changed hands multiple times, nearly always retaining some kind of industrial use (NSWC 2007). Importantly, thanks to the M-zone designation, replacement businesses neither had to obtain new zoning approvals nor to install buffers to protect residents from contaminants. The North Shore demonstrates how in rearranging urban space to accommodate and protect the FIRE economy, city policies pushed heavy industries into the outer boroughs. In addition to sacrificing the ecological health of industrialized neighborhoods, these policies and practices sacrificed the environmental and social health of their inhabitants.

Zoned Out Reshuffling manufacturing operations from Manhattan to the outer boroughs was a complicated process. As mentioned, certain parts of these boroughs that were being primed for real estate development had to be insulated from industrial uses. In some cases, city leaders used M-1 (light manufacturing) zones as buffers, while in others, they used high-density residential districts to protect lower-density neighborhoods (Rabin 1989). As geographer Julianna Maantay explains, “This was based on the planning principle that multi-family dwellings

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were more appropriate to site near industry than were single-family homes” (Maantay 2000, 70). Along the North Shore, for instance, higher-density residential zones generally spread from the border of M-2 and M-3 zones to the border of neighborhoods with single-family homes, such as Todt Hill, Emerson Hill, and Park Hill. The consolidation of manufacturing operations also required vast swaths of land, which were a rarity in the crowded metropolis. Accordingly, to carve out the space needed for larger M zones, city planners sometimes designated vibrant working-class communities as manufacturing zones. As Maantay writes, “Planners generally designated residential areas near industry as ‘M,’ manufacturing, if the neighborhood seemed ‘blighted,’ or had experienced ‘white flight,’ high rates of vacancy, abandonment, tax delinquency, and subsequent influx of minority residents” (Maantay 2002, 71; see also Angotti 2008, Sze 2006). City leaders assumed that the residents living in these new manufacturing zones would eventually move out of them. However, in practice, the zoning designation sealed the fate of many households. In other words, the M-zone label itself sent a neighborhood into decline. For instance, banks and insurance companies were reluctant to offer home improvement loans, mortgages, or insurance to homes in M zones (Maantay 2000). At the same time, a host of federal policies continued to direct mortgages, car loans, and other opportunities to white families, who seized the chance to leave M zones and relocate to the suburbs. Families of color, however, encountered a variety of racially motivated and inflected obstacles to home ownership on top of barriers to employment and education. Thus, as zoning regulations concentrated noxious uses in M zones, so too did they concentrate poverty in these areas (Maantay 2002, 99; see also Angotti 2008). Thus, as Maantay states, poor and minority people “continue[d] to live in or near M zones having high concentrations of noxious uses” (2002, 99). Economist Yale Rabin characterizes zoning practices that protect some areas and threaten others as “expulsive zoning” in that they “permit—even promote—the intrusion into black neighborhoods of disruptive, incompatible uses that have diminished the quality and undermined the stability of those neighborhoods” (Rabin 1989, 101). As neoliberal economic policies ramped up in the late twentieth century, eclipsing public support for Keynesian social programs, conditions in M zones worsened. The veneration of “free market” principles degraded environmental regulations and emphasized small government as well as individual (vs. public) responsibility (see Harvey 1985, 2006). Such neoliberal ideologies also allowed private industries to monitor their own environmental emissions, shifted labor markets, and justified the rollback of the poverty and public health programs on which many M-zone residents relied (Angotti 2008). As Bourdieu argues,

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neoliberalism is “a mode of production that entails a mode of domination based on the institution of insecurity, domination through precariousness” (2003, 29, emphasis in original; see also Clarke 2005). Neoliberal forms of precariousness shot through all aspects of life in M zones, as residents there navigated environmental pollution, job instability, diminishing public benefits, and rising crime on top of racial barriers to opportunity. Meanwhile, commercial and residential zones continued to be insulated from environmental and social hazards, allowing the city’s FIRE economies to flourish. In this way, the accumulation of value in certain parts of the urban landscape depended on the exploitation of other areas. In the next section, I further illustrate the dynamic consequences of environmental gentrification and spatial rearrangements by comparing processes of development on two industrial waterfronts—Gowanus, in Brooklyn, and Staten Island’s North Shore..

The Dynamics of Sacrifice In the fall of 2013, I sat in a packed room at the Staten Island District office building, surrounded by a crowd of angry residents from the North Shore. Flag Container Terminal, which operated a local waste transfer station, had applied for a permit to treat dredged spoils from across the five boroughs. The permit would allow Flag to accept materials dredged from the city’s waterways and combine them with concrete for reuse in construction projects (Rizzi 2013). But, as outraged North Shore residents pointed out, the expanded facility would only compound existing pollution problems. Moreover, the proposed facility was adjacent to a vacant, city-owned lot in the Port Richmond neighborhood. For months, residents had been working on a plan to create a waterfront plaza on that same city-owned parcel. Now the project seemed pointless—who would want to recreate in a plaza that was next to a waste treatment facility? Finally, the Flag proposal was eerily familiar. Just a few months earlier, the EPA had announced that it intended to treat dredged materials from the Gowanus Canal by mixing them with concrete and reusing them in construction projects (Dobkin 2013). One of the most polluted urban water bodies in the United States, Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal was an icon of urban pollution. According to an EPA investigation, the canal contained toxic sludge twenty-two feet deep in places, with more than a dozen contaminants, including PCBs and pesticides, and various metals such as mercury, lead, and copper (Buiso 2011). Moreover, during heavy rainfall, raw sewage continued to spill into the channel, and samples from the canal have contained cholera, typhoid, typhus, and gonorrhea (Bonanos 2009). After decades of community activism and a relatively short battle with the Bloomberg

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administration, the EPA named the Gowanus Canal to its Superfund program in 2010. Between 2010 and 2013, however, the neighborhood surrounding the canal (known as Gowanus) became as iconic for its rapid gentrification as the canal was for its pollution. While gentrification spread across downtown Brooklyn in the early 2000s, it stubbornly bypassed Gowanus. The canal’s stench and reputation for pollution deterred economic investment, and most of its properties were zoned for manufacturing only. But rising rents and property values in once-bohemian neighborhoods like Williamsburg, DUMBO, and Greenpoint drove artists to Gowanus’s inexpensive warehouse spaces. These artistic refugees braved the canal’s putrid stench and opened galleries, clubs, artisanal shops, and restaurants. Soon, Gowanus housed some of the city’s hottest music clubs, bars, restaurants, and art galleries. Following typical patterns of gentrification, hipster amenities portended high-end residential redevelopment (N. Smith 1996; Zukin 2010). Indeed, in 2008 the city launched an aggressive campaign to rezone a large swath of Gowanus, lifting height and use restrictions to allow for taller and mixed-use residential condominiums, a sign the developers were eager to stake claims in the neighborhood. Two years later, however, the EPA announced its intention to declare the Gowanus Canal a Superfund site. The Bloomberg administration vigorously opposed the designation, fearing that it would discourage potential property buyers (Navarro 2009). In the end, both the EPA designation and gentrification prevailed. In the second quarter of 2014, median rent in Gowanus increased 17.4 percent to $3,134, twice as much as Brooklyn as a whole. During that same period, the median sales price was $785,000, up 6.1 percent from the year before.10 New condominiums in Gowanus boasted such hip, eco-friendly amenities as landscaped backyards with bocce courts and vegetable gardens. According to local real estate reports, the canal’s Superfund status actually amplified the neighborhood’s eco-friendly image (Kaysen 2014). Renderings of the completed cleanup showed colorful canoe launch points and a “green district” of esplanades, walkways, and pocket parks that transported the canal from its present status as a waste-filled waterway into a future status as an environmental amenity.11 Many years of messy (and controversial) remediation lay in between. Initially, the EPA planned to treat soils dredged from the canal on a barge installed just off the shore of the Red Hook neighborhood, about a mile from Gowanus. However, residents of Red Hook, which was also gentrifying at a rapid pace, ferociously opposed the plan and insisted Gowanus deal with its own waste.12 In the end, the EPA decided that neither Gowanus nor Red Hook would house Gowanus sludge. In fact, the agency promised to ship the waste out of Brooklyn entirely. Six months later, Flag filed its permit application. North Shore residents believed that this was

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no coincidence. In her public comments against the Flag permit, Victoria Gillen, a North Shore resident and environmental justice activist, stated, “Creating all the wonderful new playgrounds and high-value waterfront residential areas pushes heavy industrial use into parts of Queens and Staten Island. . . . While our taxes support these changes, we do not share in the benefits, and find ourselves, here on Staten Island, once again a dumping ground for the city’s unwanted garbage.” Gillen’s statement eloquently summarizes how environmental amenities and protection in gentrifying neighborhoods like Gowanus and Red Hook were directly related to the clustering of heavy industry in sacrifice zones like the North Shore. The next section further explores how gentrification displaced heavy industries onto sacrifice zones.

(Re)industrial Gentrification Between 2002 and 2010, the city lost over 20 percent of its industrial lands to rezonings (Mistry and Byron 2011, 21). To stem that tide, Mayor Bloomberg established the city’s Industrial Business Zone (IBZ) program in 2006. According to the IBZ website, the program was designed to insulate manufacturing zones from being converted, parcel by parcel, to more profitable commercial or residential uses: “Address the challenges that industrial and manufacturing firms face by reinforcing the City’s intention to retain the land in these areas for industrial uses. This commitment allows for more predictable real estate valuation since industrial space is less vulnerable to speculation in the residential marketplace” (New York City IBZ Commission 2013, 4). The program established sixteen protected zones, distributed across Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. However, its efficacy was questionable. In 2011, a report by the Bloomberg administration found that industrial businesses continued to struggle with high rents and limited room for expansion. The 2011 report called for an expansion of the IBZ program, in part by adding a new industrial zone on the North Shore (New York City IBZ Commission 2013). Although Thurman, Gillen, and other local environmental justice activists staunchly opposed the new zone, it was quietly installed in 2014. While this new IBZ was categorically the same as those in the rest of the city, clear differences were beginning to emerge. About a year after the 2011 report was released, the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) unveiled “Manufacturing 2.0,” a set of initiatives that set aside vacant or underused industrial properties for use by small-scale manufacturers.13 Noting that New Yorkers’ recent consumption patterns favored goods with locally sourced products and an appetite for regional, specialty products, the program targeted local crafters, artisans, food/drink

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manufacturers, technology startups, film studios, visual artists, and fashion designers (NYCEDC 2013). In short, the NYCEDC had caught on to the “Maker Movement,” which emphasized healthy food; sustainable, local development, and networked, peer-led, do-it-yourself producers and creators. Emerging out of the 2008 fiscal crisis, an extremely tight job market, Occupy Wall Street, and mounting concerns about sustainability and climate change, the Maker Movement (especially popular with millennials) eschewed mass production, chain stores, and multinational corporations (Malewitz 2014). Studies of Maker demographics reveal clear class distinctions. A 2012 survey of Make Magazine’s three hundred thousand readers, for instance, found that median household income averaged $106,000. Moreover, 97 percent had attended college, and 80 percent had a postgraduate education (Hatch 2014, 5). Clearly, these manufacturers were not the low-income or working-class New Yorkers who once populated the city’s industrial labor force. Rather, they were exactly the highly educated, upper-middle-class creatives for whom Bloomberg built the “luxury city.” In this way, Manufacturing 2.0 signaled the gentrification of industry itself. Geographically, my findings show that the program was closely aligned with residential gentrification and industrial displacement. NYCEDC’s nineteen manufacturing initiatives included eight incubators, four technology startup spaces, featuring clean or green tech, an artist studio, a media center, and a “MakerSpace.” Nine of those were located in recently redeveloped or currently gentrifying Manhattan neighborhoods (including Kips Bay, the Garment District, Hudson Square, Harlem, and Washington Heights). Four of the biggest spaces (the Navy Yard, Made in New York Media Center, the DUMBO Incubator, and the NYC Urban Futures Lab) were located in or near DUMBO, Brooklyn’s most expensive neighborhood for housing sales in 2015.14 Of the remaining spaces, one was in the recently gentrified neighborhood of Long Island City, Queens, two were in the Bronx, and one was on Staten Island. In this last case, the city located its “MakerSpace” in St. George, the North Shore’s only neighborhood undergoing high-end redevelopment. In sum, in at least seventeen cases, new manufacturing spaces were surrounded by highly valued residential areas. In some cases, these spaces actually generated redevelopment. For instance, the Navy Yard’s success led to several new, high-end condo developments to break ground across the street. In 2015, small-scale manufacturing got a significant boost from the de Blasio administration when, in November, the mayor announced a plan to invest more than $115 million in the city’s industrial sector. Noting that manufacturing was “a thriving part of our 21st century economy,” de Blasio stated, “We are positioning our industrial businesses to take advantage of new technology and new demand. These investments are going to generate tens of thousands of good jobs for New

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York City families.”15 However, the funding targeted a fresh set of neighborhoods undergoing significant housing price increases, including Gowanus, Sunset Park, and East New York. Already, a private developer had acquired a 49.9 percent share in Sunset Park’s “Industry City,” a massive waterfront industrial complex. Industry City was set to host a Brooklyn Nets training facility and a range of artisanal manufacturers paying an average $20 per square foot in rent. Three months after de Blasio’s announcement, the developer filed special permits to build a hotel, a university facility, and expanded retail (see Hum 2015, 2016). In stark contrast, the North Shore’s IBZ was set to host the Flag facility, a cement manufacturing plant, a natural gas pipeline, and expanded port operations in addition to the twenty-one contaminated sites mentioned above. Industrial gentrification thus distributed new, clean manufacturing businesses to gentrifying neighborhoods while clustering heavy, noxious industries in non-gentrifying parts of the outer boroughs. Importantly, neither type of manufacturing promised access to the “good” jobs touted by politicians. In the next section, I detail the ways that neoliberal shifts have restructured the industrial labor market.

Postindustrial Job Blackmail Across the political spectrum—from de Blasio to Bernie Sanders to Barack Obama to Rick Santorum to Donald Trump—politicians and candidates routinely call for a return to manufacturing in answer to an unsteady economy, a sinking middle class, and the disappearance of blue-collar jobs (Harsanyi 2015). Such narratives conjure rosy images of a robust manufacturing sector that offers cheap, domestic products while providing well-paying, secure jobs to unskilled, non-college-educated workers. In promoting the Bayonne Bridge project, for instance, PANYNJ officials, as well as local politicians, repeatedly emphasized that the project would retain 250,000 port jobs. Similarly, new IBZ businesses on the North Shore promised to bring hundreds of new jobs to its residents.16 Certainly, jobs were sorely needed in this area—15 percent of families on the North Shore lived below the poverty level, and unemployment was approximately 8.2 percent, nearly 58 percent higher than on the rest of Staten Island. Moreover, manufacturing jobs on the island declined by 23.6 percent between 2000 and 2010 (Tumarkin and Bowles 2011). However, nostalgia for the manufacturing-based, industrial economy glossed over certain factual details. For example, even in their heyday, unions rarely included workers of color, and industries have always been noxious neighbors, spewing pollutants into the air, water, and soil around them. More recently, globalization, neoliberal-era privatization, flexibility, and free-trade programs have

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destabilized union power and promoted the use of informal or “day” labor, creating highly precarious local labor markets. In their 1982 book, Fear at Work, Richard Kazis and Richard L. Grossman coined the phrase “job blackmail” to describe how private companies threatened layoffs and closures to lobby against environmental regulations (Kazis and Grossman 1982). Several years later, sociologist Robert Bullard applied the term to the environmental justice movement. Specifically, he argues, “Environmental risks were offered as unavoidable trade-offs for jobs and a broadened tax base in economically depressed communities” (2000, 27). Today, job blackmail masks the reality of an increasingly segmented labor market. Between 2001 and 2012, the total number of manufacturing jobs in New York City decreased by nearly 50 percent. Yet, after 2006, the average number of manufacturing businesses stabilized. During the same period, industrial output declined at a far slower rate than industrial jobs (NYCEDC 2013). These numbers indicate that manufacturing businesses were hiring fewer workers and relying heavily on technology. Manufacturing 2.0’s high-tech and small-scale businesses follow this trend. For instance, in 2014, the 330 companies at the Navy Yard averaged nineteen people per business. The Brooklyn Army Terminal in Sunset Park averaged thirty-four workers per company. A 2014 report by the City of New York’s Independent Budget Office found that industrial subsectors such as biotech, computer and electronics manufacturing, broadcasting, and motion picture and sound hired relatively small numbers of workers, especially without college degrees, relative to traditional industrial firms. Moreover, the report found that “many of the industrial subsectors that did employ a large number of workers without college degrees, like food manufacturing or warehousing, pay wages that are comparable to the average wages for workers in nonindustrial sectors” (IBO 2014, 3). These statistics demonstrate that in practice, small-scale manufacturers provided few opportunities for low-skilled workers. Traditional manufacturing businesses also shifted in light of neoliberal economic restructuring. For instance, while the ports of New York and New Jersey generated $15.5 billion in business activity and more than $2 billion in annual tax revenues,17 workers around the port live in increasingly precarious circumstances. In particular, the federal deregulation and subsequent de-unionizing of the trucking industry in the 1980s allowed industry owners to classify truckers as independent contractors. Not only were the truckers then paid by the load (rather than hourly), but they were no longer eligible for health insurance and became responsible for all truck-related expenses including purchase, fuel, taxes, insurance, maintenance, and repair costs. According to the Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports (a nonprofit coalition for economic and environmental justice around U.S. ports), truck drivers take home an average of $28,783 a year (Coalition for

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Clean and Safe Ports 2010). As a result, drivers could not update or maintain their trucks, which dramatically degrades the air quality in the ports and the neighboring communities.18 Recent state-sponsored programs to address these environmental impacts have only worsened problems for truckers. For instance, the Port Authority’s $33 million Truck Replacement Program (which included $7 million from the federal Recovery and Reinvestment Act) provided loans to independent truck drivers to purchase cleaner-fuel trucks. Yet, because these drivers make such low wages, the program wound up pushing them into debt.19 In the next section, I describe how North Shore activists added such concerns to their environmental justice agenda, especially as it concerned the raising of the Bayonne Bridge.

Building Bridges At almost every community meeting I attended on Staten Island’s North Shore, conversation would eventually turn to the subject of trucks. Residents would describe in vivid detail how the trucks that served the Staten Island ports diminished their quality of life. Not only did they add to congestion on Richmond Terrace, the neighborhood’s main two-lane artery, but many truckers also took illegal shortcuts along the neighborhoods’ narrow streets. In the wee hours of the morning they turned around in private driveways, shone headlights in people’s windows, and idled outside people’s homes. In fact, drivers began lining up for the port around 4 a.m., running their engines to operate refrigeration and heating systems. In the summer of 2011, I attended a meeting of the North Shore Community Coalition for Environmental Justice (NSCCEJ). Coalition members were planning an anti-idling campaign to cut down on the number of trucks illegally idling on residential streets. They were joined that night by representatives from the Ironbound Community Corporation, a Newark-based social service organization, and ALIGN, a local nonprofit focused on building alliances between workers and community members (see the introduction for details on this organization). This time, after residents recited their usual litany of complaints about port truck drivers, their guests spoke up. They gently explained the difficulties that drivers faced and that they also suffered from air pollution. An NSCCEJ member named Maxine, who had just woefully described how the truck drivers interrupted her sleep, responded, “Well, I guess it’s not the drivers’ fault.” She suggested creating a truck stop—a designated space where the trucks could wait for the port to open without disturbing local residents. Following her lead, NSCCEJ members shifted from detailing the transgressions of individual drivers to laying blame on the owners of trucking companies and the Port Authority itself.

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Three years later, the collective sympathy engendered during that meeting laid the groundwork for collective opposition to the Bayonne Bridge raising. Both the North Shore’s environmental justice organizations (NSCCEJ and NSWC) joined the Coalition for Healthy Ports (CHP),20 the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Eastern Environmental Law Center to file a lawsuit challenging the Coast Guard’s decision to permit the project without an extensive environmental review. As the lawsuit lingered in the courts, however, bridge construction moved forward, bringing even more problems than anyone anticipated. A cacophony of noise pollution kept residents awake at all hours of the night, enormous lead paint chips collected in their yards and on their cars, their streets were constantly being closed, and the sewers flooded often. Although the PANYNJ offered hotel vouchers on nights that construction was going to be particularly noisy or toxic, they did not pay for food, and the hotels they chose did not allow pets. Moreover, families had to stay in separate rooms, and kids wound up far from their schools. Local residents told me that they refused the vouchers more often than not. On a windy Saturday in November 2015, I joined about fifteen labor organizers sent by the Clean Air Coalition (which also led the CHP) and approximately ten North Shore residents in Elm Park, a small, low-income neighborhood at the base of the Bayonne Bridge. Fanning out across the neighborhood, we knocked on doors, informing residents that the Port Authority had just extended the bridge’s construction period by at least two years. We also asked them to sign a petition demanding that Governor Andrew Cuomo visit the construction site and see neighborhood conditions for himself, and we distributed information about other Clean Air campaigns. As we approached people, we heard story after story about lives thrown into havoc. “I can’t sleep!” said a sixteen-year-old girl who answered one door and told us how worried she was about her grades. A group of four kids on their way to a playground cheerfully related new ailments. “I have a cough now,” said a boy of about ten as his friends chimed in with “me too,” “I get nose bleeds,” or “My brother’s got asthma.” Like the industries that continued to overtake the North Shore’s waterfront, the raising of the bridge had invaded the lives of local residents and sacrificed their health for the sake of global shipping.

Conclusion The North Shore residents who distributed and signed the petition that day demanded the right to sleep, to reside in their homes without the incursion of construction debris, and to not be constantly inconvenienced. They also

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demanded their right, and that of local truck drivers, to breathe clean air and to live and work in healthy environments. In a more general way, like other activists depicted in this volume, they asserted the rights of all city residents, regardless of income or wealth. The long-term significance of the bridge campaign is difficult to predict. However, in the short term, it also highlighted the ways that uneven and exploitative political, economic, and spatial arrangements link the city’s low-income residents and workers (see Hardt and Negri 2005). This chapter has provided a brief overview of the history of such arrangements and the ways in which they reinforced urban inequality. Using the North Shore as a case study, I argued that industrial-era zoning regulations sought to preserve property values for elites. In so doing, they allowed industries to cluster in low-income and minority neighborhoods. In the postindustrial era, city leaders emphasized the growth of the FIRE economy, displacing industries from certain areas in order to clear the way for high-end residential and commercial redevelopment. Such spatial arrangements, or expulsive zoning practices, combined with neoliberal reductions in public services, had the effect of sacrificing both the environmental and social health of low-income, minority neighborhoods. In this way, zoning practices segmented parts of the city and unofficially designated them as sacrifice zones. In the twenty-first century, high-end redevelopment accelerated, and an era of rapid gentrification overtook many of the city’s industrial waterfronts. Environmental improvements in gentrifying neighborhoods further pushed heavy industries into sacrifice zones. Similarly, my research shows that incentives for small-scale, “green” manufacturing businesses were distributed to gentrifying neighborhoods, amplifying their appeal to the young professionals that developers hoped to bring to “the luxury city.” Yet this industrial gentrification further proliferated heavy industries in sacrifice zones like the North Shore. Meanwhile, in a postindustrial era, neither heavy nor light manufacturing businesses were a source of reliable jobs for workers without a college education. Crucially, those affected by these powerful global processes have never been passive. Indeed, both labor and environmental justice activists have long organized to challenge processes of uneven spatial development and exploitative labor practices. As the Bayonne Bridge–raising case shows, increasingly these activists are joining forces in “right to the city” alliances that highlight the links between environmental, social, and labor justice. Some of these coalitions—such as ALIGN and the Coalition for Healthy Ports—appear in this chapter, while others are discussed throughout this volume. Such examples suggest that, even as the city grows ever more polarized and uneven, the conditions for broad-based alliances are ever riper and more fertile.

6 RADICAL RUPTURES Crisis Organizing and the Spatial Politics of Uneven Redevelopment Miriam Greenberg

“We have all experienced the devastating effects of natural and unnatural disasters in America.” So began a speaker at a post–Hurricane Sandy rally at Zuccotti Park on July 31, 2013, nine months after the storm hit on October 29, 2012. The speaker—Bobby Tolbert, from Vocal-NY (Voices of Community Activists and Leaders)—was recalling two previous disasters that the audience knew well: the World Trade Center attack of September 11, 2001, and Hurricane Katrina’s flooding of New Orleans on August 29, 2005. Yet by “devastating effects,” he wasn’t just referring to the terrorist attack or breached levees. As he went on to say: “The recovery efforts were the disaster inside the disaster.”1 His first example was close at hand: the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), through which $20 billion in post-9/11 recovery funds once flowed, housed in the reconstructed Deutsche Bank building now rising on Zuccotti Plaza’s northern edge. Shaking a fist at the tower, Tolbert listed the major corporations and Wall Street firms that were primary recipients of LMDC aid, and drew a parallel to the “recovery” following Katrina, where despite $32 billion in aid—the most following any disaster in U.S. history—the city, state, and federal governments were unable to rebuild the neighborhoods or fund the return of New Orleans’s poorest and most vulnerable communities. After Katrina, he said, “We vowed never to have that same situation arise on our soil.”

This chapter is significantly expanded and updated from an earlier article (Greenberg 2014). Thanks to New Labor Forum and Sage Publishers for permission. 120

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FIGURE 6.1.  Alliance for a Just Rebuilding’s “Turn the Tide” rally, New York City Hall, July 2013. Photo by Miriam Greenberg.

The speech was one of many along the route of a “Turn the Tide” march led by a newly formed labor-community coalition, Alliance for a Just Rebuilding (AJR). Beginning at the Staten Island Ferry and culminating with a rally and news conference at City Hall, speakers represented the diversity of Sandy-impacted communities and organizations from across the five boroughs. This included public housing residents and renters still displaced or living with mold; day laborers who worked as first responders under abysmal conditions for little pay; and trade unions whose members participated in the cleanup and continued to face economic, health, and emotional hardship.2 Their immediate goal, as AJR director Nathalie Alegre put it, was to remind the many New Yorkers for whom Sandy was already a “distant memory,” including the new slate of New York City mayoral candidates, that thousands were still affected and in desperate need of aid. Yet AJR also had a longer-term goal: to “turn the tide” on the top-down and inequitable approach to recovery and redevelopment indicted by Tolbert. This approach, established in the wake of 9/11 and Katrina, constituted “the disaster inside the disaster” for low-income, front-line communities. Funds that should have targeted basic needs like housing and jobs instead went disproportionately to big businesses and high-income residents, and so became tools to further

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disadvantage and displace the communities hardest hit. AJR marchers called for a new approach: a “just rebuilding” based in a recognition of the inequalities of race, class, and neighborhood that preceded disasters and shaped their outcomes. Thus, seizing the moment, AJR unveiled a “people’s agenda” for post-Sandy rebuilding with four demands, represented as buoys rising above the tide: “good jobs,” “affordable housing,” “sustainable energy,” and “community involvement.” What’s striking is how radical this basic platform appeared against the new normal of twenty-first-century post-disaster redevelopment. In the months following Hurricane Sandy, I was at work completing a coauthored book project that sought to make sense of this new normal: Crisis Cities: Disaster and Redevelopment in New York and New Orleans (Gotham and Greenberg 2014). The book was motivated in part by witnessing, in two very different cities facing two very different kinds of disaster, the same starkly inequitable rebuilding process. In addition, it was inspired by finding, in the midst of this inequity, the rise of expansive new political movements and visions of a just city. We came to recognize the post-disaster moment as one of potentially radical rupture—when injustices are laid bare, shared experience and emotion become fertile ground for new solidarities, unprecedented coalitions form, and new spatial politics, including visionary “right to the city” goals, come to feel possible. At the same time, we found new elite coalitions seizing the moment and policy upper hand, and emerging right-to-the-city movements unable to stop them. Ultimately, in both cities, the benefits of rebuilding broke down along lines of race, class, and neighborhood. We dubbed this dynamic uneven redevelopment, invoking the theory of uneven development to examine how the dynamic of spatialized inequality that capitalist urbanization entails can be catalyzed in crisis cities suddenly flush with funds, lacking oversight, and subject to the policy and planning ambitions of elite rebuilding coalitions. One might be tempted to read in this a purely pessimistic tale of disaster capitalism at the urban scale—and in certain ways it was, as I will discuss below. But this is also not the end of the story. What was so striking in watching new post-Sandy organizing by AJR and a host of groups citywide was the degree to which they had learned lessons from the post-crisis struggles we studied. Much as post-Katrina organizers learned lessons about the successes and failures of organizing post-9/11, by post-Sandy the struggle was informed by both 9/11 and Katrina, as well as by Occupy Wall Street, which followed the Wall Street–led economic collapse of 2008 and the subsequent, disastrous period of “recovery” from that crisis. AJR, a fusion of all these struggles in personnel and vision, indicated the cumulative dynamics of crisis organizing. This fusion was part of a larger movement that did manage in significant if still incomplete ways to turn the tide on disastrously uneven redevelopment.

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In The City Is the Factory, as we examine the role of solidarity and social movements in contemporary dynamics of urbanization, I would argue that we have much to learn from these successive generations of political mobilization. First, there is the importance of studying the politics of “crisis” itself, which in the last two decades has been the historical context for the rise of many of the new urban movements addressed in these pages and beyond, from the piqueteros in Buenos Aires, to the PAH in Barcelona, to Occupy Wall Street in New York. And second, there is the importance of studying the insights of crisis organizers and the dynamics of their struggles. In part, such a focus reveals the importance of attending to successive crisis moments and their relationship between each other. And in part it shows us the open-ended, potentially catalytic impact of contingent events like disasters —whether “natural” or “man-made”—in sparking both new rounds of urbanization and new kinds of urban movements. In what follows I will examine the significance and indeterminacy of such events, advancing a few theoretical arguments. First, I argue for what William Sewell called an “eventful temporality” in the social sciences, or an understanding of society that takes seriously the potential impacts of events on social structure, dynamics, and movements (Sewell 1996). I argue in particular for engaging with events understood as crises, and doing so in all their complexity. This includes examining what affect scholar Deborah Gould might call the “emotional habitus” (Gould 2009) of such moments, and its impact on sense of potentiality that so often embues crisis organizing. It also includes reckoning with what political theorist Giorgio Agamben recognizes as the repressive “state of exception” imposed by political elites that crises can facilitate (Agamben 2004). As moments of simultaneous rupture and intervention, crises combine great potential for change (counter to structuralist analyses) with indeterminacy (counter to notions of victims automatically coming to consciousness and rising up).3 On the latter, as critical climate scholar Alyssa Battistoni notes, “No matter how extreme or earth-shattering the event, powerful, actively engaged publics don’t emerge from them ready-made. . . . The disruptiveness of disaster may help create an opening, but the challenge of pushing through it is a combination of ordinary political work—organizing, creating and strengthening communities, building trust and vision—and recognizing where an obstructed opening is big enough to slip in a lever.”4 The question is what we make of crises, and the moment of rupture they create, politically and imaginatively. I argue here that one crucial tool for responding to this question is our capacity to learn within and across these events, between the spaces in which they occur, and from the people who have struggled to organize during them. In the following pages, I unpack this argument by first laying out the key elements of a theory of crisis cities and crisis-driven urbanization, against the

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historic backdrop of post-9/11 and Katrina redevelopment. I analyze the “radical rupture” of post-crisis organizing, seeking to understand the opportunity for new solidarities to arise, as well as, and in relation to, top-down dynamics that challenge grassroots organizing. Finally, I analyze the direction forged by AJR and other post-Sandy groups, seeking to understand what they learned from previous crises, the new spatial politics they set in train, as well as the right-tothe-city challenges they continue to face.

Crisis Cities The argument that “there’s no such thing as a natural disaster” is a long-standing one on the left, and became common sense following Hurricane Katrina. The title of an important anthology (Hartman and Squires 2006) as well as numerous journal articles, conferences, and web forums, the phrase was perhaps first put into print in relation to Katrina by geographer Neil Smith. Invoking the well-researched perspective of environmental geography, he argued, “In every phase and aspect of a disaster—causes, vulnerability, preparedness, results and response, and reconstruction—the contours of disaster and the difference between who lives and who dies is to a greater or lesser extent a social calculus.” Framing disasters as natural allows an uncritical disregard of this calculus, nowhere more so than in the reconstruction phase, which typically, Smith notes, is understood as “technical” rather than “in the first place . . . political” (N. Smith 2006). In Crisis Cities, Kevin Fox Gotham and I align with this call for a more sociopolitical reading of natural disasters, while linking it to a broader analysis of disasters in general. Even more obviously “man-made” disasters reflect more complex social and political roots, whether triggered by terrorists or technology or market failure. And whether understood as human or natural in origin, all catastrophic events can expose equally stark differences in who lives and dies, who stays and who is displaced. Such a focus asks that we appreciate the historical and political dynamics preceding and following these events, with particular implications for urbanization and social movements. There are three “moments” in this mode of eventful analysis. First, there is the prehistory of the event, in which uneven landscapes of risk and resilience are produced, setting the stage for certain communities and geographies to become “at risk.” Second, there is the immediate post-history of the event, including the period of short-term recovery and anticipation of long-term redevelopment phases. This entails a new spatial politics, in which multiple actors and groups join forces, in unusual coalitions, and focus their energies on a large-scale urban

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vision. Third, the longer-term period of redevelopment entails a process of crisis-driven urbanization, in which the city and region are transformed physically, ecologically, and socially. Depending on the outcome of post-crisis politics, this may lead to a more just and sustainable city, or new uneven landscapes of risk and resilience.

Uneven Landscapes of Risk and Resilience Disasters need not lead to large-scale, long-term crises for cities and their populations. In places where risk and inequality are minimal, disaster can be contained; where they are great, “crises” ensue—and at an extreme become endemic. The broader context is key to understanding both their origin and impact. In an age of planetary urbanization, global inequality, and climate change, cities are increasingly the site of greatest impact for disasters of all kind. Thus we might ask: How has the urban context contributed to or helped mitigate the socio-spatial inequalities associated with increasing risk? In the case of New York and New Orleans and many crisis cities like them today, particularly in the industrialized regions of the Global North and South, this context was shaped by a neoliberal approach to urbanization that began in the late 1970s. Growth coalitions, responding to urban unrest and fiscal crisis, and seeking to compete globally, pushed through market-oriented reforms, including the rollback of social services and market regulations and the rollout of entrepreneurial forms of development, business incentives, and rebranding campaigns.5 While always a site of struggle, cities since this time have increasingly operated as “for profit” enterprises, with urban land a source of exchange rather than use value. Investment in urban development, meanwhile, became a “spatial fix” to stave off broader fiscal and accumulation crises. In New York City, this entailed the “financialization” of Lower Manhattan, despite local efforts to maintain a more mixed economic base; in New Orleans, it entailed the urbanization of the wetlands, despite efforts to preserve this essential storm buffer and ecosystem. Both were highly contradictory interventions: exacerbating uneven development and spawning new forms of economic, environmental, and social risk. Thus by the time of the 2001 and 2005 disasters, respectively, New York and New Orleans had undergone two decades of inequitable and unsustainable policy and planning. In New York, the city’s subsidizing of and dependence upon the volatile finance, insurance, and real estate sector for tax revenue increased its vulnerability to economic downturns. Meanwhile the city’s lack of comparable support for “high road” industries like the unionized manufacturing in neighboring Chinatown, alongside its lack of protection of affordable housing stock, rendered

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the manufacturing and related service and retail sectors as well as working-class Asian American residents extremely vulnerable. In New Orleans, flood risks were intensified by wetland destruction driven by oil and shipping interests, while levee building was undertaken by the Army Corps of Engineers to accommodate the development schemes of local parishes, which generated great disparity in the height and strength of levees in different communities.6 What’s more, little was done to protect the housing of those who could least afford physical repairs or insurance. Thus in both cities, the bulk of risk devolved to low-income people, who typically lacked adequate insurance or government support—whether for their homes, their businesses, or their jobs—creating the uneven landscape of risk and resilience upon which 9/11 and Katrina fell.

Radical Rupture and the Politics of the Crisis Moment In the opening of The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein cites Milton Friedman’s famous dictum: “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” The role of political leaders, then, is to “develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable” (Klein 2007, 7). Klein emphasizes the tendency for increasingly conservative ideas to gain sway in such moments, and indeed for conservative, pro-capitalist forces to help orchestrate crisis to bring this about, as seen with the rise of Chicago School neoliberalism in the midst of the fiscal crises of the 1970s, and its resurgence following the coup in Chile and the Iraq War. We hear in this work echoes of Agamben’s concern for the “state of exception” in which the powerful both help to produce and exploit the shock and awe of crisis to suspend democratic laws and extend their power. The affectual conditions of shock and awe are certainly generative. By offering such a severe break in “business as usual,” a variety of interventions across the political spectrum become both imaginable and viscerally desired. From Thomas Hobbes to civil defense planners to the nightly news, we have been warned of the anomic mobs prone to looting and violence arising from such conditions unless controlled by armed force or government expertise. Yet, it should be remembered that quite the opposite can also emerge from the wreckage. As Rebecca Solnit documents in her evocatively titled “A Paradise Built in Hell” (Solnit 2010), which surveys modern disasters from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to the London Blitz and up and through 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, the most typical disaster response has actually been one of altruism, self-organization, and mutual aid.

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In laying bare uneven landscapes of risk and resilience, we are also reminded of the political and etymological link between “crisis” and “critique” (Roitman 2013). Disasters create in this sense moments of radical rupture, offering historic opportunities to see and question the often invisible processes, structures, and ecologies that lead to crisis, and to pursue radical alternatives to them. In this pursuit we often see people conceiving of their political aims in larger terms, and so creating new solidarities that transcend old boundaries of identity, issue orientation, and geography. Integrally tied to these new spatial politics is the question of narrative, or how and by whom the “crisis” itself is framed. What caused the crisis, who were its primary victims, what areas were most affected by it? The answers to these questions become essential to the subsequent debate about what is to be done. Thus beyond utopian visions, the post-disaster moments are also ones of messy politics and battles over crisis framing. Recognizing the opportunity to redress past wrongs and shift the course of urban redevelopment, multiple coalitions enter the discursive and political fray. The above theorizing helped us make sense of the aftermath of 9/11 and Katrina. There was a rapid mobilization of elite groups, fitting neatly and disturbingly into the disaster capitalist model. Yet also significant were other forms of mobilization. There were professional planning and architecture groups, seeking to lend expertise and democratic design principles to the rebuilding process. And perhaps most numerous were what Rachel Luft, writing after Katrina, called “crisis organizers,” or broad-based, grassroots coalitions made up largely of alliances between community organizations, labor, and disaster-impacted communities, with the latter mostly low-income people and people of color (Luft 2009)7 Uniting crisis organizers was a desire to ensure that the less powerful and well-connected had a seat at the decision-making table when it came to how and where recovery monies were spent and redevelopment plans enacted. They were spurred on by a number of imaginative, participatory planning processes held in both cities—from town halls and visioning sessions to public hearings on specific developments. These coalitions represented groups with deep histories of organizing—including settlement houses, environmental justice organizations, and labor unions. Underlying their participation was the desire—not unlike in elite coalitions—to move beyond a focus on immediate recovery and short-term charity targeting narrowly defined disaster zones, toward a more visionary and long-term agenda that was expansive in both spatial and social terms. Under the banner of campaigns like “Beyond Ground Zero” in New York City, and “Solidarity Not Charity” in New Orleans, organizers labored to frame the crisis in such a way as to lead to progressive transformation beyond the crisis moment.

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Crisis-Driven Urbanization Yet it was precisely in the “beyond the crisis moment” period of long-term redevelopment that we saw the most profoundly unequal dynamics unfold in New York and New Orleans, and witnessed a political process that ran directly counter to the vision of crisis organizers. Indeed, despite high-profile participation in vision sessions, and clear articulation of structural demands, grassroots groups were either excluded from political decision-making entirely, or their demands were met only to the degree that they jibed with those of elites. For instance, at the five-thousand-person post-9/11 “Listening to the City” event at the Jacob Javits Center in early 2002, popular demand for affordable housing and jobs supported by the majority of participants were ignored, while those for “spectacular design” for the rebuilt World Trade Center were embraced and publicized.8 We argue that in lieu of empowering participation that might actually affect policy and planning, post-disaster forums offered the performance of participation, privileging the technical and communicative aspects of participation as opposed to its empowering dimensions, while actually eliding the public agenda (Gotham and Greenberg 2014, chap. 4; Baiocci and Ganuza 2014). Thus elided, the way was clear for a top-down and market-oriented process of crisis-driven urbanization to unfold with apparent legitimacy. This process began very early in the weeks following 9/11, when Wall Street–backed lobbying groups moved to deregulate federal disaster aid and delimit the disaster zone. Both moves were justified by the claim that funds had to flow freely and flexibly to financial sector victims, framed as the primary victims of the attack, and be used to incentivize development in a restricted area of Lower Manhattan immediately surrounding “Ground Zero.” This claim ignored the equally harmful health impacts caused by toxic dust, and economic impacts caused by street closures, on low-income, largely uninsured residents and small businesses in neighboring Chinatown and the Lower East Side, as well as for first responders (Parrot and Cooke 2005). Yet based on this elite framing, sweeping changes were made at the federal level in how the primary source of recovery funds (FEMA grants) and redevelopment funding (Community Development Block Grants and Private Activity Bonds) could be distributed and for what purpose. Through a series of waivers, provisions regarding “public benefits” and “means testing,” which would have directed 70 percent of funds to low-income victims and small businesses, were stripped, as were “public oversight” provisions, which would have enabled leaders of affected communities to scrutinize and have a say in funding decisions. These federal waivers were then used as a precedent in the deregulation of aid for the entire Gulf Coast region following Katrina (Gotham and Greenberg 2008, 2014).

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As a result, in both New York and New Orleans, short-term “recovery” and longer-term “redevelopment” were used to steer billions of public dollars to powerful industries—in particular real estate and finance—and already well-off neighborhoods. Organizers did win some important concessions, with a small proportion of funds ($50 million of the original $20 billion) going to collective consumption needs like parks, infrastructure, and affordable housing. Yet on the whole, “the New Lower Manhattan” and “New Orleans Miracle” served to intensify preexisting forms of socio-spatial inequality. Affluent, majority white neighborhoods like New York’s Financial District and New Orleans’ Lakeview saw increasing wealth, population, and infrastructure, while low-income, majority nonwhite neighborhoods like the Lower East Side, Chinatown, and New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward saw decline, gentrification, and/or permanent displacement. Combining theories of critical geography with concern for the impact of contingent events, my coauthor and I saw how crisis-driven urbanization could catalyze uneven spatial development on a larger scale and over a longer term than would be possible under “normal” circumstances. Such a finding is of concern in the historical context explored in the current volume: a neoliberal urban age characterized by precarity, inequality, and climate change, with the potential for increasing numbers of disasters and the “concatenation” of crisis. It forces us to ask: are these market-oriented dynamics inevitable? If we believe that social movements matter, and radical ruptures can be transformative, what are the political lessons we can draw from the efforts and struggles of crisis organizers?

Turning the Tide When Hurricane Sandy hit New York City on October 29, 2012, it blew away any doubt that New York was now as vulnerable to extreme weather as New Orleans had long been. This was due, in part, to the effects of global warming and sea level rise for coastal cities. Yet the lessons of this latest category 3 storm extended beyond this. In its immediate and ongoing effects on vulnerable communities and ecosystems, Sandy was a reminder of the direct legacies of crisis-driven urbanization. Most immediately, the devastation Sandy caused in Lower Manhattan should be seen as a result of uneven post-9/11 redevelopment. Billions in federal rebuilding dollars fueled the meteoric construction of luxury residential and commercial towers on the southern tip of Lower Manhattan, while sidelining low-income communities in Chinatown and the Lower East Side. And rather than disincentivizing storm-prone construction, the LMDC allowed proximity to low-lying waterfronts to actually boost real estate values, thus placing new, wealthy residents and their

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tax-financed buildings at enormous physical risk. Advance warning was provided in 2011 by Hurricane Irene, dubbed a “wake-up call” that extreme weather was now a real threat to the city. The administration of Mayor Bloomberg was commended at the time for creating emergency evacuation zones for low-lying areas—including Lower Manhattan—and actually evacuating over three hundred thousand people in those areas. Yet this known risk in no way inspired a change in course for downtown development. Indeed, just one week after Irene, at the official unveiling of the “new Lower Manhattan” for the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the only reference to the storm was Mayor Bloomberg’s assurance that it would have “no impact” on rebuilding. Speaking at a Wall Street breakfast sponsored by the real-estate-backed Association for a Better New York, the mayor proudly promised the continued construction of waterfront towers “come hell or high water” (Taylor 2011). Additional relationships between Sandy and 9/11 were revealed in the coming days, weeks, and months, as the preexisting uneven landscape of risk vs. resiliency—worsened by redevelopment following 9/11, as well as by the 2008 financial meltdown—enabled Sandy to have such devastating and starkly uneven economic, human, and environmental impacts. The “new” Lower Manhattan— heavily insured, with superior infrastructure, and more politically connected than ever—was able to withstand the storm’s initial impact better than most, and then repair and rebuild in what seemed like lightning speed. Some fared better than others—illustrated famously when the only building on the Lower Manhattan skyline to stay lit on the night of the storm was the new Goldman Sachs tower (a leading recipient of post-9/11 Liberty Bonds and Community Development Block Grants). Nonetheless, with some notable exceptions, the downtown area was to get essential services like electricity, heat, and hot water back within days, and 99 percent of its commercial, residential, hotel, and retail inventory “back to business” within weeks (Downtown Alliance 2013). This stood in stark contrast with equally inundated parts of the Lower East Side and Chinatown, as well as Red Hook, Coney Island, Far Rockaway, parts of the South Bronx and Queens, and the North Shore of Staten Island.9 For these low- and middle-income, racially diverse neighborhoods, with high concentrations of industry and public housing and far less by way of private resources or political clout, the response by FEMA and city agencies was woefully inadequate. Thus neighborhoods remained flooded, schools and clinics stayed closed; apartments and businesses were without light, heat, or working plumbing; and people remained in buildings with serious structural damage and mold contamination, for weeks and often months. The extreme race, class, and geographic disparities created a profound shock that defied local comparison, even to 9/11. As Red Hook public housing resident Toni Khadijah James put it, speaking a month after the storm: “This is our Katrina” (Pinto 2012). New York City also seemed poised for a repeat of Katrina—and 9/11—when it came to the longer-term period of uneven redevelopment. Exhibit A was

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“Build It Back,” the city’s rebuilding program for storm-damaged homes and communities. The Bloomberg administration, seeking to “harness private sector tools,” create a “template for modern disaster response,” and combat the “waste and corruption” seen with rebuilding after Katrina, hired the business advisers Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to design the program (Kastoun and Marcil 2014). However, as a report by the New York Times followed by an investigation by the New York City Comptroller’s Office revealed, the flaws of this program were Katrina-level, and “mired the program by design” (Buettner and Chen 2014; D. Chen 2015). BCG’s expensive consultants, disconnected from the local context, hired inexperienced and untrained temporary workers, paid contractors up-front so that they had a disincentive to make repairs, diverted funds to projects unrelated to urgent housing needs, and all the while were subject to no oversight from the city. Almost two years after the storm, “devastated homeowners were stuck in an application process that was overdesigned and undermanaged to such a degree that . . . not a single one of the 20,000 homeowners who applied for help rebuilding their homes in the city had seen work begin,” despite hundreds of millions of dollars in federal money waiting to be used (Buettner and Chen 2014).10 As in New Orleans after Katrina, those with private insurance or enough cash reserves were more likely to stick it out or fix storm-damaged homes themselves, while low- to moderate-income homeowners were more likely to abandon homes or stay put living in dangerous conditions, while potentially suffering long-term consequences. Had it been a repeat of Katrina, however, this would have been the end of the story. Yet starting in mid 2014, Build It Back was overhauled. The city was put in charge of application processing and the hiring of trained, unionized trades people and aid workers, many from the same communities being rebuilt. Within a year the city handled 80 percent of outstanding cases, with the remainder due to be closed by the end of 2016. Some might say the ultimate success of the program was due to the new, progressive, pro-labor Mayor Bill de Blasio, sworn into office on January 1, 2014. Yet crucial to the language and priorities of de Blasio’s approach to “a just rebuilding” and “social resiliency,” and indeed to his mayoral victory, were the visionary and powerful coalitions that formed, in the aftermath of the storm, among low-income people in the flood zone.11 These coalitions included AJR, the Alliance for a Just Rebuilding, which grew out of the labor-community alliance ALIGN, as well as new coalitions within labor itself that formed among the unions charged with the dirty and dangerous work of cleaning up after Hurricane Sandy. Workers, many from storm-damaged homes themselves, and putting in sixteen-hour days, were out “repairing and clearing roads and bridges, restoring phone service, turning the lights back on, getting the subway lines back on track, repairing homes, operating hotels where families are taking refuge from their flooded neighborhoods, and nursing injured

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survivors back to health. . . . And that’s to say nothing of the unionized police officers and firefighters who, as in Staten Island, seem to be stationed on every corner in zones with heavy damage” (Shapiro 2012). New coalitions within labor included alliances between unions like the transit workers and nurses, with long histories of political engagement, and the Laborers International Union, whose political culture was historically more conservative. Also instrumental was the Sandy Regional Assembly (SRA), which grew out of the New York Environmental Justice Alliance and Faith in New York, an interfaith federation. These coalitions combined existing political networks with groups that were newly formed or had never worked in coalition before, including neighborhood-based recovery assemblies, day-worker centers, university-based research centers, and Occupy Sandy collectives. As Matt Ryan, executive director of ALIGN, put it of this combination of old and new: “There were some relationships that were there prior and were critical to getting things off the ground, but that quickly blossomed into something broader and more intersectional than we had ever seen before” (author interview, 2016). Moreover, as AJR’s lead organizer Nathalie Alegre put it—also quoted at the beginning of this volume—they were “geostrategic” in their coalition building, recognizing that the “city was now the factory” and that their success in building these intersectional alliances would be tied to their relationships on the ground in neighborhoods across the city (author interview, 2013). To the degree that the tide had finally begun to turn on inequitable redevelopment in the years post-Sandy, it was arguably the result of the work of these coalitions. It was also, I would argue further, a victory for the crisis organizers from 9/11 and Katrina, as well as Occupy Wall Street, from whom post-Sandy coalitions learned a great deal. As I will explore in this final section, Sandy’s coalitions learned and effectively applied three lessons from these earlier movements. This includes the crucial roles of the timing of organizing in the wake of disaster; of ensuring transparency and access to information about rebuilding; and of making big, visionary, structural demands for reshaping the post-crisis city.

Getting Political from the Jump Just two weeks following Hurricane Katrina’s devastating impact, an urgent letter was written by New York City–based civic groups who were active following 9/11 to those just getting started in New Orleans. It opened with this cautionary tale: The early design of relief and recovery programs will have a lasting impact on the fairness of the rebuilding effort. Structures and systems will get “cast in stone” very soon that can either promote broad civic participation in the rebuilding process or make the process very

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undemocratic. To the extent local groups are able, it is critical to be cohesive, to be vocal, and to get involved now, in the early stages of program design, so that groups representing local communities, people of color, low- and middle-income people, and small businesses can be an active part of the process. . . . In New York, many of us hesitated to criticize program design because we didn’t want to seem ungrateful or (in the post-9/11 world) divisive. As it turned out, however, when we got into debates later on, the early design of the programs limited our ability to influence the decision-making process. (Labor Community Advocacy Network to Rebuild New York 2005) The letter underscores the political and affectual dimensions of the postdisaster moment. It is a moment of trauma, grief, and often mourning, of solidarity and care, and sometimes, of the patriotism called for after 9/11. Such emotions, collectively held, can bring people together and form new relations of mutuality and hope. Yet, the authors note, getting vocal and politically involved in such a moment is challenging, making organizers appear “ungrateful” or “divisive,” disrupting the formation of new collectivities, and/or challenging nationalist tropes. These reservations, however, were not shared by the elite coalitions and powerful public-private partnerships making early decisions, often behind the scenes, on how to frame the crisis and target aid. Hence New York’s main message for New Orleans: time is truly of the essence for disaster politics. The immediate post-disaster moment, in which priorities and crisis frames are set, can also be ones of permanent disadvantage for disaster-impacted communities. Post-Katrina organizers did try to mobilize on this advice in the early weeks, yet were unable to sufficiently alter the elite-driven process of recovery and redevelopment that rapidly unfolded. Indeed, as we have seen, post-9/11 redevelopment was used as a model not only for New Orleans but the entire Gulf. After Hurricane Sandy, there was great concern among organizers that history not repeat itself again and, in particular, that they avoid “another Katrina.” While not necessarily having read the letter above, many had read The Shock Doctrine, remembered or were personally involved in organizing efforts after 9/11 and Katrina, as well as Occupy Wall Street, and had teach-ins with former organizers to learn more about what they were up against. Thus, Matt Ryan stated that the “number one concern” amongst AJR organizers post-Sandy was “to move extremely quickly.” Ryan acknowledged that “this may not seem revolutionary” but went against the methodical practice of many organizers, as well as the emotionally raw state of many communities. Now they realized what mattered was to frame the post-crisis debate as soon as possible. As Ryan explained,

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After Sandy, and seeing what happened after Katrina, we realized we had to move very quickly because if we don’t someone else will seize the narrative and we cede space for someone else’s political agenda to take hold. And then we’re constantly going to be behind the curve, when from the jump we understand that we don’t have the same power, particularly up against real estate in New York. We need to try to wage this fight in a territory that will be most advantageous to ourselves, which frankly, is more in our ability to control the narrative. If we did it all behind the scenes we would have a tougher time. We knew this was what opposing forces were doing, very quickly, trying to implement their plan. It was significant that AJR, like the SRA, was savvy about whom they were “up against” in terms of the simultaneous effort by real estate–backed coalitions to frame the crisis in their own terms (focused again on the financial district of Lower Manhattan). They recognized that these were “opposing forces” whose strategy was and had been to work behind the scenes. They also anticipated the extensive national media coverage they would be getting before the news cycle moved on, and their relative advantage in this arena as the media sought “human interest” coverage of the disaster. As Ryan continued: “We knew we’d receive a huge amount of media attention and that there’d be a national eye on this, and that that could be an opportunity for us to build power.” Thus both AJR and SRA organized their own large events in the weeks after the storm, to educate their members on what was at stake for public housing residents, workers, and vulnerable communities in the recovery efforts, and to seize the spotlight to define the crisis in their own terms.

Demanding Transparency Taking a page from the post-9/11 and Katrina playbook, a key goal of this early activism was greater transparency in the distribution of aid. For earlier generations of crisis organizers, getting basic information about aid became an all-consuming and often hopeless pursuit. The Labor Community Advocacy Network, founded by the good-government watchdog group Good Jobs New York, created Reconstruction Watch after 9/11, emulated by Gulf Reconstruction Watch after Katrina. Like fiscal detectives, these dogged groups provided some of the only reliable information for the public on basic questions about the sources, amounts, and recipients of billions of dollars in public funding. They uncovered major conflicts of interest in how the well-connected board members on the LMDC and Louisiana Recovery Authority disbursed funds. They showed the insuperable hurdles for those seeking funds for basic community needs,

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the dismissal of thousands of claims, and whose claims were being dismissed. But they were ultimately powerless to get any true accountability out of these public-private partnerships, whose obstructionism was legally sanctioned given the above-mentioned waivers to “public oversight” gained early on. Thus, organizers described the limited number of “public hearings” the agencies actually held as Kafkaesque affairs, in which board members would recuse themselves multiple times as their own projects were given grants, public comment was eliminated by over-packing the agenda, and dissent went unrecorded. Bettina Damiani, director of Reconstruction Watch, recalled the creative if ultimately futile tactics they devised to speak out at LMDC’s post-9/11 hearings: “We would sneak in sheets in our handbags that we would hold up throughout the meeting saying ‘Build Our Community!’ But if you look at the minutes it’s like we were not even there. So making them even feel accountable was like a herculean task. Now it is almost 10 years later and we’re all still like, ‘so where is that money?’ ” This herculean task resulted in major burnout: having devoted years of time and energy to simply finding data, many gave up. Initially, it seemed post-Sandy organizers might face similar challenges, if not worse. Two months after the storm, Damiani bemoaned the alphabet soup of federal and state relief agencies, all with different mandates, and many with few staff people answering phones or even offices to contact. She said she felt ironically some “nostalgia” for the LMDC: “at least they had one address, and held public hearings, even if our voices weren’t heard.”12 Yet while it was true that the Bloomberg administration, with the aid of BCG, had helped establish an opaque bureaucracy that denied or was unable to process the vast majority of claims, the months post-Sandy would also be different: organizers could now track this waste and inaction relatively easily and with considerable accuracy. In a win for their early organizing strategy in appealing to Bloomberg’s appreciation for “big data” and tech-driven transparency, AJR and SRA successfully lobbied for legislation that ensured data on reconstruction contracts be made publicly accessible, easily interpretable, and available for download and sharing rather than proprietary (Neubauer 2013). This was done through the city-run website Sandy Tracker. Elizabeth Bird at Good Jobs NY (GJNY) noted that Sandy Tracker’s quick appearance was somewhat attributable to changes at higher scales: the federal-level embrace of new technology, plus a more democratic ethos with the transition from the Bush to the Obama administration. Thus three months prior to Sandy Tracker’s release, it had become possible to track in broad terms how billions in reconstruction monies were being spent through the federal website USAspending.gov. But AJR, in consultation with GJNY, recognized that more fine-grained local analysis would be crucial to their political efforts in relation to the Build It Back program, and also that strong legislation would be necessary to ensure

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access and usability. Suddenly, the renegade reports of reconstruction watchdogs were rendered obsolete. Bird and others remained vigilant but welcomed this obsolescence. Organizers at last could focus on organizing.

Big Demands By rapidly mobilizing to control the narrative and ensure transparency, post-Sandy coalitions could pursue a larger goal. In much the same way as previous post-disaster organizers, but more effectively, they sought to shift the narrative from short-term recovery toward long-term, structural goals. In so doing, they sought to channel the rare confluence of aid money and public concern into something transformative: to level the divided urban landscapes of risk and poverty versus resiliency and wealth. As Ryan of AJR put it, One of the immediate things that we were thinking was this should not be seen as a moment for humanitarian aid and service support for New York only, but both that and an opportunity for rebuilding communities and for really committing to justice long-term. People were going to understand this as a tragedy no matter what. How they respond can either be in sort of a “let’s give money and make sure people have blankets and temporary shelter.” Or if we do a good job organizing perhaps people can see this as exposing inequities and structural problems that were there before the storm. . . . So you know it’s that moment of recognizing everyone cares right now. You don’t often get that in social justice organizing. It usually is a little more polarized from the jump. So everyone cares—but we’ve got to work in a way to help build a more common analysis and hopefully a broader will to support change. That this common analysis was lacking at city hall became clear when Mayor Bloomberg proposed his Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency (SIRR), a $20 billion plan to increase the resilience of infrastructure and buildings citywide in the face of climate change and sea level rise.13 Within a month SRA released its critiques of the plan, endorsed by AJR and more than thirty other community and labor groups. Bloomberg’s SIRR was fundamentally a technology and real estate–driven intervention. Whatever flood control systems created would make areas like the “New Lower Manhattan” appear safe for investment and habitation, yet simultaneously mask the considerable risks produced by privileging high-end waterfront development. This led to a deeper concern with the plan: however state-of-the-art, a technological fix would not build real resilience, since it would not address the broader social and environmental inequalities

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that increase vulnerability and lay the ground for future crisis (Sandy Regional Assembly 2013b). Meanwhile, AJR and SRA recognized that Bloomberg was a lame duck, his third term in office over within months, and that the mayoral election was an opportunity to “turn the tide” for the next administration. Thus, on July 30, 2013—one month after SIRR’s release and a day before the march and news conference mentioned above—they held a candidates assembly, attended by fourteen hundred of their members and widely covered in the media. Here both organizations presented their “people’s agenda” for housing, jobs, sustainability, and community engagement, getting all the candidates “on the record” as being in support of their platform, or not (ALIGN 2013). After strong supporter de Blasio won the Democratic primary, he then joined the two groups in visiting Far Rockaway and meeting with families impacted by the storm, making an additional commitment to the people’s agenda. Finally, Ryan notes, the coalitions were “able to get a very strong commitment from the mayor when he came into office.” This entailed rejecting both the SIRR and Build It Back approach of the Bloomberg era, and launching a rebuilding program that targeted job and training opportunities for union workers and thousands of the poorest Sandy-impacted residents, and included long-needed repairs to public housing as a major part of the city’s long-term resiliency investments. In dollar terms, Ryan notes, “we’re talking well over $1 billion that’s being shaped by the work of the AJR” and going into the communities both hardest hit and most historically disadvantaged. One element, however, was missing from AJR’s and SRA’s original agendas: affordable housing. There were a number of wins early on in temporary support for renters and expanding these to the undocumented. But in the current context in New York City, as of this writing, in which housing prices and rent burdens are escalating citywide, organizers are recognizing that the fruits of their organizing may have paradoxically exacerbated the problem. Similar to what occurred in Chinatown and the Financial District after 9/11 and much of New Orleans after Katrina, some of the most intense financial speculation is happening in formerly devalued areas into which redevelopment funds flowed for new infrastructure, home repairs, resiliency, and economic development. In the case of New York this includes the Lower East Side, Red Hook, and the Rockaways—all neighborhoods in which AJR and SRA members live and organized, and that now are seeing some of the most rapid gentrification in the city. Thus, as Matt Ryan reflected, organizers find themselves asking: “Does a disaster need to lead to displacement over time? And how do you maintain a city that’s affordable for all people, and working people having a place in long-term?” A final lesson, it seems, gained from the limitations coalitions like AJR found around housing, was the need to move beyond structural demands to demands for the right to the (post-crisis) city.

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Conclusion: New Solidarities beyond the Crisis Moment I have argued in this chapter that multiple forms of disaster, from terrorist attacks to hurricanes, and the periods of recovery and redevelopment that follow, create messy political environments of potentially radical rupture, in which different transformative outcomes become possible. These ruptures can be used to reestablish and extend power, profit, and control of urban space, with uneven redevelopment becoming “the disaster inside the disaster,” leaving its devastating mark for years after the event. The post-crisis urbanization process, involving massive new investments as well as legal forms of dispossession, can catalyze deeper and wider forms of uneven spatial development and displacement than those directly resulting from the catastrophic event itself. But in addition, by exposing deep-rooted inequity across the urban landscape, and creating “time out of time” in which exceptional emotions and politics reign, disasters have the capacity, albeit brief, to inspire new scales and strategies of grassroots organizing. We see newly formed coalitions transcend old boundaries of issue, identity, and neighborhood and strive to change the course of uneven redevelopment locally and citywide. And we see a resurgence of right-to-the-city politics, critical analysis of past urban planning and policy decisions, and a spark to people’s capacity to imagine a more just and sustainable urban future. Crisis organizing has its victories and limits, and is in the end always in process, moving beyond and between crisis moments. Post-Sandy organizers learned that to achieve their transformational goals they first had to “turn the tide” of dominant approaches to recovery and redevelopment established in cities like New York and New Orleans. They recognized they had to act more quickly to shape the narrative, oppose elite plans, and build power. They had to gain access to information about aid and control over how knowledge of the rebuilding was being produced. They had to direct the public concern, media attention, and rare federal funding of the crisis moment toward advancing a long-term structural agenda that included big demands for material needs and inclusive process. Visionary moments of post-disaster are, perhaps by definition, impossible to sustain. The emotional habitus of urgency and desire for collectivity wanes, often replaced by crisis fatigue. People seek a return to normalcy. And nonprofits working with low-income communities cannot afford to keep it up. As an administrator at University Settlement, a Lower East Side aid agency that did groundbreaking post-9/11 crisis organizing, recalled: “[After two years] we had zero resources for all this advocacy work, and frankly we had to turn our organizing energies to more immediate issues, such as welfare and minimum wage rate increases, and local housing fights” (e-mail correspondence with the author, August 9, 2013).

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Large alliances with more resources to continue this work beyond the crisis moment also face a decision. As Matt Ryan put it: “Do we extend the AJR, or do we try to pivot and say we don’t always want to be in this recovery framework?” Much like the Environmental Justice Alliance, which channeled the work of the Sandy Regional Assembly into citywide climate justice work, ALIGN chose to phase out AJR and to create in its place Climate Works for All. These were the same groups from AJR, but now doing regional class analyses of greenhouse gas emissions, building a green jobs agenda that includes public transit, and transforming the resiliency effort into “a more holistic vision,” marshaling public investments to benefit poor and working-class communities. Yet organizers came to the realization that an ongoing crisis—of unaffordable housing, evictions, and displacement—is linked in part to these victories. The same areas that post-Sandy coalitions remediated for mold and got union workers to rebuild are now new targets of gentrification and displacement—like the Rockaways—or being pushed into the final stages of exclusionary development—like Chinatown and the Lower East Side, where the University Settlement has worked for over a century. Once pushed to the urban fringe, low-income residents from these areas may be thought of not as disaster refugees, but redevelopment evictees. Meanwhile, rebuilding and sustainability policies that did not include sufficient affordable housing will have reproduced uneven landscapes of risk and resiliency, and made the city as a whole more unequal and unsustainable. Thus a lesson for organizers could be to not only strengthen the resources necessary to support political work beyond the crisis moment, but also to apply crisis frames to broader right-to-the-city organizing.

7 THE OTHER LOW-CARBON PROTAGONISTS Poor People’s Movements and Climate Politics in São Paulo Daniel Aldana Cohen

In the São Paulo of the late 2000s, two civil society projects rose to prominence. Each aimed to make a brutal city more humane and livable for its residents, starting with the downtown core. But each group framed its efforts in different ways and pursued its goals using different methods. While the city’s housing movement occupied vacant buildings to pressure state actors to build up affordable housing and democratize urban planning, green policy elites worked closely with city managers on a downtown revitalization plan that would model a more intelligently dense, and hence lower-carbon, style of urbanism. Groups that might have cooperated in building a more democratic and more energy-efficient city ended up on opposite sides of a great battle over how the city would be transformed. Years later, these two camps tentatively explored working together. How did this estrangement take hold? And why is there now a tentative basis for cooperation?

This chapter is based on dissertation research and a journal article under review and duplicates some of the arguments and data found there. My thanks to this volume’s editors and anonymous reviewers for comments and assistance in refining the argument. I thank Craig Calhoun, Gianpaolo Baiochhi, Neil Brenner, Eric Klinenberg, Jeff Manza, Steven Lukes, Timmons Roberts, Vivek Chibber, Jeff Goodwin, Colin Jerolmack, Matthew Connelly, and James Fleming, as well as the members of NYU’s Economic and Political Sociology Workshop for feedback on earlier versions of this work. I also thank Eduardo Marques and the Centro de Estudos da Metropóle in São Paulo for hosting me during part of my fieldwork, and Mariana Fix, Ruy Braga, João Seitte Whitaker, Angela Alonso, and Daniel Sanfelici for their intellectual generosity and insights while I conducted fieldwork in São Paulo. And thanks to my informants and interviewees, who were extraordinarily generous with their time and attention. My fieldwork in São Paulo was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 140

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There is more to this case than a one-off puzzle of working-class and professional-class ships passing in the night. For São Paulo’s developments speak to a broader puzzle in accounts of urban ecological politics: Why is the implementation of urgently needed, apparently broadly beneficial, low-carbon policies, passed by city governments, stagnating in the real world (Bulkeley 2011)? The stakes are high. As the planet warms, and as the pressure on all levels of government to slash heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions grows, urban politics will increasingly be structured by the logics of climate politics. The question is less whether urban regions manage to shrink their carbon footprints at all; rather, what is up for grabs is how fast they slash emissions, and who wins and who loses from the policies that are ultimately implemented. Whose consumption will be curbed to keep a lid on emissions? There can be no success in “right to the city” struggles that is not, simultaneously, a success in democratically decarbonizing urban life. Once we realize that several core stakes of right-to-the-city struggles—especially housing, transit, and land use—are the also the core stakes of low-carbon urbanism, we see that it is no longer possible (or desirable) to deeply distinguish social from environmental politics (Cohen 2015). São Paulo is a good place to work through our f  ledgling future, because in many ways, its dynamics reflect worldwide trends among large, relatively prosperous cities of the North and South. As has happened elsewhere with big cities undergoing deindustrialization and in the broader neoliberal context, São Paulo’s housing and labor markets have polarized, with local inequality increasing even as countrywide it has gone down. Housing insecurity there has increased massively since the late 1970s, when 1 percent of the population lived in informal, illegal settlements; today, the rate hovers around 30 percent. The explosion in these numbers greatly outpaces the far more modest rate of migration to the city over the course of those decades. It is the result, instead, of rising rents and building abandonment downtown, and the degradation of the labor market across the city (UN-HABITAT 2010). And as congestion has increased, São Paulo’s poor have been pushed farther and farther from the job-rich downtown, forced to endure increasingly long and painful commutes by bus. Investments in the built environment, including transit, overwhelmingly favored private automobiles, even as the great majority of commuters continued to travel by public transit (Rolnik and Klintowitz 2011). It is no accident that in June 2013, when massive protests demanding higher-quality and more affordable transportation broke out across Brazil, the greatest numbers mobilized in São Paulo. Meanwhile, again reflecting a global trend, affluent professionals are moving into São Paulo’s downtown core, lured by developers working with city governments. This has coincided with professional-class-rooted civil society groups

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joining campaigns to improve the quality of central areas’ urban amenities; these campaigns have increasingly taken on ecological themes, from the local environment to global climate change. Green policy elites have argued that cities should be increasing density, reducing car use, and building larger and more energy-efficient buildings, thus shrinking carbon footprints and slowing global warming while boosting their economic vitality and the quality of life of their citizens. In the late 2000s, São Paulo was one of the first global cities whose municipal government, working with environmental groups, passed an ambitious low-carbon policy. Countless other cities have since followed. Housing-oriented, working-class movements, flying the banner of the right to the city, have also been active in contesting the shape of the city’s center, again reflecting global trends. Fighting back against growing inequalities in labor and housing markets, they have demanded higher-quality public services, more public transit, and especially more centrally located affordable housing—in sum, another version of a smart densification agenda. This agenda would also slash carbon emissions, although for the most part housing-oriented movements have not embraced environmentalist rhetoric. This issue of whether, and how, to understand working-class urban projects as ecologically beneficial is central. So before introducing the São Paulo case, I propose an encompassing reconceptualization of urban ecological politics.

Ecologies Green and Gray, Luxury and Democratic In the 2000s, some of the world’s biggest, richest cities decided to cut their carbon emissions. Ken Livingstone, elected London’s mayor in 2000, founded a global network and then merged it with Present Bill Clinton’s urban climate initiative to create the C40 Large Cities Leadership Network. New York, Toronto, São Paulo, and others would soon seize leading roles in the C40. In each case, cities took up the argument that intelligent densification involving housing, transit, and land use could at once reduce emissions, increase economic dynamism, and improve residents’ quality of life (Greenberg 2015; Seto 2014). How were this agenda’s social and ecological dimensions connected? Let us first label the density-based, emissions-cutting interventions gray ecologies. These “gray” interventions, based in infrastructure and the built environment, yield ecological benefits without looking like typical “green” environmentalist interventions, like ponds, parks, or tree-lined streets. Gray ecologies are good for the environment because they produce little pollution, which is why environmentalists increasingly advocate compact city urbanism.

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We distinguish these gray ecologies from more familiar features of urban greening, or green ecologies. While the principal virtue of the former lies in reducing (often indirectly) our pollution and resource use, green ecologies’ principal ecological contribution is improving the quality of our air, water, and sense of well-being. I place the two ecologies on a continuum, since in practice projects and developments often contain elements of each. From a social perspective we can understand each kind of ecology in terms of what the urbanist Manuel Castells has termed collective consumption—the state-mediated provision of public services, like housing, transit, and parks (Castells 1977, 1983, 2002; Kowarick 2000). The term once implied universalist services aimed at the broad majority of the population. But in the contemporary, neoliberal period, state intervention has been inverted. Direct grants, subsidies, and public services, as well as tax breaks and other incentives, are now commonly targeted toward business and elites, and the first priority is improving the everyday life of the professional class. This mode of governance and urban economic development has led to the rise of what I term luxury ecologies, denoting projects and developments aimed principally at benefiting the professional class and associated businesses, especially finance, real estate, and the firms that assist and surround these (the so-called “creative” sectors). The term “luxury” refers both to the beneficiaries of individual groups and projects, and to the broader luxury city model notoriously pioneered by New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg (Brash 2011). Luxury ecologies have fit the framework of urban neoliberalism; looking ahead, as pressures to slash emissions increase, we should expect increasing convergence between neoliberal urbanism and luxury ecologies. In contrast, we can term ecologically inflected projects and developments targeting a city’s broad majorities democratic ecologies, in reference both to their universalistic orientation and the short-term imperative of helping those in greatest need. Democratic ecologies recall a more social democratic form of urbanism; looking ahead, they are likely to converge more and more explicitly with the right-to-the-city agenda. (For examples, see figure 7.1.) According to this framework, urban politics in general, including struggles for the right to the city, are increasingly (and increasingly explicitly) dominated by the tension between luxury and democratic ecologies. This requires that analysts look beneath the surface of who is normally labeled as an urban environmental (and climate) actor. Looking beyond everyday labels is crucial. Few residents of São Paulo (or other cities) complain in everyday life about the atmosphere’s concentration of carbon dioxide. For ordinary residents, competing visions and politics of housing and

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LUXURY (targeted benefits mostly to professional class) High value condo or office high-rise

Private gardens and swimming pools

GREEN (looks and feels like nature; reduces impact of pollution)

Recreational bike lanes Community gardens

Parks in workingclass area

GRAY (energy efficient Subway amenity; reduces indirect Bus rapid transit production lanes of pollution)

Affordable housing near jobs and services

DEMOCRATIC (universalist benefits to broad majority) FIGURE 7.1.  Heuristic grid, with examples. In practice, the placement of any particular project or development will depend on local context.

transit are more likely to be front-of-mind. And yet, since everyone’s actions have ecological consequences, we should understand everyone as an ecological actor, just as we treat everyone as an economic actor. São Paulo’s (and indeed every city’s) climate politics coincide with, at minimum, the giant questions of who will be housed, when, where, and how; the priorities and quantities of investment into public transit; how flood and rainwater defense will be organized; which broader economic development strategies will aggregate all the individual pieces of socio-ecological policy; and so on. Green policy elites and scholars often understate the social implications of this situation (Wachsmuth, Cohen, and Angelo 2016). But major social conflict is inevitable around green and gray ecologies because their realization implicates the core interests of all urban residents. The social realm of climate policy making may be small. Its social ramifications, however, are huge. Among these is how we understand prospective political alliances. Both my analytic framework and empirical findings suggest that there is a possible alliance between segments of the professional class and the broad working class around intelligent, low-carbon, affordable and accessible densification—in short, democratic gray ecologies. I am arguing that the climate crisis, and the fact that efficient low-carbon urbanism tends toward egalitarianism (or its undesirable opposite, a vicious eco-apartheid), could ultimately drive some green policy elites and some

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of their professional-class constituency to support a right-to-the-city agenda if it is (as I argue) the best bet to slash carbon emissions. In terms of the analogy of the city as a factory, this recalls something like the tense, uneasy, but productive class alliances involved in the New Deal, and especially during the subsequent war economy. Putting such emphasis on carbon probably seems far-fetched. But in my view, progressive scholars and thinkers have, for the most part, simply not reckoned with how quickly and intensely the climate crisis will dominate our politics, along with the dangers and opportunities that this fact represents (see Klein 2014; Cohen 2015). Since prosperous areas will need to cut emissions by 100 percent by the mid-2030s to prevent catastrophe (Anderson 2015), struggling with those goals is bound to dominate politics. Looking ahead, it is not in abstract historical time that the broad right-to-the-city movement will develop, but in the crisis time of growing pressures to slash carbon emissions and in the context of increasing extreme weather events (Cohen 2016; Gotham and Greenberg 2014). We must study the present in terms of how it is changing in the face of new pressures. My account of the São Paulo case is based on primary and secondary data gathered during thirteen months of fieldwork, undertaken in several waves between June 2010 and May 2015. I conducted semi-structured interviews with fifty-five key government actors, green policy elites, and poor people’s movements’ leaders—largely housing-focused.1 I spent dozens of hours observing public political meetings and events. And I have collected evidence from secondary sources, including newspapers and magazines; academic articles, reports, and graduate theses; policy documents provided by interviewees or accessed in public (and online) archives; and records of political meetings. In what follows, I introduce the São Paulo case, outline its leading players, and explain its low-carbon policy stagnation by tracing the estrangement of poor people’s movements and green policy elites. I then show how a recently elected center-left government has brought elements of these groups back into dialogue.

Climate Politics in São Paulo An Exemplary Case Metro São Paulo has twenty million inhabitants; municipal São Paulo, eleven million. Every global city is unique. Still, in a warming world characterized by planetary urbanization (Brenner 2014), São Paulo resembles other big cities in several ways. It suffers from cities’ typical vulnerability to extreme weather. Already-severe seasonal flooding—from swelling rivers and rainwater runoff—will worsen with global warming, further paralyzing traffic, cutting off

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electricity, and sometimes killing residents (Nobre 2010). Drought and water shortages have also lately plagued the region (Cohen 2016). Also like cities worldwide, São Paulo suffers from paralyzing congestion—only worse. A recent study found that average commutes were longer in metro São Paulo than in nineteen of twenty comparable cities worldwide (Pereira and Schwanen 2013). Vehicles cause most of São Paulo’s greenhouse gas emissions (Prefeitura do Município de São Paulo 2005). Other effects of cars’ pollution are less abstract. An autopsy technician has said that pollution is now so bad, he can no longer tell from the lungs of the corpses on his table whether or not they were smokers (Burgierman 2011). Congestion results from the concentration of employment in central areas, while workers have been pushed into the metro region’s sprawling peripheries of low-slung homes they often had to build themselves. There is also the middle-class romance with the automobile; municipal São Paulo’s eleven million residents today own seven million cars, which clog city streets, while most residents ride the underfunded public transit system, mostly in overcrowded buses. City government is under pressure from all sides to improve central areas’ socio-ecological qualities. Yet there are starkly different programs for how to carry out this agenda, paired with competing visions of whose needs it should prioritize.

A Climate Law Enters the Picture One such agenda, developed by the 2005–2012 center-right mayoral regime, was to combine ecological policy making with a finance- and real-estate-oriented growth policy anchored in downtown redevelopment. São Paulo’s center-right mayor Gilberto Kassab strongly supported a climate law to this effect, which the city council passed with a unanimous vote in September 2009. The climate law’s headline target was an ambitious 30 percent reduction of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions (against a 2003 baseline) by 2012—that is, in just three years. This expectation was not realistic. But it was reasonable to expect that at least the city’s highest-profile, climate-linked projects would get off the ground, building political momentum for greater emissions reductions down the road. Of central interest here were the measures proposed to reorganize city life to reduce vehicle emissions. Strategies included policies to increase the quantity and the energy efficiency of public transit and to impose the concept of “compact city” planning on subsequent developments and redevelopments. The compact-city provision was no mere rhetorical flourish. In São Paulo, climate policy networks, including many with São Paulo offices, pressed this

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objective repeatedly to a receptive audience. It was at the 2007 C40 summit in New York City, where the conjoined virtues of density and carbon reductions were trumpeted by New York mayor Bloomberg, that São Paulo’s mayor Kassab decided that his city needed a climate law and demanded that his secretary of the environment, Eduardo Jorge, design one. The “compact city” clause harmonized with the administration’s already strong emphasis on densifying and revitalizing much of the city’s urban core. The devil would lie in the social detail of the climate law’s implementation, especially transit policy and downtown redevelopment. Success would depend on how climate-policy-linked projects related to housing movements, which were battling to implement their own vision for a more compact and efficient central São Paulo. Before I zoom in on these climate-linked battles, I pause to examine their protagonists.

A Tale of Two Compact-City Political Infrastructures Two political infrastructures of civil society stand out for their pursuit of a somewhat similar vision: more downtown housing, more public transit, greater economic development, and enhanced services distributed in the peripheries.2 Leading actors from each group pursued this agenda through the 2000s. But they never cooperated, nor saw each other as allies. One political infrastructure is the green policy elites. They understand themselves as environmentalists, often prioritizing greenhouse gas emissions reductions. They largely come from São Paulo’s professional (or in local terms,“middle”) class, attend a handful of elite universities, live in well-heeled neighborhoods, have traveled to North America and Europe, and work in networks with global (especially environmentalist) civil society. In the early 2000s (2000–2004) a small network of green policy elites worked with the leftist Workers’ Party’s (PT) mayoral regime. But when a center-right regime was elected and took power in 2005, environmentalists began to cooperate with the new administration, looking for ways to realign social and environmental priorities. Ultimately, environmental politics in the city came of age just as a new phase of city government-led neoliberal urban governance was taking shape. A second civil society political infrastructure has been composed of poor people’s movements, especially their most dynamic sector, housing movements. In a city with a housing deficit estimated at one million units, the movements have consistently advocated for more construction of affordable housing near jobs and services, especially the downtown core (Fundação Gaspar Garcia 2012). This demand was nested in a national campaign for “urban reform” and the right to the city.

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The movement’s leadership grew out of the broad ranks of its members—poor and working class, often lacking a home, often based in the periphery, often having migrated from the northeast, and darker-skinned than São Paulo’s light-skinned elite. Lead organizers have tended to work closely with academics, acquire graduate degrees, and travel internationally in leftist circuits, from regular occurrences like the World Social Forum to idiosyncratic exchanges, like ones organized from New York by the Pratt Institute and the Rosa Luxemburg Siftung. The housing movement support hub Apoio exemplifies this. Apoio is connected to the city’s most confrontational movements, but also works with foreign funders—especially the British Catholic charity CAFOD—on programming to raise awareness around housing and other social rights among working-class city residents, especially women. Overall, housing movements in São Paulo have sought to pressure and influence PT politicians, while supporting the party at election time. They differ from polite civil society most significantly in their confrontational tactic of occupying buildings to press their demands for more affordable housing. They frame occupations in terms of existing legislation and constitutional norms, including property’s obligation to fill a social function (often understood as a right to the city) laid out in the 1988 constitution; specification of this principle in the federal “Statute of the City” was passed under movement pressure in 2001. São Paulo’s housing movements cite the law, which in practice is rarely followed. Instead, there is regular police repression of housing movement activities (Fórum Centro Vivo 2006). Their organizing has required painful, grinding work. Two leading movements’ slogans are “Occupy, Resist, Build” and “Those Who Don’t Struggle, Die.” The anthropologist Teresa Caldeira (2000) has described São Paulo as a “city of walls,” with different social classes inhabiting divided spaces under the specter of violent crime, including rampant police violence. But intense class divisions, all on their own, cannot explain the estrangement of green policy elites and poor people’s housing movements. In São Paulo, many middle-class professionals have for decades been members and allies of radical left political projects led by the poor. The housing movements’ allies include well-known academics and young students from wealthy families. Like green policy elites, poor people’s movements have had extensive contacts within city government. If green policy elites chose not to work with housing movements at that time, this reflected not brute class interest, but a political decision based on a context where the center-right was wielding power. Yes, for some greens this was a more familiar political culture; but not for all, and not absolutely. Through the intermediary of the PT, green policy elites have also joined projects and developments—green and gray ecologies—that prioritized the collective consumption needs of the poor when the PT was in power, to a small extent from 2000 to 2004, and more extensively

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since 2013. Below, we explore the shifting contexts of the movements’ estrangement and rapprochement.

Carbon, Class, and the City Core In the early 2000s, it was the center-left Workers’ Party (PT) mayoral regime of Marta Suplicy that laid the foundation for São Paulo’s 2009 climate law. And yet, almost no one to whom I spoke recalled this history. I sketch it here because it reminds us of how fluid the link between social and climate politics can be, both in substance and in political labeling.

Transit—from Democratic to Luxury Ecologies Suplicy’s administration pursued several policies manifesting the “socioecological” orientation then circulating on the Brazilian left (see Hochstetler and Keck 2007). The administration passed clean air policies that persuaded the United Nations’ urban sustainability policy network, the ICLEI (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives), to relocate its Latin American office from Buenos Aires to São Paulo. Secretary of the Environment Adriano Diogo then arranged for a detailed audit of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions. The audit was completed in 2005, soon providing the informational baseline for the Kassab regime’s low-carbon policy making. Diogo also moved to build the city’s first biogas plant to slash methane emissions. Both Suplicy and Diogo contributed to ICLEI’s Portuguese-language climate policy newsletter, Conexão Clima. And the administration passed a pro-density master plan that used “socio-environmental” principles to guide its pro-density policies. Yet Suplicy’s administration never trumpeted, as such, her most effective low-carbon policy: a massive expansion and rationalization of bus service. In 2002, the administration introduced an electronic fare card to facilitate free transfers between buses, and discounted transfers to the subway system—a complex feat because buses were operated by private companies and the subway by the state level of government. The administration also poured cash and political capital into the construction of nearly one hundred kilometers of dedicated bus lanes, dramatically improving the mobility of the city’s poor in the face of middle-class opposition to the resulting construction work in (and increased accessibility to) their neighborhoods. In 2004 Suplicy was defeated in her reelection bid by center-right candidate José Serra, who was succeeded by his deputy Gilberto Kassab in 2006. Each of these center-right mayors worked closely with Secretary of the Environment

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Eduardo Jorge, who persuaded them to place ecological politics at the heart of their economic development agenda. Perhaps the most striking departure was the abandonment of bus service expansion as a priority, despite cars’ leading role in greenhouse gas emissions, and in other pollutants that damaged public health. Jorge, as environment secretary, lacked the direct jurisdiction over bus policy needed to push bus lanes through. But he could have used his prestige to advocate bus lane policy explicitly. He never did, despite making frequent broad critiques of the city’s car culture. Jorge did, however, support aggressive action to expand bicycle lanes—leading to the construction of two hundred kilometers of lanes in eight years, of which a plurality were categorized as “recreational.” In that period, the city constructed only twelve kilometers of dedicated bus lanes. In short, the transit policies of the Kassab regime represented a shift from democratic to luxury ecologies, and bus service stagnated as a result. Indeed, when street protests erupted all across Brazil in June 2013 to protest fare hikes, the greatest numbers mobilized in São Paulo (Maricato 2013). At the protests’ peak in late June, crowds numbered in the hundreds of thousands and combined middle- and working-class, white and black city residents. This mass outpouring of rage constituted a kind of accidental low-carbon urbanism, a cry for more democratic gray ecologies, as Naomi Klein (2014) has suggested. But in contrast to housing organizing, this outburst was almost entirely spontaneous. An organizer of the Free Fare Movement that organized the protests told me that in the months leading up to the protests, about forty activists would attend weekly meetings. In recent years in São Paulo, transit activism has not manifested the kind of lasting social movement infrastructure at the core of the housing movement. If the June Days, as they are known, constituted a pivotal and transformative event in demonstrating the capacity for multi-class outrage over collective consumption, they did not herald a major new organizing force in the city. If anything, it was the traditional housing movements that ultimately grew the most in the long aftermath of those protests (Cohen 2016).

Nova Luz and the Housing Question—Luxury Ecology from Above By the 2000s, downtown São Paulo seemed to be emerging from a long decline, its streets the sites of a chaotic mix of leading business and governmental functions, services and commerce (much of it informal), elite cultural institutions, and a great deal of poverty and abandonment. In the early 2000s, it was estimated that 17 percent of the housing units downtown were abandoned (Bomfim 2004, 66). Poor families organized by housing movements would break in and squat, announcing their presence by draping movement flags out windows.

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But the movements were not alone in seeking to improve the center’s socio-ecological qualities. In keeping with global trends, the São Paulo real estate sector encouraged young professionals’ changing taste in lifestyle by focusing attention on the historical center’s still-vital services and infrastructures, degraded building stock, and fledgling cultural capital. The goal was to transform São Paulo into a “global city” like New York, London, or Paris (Fix 2007). This vision, embraced by the center-right Serra and Kassab regimes, would combine economic development with an increasingly prominent ecological program. The immediate target was an area near a train station called Luz, where the city had encouraged the construction of new museums and a concert hall. The administration used middle-class fears of crime and degradation, crystallized in the popular image of a tangle of streets known as crackolandia, or crack-land, to justify a redevelopment project called Nova Luz (new light). The idea was to implant in a small area a European-style downtown, but dominated by a postindustrial “creative” sector of large tech companies, advertising and marketing firms, and a large cultural nonprofit. Some historic buildings would be restored, others demolished and replaced. The plan’s ecological dimensions kept growing. After all, Kassab had asked Jorge to draft a low-carbon plan after they had visited New York in 2007, where Bloomberg had celebrated the confluence of central city revitalizations (as he understood them) and low-carbon, gray ecologies achieved via density. And within Jorge’s green secretariat, there was a great deal of interest in leveraging densification to shrink the city’s carbon footprint. But getting Nova Luz built would cost a lot of money and displace residents and businesses that preferred to stay. The city government, stymied by opposition, decided to outsource the right to expropriate properties in the area to private companies. This subcontracting of a traditionally public function galvanized opposition. Housing movements and an association of small shopkeepers worked together to block the redevelopment. The groups distrusted government promises of new affordable housing, promises that in similar projects elsewhere had been broken. Neither the city’s economic development planners nor environmentalists were able to assuage these concerns. Remarkably, even historically progressive urban policy makers in the environmental secretariat, like the green secretary Jorge, refused to recognize the legitimacy of social movement opposition to the plan. In Jorge’s comments recorded at public meetings, he celebrated Nova Luz’s ecological potential, lamented the existing poverty, argued that displacing current residents into far-flung favelas would be “illogical, inefficient, and inhuman,” and made no mention of organized movements of the poor (“Ata Da 25a Reunião Plenária Extraordinaria” 2011). Yet one might argue these green advocates were the ones lacking vision. While David Harvey has argued that the right to the city includes both a “right of access

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to what already exists” and “a right to change [the city] after our heart’s desire” (Weinstein and Ren 2009), green policy elites in São Paulo seemed willing, at most, to engage with the right to access of the generic poor. Working-class social movements’ right to change the city, with all the political organization and the distinctive normative registers that this entailed, was never taken seriously. Indeed, São Paulo’s housing movements had been articulating an alternative project for the downtown, developed in parallel to Nova Luz. We will see that it was not just an abstract desire for justice that green policy elites ignored, but a concrete, compelling, and well-known project for a more egalitarian and democratic São Paulo, a project equally consistent with low-carbon objectives.

Demanding a Democratic Center On March 8, 1997, one of São Paulo’s housing groups conducted the city’s first large-scale occupation of a downtown building; this set off waves of occupations throughout the 2000s (Earle 2012). As federal and municipal law in the early 2000s mandated that city government guarantee property’s “social function” by increasing taxes on abandoned buildings, and then seizing them for social housing, the occupations framed themselves as bottom-up accelerators of established legal norms. At the turn of the century, a multi-class coalition organized in connection with the downtown housing movements, called the Forum for a Living Center, would bring this broader perspective to public attention in São Paulo. In 2000, the forum released a twelve-point platform for the “democratization of the city center,” including calls for the defense of property’s social function, against its capture by real estate speculation, and for popular, participatory housing policies for central areas (Fórum Centro Vivo 2006, 1–2). Four years later, their coalition released a manifesto “for a living center” to articulate an alternative to the “so-called ‘revitalization of the center’ that is in fashion” (Fórum Centro Vivo 2004). In one especially high-profile occupation, there was an attempt to prefigure housing movements’ vision of their own success. Just two blocks from the planned Nova Luz’s edge, a twenty-three-story building on Avenida Prestes Maia was occupied by hundreds of families, many organized through a close affiliate of Apoio. This was South America’s largest squat. Allied intellectuals helped build sophisticated cultural spaces inside, including a library of thousands of volumes. The occupation was chronicled by leading newspapers, documentaries by domestic and foreign filmmakers, BBC reports, academic articles and theses, and a feature article in Rolling Stone Brasil. The occupation would undergo a series of interruptions and revivals. But the most powerful break came in mid-2007. São Paulo’s mayor, Kassab, had just attended the April C40 summit in New York, where Mayor Bloomberg and others enthusiastically celebrated the densification of city cores as a critical element of

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low-carbon urbanism. At the summit’s close, Kassab ordered Jorge to begin the process of drafting climate legislation. Weeks later, Kassab had the Prestes Maia occupiers evicted. The city did arrange housing for many of the occupiers—but mostly in the city’s most peripheral areas. The city refused the occupiers’ central demand that the city obey prevailing laws and convert a mass of abandoned buildings into social housing. Meanwhile, the coalition of housing movement activists, small shopkeepers, and the PT had Nova Luz’s expropriation efforts suspended in the courts. They also made it an electoral issue. PT mayor Fernando Haddad, elected with support from housing movements, took office in January 2013 and canceled Nova Luz for good. São Paulo’s poor, working class, and small shopkeepers demonstrated the power of a multi-class alliance fighting for a right to the city. And through their projects in and around the Prestes Maia occupation, they prefigured an alternative, long-term model for a culturally vibrant and egalitarian urban core. But they were also alienated from explicit ecological politics by the Serra and Kassab mayoralties’ high-profile marriage of ecological discourses, gray and green, to luxury urban projects and developments that displaced the poor and ignored their immediate need for improved public transit. This would serve as a substantial barrier to movement organizers interested in framing their struggles in ecological terms. Most housing movement organizers I spoke with lamented their groups’ lack of recent, explicit engagement on environmental issues, while pointing out that under Serra and Kassab, ecological rhetoric seemed mainly to serve as cover for gentrification and displacement. The irony is that what the poor people’s movements demanded would have shrunk the city’s carbon footprint by increasing low-income housing downtown for those who worked there, reducing traffic on the roads, and modeling more complete and livable communities accessible to all. Yet trumpeting all this would require the elaboration of a whole other political and discursive framework, one building on a technical grasp of urban carbon-emissions accounting that, understandably, housing activists mired in everyday battles were in no hurry to acquire. But if movements of the poor do not (always) explicitly engage in climate politics, are they fated to play only an oppositional role to elite-backed projects? I argue below that such movements can not only block luxury gray ecologies, but also join coalitions in support of democratic gray ecologies.

Partial Victories On May 23, 2013, two unrelated roundtables on climate politics were held in São Paulo. The first, at the University of São Paulo, addressed the release of a

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greenhouse gas emissions audit, announcing that emissions had increased since 2003, despite the 2009 climate law (Rodrigues 2013). The second, at City Hall, was held to launch a joint project of international aid, with funding from the European Union and the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD), which had worked for years with the center-focused Apoio and a connected, periphery-oriented group (see www.programaurbano.com). The theme was securing precarious housing in the face of extreme weather caused by climate change. Apoio and its favela-based partner organization brought so many of their members, nearly one thousand poor people of color, that they filled the City Hall’s main auditorium, as well as an overflow auditorium with a video link (where I stood) and a courtyard outside with audio speakers. The roundtable featured representatives of CAFOD and the European Union, leaders of several housing movements and organizations, and three leftist PT politicians. When Apoio’s director, Manoel del Rio, rose to speak, he mentioned adaptation to climate change in passing. He then delivered a thundering call for a poor people’s compact city. “You want a low-carbon city?” he shouted. “How about more social housing for the poor downtown? How about better public transit? How about urbanizing the favelas, and having economic development there?” The European Union and CAFOD representatives seemed unprepared for the meeting’s tone. They spoke politely about collaborations across borders. Other speakers, from the housing movement and the PT, delivered variations on del Rio’s themes: espousing the potential of poor people reclaiming from elites the environment as an issue and insisting that confrontational struggle remain a central strategy. Even in the overflow auditorium, audience members frequently broke into applause. Onstage, one PT politician led a housing movement chant: “Those who don’t struggle . . .” he cried out and paused. “Die!” The audience roared in response. Months later, I met with del Rio, one of his colleagues, and CAFOD’s principal liaison for the project. How did this democratic ecology vision come about? On CAFOD’s end, there was increasing pressure from European Union funders to incorporate climate change into its overseas programming. More interesting is del Rio’s trajectory. In fact, he had been developing his own concept of the low-carbon, poor people’s compact city for years. This was based on his earlier history as a labor organizer, where he came to view the lengthening commutes of workers as a form of wage theft. From there, he shifted to housing organizing, focused on securing the right of workers to live near their jobs, as a way to more justly balance the working day and everyday life. Del Rio also saw this strategy as a means to combat the sprawl of peripheries into ecologically sensitive waterways at city’s edge. Thus, when the discussion of carbon and urbanism arrived in São Paulo, del Rio elaborated a distinct approach to the issue, a democratic gray ecology vision rooted in a long-standing labor perspective on density.

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Meanwhile, within governmental policy circuits, green policy technocrats have also begun working with Mayor Haddad’s new PT administration on democratic gray ecology projects. On the transit question, the administration has reappointed many of the architects of the 2000–2004 Suplicy administration’s bus service expansion. Pressed into action by the June 2013 wave of protests against rising bus fares, the administration recanted on the fare increase and accelerated the provision of dedicated bus lanes, building 327 kilometers by May 2014, more than double the amount Haddad promised in his campaign. The administration then produced hundreds of kilometers of bicycle lanes and promised to extend their network to every district of the city. The bus lanes, in particular, have proved popular in polls (Monteiro 2014). In addition to meeting the needs of low-income commuters, these actions should reduce the city’s localized greenhouse gas emissions—a point Haddad rarely makes. On housing, the issue is more complex. Haddad’s administration, far from tempering the roar of São Paulo’s real estate boom, is stoking its flames with widespread measures to increase the urban quality of life, including the revitalization of parks and plazas. The administration, under pressure from housing movements, announced in its first month the construction of twenty thousand homes, through a state-supported public-private partnership, in the central region where Nova Luz had been planned. In pursuit of this goal, large abandoned buildings have finally been expropriated—including the twenty-three-story building on Prestes Maia whose mid-2000s occupation captured the popular imagination. What remains unclear, even three years into Haddad’s first term (the time of writing), is whether the long-term agenda he has laid out will bear real fruit. The administration’s broader vision is outlined in a master plan whose implementation will take years and whose passage depended on vigorous housing movement support. The basic notion is to establish a more polycentric urban form, with denser, multiuse and multi-class corridors connecting more employment clusters. The key idea is to take existing rail infrastructure along postindustrial and degraded river corridors, turn these into mass transit byways, and encourage tall, dense, mixed-use buildings along their length. There are connected plans to shift housing toward the center and commerce and office work toward the periphery—aiming to move as much economic activity as possible into poorer areas where workers (including much of the middle class) presently live. Housing movements have won commitments to affordable-housing construction along the new, dense axes—pushing against the trend where improved mass transit access causes increases in property value that cause displacement. But it remains unclear how much of this will materialize. For the government to implement its affordability mandates will be difficult. It is still counting on private investments from companies that will seek to evade regulations. And the plan depends on heady, “global city”–style growth, despite the model’s persistent

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association with land and labor market polarization. What is more, Brazil’s economic growth has recently ground to a halt. It is also sobering to note the administration’s decision not to trumpet the ecological virtues of its planning measures outside small and specialized audiences of environmental activists. At one level, this seems a missed opportunity. If there is a possible overlap between middle-class environmental objectives and working-class demands for a more decent life, should these not be emphasized? But this relative silence is not just the administration’s preference alone. Many green policy elites have encouraged the camouflage of low-carbon policy in social-justice garb. Adalberto Maluf, the C40’s representative in São Paulo, has worked closely with the new secretariat for urban development on a wide range of gray ecology interventions, including the expansion of dedicated bus lines for which Maluf has long advocated. Maluf insists that Brazil’s most pressing problem is social inequality, and urban political interventions need to be framed in such terms.

Conclusion If every actor is an ecological actor, and if the planet’s ecological future hangs in part on cutting carbon emissions by making cities denser through changes to housing, transit, and land use, then it follows that housing, labor, and right-tothe-city movements battling over these issues are decisive ecological actors. In São Paulo, as elsewhere, these movements exert a fair amount of power, even if they rarely realize their chief objectives. They exert this power in pursuit of collective consumption objectives, with the prospective carbon gains of reduced car traffic and more efficient buildings compounded by low levels of individual consumption, and by their advocacy for a city oriented more to public services than private consumption. These urban poor people’s movements are prospective low-carbon protagonists of serious heft. This is more than just a politically correct exercise in deductive reasoning. Out on the streets, these movements play a vital role in determining the shape of the city. And some clever policy actors have taken note, seeking in favorable political circumstances to blend low-carbon policy making with measures to increase social and economic justice. This suggests that there is no basic opposition between green and social priorities in urban politics. Although low-carbon urbanism has often gone hand in hand with the kinds of neoliberal urbanism discussed throughout this volume, alternative low-carbon urbanisms are possible—indeed, already emerging. A core concern for scholars supportive of right-to-the-city struggles must be to recognize and articulate the range of distinctive pathways to the low-carbon city,

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including the array of potential coalitions. Increasingly, the key axis of urban ecological politics will not be the opposition between social and ecological, or economic and ecological, but between different class-structured versions of the green city project—between luxury ecologies and democratic ecologies. No one wants to live on a scalding planet; no doubt, few want to live in a world of eco-apartheid. This suggests that there is a strategic opportunity to link right-tothe-city movements with green policy elites whose primary objectives are ecological (rather than the perpetuation of professional-class privilege). What I term democratic gray ecologies could be a site for this alliance. To be sure, there is no defined model of how to do this. Even in cities where center-leftists have pressed low-carbon policy, like London and Paris, gentrification and displacement threaten the very social fabric of those cities. But recognizing the potential of a democratic gray ecology coalition, which could meet the looming pressures for carbon emissions reductions in a just, egalitarian way, does not depend on already-existing models of complete success. Meanwhile, just as it is important to test these ideas in other cities, it is also imperative to experiment with them beyond urban cores. The great majority of human beings live outside global cities’ central areas. Planetary urbanization is mostly crowding peripheries. In core areas, most elites now recognize the imperative of improving quality of life to enhance economic competitiveness. Social movements can demand that such redevelopments be equitable, claiming a piece of readily available investment funds. But in peripheries, neoliberal economic rationality is more liable to entail brutal, dehumanizing efficiencies—the rampant overcrowding of apartment towers, buses, schools, hospitals, parks, and more. There too, movements of poor are effectively pursuing democratic, gray ecologies. But the suburban terrain is distinctive and in many cases more challenging (Cohen 2014; Charmes and Keil 2015; Keil 2013). Nevertheless, housing movements in global cities’ cores are taking vital first steps, with crucial implications for a warming world. As the radical urbanist Mike Davis argues, “the corner-stone of the low-carbon city . . . is the priority given to public affluence over private wealth” (Davis 2010, 43). Global cities are rich in financial resources and symbolic capital. Money and journalists accumulate there. All their downtowns are a stage, and the world is watching. For movements of the poor to take up the low-carbon cause would require few changes to those movements’ objectives; it could, meanwhile, grow their alliances and broaden their messages’ appeal. For these movements to achieve even a modest democratization of global city cores, in the process reducing greenhouse gas emissions, would be a major achievement. Then would come the next challenges—linking up with gray ecology struggles in expanding peripheries, building broader coalitions, and deepening the transformative project.

8 THE SPACE OF SPEECH Lize Mogel

Freedom of assembly is a cornerstone of popular power that is performed in public space. It is defined by the courts (some say too narrowly) under public forum doctrine, which puts forward several types of public or marginally public space where people can assemble, or not. Public space, however, is important for more than just the right to assemble there. Community planner Joan Byron calls public space “an equity strategy.”1 It provides social and spatial benefits that are meant to be accessible to everyone, and that make up in some small way for the unequal distribution of resources and power. The origins of public space as Americans know it is with the town commons, a shared piece of land. The larger idea of the commons is pervasive in activist and protest movements, as well as in academia and art. Public space is still a commons. If you want to physically define it, it generally includes streets, sidewalks, parks, squares, and other gathering places that are owned or administrated by government, set aside and maintained for public use. Within this group of shared spaces, some you mostly pass through—as in streets—and in some you stay for a while. As shared space, where diverse people intersect, interact, and must accommodate each other, it is a negotiation: legally, bureaucratically, socially. However we mostly take public space for granted—its existence is often only questioned when, for example, it is occupied. The artist and architect Vito Acconci says it well: Public space is an old habit. The words public space are deceptive; when I hear the words, when I say the words, I’m forced to have an image of 158

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a physical place I can point to and be in. I should be thinking only of a condition; but, instead, I imagine an architectural type. . . . Public space, I assume, without thinking about it, is a place where the public gathers. The public gathers in two kinds of spaces. The first is a space that is public, a place where the public gathers because it has a right to the place; the second is a space that is made public, a place where the public gathers precisely because it doesn’t have the right—a place made public by force. (1990, 901) A place can also be made private by force. Occupy Wall Street and the protest movements of the last few years underscore the fact that we can no longer take public space for granted—that our right to assembling and speaking out in public, and even our right to be a public, has to be defended. New York City’s Zuccotti Park, the epicenter of Occupy Wall Street, is a public space that was made more public by force. The territorial struggle around it was played out with people’s bodies, with policy, and with architecture. Zuccotti, as a Privately Owned Public Space (POPS), by law has to be accessible to the public at all times—which is different from city-owned public space like parks, which can have closing hours. After evicting protesters in November 2011, the New York City Police Department erected a ring of barricades around the park, limiting access through it. In December, architect Quilian Riano, lawyer Paula Z. Segal, and the New York Civil Liberties Union led a campaign to Occupy the DOB—the Department of Buildings. They organized over one hundred people to make official complaints to the DOB that the NYPD was breaking the city’s own zoning rules governing POPS, and hindering access. Just under a month later, the barricades were removed. This action made visible some of the codes that regulate public space and keep it actually public, and made sure they were enforced. While protesters were eventually evicted from Zuccotti, this was a temporarily happier ending compared with similar stories where public space and public speech have been severely limited. One can look at typologies of space and how their public natures are encouraged or eroded. One such typology is the protest zone, or the “free speech zone” (as it is ironically called). In these spaces, political speech is inexorably pushed further and further from the object of protest. This kind of space often has absolute dimensions—it can be measured.

8 feet

 Eight feet was the distance set in 2000 by the Supreme Court case Hill v. Colorado. Eight feet describes a human-scale “bubble zone” of protected space around a person, usually a woman, entering a health clinic—protecting her from physical contact and sometimes violent speech acts by antiabortion protesters. Hill v. Colorado was one of many cases that helped “legalize personal space” (Zick 2009, 85) and inscribe the right to privacy in public space. This bubble zone has also been used to regulate panhandling and begging in public, and electioneering around polling places. In 2014 the Supreme Court, citing violations of the First Amendment, struck down a Massachusetts law regulating buffer zones around abortion clinics that could have implications for the eight-foot bubble.

25 blocks

Twenty-five blocks in Seattle were designated as a “limited curfew zone” during the antiglobalization protests around the World Trade Organization meeting in 1999. This was effectively a “no protest zone” created as demonstrations against the WTO went on and could not be controlled by the police.

260 yards

In Los Angeles, during the 2000 Democratic National Convention, 185 acres around the Staples Center arena became a “secured zone.” An “official demonstration area” was placed within this zone, 260 yards from the convention site. This was challenged in court and invalidated, so the protest zone was moved to a parking lot across the street from the arena. Nevertheless, the official demonstration area was fenced in, with limited access points, and protesters were wary of it, for good reason.

20 feet

Twenty feet was the size of a gazebo designated by Texas Tech University as the only free-speech zone on campus. Similar spaces on campuses across the United States have been created to contain the places where students are allowed to demonstrate, hand out pamphlets, or conduct other forms of protest. These are often very small, and often there are too few of them. Many of these zones were opened up after complaints and legal challenges from students and civil liberties groups.

100+ blocks

The city code of Charlotte, North Carolina, recognizes First Amendment rights and allows for unpermitted demonstrations and protest. However, the city created and enacted an “extraordinary event zone” for 2012 shareholder meetings for Bank of America and Duke Energy and the Democratic National Convention. Certain behaviors and items were prohibited from the extraordinary event zone, including “a mask or scarf worn with the intent to hide one’s identity while committing a crime,”2 leaving a door wide open for arrest and prosecution of peaceful protest, which otherwise would not be a crime.

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While free-speech zones are often inscribed into the landscape of protest, they are also just as often ignored. Decentralized and multicity protest has become the norm, moving outside the institutionalization and containment of dissent as embodied in permitted routes and protest zones. According to Acconci, this can make a space more public—by occupying it for days on end, or by changing its function (for example, by sitting down on a freeway). While still constrained by the spatial forms of the city, these actions contest the socio-spatial forms of repression. Local movement–based protest, from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street and #BlackLivesMatter, have an important ripple effect, as groups regionally, nationally, and globally demonstrate their solidarity. By refusing to adhere to the increasing repression of spatial rights and speech rights, these movements strive to create a public space, and a public, that is participatory, liberatory, and more truly a commons.

33,000 square feet

The size of Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, which was occupied by hundreds to thousands of Occupy Wall Street protesters for nearly two months in 2011 and intermittently after that. It was a self-determined “free speech zone” created by activists, not government.

and then some

Occupy was not limited to this single public space alone—like the Arab Spring, it spread virally to other cities nationally and worldwide.3

uncontained

#BlackLivesMatter rose up in 2014 against structural racism and police and state violence. Simultaneous, ongoing, and widespread protests occurred in front of police stations, courthouses, and government buildings, and blocked roads, freeways, and bridges in dozens of cities across the United States. In Chicago, for example, people staged dozens of actions and solidarity events in 2015 alone.4

9 SPATIAL POLITICS AND URBAN BORDERS A Study of Buenos Aires Alejandro Grimson

Like every other human activity, politics have an impact on space—they become “spatialized”—and in so doing, create social spaces. This chapter addresses the relationship between social space and everyday politics, based on ethnographic studies in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires. Within a time frame from 2000 to 2008, it focuses on the tactical use of urban space as a key component of the new urban social movements that arose around the crisis of 2001. These movements linked the urban workers (Harvey 2012, xiii) and right-to-the-city frameworks (Greenberg and Lewis, in this volume) and offer a fascinating case of the larger “city as factory” idea by exposing the spatial dimension of class difference and conflict. In particular, I will explore how class is at work through local understandings of the barrio (neighborhood), along urban axes of north and south, and between the center and periphery of the city. By everyday politics I am not referring to the institutionalized action of political parties. The political dimension of social life, in an anthropological sense, refers to the contingent fastening of bonds and structures of power, forms of categorization and hierarchical signification that depart from micro or macro social interactions, and tend to connect with modes of social organization. A restricted notion of politics—parties, leaders, institutions—would force us to refer to very limited processes in the current Buenos Aires, leaving aside the multiplicity of A preliminary and different version of this text (analyzing only up to 2003) was published as the introduction to La vida política de los barrios populares de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2009). 178

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ways in which neighborhoods “are spaces moved by politics,” “event spaces” that are key to the city for “the associated genesis of politics, space and time” (A. Borges 2003, 179). I therefore propose a new approach to understanding the socio-spatial characteristics of Buenos Aires and the politics associated with them. Neoliberal politics and social exclusion reinforced the “classic” social and symbolic borderlines of Buenos Aires, for instance between the wealthy north and working-class south of the city, and between the powerful center versus the excluded margins. In turn, these imagined urban frontiers were challenged, to a certain degree, by new sociopolitical phenomena that began to manifest themselves in the late 1990s, and spiked following the crisis of 2001. These include the influx of cartoneros (cardboard scavengers) from the outskirts to the city center; the rise of cacerolazos and assambleas (“pots and pans” marches and popular assemblies) in middle-class barrios; and the interventions of unemployed-worker movements in poor neighborhoods and outer-ring suburbs, including highway blockades by piqueteros (pickets) that shut down transit between north and south; and “recuperated” factories, through which workers seized ownership and control of the means of production in selected sites, particularly in peri-urban industrial areas.1 Thus, both “top down” structural transformations and “bottom up” social protests have an impact on the significance and materiality of neighborhood frontiers. As a native of Buenos Aires—a true porteño—I observe and analyze these “classic” borderlines and their transformations from an anthropological perspective, exoticizing familiarity through the lens of theory and comparison. Fascinated by classical anthropology and sociology texts on the relationships between space and social structure, I have done fieldwork in several working-class neighborhoods within the metropolitan area. Anthropological theory, along with personal and bibliographical knowledge of other cities, pushed me to adopt a critical distance from my everyday experience of the city, which was once second nature to me. This isn’t my first work on the subject of space. Between 1996 and 2002 I studied the national borderlines between Argentina and Paraguay, and Argentina and Brazil (Grimson 2000, 2003). In approaching fieldwork in Buenos Aires, I intend to project some of these spatial categories onto my daily life.

City of a Hundred Neighborhoods In the first case, the places in which and the scale at which spatialization of politics occurs vary according to region, country, and culture. The agora, the plaza, the market, the coliseum, the stadium, and the parliament are spaces of politics,

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or potential politics. The events taking place in these sites can be foreseen or unforeseen, ordinary or extraordinary, formal or informal. In the case of Buenos Aires, known as la ciudad de cien barrios (the city of a hundred neighborhoods), the barrio scale is essential for politics, historically and currently, as it has been in many cities in Latin America and globally. The neighborhood is a mode of localization, a context where social interaction and identification take place. In analyzing these places, their limits, and the oppositional relationships or borderline crossings between different neighborhoods, one can also question the neighborhood’s ability to influence social bonds, local organizations, and the political imagination. We see strong sediments of a secular history from the end of nineteenth century, a history that witnessed “the ‘silent conversion’ of numerous amorphous and semi-rural quarters in the suburbs, into a barrio, a new type and scale of public space” (Gorelik 1998, 18). This new space was to “restructure the identity of heterogeneous popular sectors” (273). In this way, Buenos Aires in the 1930s witnessed “experiences of sociability in its neighborhoods that were as original and significant, if not more so, than the experiences of sociability in the work-space” (Romero 2007, 14). Neighborhood is considered here as a social category relative to space, and not merely an administrative category. Big neighborhoods in the city of Buenos Aires, such as Lugano, Pompeya, or Palermo, have many sub-neighborhoods with their own public spaces and distinctive identities. Proper villas miserias (informal settlements), of several thousand inhabitants, contain internal spaces that structure relationships with social organizations. On a daily basis, people identify with the “small” neighborhood—or barrio chico. For the “external viewer there seems to be no dividing or differentiating borderlines,” but neighbors “are very serious about spatial delimitations and the sense of belonging they entail, as they influence their movement throughout the area” (Bonaldi and Del Cueto 2009). These borderlines are influenced by narratives and agents of tradition, such as social clubs (Garriga Zucal 2009), development societies, soup kitchens, local governments, the parish, and the police station. Other influential agents, such as real estate interests, may also intervene, hoping to compress or expand the neighborhood’s frontiers based on efforts at urban redevelopment and economic interests (see Carman 2006). The relevance of the neighborhood as a category for self-definition can be measured by a very popular social practice: soccer, with the approximately one hundred soccer clubs of Greater Buenos Aires associated with different neighborhoods in their fan base and identity. Thus, the neighborhood in Buenos Aires, as a specific configuration of socio-spatial urban frontiers, is a constitutive category of modes of perception, meaning making, and action. As a classificatory system, the neighborhood

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resembles a logos that, contrary to Mexican American “neighborhoodology” (“barriología” chicana) analyzed by Villa (2000), is not only part of a cultural affirmation of social practices, a kind of daily tactic or strategy similar to that analyzed by de Certeau (1996), but is also part of the cultural constitution of politics. The barrio both overlaps and transcends these politics, in the sense that it contains them and can actually influence the most diverse spheres of social life. Durkheim and Mauss showed, more than a century ago, that spatial classifications, not only those relative to neighborhoods and cities but also “natural” ones such as cardinal points, have a specific origin and social significance. They demonstrated that in different settlements, the classificatory distribution of the world into regions was akin to their social structure (1996, 63), and that once this classification takes form, it signifies and modifies aspects of social configurations (52). These spatial regions have, in the settlements they were studying (but also for all of us), affective qualities: they imply diverse emotions, virtues, and religious values (100–101). The different emotions aroused for Buenos Aires’s inhabitants by words such as “the north,” the “second strip,” “Lugano,” and “Recoleta” don’t always converge, but serve as classificatory mechanisms that are interlaced with the social configuration of the metropolitan area. This latter is a complex configuration that the classificatory mechanisms often try to simplify. To question spatial configurations, their significance and performativity, is to question, certainly in Buenos Aires, the particular ways in which political practices are structured (Bourdieu 2002, 2007).

Gradation and Socio-spatial Boundaries of Buenos Aires In addition to its neighborhood orientation, Buenos Aires is also a metropolitan area that is highly segregated along socioeconomic lines. The overlapping of two spatial systems has given meaning to the city, and to this segregation. The first and most evident system consists of three concentric circles: the City of Buenos Aires (the federal capital with three million inhabitants), and the first and second rings of Greater Buenos Aires (in Buenos Aires Province, where around ten million people live). In broad terms, the second ring is poorer than the first, and the first poorer than the Capital, which has the highest per capita income in Argentina. The most outstanding difference lies between the Capital and the rings of Greater Buenos Aires. It is a juridical–political division, marked by the boundaries of the Riachuelo and the General Paz loop encircling the Capital. This border helps structure the territorial imaginary of Buenos Aires, as well as social practices within it.

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FIGURE 9.1.  Socio-spatial boundaries of Buenos Aires. Drawn by Adrian Iulita.

The distinction between the City of Buenos Aires and Buenos Aires Province has an additional series of symbolical implications. It frequently activates the founding opposition of the nation—the Capital versus the rest of the country— with its imaginary implications of “Europe” versus “Latin America,” and even civilization versus barbarism. From the provincial point of view, Greater Buenos Aires is the city, the metropolitan area, as opposed to the “interior.” Yet from the perspective of the Capital, the poor outer rings are a space of difference, and coterminous with the province. Upper middle classes in the Capital make use of safe highways to get to their weekend houses in Greater Buenos Aires, trying to avoid contact with suburban areas lacking private surveillance. Greater Buenos Aires is thus associated with both Capital and province but is not “assimilated by either of these poles” (Bonaldi and Del Cueto 2009; see also Rodríguez 2008). The second spatial system in Buenos Aires is based on “cardinal directions,” the prosperous north contrasting with the traditional south. “Everyone knows that the South begins on the other side of Rivadavia,” said Jorge Luis Borges (2005), and “whoever crosses that street enters an older, steadier world.” In both the Capital and Greater Buenos Aires, the north is the area where upper- and middle-class neighborhoods are located, along with modern industries; while the south contains large stretches of villas miserias and barrios populares, or

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working-class neighborhoods, along with a rust belt of factories that shut down decades ago. To the east is the river, and the west constitutes a transitional zone with shared characteristics of both north and south. The city’s “north” and “south” were constructed socially. If you were to ask a porteño standing at a major intersection such as Plaza Italia where the north is, he would signal straight toward Santa Fé Avenue and its continuity on Cabildo Avenue. However, the south would surprisingly not be located opposite to this conception of north. The latter aligns with a compass direction for northwest—where the fancy suburbs of San Isidro are located, while “south” is actually southeast. The elite “Barrio Norte” (northern neighborhood) in Buenos Aires can only be northern in relation to something else. The question is: what constitutes that reference point? Contrary to common belief, it is not Casa Rosada, the presidential house. The entire “north” is only north of Rivadavia Avenue, the one mentioned by Borges as the beginning of the south, considered by porteños to be “the longest avenue in the world” because it cuts through the entire city. However, the fact that this “north” is unrelated to compasses and lacking in cardinal validation in no way lessens its performative capacity. In commonsense usage, “north”—like south, east, and west—is a local social language, both structured by and structuring of porteño society. The point here is not simply to identify the constructed nature of the cardinal points. Even if there were to be a coincidence between cultural and natural directions, that wouldn’t indicate that the people of Buenos Aires are good geographers. Rather, the point is to highlight the role of space in the persistent dichotomization of social life, and the degree to which this symbolic map is constitutive of urban culture and politics. The north–south divide in Buenos Aires is therefore the geographical naturalization of a socially and historically contingent binary. Further, there is a difference between how this opposition between north and south operates within the first concentric circle (the Capital), and how it operates on the northern and southern frontiers of Greater Buenos Aires. There is a slow gradation in the Capital beginning with the Rio de la Plata in the north, toward the south and the Riachuelo, from the highest-income to the lowest-income sectors (see figure 9.1). In crossing the avenues parallel to the river (Libertador, Santa Fé, and, paradigmatically, Rivadavia, as well as the parallel avenues to the south), one can observe a descent in social sectors that is not automatic and homogeneous, but still creates meaning in social life and is key in the configuration of cognitive urban maps. This gradual change extends beyond the Capital, toward the north of Greater Buenos Aires for over twelve miles.2 Buenos Aires in its social geography evolved differently from other major cities in Latin America, such as Rio de Janeiro, where favelas can still be seen from the most luxurious buildings. Furthermore, in Rio, São Paulo, or Caracas,

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“accidental nature was a factor that favored the constitution of barriers between social segments.” Meanwhile, in Buenos Aires, “nature and public will coincided in their flattening spirit” (Gorelik 1998, 33). Here middle-class residents could go months, even years, without seeing a villa miseria, located outside their usual circle. As an anthropologist, I am interested in how a person’s perception and use of space differs if that person is from the northern or southern area of the city, from one neighborhood or another. From an immigrant’s point of view, both from inside and outside the country, territorial barriers have long been key to the spatial understanding of the city (Grimson 1999). The larger part of the immigrant population is located in the southern and western areas of both the Capital and Greater Buenos Aires. If crossing a political border can turn a native into a foreigner, by the same token, poor people from the city cross numerous borders (avenues Rivadavia, Corrientes, and Santa Fé) as they undertake their daily commutes into the city’s prosperous northern reaches, where they are always foreigners. Thus the majority of southern Buenos Aires inhabitants heading north, and vice versa, do so instrumentally. They cross with a purpose, for a specific reason, with a particular end. The feeling of foreignness is evident in the discomfort experienced not only by urban workers going to the northern neighborhoods for the first time, but also by anthropologists, sociologists, social activists, or public employees in their first visit to a villa miseria. They are far from home, have crossed the border, and know that their own physicality has a different significance there. Yet, in further demonstration of Borges’s insight, many of the younger upper and middle classes of the northern neighborhoods, such as Belgrano and Palermo, have never crossed Rivadavia Avenue in their lives, except for a visit to a family member or friends on the first blocks of the Flores or Caballito neighborhoods, and so have never felt this foreignness. Unlike cities such as Rio de Janeiro, where city life is visually entangled with favelas, groups of young people from the north of Buenos Aires see and move only along the river’s bank. These urban territorialities are associated with socioeconomic sectors whose social lives take place within impermeable frontiers. They structure social life in different cities throughout Latin America, and exceed by far the phenomenon of barrios privados, or gated communities. These subtle and deep processes throughout which borderlines are constructed become basic cognitive parameters for urban life (see Segura 2009). In this sense, the city is filled with metaphorical and literal customs officers. Policemen asking for documentation and frisk-stopping on account of appearances do so more often when their subjects are in foreign territories. Beyond these borderline regulations, every neighbor can be surprised or frightened by a

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strange presence. When a strange body is in the wrong place at the wrong time, suspicious looks and calls to police result. Hence it is not surprising that a large part of the city’s inhabitants never cross the borders. The spatial and social frontier is a hard one to cross, and one makes the crossing only out of pure necessity. Thus we see in Buenos Aires, as in other cities, that inhabitants have a territorial sense of social gradation, with sometimes evident, sometimes imperceptible, but ever significant borderlines. These borderlines are powerfully reinforced by, and constitutive of, larger dynamics of neoliberal restructuring.

Neoliberalism and Urban Space in Buenos Aires Neoliberal politics in Argentina can be traced to the military dictatorship that governed the country from 1976 until 1983, when the national economy was brutally opened up to foreign investors. This process destroyed a great part of Argentina’s textile industry—its most important economic sector—while at the same time undermining civil rights and generating an enormous foreign debt that limited the powers of the state. This was followed by the democratic government of Raúl Alfonsín, from 1983 to 1989, in which different political and economic arrangements were experimented with, and ultimately by the fully neoliberal government of Carlos Menem, which embraced the principles of the “Washington Consensus.” In these years and until 2001, Argentina became the “best student” of the policies of the International Monetary Fund: privatizing almost all public enterprises, including oil and gas, destroying thousands of small- and medium-scale enterprises, and increasing foreign debt until it represented 160 percent of GDP. Together with the increase in poverty and inequality, unemployment also grew. In 1974, unemployment was around 5 percent in Argentina, yet by 2002 it exceeded 20 percent. In a city where people cross borderlines for labor reasons, and where in 2002 over 40 percent of the population had serious employment issues, including unemployment and substandard employment (Grimson and Cerrutti 2005), these fortified frontiers were being crossed less and less. Labor transit decreased, and, in the vicious cycle of crisis, public transportation worsened. The growth of unemployment in a city with large working-class neighborhoods also translated into a notable increase in residential segregation. Then, in 2001 and continuing until 2003, the nation’s worst economic crisis struck. On the one hand, the impact of the crisis was felt with the emergence of what came to be called “neighborhoods of the unemployed,” particularly in the south. On the other, the heterogeneity of barrios populares in the Capital underwent an extensive process of territorial homogenization, related to deregulated

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urban growth and an increasingly restricted “right to the city” for poorer inhabitants. Possibilities for social mobility were increasingly limited, and the residents of working-class barrios saw their standard of living decline and physical surroundings deteriorate. Neighborhood-based social welfare agencies and political party committees disappeared or were transformed into distribution centers for local resources. Luis Alberto Romero’s observation that, in the heyday of the barrios populares, “there was no institution, even the smallest gambling den, that didn’t feel the need to have a library on site” (2007, 14–15) was sadly contrasted by the mandatory presence of soup kitchens. “Classic” spatial segregation in Buenos Aires—before neoliberalism—was defined by the absence of poor people in middle-class neighborhoods except as domestic employees, construction workers, or other relevant trades. As with the “Pilot Plan” of Brasília, which allowed workers to leave middle-class neighborhoods before nightfall, middle classes in Buenos Aires got the most out of this isolation from working-class life for decades. The presence of “others” was deemed a nuisance. Under the urbanization process of 1930–1940, massive migration from the provinces to the capital city was called by a racist congressmen a “zoological torrent.” When the poor and the unemployed of Greater Buenos Aires were traveling daily to the city center to recycle garbage, their presence in the Capital and in middle-class neighborhoods would again be challenged on grounds of hygiene and property. Of course, in the context of hyper-unemployment, living and working in the Capital became seen as a great privilege. Poor people living in Greater Buenos Aires knew that you could “get by” in the Capital. “You go and collect cardboard boxes, soft drink cans and bottles, and you make five pesos,” says one inhabitant of the first ring.3 “But here there aren’t any cans, there isn’t anything.” In this context of growing inequalities, the recycling and selling of the garbage of the urban elite became a job alternative, and the phenomenon of the cartoneros arose. This practice has had significant consequences on the territoriality of Buenos Aires. By their very presence in the city center, cartoneros disturb the social order of the gradient urban landscape. Cartoneros are the workers of a country that Paul Auster envisioned before Argentina’s crisis of 2001 In the Country of Last Things. And indeed small numbers of cartoneros had been making the voyage from conurbano to centro for decades. They dress differently and use horse-drawn or supermarket carts to get around. They range in phenotype and skin tones, and, though they are not “afro” or “mulatto,” are often referred to as negros by the discriminatory commonsense of upper and middle classes that tend to racialize class differences. This racial discourse exposes the idea that the cartoneros are “invading” the Capital, a symbolic space where they don’t belong, disrupting the common association of Argentina

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with Buenos Aires, of Buenos Aires with the Capital, and of the Capital with white Europeans, key associations to the idea of the country as the European enclave in Latin America. Yet the disrupting force of cartoneros increased exponentially with the crisis, as the newly unemployed took up this form of work. Their growing nocturnal presence in middle-class neighborhoods generated increasingly frightened reactions, along with disdain for the new aesthetics of trash—further highlighting the unequal “right to the city” between Buenos Aires’s Capital and its greater metropolitan region. A saying from provincial protesters in 2001 denounced how porteños seem to believe that “Argentina ends at Avenue General Paz” (on the outskirts of the Capital). And indeed, the Federal Police would historically attempt to stop cartoneros from entering the Capital with their horse-drawn carts. In this as in many cases, legislation governing the use of public space varies between the Capital and Greater Buenos Aires. That which is considered a nuisance, dangerous, or illegal in the Capital, especially in its central and northern areas, can often be allowed in the province. These legal disparities threatened to become more entrenched in the aftermath of the crisis. Thus preexisting socio-spatial dynamics facilitated new forms of neoliberal transformation with the onset of crisis. Neoliberalism is a factory for frontiers of diverse dimensions and quality. Houses are increasingly separated from the street, and there is a growing sense of insecurity and fear among residents (Reguillo 2005). Iron grillwork on doors and windows, alarm systems, and security guards are increasingly common in a city marked by private fortification. Access to “public information” is increasingly found only within the home, via privately consumed mass media, as many traditional public spaces were dissolved during the 1990s. All these elements defined an altered urban landscape, where inequality and social segregation had intensified—a social situation that was also expressed spatially through the fortification of concentric circles and cardinal points within Buenos Aires.

Spatialized and Spatializing Protests The historically shaped, socio-spatial boundaries of the Buenos Aires metropolitan area are also key to understanding forms of resistance to neoliberalism and early twentieth-century crisis—from marches to mass demonstrations, from occupations to recuperations. To some degree these protests employed the time-honored tradition of occupying the city center—a standard form of spatial urban politics, and a long-standing practice in Buenos Aires. Argentina’s extreme political centralization in Buenos Aires, and metro Buenos Aires’s extreme

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centralization in the Capital, resulted in the heightened historical relevance of its central square—the Plaza de Mayo—for large demonstrations and protests. The plaza was named for the Revolution of May 1810 that took place there, and was to be the site of protest during many of the most significant episodes in Argentine history (Sigal 2006). The plaza was the site of the massive mobilization of workers in October 17, 1945, demanding the release of Juan Domingo Perón. And it was here, under the dictatorship, that Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, began in 1977 their “Thursday rounds” in weekly protest of the disappearance of their children. So too the plaza was to become a site of mass uprisings, and renewed confrontation with the state, after 2001. Yet in addition to this classic site, distinct forms of socio-spatial protest became identified with Buenos Aires in this period, with equally distinct spatialities. These spatialities responded to, and themselves helped to challenge, the urban boundaries and inequalities we have explored thus far. The first were cacerolazos and popular assemblies, forms of protest in local squares and streets, which both symbolically and quantitatively were a phenomenon of the mostly middleand upper-class Capital. In contrast, movements of the unemployed, including both “recuperated factory” and piquetero, or road blockade, movements, were concentrated in the south and west, the working-class areas of Greater Buenos Aires. In what follows I will examine each of these spatially embedded protest movements in turn.

Cacerolazos and Popular Assemblies The phenomenon of cacerolazos in late 2001 and the beginnings of 2002 is an exceptional example of condensation of the relationships between social and political space. If one of the greater signs of neoliberal advance is the privatization of the social sphere, the caceroleros (protesters with pots and pans) intervened and worked precisely on this borderline. On December 19, 2001, a complex situation arose in Buenos Aires between home and television on the one hand and public space on the other. In a televised address to the nation that night, President De la Rúa announced a state of siege, meaning public protest was banned. In some middle-class neighborhoods in the Capital, people began beating pots and pans on the balconies of their apartments before the president had finished his speech. Others joined in. It was a public protest taking place on balconies, in living rooms, open windows, or on patios of apartments and houses: a public protest in a private place. In other neighborhoods no pots were heard, but throughout the city TV sets were on. Television programming was suspended or interrupted to give news of the caceroleros who were beating pots and pans as a form of protest in the

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middle-class neighborhoods of Caballito, Flores, Palermo, and Almagro. More and more neighborhoods were joining the protests. The noise spread from house to house, and the announcements on television also helped extend the protest citywide. Then people began going from their balcony to the apartment lobby, from the patio inside the house to the front door, and there they met other people. Looking outside, they even saw people on the streets beating pots on the corner. Converging in apartment lobbies, people asked those on balconies to come down and join them. It was 11 p.m. to 12 a.m. on a hot summer night. They came as they were, in pajamas and nightgowns, in slippers and flip-flops, in bathing suits and barefoot. They beat old battered pots and elegant new ones, some timidly and others defiantly. Nobody talked; there was no dialogue, only noise. A sense of community was being generated out of what could not be put into words (Briones, Fava, and Rosan 2004): a shared feeling of rejection. Armed with frying pans, dressed in the most varied outfits, people were grouping at the corners of different neighborhoods, where there had been no spontaneous gatherings in over a decade. They instinctively took the main avenues in one direction: the city center. It was a massive and spontaneous protest from each neighborhood, aimed at the core of political power. Strong police repression halted the spontaneity with which people joined the protest, and the tide was turned. On the other side of the borderline, in the poorer parts of Greater Buenos Aires, there was fear of demonstrating publicly that night, and particularly of reactions from the so-called “best police in the world,” who were governing the streets on the other side of Riachuelo. Several social organization leaders told me that the decision to get organized and protest outside arose only when they saw on their televisions the repressive crackdown against Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo on December 20, 2001. The Madres had gone to the Plaza de Mayo as they had every Thursday since 1977, but on this day were joined by a much larger group of marchers than usual—symbolically fusing their historic protest with those demanding justice in the aftermath of the protest. The police responded with violence and repression, sparking widespread outrage. In the following days, amid a vertiginous series of presidential overthrows (as a result of which five presidents came and went in ten days), popular assemblies became increasingly frequent in middle-class neighborhoods; there, local problems, ranging from unemployment and high prices to the system of representative government, were discussed. Notwithstanding the inexperience of participants, which made discussion arduous, the assemblies constituted arenas for public dissent and common action. In some neighborhoods the assemblies took place in abandoned spaces, giving rise to a wide gamut of activities, from soup kitchens to cultural activities. A year and a half later, very little of this collective

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fervor remained. Indeed most neighborhood assemblies had declined to the point of irrelevancy. The few that survived did so because of neighborhood-based projects.4

Organizations of the Unemployed and Recuperated Factories While cacerolazos and popular assemblies were scarce outside the Capital, so too were the organizations of the unemployed inside the Capital. The piquetero phenomenon (blocking traffic) traveled from provinces like Salta and Neuquén to the metropolitan area and settled in Greater Buenos Aires. Demonstrations by the unemployed started in the second urban strip in 1997 but didn’t reach the Capital until late 2001, and then in a more organized way in 2002. Furthermore, these organizations had different experiences in the north, west, or south of Greater Buenos Aires. In the industrialized and wealthy north, organizations of the unemployed in general, and piquetero movements in particular, were exceptional (Varela 2009). Here the problem of unemployment, when confronted, often took the form of workers taking over or “recuperating” factories, many of which had been abandoned by owners following the crash of 2001. Thus the industrialized neighborhood of San Martín in the northwest of Greater Buenos Aires, which accounted for 10 percent of industrial GDP between 2002 and 2004, had 9 out of the 180 recuperated factories in the country. The southern and western areas had the most relevant presence of organizations of unemployed workers. There was a certain diversity in the way these organizations operated: the western ones tended toward confrontation in order to obtain resources following negotiation; less moderate were those in the south of Greater Buenos Aires, where autonomous organizations were strong and radical in their protests and claims. The emergence of organizations of the unemployed posed a sociological question: there have been high unemployment rates in various countries and contexts, but this sole factor is not sufficient to explain the rise of organizations addressing claims to the state in Argentina. Svampa and Pereyra (2003) were the first to inquire into the reasons behind the exceptionality of the Argentine case in relation to the emergence of movements of the unemployed. The lack of labor retraining and stability networks offered by the state; the fact that unions from the Workers General Center endorsed structural reform; and the relevance of organizational traditions linked to classist aspects were among the main factors identified (13). Another relevant factor relates to the significance of unemployment in light of the historical meaning of labor and salary in the national imaginary of Argentines. The latter holds that more than 20 percent unemployment destroys any idea of an integrated nation; thus organizations

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of the unemployed could exploit concern about this at the federal level (see Svampa and Pereyra 2003). In addition, the importance of the territorial dimension of politics should be emphasized. We have shown that the neighborhood had historically taken shape in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires as a classificatory and civic category in a complicated and shifting articulation between place of identity and social public space. Neoliberal reforms, with their disassembling of union actors and their exclusionary effects, displayed “focused” social politics, which rested on and developed local social networks. In Greater Buenos Aires, in the context of “factory cemeteries” (hundred of factories shuttered by absentee owners) and the complicity of large industrial unions during the 1990s, the provincial and local governments led the process of territorialization of politics. Several studies (Merklen 2000; Auyero 2001; Frederic 2003) have shown this enhancement of the political pronunciation of neighborhoods through informal networks. This process instituted a common sense in terms of how to access certain resources. Expressions used by activists and other referents, such as “being in the neighborhood” and “neighborhood ethics” (Diez 2009), “the guy from the ’hood,” and, especially, the native conceptualization of social and political activism as “neighborhood work” (Frederic 2009), are a reflection of this process. This is relevant because organizations of the unemployed emerging in the south and west during the late 1990s are fundamentally territorial organizations. Indeed there is a strong connection between the qualitative leap of neoliberalism’s spatial segregation and the phenomena of both recuperated factories and piquetero movements.

Piqueteros In the case of piquetes, the first versions of this tactic of blocking routes were led by neighbors from oil company towns, far from large urban centers. What these company towns had in common was that their fortunes were tied to state enterprises, primarily the state-run oil company (see Svampa and Pereyra 2003; Cerrutti and Grimson 2005). In Buenos Aires, on the other hand, neighbors from different residential areas, and different work histories, came together in organizations of the unemployed. As we have seen, the barrio was historically characterized by bonding on the basis of vicinity. The existence of a significant context of neighborhood-based identity and shared behavior served not only as a classificatory criteria but also as means of structuring the social life of clubs, living co-ops, and other development associations (Shammah 2009). In the context of socioeconomic crisis, however, large swaths of neighborhoods in the south and urban periphery now endured a strong hardening of territory. Ironically,

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these dynamics of ghettoization contributed, together with the emergence of unemployment organizations, to what can be defined as a new link between land, housing, and (un)employment. In Greater Buenos Aires, the villas miserias that resulted from land occupations in the 1980s had by 2001 succumbed to partial urbanization, thus reducing the demands for land and housing. At the same time, neighborhoods that had formerly served as dormitories for factory workers had now become neighborhoods of the unemployed. At times through clientelist networks, at times upon the initiative of autonomous organizations, community meals were provided, and soup kitchens and places serving snacks and milk for children appeared. These local neighborhood organizations started imitating the piquetero actions of Cutralcó, Plaza Huincul, Tartagal, and other cities in the Argentine provinces. Before the elections of 1997 they experienced relative success in receiving planes trabajar, or work plan subsidies, of 150 pesos for the unemployed. Far from immobilizing them, these subsidies strengthened the organizations of the unemployed, which were now welcoming new neighbors hoping to receive the same benefit.5 Throughout this process, each unemployment organization turned into a kind of union of the unemployed, grouped by territorial criteria: a neighborhood, a borough, a township. These territories were inscribed in the classical segregation that is characteristic of Buenos Aires, but were now also experiencing neoliberal segregation: workers’ dorms had become a sort of institution of misery. People without any work, or merely with “gigs,” now represented 80–90 percent of the population, which made it increasingly hard to escape the neighborhoods. This circumstance made for an unprecedented process of segregation, deepening the city’s urban frontiers. These workers, unemployed people, and neighbors of impoverished areas, increasingly immobilized and isolated in their neighborhoods, started protesting by blocking routes and avenues that linked the periphery to the center, thus interrupting not just traffic but the general flow of the city’s transit. This was an attempt to prevent urban life from carrying on ignoring their existence, as had been common in the 1990s, with the establishment of impenetrable frontiers and total denial of the seriousness of social problems. Along came the possibility of installing their protests in the urban frontier par excellence: the bridges connecting the Capital and Greater Buenos Aires, especially in the southern area of the city where these bridges cross the Riachuelo River. That first industrial area, with the oldest working-class neighborhoods, filled with abandoned factories, carries a strong symbolic significance in Argentina as the place dividing the Capital from the periphery, and a metaphor for the provincial rest of the country. Popular history chronicles how the masses came pouring across this border, some even swimming, on the paradigmatic October 17, 1945, when workers stigmatized as

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cabecitas negras (little black heads), took to the streets demanding Juan Domingo Perón’s liberation, massively irrupting into the political sphere. In the early 2000s, in a city with an increasing number of borderlines, these significant frontiers become the setting for social protests. The bridges that ­metaphorically cross these limits turn into shared and privileged spaces for political dispute. Those who experience the opposition of employment/unem­ ployment similarly to being inside/outside society occupy the main frontier separating the Capital from Greater Buenos Aires, as the setting par excellence to make their claims. Piqueteros imagined the possibility of besieging the Capital in protest, blocking all access bridges, territorially occupying the liminal space to which they had been cast out.6 The Pueyrredón Bridge became a key site for piquetes. In June 26, 2002, on the southern entrance to this bridge, violent police repression resulted in the death of two protesters, Maximilliano Kosteki and Dario Santillán. This episode was condemned so strongly that it accelerated interim president Eduardo Duhalde’s political handover by six months. On more than one occasion, police prevented piqueteros from entering the city, arguing that the entrance to the Capital was forbidden to those bearing clubs. Stop-and-frisks were taking place on the bridges, as a kind of customs control to disarm the protesters. Once again we find the idea of legality being enforced in the Capital. Horse-drawn carts and clubs were both forbidden in the Capital. The province houses a different relationship between space and legality. In view of the fact that underprivileged classes do not go to the central, richer parts of the city if not for employment purposes, and that increasing territorial confinement comes along with unemployment, we can understand that protest and march have other symbolical implications, aside from political ones, and have consequences for urban frontiers. Demonstrators usually dress up in preparation to attend the protest, because they are headed to the city center. This emphasizes spatial discontinuities. When protests acquire a sense of promenade, this implies a cultural break with segregation.

The Limits of Growth and Integration In 2002, during the peak of popular assemblies, the first massive piquete took place in the Capital, for the first time blocking routes other than those in Greater Buenos Aires. Piqueteros walked through the main avenues, and the popular assemblies welcomed them, cheering “Piquete y cacerola, la lucha es una sola” (“Picket and pot, the fight is one and the same”). The territorial crossing of Riachuelo and General Paz Avenue was symbolically complemented by the articulation of both movements. However, as the assembly movement quieted, this

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possibility of alliance across class and territory seemed to fade. No other movement on the political horizon took its place in threatening to destabilize classic urban frontiers. Meanwhile, a new disconnect between the Capital and Greater Buenos Aires was emerging. Beginning in 2003, economic growth in Argentina led to a decrease in unemployment, poverty, and rates of indigence from the statistical peaks of 2001–2002. Though these figures did not match those prior to the military dictatorship, they were significant. However, even with such decrease, social inequality remained unaltered (Kessler 2014). Soon to come, meanwhile, were increases in inflation, which exacerbated this social inequality. This juxtaposition of declining unemployment with increasing inequality was associated with particular urban and neighborhood dynamics, as a higher volume of people began purposefully crossing urban frontiers for work. This spatial movement, however, collided with structural limits: the deterioration of urban transport. During the period of economic recession from 1998 through 2003, buses running to and from working-class neighborhoods and neighborhoods of high unemployment had fewer and fewer passengers, and transit authorities reduced, or even canceled, their services. Similarly, trains connecting the Buenos Aires city center with the suburbs, privatized during the 1990s, experienced increasing delays and cancellations, as well as deteriorating cars. Once economic growth picked up, these services did not improve overnight. Without investments, transportation services and roads were left to fall apart, further impoverishing the everyday experience of working-class people. On May 16, 2007, in response to these conditions, passengers in need of proper transportation staged a riot in Constitución Station, which connects the south and the city center. Tired of everyday mistreatment, cancellations, service deterioration, and being degraded as citizens and as workers, groups of passengers destroyed ticket booths, threw stones at police officers, and lit the station on fire. The richer citizens disapproved of this infrastructural destruction, but then again they were not affected daily by the inefficiency of public transportation and failed to grasp the importance that Constitución holds for the popular sectors. A borderline space between the Capital and Greater Buenos Aires, the station is a hybrid landscape of popular gastronomy and street vendors, with a monumental architecture reminiscent of better economic times. Further, railway systems in Argentina crystallize other symbolic and political disputes: English colonialism, Perón-era nationalization, neoliberal restructuring, and a general disconnect between an increasingly centralized Capital and the rest of the country. As we have seen, such disputes are made manifest in a city divided spatially along socioeconomic lines. The “passengers’ riot,” as it was called, didn’t take place in Retiro Station, where trains run parallel to the River Plate and wealthy

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Libertador Avenue. The riot took place on the line stopping at the station of the Pueyrredón Bridge, where the two young piqueteros were killed in 2002. Only after a tragedy in 2012, in which a train crashed into the also working-class west central Once station, leaving fifty-one people dead and seven hundred injured, did train policies begin to change. It is significant that such spontaneous actions in 2007 were not associated with the radical, territorial movements of the crisis period. This can be explained in part by the fact that the post-crisis dynamic of economic growth and enduring inequality also set the stage for the piqueteros’ integration by the state. Beginning in 2003 there ensued a constant negotiation between state and piqueteros for the specific number of social welfare plans for each organization. These negotiations maintained the flavor of piquetero protests. Yet whereas the piqueteros’ original demands for social inclusion took place on the bridges connecting the Capital and Greater Buenos Aires, their later disputes, in 2004, were set within more traditional scenarios, such as central squares and avenues. The process of social and political integration, with all its tensions, called for a territorial shift as well. The piquetero movement was always a broad and heterogeneous one, and what has been called its corporatization and integration was never complete. Several groups withdrew into the neighborhoods of Greater Buenos Aires, shifting their focus from piquetes to social work, and rejecting what they considered the co-optation and elitism of negotiation with the government. Meanwhile, in a very different context, a small number of popular assemblies also managed to continue articulating with local networks, sometimes creating working cooperatives, sometimes in different activities linked to the neighborhood. Despite their differences, there is a shared element in the persistence of these few remaining assemblies and piqueteros. They remained viable when the movements were able to identify strongly with the more classical forms of territoriality, articulated with a key dimension of political life in Buenos Aires: the notion of barrio. For amid the plasticity of movement actors’ self-definition, or lack thereof, it is this neighborhood category that has continually enabled them to create a common frame, to strengthen social bonds, and to generate a sense of belonging.

The Persistence of Neighborhood Change The borderlines of Buenos Aires are the result of what social actors have done and currently do with them. They are not the simple consequence of neoliberalism, but rather are shaped by the action of diverse agents, operating atop the sediments of multiple, historical eras, and who, in turn, produce their own sediments. There

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are many ways in which cartoneros, cazerolos, asambleistas, piqueteros, mayors, city officials, carnival performers, soccer fans, and many other actors intervene in the process of social and cultural construction of these borders. The process through which frontiers are created is an open one, involving the meanings that they hold for populations on either side (Grimson 2003). In this sense, there are dimensions of the political process in Buenos Aires that connect with broader aspects of global change. To assert that politics have simply transferred out of the factories and into the neighborhood would be a linear statement (Manzano 2009). It is imperative, rather, to consider the changing relationship between local space and work space, and the transformation of this relationship through sociopolitical activity. To wonder about the territorialization of politics in a neoliberal context since the 1990s and post-2001 uprisings without considering the ways in which the city’s public spaces were themselves reconfigured and threatened limits our understanding of urban history. It does not allow us to understand how the actors behind these political events had already been culturally constituted through stratified processes of spatial categorization, signification, and action. From 2007 on, following the decline in rates of unemployment to under 10 percent and pro-labor governmental policies, union conflicts and salary negotiations have notably regained presence. Political life, then, is not simply displaced in a linear fashion from one milieu to another. Its transformation is the result of complex dynamics involving neighborhoods and labor space, social organizations and unions, unemployed workers and marchers with pots and pans. In this new landscape, other kinds of social mobilization became relevant on the other side of the political spectrum. We saw this in 2008 in a protest from “el campo” (landowners) against a tax on soy exportation, in 2010 with national celebration of the bicentenario, in 2012 and 2013 in the middle-class protest against the “populist” government of Cristina Kirchner, and, up to 2015, in political mobilization supporting the supposedly “popular” presidency of Mauricio Macri, former neoliberal mayor of Buenos Aires. Social space was once redrawn in this recent historical process. Nevertheless, if we can learn anything from this spatial analysis of Buenos Aires, it is that new borders will structure future social action, while new politics and protest will once again redesign Buenos Aires as factory.

10 FROM WORKERS IN THE CITY TO WORKERS’ CITIES? Andrew Herod Today more than ever, the class struggle is inscribed in space. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

Capital and labour . . . use space as a weapon in class struggle. David Harvey, The Limits to Capital

The central themes of this collection are “the city is the factory” and working-class people’s “right to the city.” The first phrase concerns how cities serve as assemblages of workers and how workers must look beyond the walls of their individual factory (or other workplace) to view the city as a whole as a space for organizing and a space that must be organized. The second phrase, of course, comes from the title of French theoretician Henri Lefebvre’s 1968 book Le droit à la ville. In this book Lefebvre argued that the power to make urban spaces, which he viewed as the control points of modern capitalism, must be wrested from capital and the state and located instead in the hands of the working-class people who live in these urban spaces (and by “working-class people” I mean those people who do not own or manage the means of production, including low-income people more generally, those who toil in the informal sector, and the unemployed). Lefebvre saw the making of urban space and conflicts over it, then, as a central element in the articulation of political power. Such ideas have been picked up by a number of academic writers. Hence, Marxist geographer David Harvey (2008, 23) has argued that “the right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is . . . one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.” There is much in what Harvey outlines here, but, for my purposes, what 197

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is most important is Harvey’s suggestion that there is a dialectical relationship between the physicality of the built environment and the creation of people’s social identities—we change ourselves by changing the city—and that the right to the city involves not just a metaphysical claim but also one that encompasses concrete struggles over the material form of the built environment. It is not just academic writers who have explored Lefebvre’s notion of a right to the city, however. Various social movements have also picked up on these notions and appropriated the concept of the right to the city as a way to undergird their struggles. For instance, in New York City the Right to the City Alliance seeks to build a “housing and urban justice movement,” while in various German cities the Recht auf Stadt squatters’ and tenants’ rights groups seek similar goals.1 For their part, groups associated with the 2001 World Social Forum held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, created a “World Charter for the Right to the City.”2 In Brazil the concept of the right to the city has even been written into federal law through the 2001 City Statute, which explicitly recognized the “right to the city” as a collective right and—at least on paper—prioritized urban spaces’ social function/ use value over their commercial/exchange value and guaranteed democratic city government (see Fernandes 2007). The government of Mexico City has likewise implemented a “Charter for the Right to the City” that defines the right to the city as the “equitable use [usufructo equitativo] of cities according to principles of sustainability, democracy, equity and social justice.”3 Given this, I want to explore the notions of “the city is the factory” and the “right to the city” through an analysis that links the social with the spatial—that is to say, an analysis that explores the relationship between the social relations of capitalism and its spatial structures. My purpose in doing so is to suggest that any revolt against capitalism must be fundamentally geographical in nature, for social life does not take place on the head of a pin but is, rather, deeply spatially informed and structured. People live lives that are embedded in particular places and yet that are also stretched across space as they are connected to their fellow humans living anywhere from next door to half a world away. What I want to suggest, then, is that in order to understand the potential for working-class people to gain a right to the city and to organize successfully in and across it we must pay attention to the material geographical contexts within which they find themselves and over which they struggle, for the socio-spatial conditions of their lives singularly shape their very existence and the possibilities for them to create more emancipatory landscapes within which to live and work. The chapter is structured as follows. First, I briefly explore the connections between capitalism and urbanism, looking at the nature of the urban historically and how that nature changed with the rise of industrial capitalism (when cities became concentrations of factories) and, more recently, under the influence of neoliberal ideas about governance. Second, I outline some of the conceptual

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work linking what Lefebvre called the “production of space” with the survival of capitalism. Finally, I engage with the work of Lefebvre and Foucault to explore how members of the working class may create more emancipatory landscapes as part of their socio-spatial praxis, recognizing that they do so within conditions not necessarily of their own making. This latter notion draws upon Marx’s famous observation in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) that “men make their own history but not under the conditions of their own choosing.” However, whereas Marx was mostly focused upon matters of historical transformation, I want to suggest that people also make their own geographies (though likewise not under the conditions of their own choosing), that the making of such geographies can be the object of intense political struggle, and that such geographies, once made, play central roles in shaping the political behavior of social actors. The right to the city, then, is a right to physically make the city in particular ways as part of a politics of emancipation.

The Urbanization of Capital Cities have obviously existed for millennia. However, their political-economic role changed dramatically with the rise of industrial capitalism. This change has had implications for urban residents. For instance, although their various city-states were governed quite differently, the Hellenic Greeks generally saw the city (the polis) as the physical expression of a community of citizens. The polis was thus the hearth of culture, while the agora, which sat at its center, “permitted all citizens to affirm themselves as isoi (equals), and homoioi (peers), and to enter with one another into a relation of identity, symmetry, and reciprocity [as part of] a united cosmos” (Naddaf 2005, 84).4 For their part, the Romans also saw the city as a central element in social life, and living in a city was considered crucial to one’s ability to fully articulate a sense of being a citizen and “civilized.” Whereas in ancient times cities served largely as administrative centers, in Europe during the late Middle Ages they became ever more focal points of economic life as markets for agricultural produce and, increasingly, as places for the manufacturing of goods. Distinguishing between the emergence of several types of city—the “consumer city,” the “producer city,” the “industrial city,” and the “merchant city”—Weber ([1921] 1958) argued that by helping to break the grip that medieval political and economic institutions had held on society, this transformation of cities into centers of production and consumption facilitated the development of a new rationality in Western Europe that would help bring about the advent of capitalism and liberal democracy. Other commentators have similarly seen the growth of cities associated with the rise of industrial capitalism as playing an important part in the unfolding of the social relations of modern

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life. Hence Durkheim ([1893] 1947) detailed how urbanization resulted in the growth of feelings of anomie as people who did not know one another were crammed together in the built environment. Contemplating the link between urbanization and the rise of capitalism, Lefebvre ([1970] 2003 and [1973] 1976) argued that the making of capitalism’s geography in specific ways at different times has been central to its survival. This connection between capitalism and urbanization means that as capitalism became global so did “urban society [come to] be defined as global[, for] it covers the planet” (Lefebvre [1970] 2003, 167). Importantly, however, Lefebvre did not equate “urban society” with a city’s physical dimensions. Rather, he submitted that “the urban revolution creates an urban society, in which case the physical separation of city and countryside becomes of less and less significance” (Saunders 1986, 158). Thus, urban dwellers are reliant upon what happens in rural areas for the production of, for instance, their food, whereas rural areas have increasingly become subject to the rhythms of advanced capitalist accumulation through the commodification of land and the control exercised over it by large agribusiness interests controlled from large cities. For his part, Harvey (1989b, 22) has likewise connected urbanization and capitalism, suggesting that “capital accumulation and the production of urbanization go hand in hand,” both because cities are places where significant amounts of surplus value are generated and secured and because crises of overaccumulation in the realm of production can be displaced, at least temporarily, through speculative investments in the built environment (we shall return to this below). This relationship between production and speculative real estate activities means, therefore, that although historically the industrial city has been “a centrepiece of accumulation and surplus production, it has to be seen as a distinctive place within the spaces of the international division of labor” of its time (Harvey 1989b, 30). Regarding the observation that capitalism is distinguished by being principally an urban mode of production and that the building of urban landscapes has been central to its survival, two qualifications need to be made. The first is that the manner in which many cities are governed has been changing recently, and it is this change that has, I think, led to growing calls by social and labor activists for a renewed “right to the city.” In particular, whereas a guiding principle of a good deal of urban governance (at least in Western cities) throughout much of the twentieth century was to provide a social safety net for vulnerable citizens, the rise of neoliberal politics has encouraged a shift away from this principle, as urban governments have increasingly favored policies designed to improve their economic competitiveness vis-à-vis other cities, often at the expense of their most powerless inhabitants (Fainstein 2010; see also Greenberg, this volume). This has encouraged greater regulation of the poor (such as legislation limiting

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where people can panhandle and/or sleep, if they are homeless) and reductions in service provision for them in much the same way that the structural adjustment policies of the International Monetary Fund have forced various national governments to reduce expenditures on social welfare programs. Second, the rise of neoliberal politics has been marked by a narrative that argues for the growing importance in an era of globalization of so-called “global cities.” These global cities have been presented as the “command and control” centers of the contemporary world economy (e.g., see Sassen [1991] 2001; Knox and Taylor 1995; Beaverstock, Smith, and Taylor 2000). As McCann (2002) has argued, though, such cities are typically abstracted from their surrounding urban and national systems and reified as part of a discourse that privileges the global within discussions of contemporary capitalism. In the process of constructing such a narrative, this global cities literature tends to “obscure the linkages between global cities and their national urban systems, and to downplay the significance of research into other ‘local’ or ‘ordinary’ cities” (79; see also Robinson 2006, especially chapter 4). In discussing the nature of urbanization under capitalism and what this means for political struggles over the right to the city, then, McCann maintains it is important to recognize that the “same economic, political, and cultural processes (cycles of investment and disinvestment, exchange of knowledge and ideas, changing patterns of immigration, for instance) are co-present in all cities, although the manner in which these larger processes intersect to produce places is different. The tendency in global cities literatures to focus analysis on a few cities while also creating a dualism between the global and the local as part of the construction of a theoretical object [thus] leaves them open to criticism in terms of how they allow us to understand contemporary urbanism.” Following from McCann, then, although there is a tendency by some to see global cities as being at the forefront of right-to-the-city campaigns because they are supposedly at the ground zero of neoliberal policies to encourage competition in a global economy, it is important to recognize that the global cities in which have taken place many of the protests worldwide to retain such a right are deeply connected to places beyond their boundaries. Thus, rather than succumbing to a rhetoric that, according to McCann, creates a theoretical object (“global cities”) as if they were somehow separate from the broader societies and urban hierarchies in which they are located, I want to suggest here that by viewing both “global” and “nonglobal” cities as being connected to the broader machinations of global capital (if in perhaps different ways), it becomes possible to imagine a world in which all cities (and not just “global” ones)— together with the broader landscapes of capitalism, including rural ones—can be made in more emancipatory ways.5 Creating a right to the city, in other words, does not mean that critics of neoliberal capitalism should focus solely

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upon remaking urban landscapes, nor remaking the urban landscapes only of so-called “global cities,” despite the fact that protests there often catch our attention because these cities are frequently important hubs in global media networks. Rather, they must understand how the urban is connected to the nonurban, and thus that by also making strategic interventions in nonurban landscapes (e.g., through being engaged in the politics of food production or various rural conflicts), they can play a role in reworking how urban environments are made (and vice versa)—being engaged in rural land-reform campaigns, for instance, may shape processes of rural-to-urban migration and thus patterns of urbanization and urban governance. Equally, remaking the social relations extant in “global cities” may require focusing attention upon events occurring in “nonglobal cities.” What is important, in other words, is to view right-to-the-city campaigns to remake the broader geography of capitalism as needing to be fundamentally relational, for intervening in one place can have effects elsewhere, depending on how that place is spatially connected to other locales perhaps hundreds or even thousands of miles away. Being geographically aware, then, must be a central element in any project of emancipatory politics.

On the Links between the Social Relations and the Spatial Structures of Capitalism The notion that social processes and spatial form are related, such that changing the landscape’s spatial form can help change a society’s social structure, is an old one. Indeed, history has been replete with efforts—for both emancipatory and reactionary purposes—to plan the built environment and to use architectural design as a way to further various social and political agendas. For instance, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social reformers like John Ruskin (1848) and Patrick Geddes ([1915] 1950) argued that improving the lot of the poor could be achieved by transforming the spatial environments within which they live, while Hayden (1976) has documented efforts by abolitionists, labor unionists, feminists, prison reformers, and others to construct a new urban landscape as a central element in their plans to redesign society. On the other side of the equation, perhaps one of the most famous examples of spatial planning for purposes of social control is Napoléon III’s rebuilding of Paris to impress upon the general public the glory of Second Empire France, as well as to ensure that the city’s new boulevards were sufficiently geometric that his artillery could control the mob with a few well-placed rounds. For her part, Watson (2009) has shown how, more contemporaneously, in many parts of the Global South urban planning has been

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used to keep the poor out of those parts of cities that have been earmarked as the playgrounds for the international jet set. As outlined above, efforts to connect theoretically the production of urban space in certain ways with the functioning of capitalism owe much to the work of Henri Lefebvre and its interpretation and subsequent reworking by Marxist geographers. For Lefebvre, the production of space in general—and of urban space in particular—has been central to what he called the “survival of capitalism” ([1973] 1976). Thus, whereas theorists like Rosa Luxemburg ([1913] 1951) argued that capitalism would collapse in upon itself once it had spread so widely that there were no non-capitalist spaces into which it could expand, Lefebvre maintained ([1973] 1976, 21, emphasis in original) that, in fact, “capitalism has found itself able to attenuate (if not resolve) its internal contradictions for a century, and consequently, in the hundred years since the writing of Capital, it has succeeded in achieving ‘growth.’ We cannot calculate at what price, but we do know the means: by occupying space, by producing a space.” Central to Lefebvre’s argument is the assertion ([1974] 1991, 53, 59) that “every society produces a space, its own space” and that “new social relationships call for a new space, and vice versa.” The proposition that the production of space is central to how capitalism operates has been explored by several Marxist geographers, of whom David Harvey is probably the most well known. In a series of publications he sought to show how the geography of capitalist urbanization is reflective of the dynamics of accumulation (Harvey 1972, 1973, 1976, 1978, 1982, and 1989b). In so doing he developed a framework in which cycles of building and disinvestment in the urban built environment can be linked historically to cycles of accumulation. Specifically, he argued (1978) that three circuits of capital can be identified. These he termed the “primary circuit” (the circuit in which surplus value is extracted during the production process), the “secondary circuit” (the built environment), and the “tertiary circuit” (collective investments either to make capital more productive [e.g., money spent on things like science, technology, and education] or to keep workers “in their place” [e.g., expenditures on the military and police forces]).6 These three circuits are connected. Hence, when capital finds it difficult to accumulate in the primary circuit, it may switch to one or both of the others—it may invest in speculative real estate construction (secondary circuit) as a way to secure long-term returns through the charging of rent or interest rather than through direct production of commodities, or it may invest in science and technology (tertiary circuit) as a way to develop new commodities and/or ways of making them more efficiently and so improving its competitiveness. This need to switch capital between circuits can provide openings for social

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movements to challenge the continued smooth accumulation of capital and to create so-called “switching crises.” With regard to the secondary circuit, Harvey suggested that the built environment’s physical form is shaped by flows of capital necessary to build either those pieces of infrastructure required for production to occur (including factories, roads, railway systems, and ports—what he called the “built environment for production”) or for consumption to occur (worker housing, sidewalks, shops, and other types of urban infrastructure—what he called the “built environment for consumption”). Some of these infrastructural elements can, of course, be used for purposes of both production and consumption—roads, for instance. What this all means for Harvey is that “capital builds a physical landscape appropriate to its own condition at a particular moment in time, only to have to destroy it, usually in the course of a crisis, at a subsequent point in time” (1978, 124). Consequently, much as reading a book tells us a story about the characters who inhabit it, so, too, does reading the contours of the built environment allow us to deduce something about the nature of capitalist accumulation at different historical moments—periods of speculative building can quite literally be seen in the fabric of cities, as can other developments in the history of capitalism (such as transformations in the dominant mode of transportation, as when cities shifted from a nineteenth-century focus upon the movement of people and cargo by carriage and train to a twentieth-century focus upon their movement via truck and car).7 A central element in Harvey’s formulation of how the production of space is central to the functioning of capitalism came in his 1982 book The Limits to Capital. In this he argued that capital must create particular “spatial fixes” in the landscape so that accumulation may proceed. For example, capitalists must collectively and individually ensure that raw materials can reach their factories and offices, that workers can be brought together in particular places to serve as the labor force for various different employers, and that the products of such labor can be distributed to final markets. All of this requires putting in place a certain configuration of the economic landscape. For Harvey (1982, 426) these spatial fixes are integral to the circulation of capital and constitute the basis of the uneven development that characterizes capitalism’s geography, an uneven development that is never fixed but is always being remade as various segments of capital compete among themselves. Other Marxist geographers have made similar arguments. Harvey’s student Neil Smith, in his 1984 (1990) book Uneven Development, argued that capital produces space “in its own image” (xv), while another of his students, Dick Walker (1981), showed how the U.S. government had stimulated urban construction and working-class homeownership after World War II as a way of priming the economic pump and seeking to reduce

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the likelihood that the class conflicts of the 1930s would reemerge—a set of policies that Walker termed the “suburban solution.” Though not geographers, several additional writers have similarly made connections between the built environment’s spatial form and the nature of class conflict under capitalism. Hence Gordon (1978) showed how ongoing class struggle in the paid workplace encouraged many manufacturers to establish suburban plants during the first two decades of the twentieth century so as to escape the grip of militant urban unions.8 For his part, Castells ([1972] 1977, 1978, 1983) examined how conflicts over collective consumption (e.g., rent strikes) have shaped the development of the capitalist city. In theorizing the creation of the spatial fix and how conflicts over the spatial form of the city are central within class struggles, however, it is important to bear in mind (at least) four things. The first of these is that capital is not an undifferentiated mass. Indeed, it is frequently the case that different segments of capital have quite different visions for how the built environment should look and quite different needs when it comes to constructing what they consider to be the spatial fix they require at any given moment in any given place. For instance, large, speculative construction capital may want certain urban blocks cleared of their current buildings so as to provide a tabula rasa for new construction, a plan that smaller-scale capital involved in rehabilitating old buildings may oppose. Likewise, whereas some transnational corporations may want to see governments build roads in isolated areas so that these corporations can readily access raw materials and/or use the roads to more easily bring their goods to rural markets, local capitalists may oppose this because such infrastructure could help break their monopolies over local markets by facilitating the rural population’s access to cheaper goods coming from the outside or because their local workers now have an easier way to travel to the region’s big cities in search of other employment opportunities. The second thing to bear in mind is that, like capital, working-class people have an interest in ensuring that the geography of capitalism is made in some ways and not in others. As with capitalists, so may different groups of workers have quite diverse ideas as to how economic landscapes should be made. For example, when containerization began to impact the maritime-cargo-handling industry in the 1950s, different groups of workers were affected differently. Dockers saw much of the work that they had previously done move to warehouses inland, where the job of putting goods into containers and taking them out—referred to as “stuffing” and “stripping” in the industry—was now being done. This left them with just the work of putting the actual containers on ships leaving port and taking them off those coming into port. Consequently, in the United States the International Longshoremen’s Association engaged in a series of legal battles

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to force the shipping companies to retain much of the stuffing and stripping work—and the jobs it provided—in waterfront areas. However, the Teamsters union, representing warehouse workers, argued against such an effort for fear that this would rob its members of work now being done inland. The dispute between these two unions, then, was fundamentally about where the location of certain types of work should take place—that is to say, about how the economic landscape should be made (see Herod 1994 for more details). Third, although collective capital and collective labor may have different desires when it comes to constructing the geography of capitalism—capitalists must collectively seek to produce a landscape that facilitates accumulation, even if different groups of them may have opposing ideas as to how that landscape should look, whereas working-class people must collectively ensure that a landscape is made that facilitates their self-reproduction on a daily and generational basis (though they likewise may have diverse views of how to go about doing so)9—it is frequently the case that particular segments of capital and particular segments of labor may join together to fight for one type of economic landscape, whereas other segments of capital may join together with other segments of labor to ensure that a quite different landscape is enacted in place. Often, these social actors are in the same industry or region/country and so see a common set of interests worth defending—coal companies and coal miners, for instance, might unite to maintain an economy and its attendant landscape based upon carbon use in response to efforts to switch power sources to, say, solar energy, whereas U.S. employers and workers might come together to restrict imports from China, imports that are themselves being pushed by coalitions of Chinese businesses and workers.10 While in general, then, there is a tension under capitalism between capital on the one hand and labor on the other, it is important to recognize that, when social actors are understood to be geographical beings who are spatially embedded in particular places and may have feelings for those places (what geographers call topophilia—literally, “a love of place”), the spatiality of capitalists’ and workers’ lives means that they frequently engage in cross-class alliances and intra-class conflicts, for geography can greatly complicate class analysis (Herod 1991b). Finally, it is critical to recognize that in their struggles to make the geography of capitalism in their desired ways, social actors struggle within landscapes created by past generations. To draw from Marx, the landscapes of all the dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living. There is, in other words, a degree of path dependence in the built environment. Thus, the form of twentieth-century cities was shaped by their nineteenth-century growth patterns, just as those patterns were shaped by the struggles that took place in the preceding centuries; but that form will also shape how twenty-first-century cities

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evolve. Equally, however, even as social actors are constrained by the landscapes within which they find themselves at any given moment, they also transform and erase them through their struggles—the landscapes of the past shape the possibilities for struggle, even as the outcomes of such struggles erase those extant landscapes. The geography of capitalism, in other words, is not static but is constantly in motion, the product of myriad struggles to make it in some ways and not in others.

Workers Making Workers’ Cities Having outlined above a conceptual framework for linking the physical form of the city with the way in which capitalism functions, as well as a way to consider how class and other social conflicts can play out geographically but also be fundamentally about geography, in this third section of the chapter I want to focus upon the matter of how working-class people might go about producing what I am calling here “workers’ cities”—by which I mean cities that both respond to working-class people’s individual and collective desires and help them to reproduce themselves more easily on a daily and generational basis. One obvious way in which they might do this is through either facilitating or disrupting the spatial fixes that individual capitalists and capital collectively must emplace in the landscape if they are to ensure that accumulation occurs—facilitating so that they might have jobs, or disrupting in cases where capitalists are trying to deprive them of the ability to work. The former might involve workers working together with various segments of capital. The latter might involve, perhaps, blocking the removal of equipment from a factory and its transportation elsewhere or making it impossible for capitalists to set up shop in particular places in ways that might disrupt existing work patterns, either though direct action like physically interrupting the supply chain to make certain areas “no-go zones” for particular (or even all) capitalists or, less directly, through convincing local governments to zone pieces of property in certain ways and not others (cf. Luce and Lewis in this volume).11 For the first of these strategies (directly disrupting capitalists’ spatial fixes) to be successful, working-class people and their supporters will usually need to acquire particular geographical knowledge of firms’ socio-spatial organization so that they can make focused and considered interventions into the production of the economic landscape, which is why many unions and others have invested significant quantities of time and money into mapping supply chains.12 One such example has been a project initiated by the International Research Network on Autowork in the Americas, which sees as central to challenging auto producers’

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power the ability to map “the changing contours of this supply chain” (see Babson and Juárez 2007 for more on the IRNAA). Other examples include developing a cartography of a firm’s customers so that pressure can be brought to bear upon them to no longer buy from that firm during a dispute. Although there are myriad examples of such corporate campaigns, one interesting illustration of how to ascertain the spatiality of a firm’s customer base is that of locked-out workers who, during the course of a 1989 dispute with the Ravenswood Aluminum Corporation in West Virginia, would simply get in their cars to follow to end-users the trucks hauling the aluminum being smelted by the scab workers who had replaced them—traveling the highways of North America allowed their union to chart the distribution network of the plant’s product as a way to build a consumer boycott campaign (see Herod 2001 for more details). Such a mapping of the geography of firms’ production chains and distribution networks may seem like an obvious thing to do, but it is surprising how many labor campaigns must start with workers having to construct from scratch a map of how their plant is tied into a corporation’s broader spatial structure because they were unaware of this before they began. For the second of these strategies (persuading local governments to zone pieces of property in certain ways) to be successful, working-class people and their organizations must engage with elements of the state (local, state/regional, national). This often involves thinking in quite geographically strategic ways about particular spaces and how such spaces might be defended against the predations of particular capitalists. One such example of workers successfully lobbying local government to rezone property so that they could defend their jobs (and thus their ability to reproduce themselves biologically and socially) involved the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union in New York City, which, in the 1980s, feared that the financial sector’s boom—part of New York’s transformation into a “global city”—would encourage manufacturing lofts in Manhattan’s midtown garment district to be converted into office space, thereby denying garment manufacturers space and so threatening workers’ jobs. As a result, they organized a campaign that resulted in the city government creating a Special Garment Center District in which conversions of lofts to office space would be restricted, thereby relieving some of the pressures on garment manufacturers (Herod 1991a). Through its spatially informed actions the union not only carved out a section of the city that would be protected from the broader forces of globalization that were encouraging the repurposing of manufacturing lofts into spaces for financial institutions—a protection that was clearly visible in the built environment through the pattern of loft conversion and nonconversion—but it also played an important role in shaping the evolving spatial division of labor in this part of the city by favoring

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manufacturing jobs over financial ones. Significantly, then, the union’s strategy for saving its members’ jobs relied upon creating both a material space (the Special District, as codified legislatively by the city’s zoning laws) and a discursive space (the Special District as an “industrial” rather than as a “postindustrial” / “service sector” space).

Learning from Lefebvre: The Spatial Trialectic and Building Emancipatory Landscapes The example above—of garment workers creating both a material and a discursive space as part of their social and spatial praxis—is but one instance of working-class people going about making urban landscapes that more readily facilitate their self-reproduction. Significantly, though, it brings us back to Lefebvre for a moment. In particular, Lefebvre ([1974] 1991, 33–39) argued that there were three deeply intertwined elements to the production of space under capitalism. These three, which constitute a spatial trialectic,13 are • spatial practice (the social activity through which landscapes are physically made and restructured geographically and which “embraces production and reproduction, and the particular locations and spatial sets characteristic of each social formation”); • representations of space (signs and images of the city—both verbal and nonverbal—that are generated by urban planners, architects, engineers, artists, and others through maps, models, plans, and paintings and that shape how the urban landscape is conceived of and subsequently put in place and which “are tied to the relations of production and to the ‘order’ which those relations impose, and hence to knowledge, to signs, [and] to codes”); and • spaces of representation (these are material spaces imbued with complex symbolic meanings in which everyday life is lived).14 In the case of the garment workers, then, we can think of their actions as being an example of their spatial praxis (lobbying the city government) resulting in a certain representation of space (the formal outline of the Special Garment Center District as marked on zoning maps) and a particular space of representation (the district as a place whose use would be restricted in particular ways but which also took on a certain symbolic weight as a place that would continue to function as it had historically—as a place of garment manufacturing rather than as an area of greater office activity). Taking things one step further, within this schema Lefebvre (40) suggested that these three elements correspond with what he called “perceived space”

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(l’espace perçu), “conceived space” (l’espace conçu), and “lived space” (l’espace vécu). As Elden (2004, 190) has stated, these three types of space are important to consider, for there is a unity . . . between physical, mental and social space. The first of these [l’espace perçu] takes space as physical form, real space, space that is generated and used. The second [l’espace conçu] is the space of savoir (knowledge) and logic, of maps, mathematics, of space as the instrumental space of social engineers and urban planners, of navigators and explorers . . . space as a mental construct, imagined space. The third [l’espace vécu] sees space as produced and modified over time and through its use, spaces invested with symbolism and meaning, the space of connaissance (less formal or more local forms of knowledge), space as real-and-imagined. In such a schema, the third space (l’espace vécu) is a product of the other two and is space “as it might be” (Shields 1999, 161). What is important here, however, is that while all spaces exhibit these three elements simultaneously as part of a unity, each is deeply contradictory and so there is not necessarily any degree of coherence in how space is produced, imagined, and experienced. This lack of coherence presents an opportunity for working-class people to challenge how the built environment is made, for it provides them with a possibility of disrupting individual capitalists’ and collective capital’s ability to shape the urban landscape in such a way as to ensure the reproduction of capital and capitalist relations of production. In other words, it presents working-class people with an opening to create more emancipatory landscapes, for, as geographer Jane Wills (1998, 147) has argued, “by drawing new contour lines on the map of class power, workers’ activity can shape the terrain in which economic processes and social relationships unfold.” Considering Wills’s comment not just metaphorically but also materially, we can see not only a number of ways in which workers can challenge the terrain where the economic processes and social relationships of capitalism unfold, but also how changes in that terrain shape the likelihood of their success. For example, a significant source of conflict in many cities in recent decades has been the phenomenon of gentrification and the pushing out of working-class people from particular neighborhoods they have long inhabited. Although they might at first seem unconnected, such restructuring of the geography of residence in a city can impact working-class people’s ability to exert political power in the workplace because it changes the geographical relationship between where people work and where they reside and so affects workers’ opportunities to socialize outside the

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spaces of work. This is important because workers are more likely to develop the kinds of informal social relationships upon which they can draw during disputes within the workplace when they socialize beyond it. The relationship between physical space, both within the workplace and outside it, and working-class people’s abilities to build solidarities and develop political power through their ongoing social interactions is something of which employers are often painfully aware and why they frequently seek to limit workers’ abilities to mingle at work and after work. For instance, in the early twentieth century the Ford Motor Company began to decentralize its operations by building smaller plants across the United States (at least compared to the massive one-hundred-thousand-plus-worker River Rouge facility in Michigan); building smaller plants, the company reasoned, would reduce the number of workers in any particular plant and so make them easier to keep in check. Significantly, Zhang (2015) notes that Chinese automobile manufacturers are today likewise scaling back on the size of their facilities and trying to fragment workers’ living arrangements through the strategic location of dormitories in response to growing worker unrest. Equally, the history of employer efforts to control the workplace has been replete with designs for factories and offices that facilitate the surveillance of employees by limiting the latter’s abilities to congregate out of the sight of managers.15 With regard to efforts to limit workers’ abilities to mingle outside of work, in the contemporary period mining companies in Western Australia have developed a system of labor control called “fly in, fly out,” wherein workers fly in to iron-ore mining regions and work for several days and then fly back out to where they more permanently live (which might be hundreds of miles away in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, or even in New Zealand or Indonesia) (Ellem 2015). Myriad other such instances of workers increasingly living significant distances from where they work—whether voluntarily or not—can be identified, such that, as Hyman (2004, 21–22) has suggested, in recent decades “the spatial location and social organisation of work, residence, consumption and sociability have become highly differentiated.” Consequently, the average employee today “may live a considerable distance from fellow-workers, possess a largely ‘privatised’ domestic life or a circle of friends unconnected with work, and pursue cultural or recreational interests quite different from those of other employees in the same workplace.” The growing spatial “disjuncture between work and community (or indeed the destruction of community in much of its traditional meaning) entails the loss of many of the localised networks which [previously] strengthened the supports of union membership (and in some cases made the local union almost a ‘total institution’).” As a result, whereas in the past many workers’ identities “were

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reinforced by the broader networks of everyday life”—meeting at church or at the neighborhood bar or where their kids go to school or at the local ballpark—“the possibility and character of collectivism are today very different when work and everyday life are increasingly [spatially] differentiated.” In turn, this can affect workers’ ability to come together to challenge extant power relations. Certainly, this is not to say that employers have necessarily consciously driven gentrification or the pushing of working-class people out of their neighborhoods as a way to minimize their power. But it is to recognize that the recent history of U.S. cities (and those in many other countries) has been one of an increasing spatial and functional separation of work and living spaces to produce distinct areas of production and social reproduction, as many people live ever greater distances from where they work (England 1991). When thinking about how the relationship between home and places of paid work is being transformed by gentrification (often driven by neoliberal policies to “renovate” the city) and suburbanization (driven both by a desire on the part of many for a suburban lifestyle but also, for many others, by an inability to find places to live in increasingly expensive cities), it is important to recognize that such transformations are highly racialized and gendered. Numerous studies have shown, for example, that married white women’s domestic responsibilities mean that they tend to work closer to home than do their husbands (Hanson and Johnston 1985; Silveira Neto, Duarte, and Páez 2015), while the racialized nature of the labor and housing markets—at least in the United States—means that for minorities the relationship between where they live and where they work is often quite different from what it is for whites. Thus, because they have poorer spatial access to jobs than do white women, minority women tend to have longer commuting times and less-localized labor markets than do white women, even as they generally have better spatial access to employment than do minority men (McLafferty and Preston 1992). How people negotiate the spaces between home and places of paid work are similarly gendered and racialized—women in one-car, two-worker households are more likely than men to commute to work on public transit, while, in urban America, working-class African American women tend to rely on mass transit more than do working-class white women (Taylor and Mauch 1997). What this all means is that the ability of diverse groups of working-class people to cross space (say to go to community and/or union meetings) and to come together in both the workplace and the neighborhoods in which they live, to build the kinds of social relationships out of which they might develop solidarities that challenge capital’s power to fashion the built environment, is likely to be quite varied, because not only do many workers now lead largely individualized lives separated from the broader networks of everyday life, but they also do so in dissimilar ways. Consequently,

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working-class struggles against gentrification and lack of affordable housing and to create a city in which working people can afford to live close to where they work, together with struggles over things such as having better mass transit systems, not only are about not having to spend so much time and money on commuting from distant residences but are also about creating a milieu in which working-class values may be expressed because workers’ identities as working-class people can be reinforced collectively both in the workplace and beyond it. Two important observations come out of this discussion. First, struggles over housing and transit are not unconnected to struggles in the paid workplace and should force unions and others to think beyond the boundaries of the space of the workplace and to contemplate how what goes on in the workplace is connected to the spaces of the broader community (and vice versa). Fortunately, this is something that growing numbers of labor groups—those advocating for a new model of organizing, one that is more community-oriented and less workplaceoriented—are recognizing (e.g., see Savage 1998 and Walsh 2000; also, see de Graauw and Gleeson, and Purser in this volume). But it does mean that these groups must be sensitive to how different sets of working-class people are differentially embedded in space and have disparate capacities to cross it. Second, and closely related, struggles over the spatial relationship between places of work and of residence are important in allowing working-class people to exert influence over the broader urban landscape. In thinking about such struggles, however, it is useful to go back to Lefebvre for a moment, for the fact that each of the elements that make up the spatial trialectic itself contains tensions means that the production of the spaces that allow for the reproduction of capitalist social relations and/or working people’s self-reproduction is never straightforward. Thus, as Mosher (2004, 3) has argued, spatial “visions are seldom smoothly and inexorably translated into [physical] design[s] and then into [actual built environments]—even when shepherded along by politically or economically powerful individuals.” Furthermore, recognizing that the trialectic is deeply contradictory provides a way for us to think about how spaces made with one thing in mind might nevertheless be appropriated by others, both materially (as when squatters subvert a property’s use as a generator of rent by turning it into a place of free shelter, or when, say, street vendors’ appropriation of urban space challenges property rights [see Dunn in this volume]) and symbolically (as when a public space designed to express corporate power—such as a park named for a corporate sponsor—is occupied by protesters demonstrating against corporate power). Putting in place new built environments, then, is never an unproblematic proposition and such landscapes may be reworked physically and symbolically by those who will use them in ways not imagined by, or counter to, the desires of those who brought them into being.

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FIGURE 10.1.  Place Vendôme column. Lefebvre’s trialectic links spatial practices (material acts involved in physically making the landscape) with representations of space (symbols generated by planners and others that reflect the social order that they represent) and spaces of representation (material spaces that come to be imbued with complex symbolic meanings). This linkage was implicitly understood by the Communards who, after establishing a revolutionary government in Paris in 1871, toppled the Vendôme column in central Paris. Originally built to celebrate Napoléon Bonaparte’s victory at the battle of Austerlitz, by 1871 the column had come to symbolize the hated regime of his nephew, Napoléon III. Toppling it was therefore a powerful symbol of the Communards’ opposition to a repressive state. Significantly, though, one of the first things that the government of the new Third Republic did after defeating the Communards was to rebuild the column, thereby symbolically reestablishing the regime’s authority within the city’s urban fabric. Photo by André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri. From http://www.republique.ch/archives/ enavant/mai98/insurrection.html, through Wikimedia Commons.

The way in which urban landscapes are constructed to project certain symbolic values and order by their corporate builders and/or by city planners and how these values might be subverted raises the question of how working-class people might themselves seek to create new symbolic values in the semiotic landscape and how these play into the material production of the spaces of the city as part of the spatial trialectic. Thus, working-class people can sometimes

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physically shape the landscape and/or imbue it with certain symbolic values as a way to reinforce their identities, thereby creating a habitus out of which a sense of collective experience can emerge, which can itself shape whether they feel welcome or not in particular urban environments. For example, whereas large corporate office blocks full of shining glass and steel may make them feel as if they do not belong in particular parts of the city, monuments recalling workers’ struggles may have the opposite effect, thereby opening up such spaces to them.16 Hence, much as the U.S. civil rights movement has attempted to remake the symbolic landscape and make it more welcoming to minorities by renaming streets and buildings for African Americans, a process that sometimes—at least in the South—involves taking away names associated with the Confederacy (Alderman 1996), so can anti-capitalist or right-to-the-city groups work to create new “landscapes of memory” (Dwyer and Alderman 2008) by making particular spaces “workers’ spaces” or “people’s spaces” (on a temporary or permanent basis) through such activities as building monuments to workers and important elements in working-class history (e.g., monuments to strikes or massacres of workers), renaming streets and buildings for workers, or challenging their naming after the titans of industry, and so forth. For example, numerous labor groups have come together to fund and/or agitate for memorials, causing to be erected everything from individual statues like the American Merchant Marine Veterans Memorial in the Port of Los Angeles and the Ludlow Monument (erected in 1918 by the United Mine Workers of America to honor the victims of the Colorado Ludlow massacre), to murals depicting workers (as in San Francisco’s Coit Tower), to buildings (such as the Workers’ Memorial Tower in Reading, Pennsylvania, commemorating workers who died from on-the-job accidents and illnesses), to larger-scale landscapes (such as the Nuestra Señora Reina de La Paz property encompassing 187 acres in California’s Tehachapi Mountains, which is associated with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers of America and which was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2011).17 Creating landscapes of memory through constructing such “memorial arenas” (Alderman 2002)—part of Lefebvre’s “spaces of representation”—in which highly visible public texts of various kinds (statues, buildings, murals, etc.) about the past (and thus the present and possibly the future) can be read by the population, then, can be an important element in nourishing contemporary struggles because they “merge the past they commemorate into ordinary settings of human life” (Azarayahu 1997, 481). Sometimes such memorials are deliberately planned by urban planners and architects (and so serve as what, following Lefebvre, we could term espaces conçus), but sometimes they are more organic, as with graffiti that reflects opposition to corporate power.18

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Learning from Foucault: Enclosing and Partitioning Urban Space In addition to using Lefebvre to help think about how working-class people can play a role in creating cities that more readily facilitate their own self-reproduction, it is also important to consider the work of Michel Foucault (1984, 252), who famously stated that “space is fundamental in any exercise of power.” Foucault was particularly interested in how human bodies are disciplined in space and suggested that this disciplining relies in part on the ability of those seeking to control workers and others to be able to enclose and/or partition spaces. Hence, Foucault ([1975] 1977, 141, 143) maintained, discipline sometimes requires spatial enclosure to contain oppositional groupings of people, while at other times it relies upon partitioning space as a way to break up groups of individuals who might coalesce to challenge power elites. Crucially, these two spatial practices—enclosing space and partitioning space—frequently work hand in hand. Thus, the practice of enclosure allows for the regulation of spaces by controlling who enters and exits them, whereas that of partitioning allows for the separating of individuals from one another so as to reduce the possibility that they might develop any kind of collective consciousness. At the same time, enclosure can encourage working-class people to regulate their own behavior by getting them to internalize that certain types of activities that might be appropriate in some spaces are not in others—the enclosed space of the workplace, for instance, can be presented as a location where different types of behavior are expected and tolerated relative to what happens outside this space, such that crossing the boundary from the outside space to the inside space is expected to elicit a change in their behavior. Although Foucault was largely talking about particular institutions of the modern age—hospitals, prisons, classrooms, factories—and how they are laid out spatially so as to control the bodies located within them, we can apply his ideas to the city more broadly. For instance, some cities appear to be becoming ever more partitioned as certain parts of them are increasingly spatially enclosed as a way of keeping the poor in or out, depending upon the particular space. Sometimes this is being done through the conscious design of the urban environment—here we can include the seemingly ever more ubiquitous “gated community” model of urban development (e.g., see Dinzey-Flores 2013), as well as the way in which a city’s infrastructure is created to keep people from accessing certain parts of the built environment or to keep them in their neighborhoods (e.g., when major highways are constructed as cordons sanitaires around minority neighborhoods, such that the residents of these neighborhoods are effectively sectioned off from the broader city).19 At other times, it is being done through legal restrictions, such as the use of zoning codes (which may require lot sizes be

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greater than a certain square footage so as to keep out of particular neighborhoods smaller—and cheaper—houses and the people who might occupy them) or through police patrols that stop and frisk people who “look like” they should not be in a particular place at a particular (or any) time. Developing a politics that challenges the way in which powerful elites have ensured that parts of the city are enclosed and/or partitioned, then, can be an important element in facilitating a right to the city. Worker and citizen efforts to challenge the location of new highways—as in the myriad “highway revolts” that took place in many cities across the globe in the 1960s and 1970s and which led to the abandonment of various highway construction projects—or to build sidewalks to connect various neighborhoods and even to successfully remove highways and replace them with public parks and boulevards to restore neighborhoods (as in cities like Portland, Milwaukee, Toronto, and Seoul) can thus be read as what, following Scott (1985), we might call small-arms fire in the class war (see Checker in this volume for a contemporary struggle over infrastructure and how this had class dimensions).

The City as Factory Having discussed the notion of the right to the city, I want to return for a final moment to that of the “city as factory,” for I believe that these two are connected. There are (at least) two ways in which we can think about the city as factory. The first relates to the issue of enclosure and partition à la Foucault. In particular, whereas labor strategy—at least in the United States—has long been workplace based and focused, transformations in the nature of capitalism and the weakening of the labor movement for various reasons (“globalization,” a significant employers’ offensive over the past three decades, and the shift from manufacturing to service-sector employment, among others) mean that workers must increasingly look beyond the walls of the workplace to develop political alliances that help them to secure their rights and enable them to reproduce themselves on a daily and generational basis. As discussed above, they must, in other words, breach organizationally the walls that enclose their workplaces to make linkages with those groups that lie beyond them, turning the city as a whole into an arena for organizing—into the factory floor. In this sense labor organizing must be geographically rescaled, from a focus upon what goes on inside the boundaries of individual workplaces to one that looks across the built environment en bloc. In this regard, Savage (1998) has shown how the Service Employees International Union’s Justice for Janitors campaign in Los Angeles, rather than seeking to organize individual buildings, broke the city into a number of areas characterized by the nature of their office market dynamics (downtown, Century City, Burbank, etc.) and organized across each of these. This allowed organizers to switch scales from

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trying to organize particular work sites to organizing across broader swaths of territory. For her part, Jess Walsh (2000) has detailed efforts by service sector workers to organize across whole metropolitan areas through mechanisms such as living-wage campaigns (see also the chapters by Checker and Grimson in this volume, which look at efforts to organize across large sections of New York City and Buenos Aires, respectively). The second way of thinking about the city as factory, though, relates to factories as places of production. In analogous fashion, we can think of cities also as places of production, though, in this case, not only as places for the making of goods but also as places for the making of new citizens. This concept draws upon Foucault’s idea of “governmentality” to recognize that the deliberate manipulation of the spatiality of the built environment can be used to inculcate particular ideas and ways of thinking and being within the heads of those who occupy it—as when particular spots are established as memorial sites for various events deemed important or when streets are designed so that one is expected to access them via private car rather than, say, public transit (thereby inculcating the idea that certain parts of the city are really not designed to be “public”).20 Cities, then, are molders of social identity but also places where new identities can be forged through the physical and symbolic redesign of the built environment. Significantly, this idea has been picked up on historically in a number of places, some with more success than others. In the 1920s, for instance, Soviet planners saw the built environment as a milieu for (re)making workers and went about building “socialist cities” that would, they believed, be arenas for making the “new Soviet man/woman” (Fisher 1962). For his part, modernist architect Le Corbusier ([1933] 1967) outlined plans for a Radiant City in which the built environment’s rational planning would provide working-class people with material and spiritual freedom from the want, chaos, and inhumanity of the industrial cities in which they were living. In both instances there was a belief that molding the urban fabric in particular ways so as to promulgate particular sets of ideas about citizenship and social identity upon which a better society could be built was central to humanity’s liberation. Perhaps there is a lesson in that for today.

Concluding Comments In this chapter I have outlined how the survival of capitalism is centrally tied to how capitalism’s geography is made, that the production of the built environment in particular ways is central to the exercise of political power and to working-class people’s life chances, and thus that any emancipatory struggle must be about not simply creating more socially just institutions but also creating more socially

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and spatially just landscapes. Significantly, recognition of the links between the making of space and the exercise of political power is not new, even if how such links are theorized might be. Hence, Vural (1994) has detailed how, in the early twentieth century, various elements of the labor movement established worker cooperative housing in the Bronx in New York City as a step toward constructing a “workers’ city.” This housing would not only provide higher-quality accommodations for union members but also take on “an extended social meaning as a symbol of the successful departure of the working classes from the densely packed tenement districts of Manhattan” (Plunz 1986, 49). More recently, the AFL-CIO has used its pension funds to invest in various housing and commercial developments to “promote home ownership for working people and to help renew [blighted] areas of cities” as part of an effort to help them to “achieve the American dream of decent housing” (AFL-CIO 1995, 3). There are, then, several key lessons to be learned when it comes to efforts to create a right to the city. First, there is clearly a link between space and identity, wherein the physical construction of the built environment can shape social identities in particular ways. What this means is that making the built environment a place in which progressive ideas can be nurtured and grow is not just a metaphorical issue but also a material one that involves physically structuring the urban landscape in some ways and not others. Second, as I have outlined above, there is a recursive relationship between what happens in the workplace and what happens outside it, and the nature of this relationship shapes the possibilities for progressive political action. Consequently, the spatial connections between home and work must be thought about carefully when devising strategies to create access to the city as an environment for living. Third, how work is arranged geographically—what spatial fix is emplaced in the built environment—has significant implications for working people’s efforts to mobilize. In turn, how they mobilize can have significant implications for how work is arranged geographically. There is, in other words, a socio-spatial dialectic at work that those who wish to secure a right to the city must appreciate as they think about remaking the city. If they are to be successful, then, working-class people must have a geographical sensibility. In his exploration of what he conceived to be the need for a radical remaking of the city, nearly a century ago Le Corbusier ([1923] 1931, 8) famously stated that “the various classes of workers in society to-day no longer have dwellings adapted to their needs; neither the artizan nor the intellectual. It is a question of building which is at the root of the social unrest of to-day: architecture or revolution.” “Modern life,” he thus suggested (3), “demands, and is waiting for, a new kind of plan, both for the house and the city.” Much the same could be said of the city of today.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. Nathalie Alegre, interview with Miriam Greenberg, at the ALIGN offices, August 15, 2013. At the time of our interview, the Fight for $15 was significantly smaller, but, as we explore in chapter 3, it eventually led to efforts that have successfully raised the floor on low-wage jobs citywide—serving as a model, together with campaigns in 150 other U.S. cities, for statewide and national efforts. 2. For more on Occupy Wall Street see Milkman, Luce, and Lewis 2013. 3. Joel Feinberg, interview with Penny Lewis, at the Murphy Institute, March 15, 2015. See also Jaffe 2015. 4. For analysis of this new era see Michelle Goldberg’s lead article for the Nation, “The Rise of the Progressive City,” April 2, 2014. 5. For more on this ever-expanding body of research see the Urban Age Programme run jointly by LSE Cities, of the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Deutsche Bank, at https://lsecities.net/ua/, and the semiannual reports on World Urbanization Prospects produced by the United Nations Development Programme, at http:// esa.un.org/unpd/wup/. 6. Some critique Castells for disregarding the significance of class polarization and neoliberalization occurring at the time. Nonetheless, even his critics acknowledge the relevance of his central claim about the growing importance of collective consumption demands in these movements—as evident in the current resurgence of interest in his work. Margit Mayer reflected in 2006 on how “crucially relevant” Castells’s effort to define urban social movements in the 1980s remained, even while his notion of a “multi-class actor” intent on social change was belied by a contemporary urban context “transformed due to globalization and neoliberal restructuring, producing new battle zones around privatization, retrenchment and social polarization” (204). 7. For an analysis of how contemporary forms of market-oriented “urban sustainability” policy help, ironically, to drive these interacting dynamics see Greenberg, forthcoming. 8. Scholars also note the resonance of this new generation of progressive mayors with earlier cases of “municipal socialism” in many Latin American and European cities in the 1970s and 1980s. See e.g., Baiocci 2003; Chavez and Goldfrank 2004. 9. See Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2009, 44), “In the Shadow of the Shadow State,” for a compelling discussion of the “anti-state state actors” who lead this “devolution,” displaying a “frightening willingness to engage in human sacrifice while calling it something else.” 10. It is not only grassroots groups that identify the urban scale as a site of innovation. In fact, the importance of cities to the global economy is highlighted by the engagement shown by elites in tinkering with city programs and plans—from cultural zones to urban greening—and their use of these as lures in ever-intensifying forms of interurban competition. Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s three terms in New York City, from 2001 to 2013, for example, business-led public-private partnerships increasingly dictated the priorities of urban development (Greenberg 2014). Since he has left office, Bloomberg’s privately funded philanthropy continues to reward cities around the world that adopt his approaches. This entrepreneurial model of governance, widely practiced by mayors 221

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globally, has only contributed to the politicization of the metropolitan scale. Urban alliances now target hip urban redevelopment schemes, from “urban greening” to the “creative city” to “new urbanism,” that are primarily designed to help cities attract investment and more affluent consumers and residents. Thus we see many right-to-the-city movements exposing the hypocrisy behind the progressive claims of growth-oriented plans that either don’t address bread-and-butter issues like affordable housing and jobs, or that contribute to more problems by undermining living-wage efforts, speeding gentrification and displacement, exacerbating congestion, sprawl, and greenhouse gas emissions, or increasing the socio-spatial class divide. 1. THE STREET LABOR MOVEMENT

1. “Chaos in Gangnam! Government Thugs Attack Vendors,” YouTube, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=nxObRHwTkuI. 2. “Councilor Denies Extortion,” Bangkok Post, August 15, 2014, http://www.bang kokpost.com/news/politics/426788/councillor-denies-extortion. 3. “Message from FEDEVAL,” StreetNet International, http://www.streetnet.org.za/ show.php?id=673. 4. Interview with the author, New York City, October 2011. 5. Cities included Accra, Ghana; Ahmedabad, India; Durban, South Africa; Lima, Peru; and Nakuru, Kenya. 6. Public-space ordinances have been used to police day laborers (Varsanyi 2008), and supreme court rulings in Mexico, Colombia, and India have asserted that the constitutional right to work supersedes municipal jurisdiction over public space (Meneses-Reyes and Caballero-Juárez 2014). 7. Years after he capitulated to their demands, Mayor Koch expressed regret over carrying out the BIDs’ vendor eviction agenda (Allen 1998, cited in Devlin 2010). 8. Military veteran Joseph Kaswan appealed to a statute protecting veterans’ right to vend under state law, and Robert Lederman led a lawsuit securing artists a First Amendment protection to vend without licensing. 9. Correspondence, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, November 2011. 10. Interview with the author, New York City, October 2011. 11. Durban, South Africa, has been hailed as a model of vendor inclusion, where in the 1990s an alliance of vendor groups organized to participate in the redevelopment of Warwick Junction (Lund and Skinner 2004; ILO 2003). 12. David Weber, interview with the author, New York City, March 2011. 13. “Capital City Food Truck Convention!,” Southern California Mobile Food Vendors Association, January 20, 2016, http://socalmfva.com/. 14. “High Court Lambasts Municipal and Police Authorities,” National Association of Street Vendors of India—NASVI, December 10, 2014, http://nasvinet.org/newsite/ high-court-lambasts-municipal-and-police-authorities/. 2. DAY LABOR AGENCIES AND THE LOGIC AND LANDSCAPE OF NEOLIBERAL POVERTY MANAGEMENT

1. To comply with the requirements of the institutional review board and to ensure participants’ confidentiality, I use pseudonyms when referring to all companies and individuals in this study. 2. As Williams (2009, 243) has pointed out, “The complex interconnections between day labor agencies and other poverty survival mechanisms that sustain and reproduce

NOTES TO PAGES 48–71      223

pools of impoverished workers and, hence, the industry—such as public housing, unlicensed recovery houses, and their legal counterparts, rescue missions and halfway houses—are timely avenues of future study.” 3. “Our era’s economy, its structures of service provision, and the symbolic violence of individual achievement and free market efficiency condemns increasingly large proportions of the transgressive and unemployed poor to processes of lumpenization, which decimate bodies and amplify suffering” (Bourgois 2011, 7). 4. As Peck and Theodore (2001) point out, in some low-income neighborhoods “it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the labor market is the hiring hall” (476). 5. A news article published in the Jacksonville-based Florida Times Union exemplifies—even as it purportedly contests—this point (Maraghy 2005). Focused on Labor Ready, one of the country’s leading day labor companies, its headline reads: “Labor Ready Fights Image as Social Service Agency.” The article highlights how the agency, long used as a public feeding site and homeless survey station, is working to alter its image as a “hangout for homeless people.” The manager of the agency is quoted as saying, “We’re not a non-profit. We’re not a homeless shelter.” The manager confirms that churches and nonprofit agencies like the Salvation Army can continue to feed day laborers in the lobby, “but not those who just show up and don’t work.” 6. Numerous scholars have demonstrated that the temporary staffing industry underlies the very shifts in the labor market that it claims to be responding to. Temporary staffing companies, in other words, act as entrepreneurs, doggedly working to legitimate, and generate demand for, their services. Through their “market-making” activities, temporary staffing firms operate as “active institutional agents” in the remaking of employment relationships and labor market norms and conventions (Peck and Theodore 2001, 474; see also Gonos 1997; Hatton 2011; Ofstead 1999; Smith and Neuwirth 2008). 7. As Peck and Theodore (2012) remark on worker centers, “Their relatively modest scale—when balanced against, say, the size of the network of for-profit intermediaries, like private temp agencies—also speaks to the way in which the odds are stacked when it comes to ‘positive’ regulatory reform” (755). 3. ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT FOR WHOM?

1. “Retail Sales Worldwide Will Top $22 Trillion This Year,” eMarketer, December 23, 2014; http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Retail-Sales-Worldwide-Will-Top-22Trillion-This-Year/1011765. 2. Retail employment is difficult to measure, given data definitions and inconsistencies across countries, and in developing countries much of the retail workforce is self-employed. Furthermore, many countries combine wholesale and retail trade data. 3. U.S. data are from the National Retail Federation. Data for India are from Amin 2010. Some sources report that the 14 percent figure for India includes wholesale trade as well as retail trade (Guruswamy et al. 2005). 4. U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Occupational Employment, Job Openings and Worker Characteristics,” http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_107.htm. 5. Josh Kellerman and Stephanie Luce, The Walmartization of New York City (New York: ALIGN, 2011). 6. New York City, with its large economy, has more power to challenge Walmart than a small rural area with high unemployment might have. But given the power of some of the large corporations, activists have had to try using similar tactics at different levels, including enacting or using national laws or building international pressure campaigns. For example, South African unions attempted to use their Competitions Commission to

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prevent Walmart from entering the country through merging with Massmart. This failed, but the commission did rule that 503 workers who had lost their jobs in the merger be reinstated. India had foreign direct investment laws that prevented foreign companies from holding a majority ownership share in any retail business operating in the country, which worked to keep Walmart out for some time. But despite major protests, India changed its laws in 2013, paving the way for Walmart and other foreign retailers to enter. Activists in Bangladesh and their supporters around the world have pushed Walmart to sign the Fire Building and Safety Accord designed to improve conditions in garment factories that produce for Walmart and other large retailers. Other campaigns have targeted Walmart subcontractors processing food, such as banana pickers in Central America and shrimp-processing workers in Louisiana. 4. CONTEXT, COALITIONS, AND ORGANIZING

1. In May 2010, Governor Rick Perry signed into law SB 1024, expanding the ability of police departments across Texas to arrest employers who cheat their workers out of their pay. Immigrant and worker advocates, however, have argued that this new state law is inadequate to protect worker rights because of insufficient enforcement resources and the particular challenges faced by undocumented and limited English proficient immigrant workers struggling to navigate the state’s complicated labor enforcement bureaucracy. 2. Exempted from the Minimum Compensation Ordinance in 2000 were contracts for goods, contractors with twenty or fewer employees, for-profit businesses with service contracts of less than $25,000, nonprofit service providers with contracts less than $50,000, and nonprofit contractors who could prove that compliance with the ordinance would cause them economic hardship. These provisions still hold, but as of January 2016 the hourly wage is $13.34 for new and amended contracts with for-profits, and $12.25 in the case of nonprofits (OLSE 2016). 5. A BRIDGE TOO FAR

1. Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, “Bayonne Bridge Navigational Clearance Project,” http://www.panynj.gov/bayonnebridge/. 2. Sam Roberts, “High Above the Water, but Awash in Red Tape,” New York Times, January 2, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/03/nyregion/long-review-of-bayonnebridge-project-is-assailed.html?_r=0. 3. This initiative allowed expedited permitting and review processes for infrastructure projects deemed “regionally significant”; http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/ 2012/07/19/we-can-t-wait-obama-administration-announces-5-major-port-projectsbe-ex. 4. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “EPA Superfund Program: Diamond Alkali Co., Newark, NJ,” https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0200613. 5. Global Container Terminals, http://www.nycterminal.com/t3/index.php?id=144. 6. See Mike D’Onofrio, “Environmental Groups File Suit to Halt Bayonne Bridge Project,” Jersey Journal, August 19, 2014, http://www.nj.com/hudson/index.ssf/2014/08/ environmental_groups_bayonne_bridge_raise_the_roadway_project_port_authoirty_ ny_nj_court_coalition_f.html. 7. See Global Container Terminals, “GCT New York LP,” www.nycterminal.com. 8. “Dumbo Historic District Designation Report,” New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, December 18, 2007, 15. 9. Sharon Zukin’s (1989) study of the Soho neighborhood of Manhattan details how city officials rejected a proposal for urban renewal clearance and new housing in Soho in the early 1960s because local industries there were still thriving.

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10. The Real Deal: New York Real Estate News, “9 Noteworthy Real Estate Projects in Gowanus,” August 1, 2014, http://therealdeal.com/blog/2014/08/01/9-notable-real-estateprojects-in-gowanus/. 11. Leslie Albrecht, “Two Gowanus Canal Cleanup Projects Gearing Up,” dna info, October 14, 2015, https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20151014/gowanus/two-gowanuscanal-cleanup-projects-gearing-up. 12. Interestingly, the Red Hook plan called for the barge to be installed just opposite the Red Hook Houses, a massive public housing project. Opposition to the plan used “environmental racism” as a rallying cry, claiming that Red Hook Houses residents were being unfairly targeted to house a waste disposal operation. However, plan supporters claimed that the Red Hook opposition was being fueled in part by developers wanting to protect property values in that area (Musumeci 2013). 13. See http://www.nycedc.com/service/incubators-workspaces for further descriptions of these spaces. 14.  Alexandra Leon,“DUMBO Was Brooklyn’s Most Expensive Neighborhood for Sales in 2015: Report,”dna info,December 30,2015,https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20151230/ dumbo/dumbo-was-brooklyns-most-expensive-neighborhood-for-sales-2015-report. 15. ada fruit, “Mayor de Blasio and Speaker Mark-Viverito Unveil Action Plan to Grow 21st Century Industrial and Manufacturing Jobs in NYC,” November 3, 2015, https:// blog.adafruit.com/2015/11/03/mayor-de-blasio-and-speaker-mark-viverito-unveilaction-plan-to-grow-21st-century-industrial-and-manufacturing-jobs-in-nyc/. 16. At the time of writing, this project was on hold. 17. See Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, http://www.panynj.gov/port/. 18. See Clean and Safe Ports, http://www.laane.org/what-we-do/projects/cleanand-safe-ports/. 19. Joseph Bonney, “Revised NY-NJ Clean Trucks Plan Stirs up Controversy,” JOC. com, January 14, 2016, http://www.joc.com/port-news/us-ports/port-new-york-andnew-jersey/revised-ny-nj-clean-trucks-plan-stirs-controversy_20160114.html. 20. According to its website, “The Coalition for Healthy Ports is a bi-state alliance of environmental justice and environmental activists, truck drivers, faith leaders, labor unions and community advocates fighting for environmental and economic justice at the ports of New York and New Jersey. The Coalition for Healthy Ports is the local arm of the Coalition for Clean & Safe Ports, which unites over 150 organizations strong nationwide and a multitude of individual supporters.” See http://www.alignny.org/posts/ campaign/2012/01/about-the-coalition-for-health-ports/. 6. RADICAL RUPTURES

1. The author recorded this speech at the rally. 2. For images and description of the rally, as well as a list of the more than thirty groups involved, see Diby 2013. 3. On crises as moments of “simultaneous rupture and intervention” see Hay 1996. 4. See also Battistoni 2012. 5. On rollback and rollout neoliberalism see Peck and Tickell 2002. 6. For this history see Colten 2005. 7. In New York, four coalitions led by middle-class professionals—including architects, designers, and academics—became influential, particularly on questions of the redesign of Ground Zero: the Civic Alliance to Rebuild Downtown; Imagine New York; New York / New Visions; and Rebuild Downtown Our Town. Meanwhile, groups like the Labor Community Advocacy Network (LCAN), Rebuild with a Spotlight on the Poor, and Beyond Ground Zero focused on including the needs of the poor and people of

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color—communities disproportionately impacted by the 9/11 disaster but largely unacknowledged as victims—at the center of their recovery efforts. In New Orleans, groups like the Common Ground Collective, one component of the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund, mobilized an estimated thirteen thousand volunteers in the weeks and months following the storm. Later they were joined by Bring New Orleans Back—a professional coalition in the mold of groups like the Civic Alliance—as well as innovative grassroots coalitions focused on making longer-term rebuilding more equitable and inclusive. Such groups included the Neighborhoods Partnership Network, the Greater New Orleans Disaster Recovery Partnership, the Citizens’ Road Home Action Team, and Levees.org. For more on these groups, and the spatial politics of rebuilding, see Gotham and Greenberg 2014, chapter 4. 8. In terms of what was reported by the media, an LCAN member, present at the event, noted that “we didn’t expect [housing and jobs] to be the major story, but we were stunned by their total omission.” Author interview. 9. The same was true across the Hudson. In Jersey City and Hoboken, poorer neighborhoods that were seriously affected remained without electricity for weeks. 10. Buettner and Chen (2014) reported, “Many of the consultants were recently minted M.B.A.s, billing the city nearly $400 an hour, according to city records. The firm’s top consultant billed the city $860 an hour. A gaggle of well-dressed consultants tagged along everywhere with Brad Gair, a former federal disaster recovery official whom Mr. Bloomberg hired days after the storm and put in charge of the housing office.” 11. For an analysis linking voting patterns in the Democratic primary to Sandy see Crowley 2013. De Blasio won in storm-affected areas that were poorer and with more public housing, as opposed to wealthier areas with single-family homes. Crowley suggests, quoting Occupy Sandy volunteer Diego Ibañez, “It seems that voters who know all too well the ‘slow hurricane’ of poverty and inequality chose the candidate whose platform most resembles a social resilience program.” These patterns were to persist into the general election. 12. Bettina Damiani, phone interview with the author, May 15, 2013. 13. To view the report see http://www.nyc.gov/html/sirr/html/report/report.shtml. 7. THE OTHER LOW-CARBON PROTAGONISTS

1. When citing an interview, I report full names with interviewees’ permission. 2. I use the metaphor “political infrastructure” rather than “network” to emphasize the invisible, but enduring and consistent, socioeconomic characteristics of the groups in question. 8. THE SPACE OF SPEECH

1. Panel discussion, “Freedom of Assembly, Public Space Today, Part 3,” Center for Architecture, New York, September 16, 2012. 2. City of Charlotte, “An Ordinance Amending Chapter 15 of the Charlotte City Code Entitled ‘Chapter 15—Offenses and Miscellaneous Provisions.’ ” Ordinance Book 57, p. 503, January 23, 2012. 3. Locations in the United States of Occupy sites, actions, and meetings, sourced from http:// www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/oct/17/occupy-protests-world-list-map, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Occupy_movement_protest_locations_in_the_ United_States. 4. Locations sourced from https://www.facebook.com/chicagolightbrigade/ and https:// www.facebook.com/blacklivesmatterchi/.

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9. SPATIAL POLITICS AND URBAN BORDERS

1. Workers took over control of the factories in which they had worked, commonly after bankruptcy. 2. Outside the city center, with a few exceptions, all subway lines and major avenues have the same directional sense, i.e., they run parallel to socioeconomic sectors. In essence, there are no metropolitan subway lines or connecting avenues that link working-class to wealthy areas. In suburban transportation, despite greater diversity, there is one train for upper-middle sectors, parallel to the river, and a separate train for the poor and working class, which connects the Capital with the south and the west. 3. These quotes, and those throughout the section, are taken from the author’s ethnographic research. 4. Among the complex reasons for this decline are inexperience on the part of organizers, the boycotting action of traditional political parties, and the successful process of hegemonic reconstitution. 5. Delamata (2004) and Svampa and Pereyra (2003) analyze this process in detail. 6. It should be noted that several ethnographic studies on political practices and territoriality aim to demystify the piquetero figure, which has been socially perceived in the city simply as a route obstructer. These studies have shown that participants of unemployment organizations don’t all think of themselves as piqueteros, as this reference is limited specifically to those in charge of interrupting transit by lighting tires on fire, or by physically blocking the street. There is a distinction being made here between the roles people play within the organization, when they go on piquetes, and what they do in their everyday life (Ferraudi Curto 2007). As characteristic of this organizational life, assemblies and soup kitchens emerged throughout the city, brewing specific hierarchies and consequential conflicts. 10. FROM WORKERS IN THE CITY TO WORKERS’ CITIES?

1. For more details on the Right to the City coalition see http://righttothecity.org; for more details (in German) on Recht auf Stadt see www.rechtaufstadt.net. 2. A copy of this charter is available at http://tinyurl.com/z5kqcpy. 3. For more details see http://base.d-p-h.info/fr/fiches/dph/fiche-dph-8536.html and (in Spanish) http://derechoalaciudaddf.blogspot.com. 4. In practice, of course, this notion of equality did not include many members of the community, such as slaves and, depending upon the specific city, women. 5. The distinction made here between “global” and “nonglobal” cities highlights precisely the problematic nature of much of the discourse that suggests “global cities”— which are often thought to be “global” because of their size and cosmopolitanness—are the most important arenas for confronting the neoliberal politics shaping our times. What makes supposed second-, third-, and/or fourth-tier cities any less central to how neoliberal global capitalism is operating (and thus any less “global”) than first-tier “global cities” like New York, London, and Tokyo? Such a question, however, must await answering in a place different from here. 6. It is important to note that the term “built environment” does not refer solely to urban landscapes. Rather, it can also refer to those rural landscapes that have been transformed by human labor, such as through plowing. 7. Revolutions in transportation are an important element in the functioning of capitalism—among other things, faster transportation allows a quicker turnover time for capital because capitalists can get their products to market more quickly. This “annihilation of space by time” (Marx [1858] 1973, 539) revolutionizes both the form of the built environment and the relationship between different places. Thus, in the nineteenth

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century those locales on the new railroad networks were brought much closer together and closer to the markets for their goods than were those not on the network, a fact that led many communities to seek to ensure that railroads ran through their town rather than through neighboring ones. 8. Perhaps the classic such case is that of Gary, Indiana, founded in 1906 by the United States Steel Corporation as a way to escape the unions then dominating Chicago. However, although the city was laid out as, essentially, a company town, US Steel’s desire to use urban planning to avoid worker militancy did not prove as successful as the company had hoped—during the 1919 national steel strike a riot broke out on the city’s main street between striking steelworkers and strikebreakers! 9. Put another way, capitalists must seek to produce a landscape of profitability, whereas working-class people (bearing in mind Joan Robinson’s [1962, 46] admonition that, under capitalism, the only thing worse than being exploited within the wage relationship is to not be exploited) typically seek to produce a landscape of employment by capitalists, which is not necessarily the same thing. 10. See Cohen in this volume for a case study of the politics of coalition building around environmental issues in São Paulo. 11. Manufacturers’ embrace of just-in-time delivery systems has made interrupting the supply chain easier for workers to do, which is why the logistics industry has come to play such an important role within contemporary capitalism (for more on this see Bonacich and Wilson 2008). 12. See Grimson in this volume for an example of how an understanding of the geography of the built environment of Buenos Aires shaped protest movements’ socio-spatial form and their tactical use of urban space. 13. Lefebvre ([1974] 1991) actually used the expression “dialectic of triplicity” (dialectique de triplicité). The phrase “trialectic” is from Soja (1996). Personally, I think that Soja’s phrasing is less obtuse than is Lefebvre’s. 14. In the original 1974 French version of his book La production de l’espace (The Production of Space) Lefebvre used the term “espaces de représentation.” The 1991 translation into English rendered this expression (poorly, in my opinion) as “representational spaces.” I prefer “spaces of representation” as a more precise translation. 15. For example, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the layout of hospital wards often reflected not only extant theories concerning the spread of disease but also supervisors’ desires to monitor nurses (Prior 1988), while offices were often laid out with an open floor plan so that a manager could keep an eye on the army of secretaries laboring away (Andrzejewski 2008). For their part, many factories were built as rectangles rather than as E-, L-, or T-shaped buildings, since these latter shapes provided awkward corners around which workers could talk beyond the gaze of their supervisors (Biggs 1995). Of course, the advent of video cameras and closed-circuit TV has reduced the ability of workers to avoid observation by their bosses and so has meant that there is less of a surveillance need to build factories that avoid such configurations. 16. Eco (1973) has argued that buildings often semiotically communicate to the broader world their function—corporate headquarters, for instance, frequently use lots of steel and reflective glass to express commercial power. 17. The American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFLCIO) maintains a list of such memorials (including those in the United States, Canada, and the UK) at www.aflcio.org/Issues/Job-Safety/WorkersMemorialDay/A-Collectionof-Workers-Memorials. 18. In a different context, Azaryahu (1996) has detailed how graffiti on the walls of buildings near the Kikar Malchei Yisrael (Kings of Israel Square) in Tel Aviv, the spot of Yitzhak Rabin’s 1995 assassination, served as a kind of open-air archive of public

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sentiments and political discussions and helped lead to the square’s formal renaming as Kikar Rabin (Rabin Square). 19. In the United States, for instance, many of the highways that were built as part of “urban renewal” effectively either isolated entire neighborhoods (as in Birmingham, Alabama, where, beginning in the 1950s, city leaders used the building of highways to geographically isolate the city’s black neighborhoods from its downtown [Connerly 2002]) or cut them in two (as with New York City’s Cross Bronx Expressway, conceived by planning power broker Robert Moses [Caro 1974] and built between 1948 and 1972). 20. The term gouvernementalité/governmentality is a portmanteau word, combining gouverner (to govern) and mentalité (mode of thought).

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About the Editors and Contributors

VOLUME EDITORS

Miriam Greenberg is professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she also directs the Critical Sustainabilities Research Project. She is the author of Branding New York: How a City in Crisis Was Sold to the World (Routledge, 2008), and coauthor, with Kevin Fox Gotham, of Crisis Cities: Disaster and Redevelopment in New York and New Orleans (Oxford University Press, 2014). Penny Lewis is associate professor of labor studies at the Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies at the City University of New York. She is the author of Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory (Cornell University Press, 2013), and coauthor, with Stephanie Luce and Ruth Milkman, of the report Changing the Subject: A Bottom-Up Account of Occupy Wall Street in New York City (Russell Sage Foundation, 2013). CONTRIBUTORS

Melissa Checker is the Hagedorn Professor of Urban Studies at Queens College and a faculty member in the PhD program in anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research focuses on environmental justice, urban sustainability in the United States, and the social justice implications of the green economy and social movements. Her book Polluted Promises: Environmental Racism and the Search for Justice in a Southern Town (NYU Press, 2005) won the 2007 Association for Humanistic Sociology Book Award and was a finalist for the Julian Steward Award and the Delmos Jones and Jagna Sharff Memorial Book Prize. Daniel Aldana Cohen is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He has worked as a writer and editor in Toronto and South America and is the coeditor of Notes from Canada’s Young Activists (Greystone, 2007). His research explores the interplay of climate politics and social movement protest in global cities, especially São Paulo, New York, and London. His writing about climate governance, climate justice, and the Occupy movement has appeared in the Journal of World-Systems Research, Public Books, the NACLA Report on the Americas, and at the Center for Humans and Nature. 255

256       ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Els de Graauw is assistant professor of political science at Baruch College, the City University of New York. Her research centers on the nexus of immigration and immigrant integration, civil society organizations, urban and suburban politics, and public policy. She earned her PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of Making Immigrant Rights Real: Nonprofits and the Politics of Integration in San Francisco (Cornell University Press, 2016). Kathleen Dunn is assistant professor of sociology at Loyola University Chicago, where she also serves on the Women’s Studies and Gender Studies Steering Committee. She is an urban sociologist whose research focuses on public space, gentrification, and new paradigms in work and worker organizing in urban society. Her forthcoming book manuscript examines urban public space as a workplace and is based on several years of research within New York City’s street vending industry. Shannon Gleeson is associate professor of labor relations, law, and history at Cornell University’s ILR School and was previously a faculty member in the Latin American and Latino Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley (sociology and demography) and is author of Conflicting Commitments: The Politics of Enforcing Immigrant Worker Rights in San Jose and Houston (Cornell University Press, 2012) and Precarious Claims: The Promise and Failure of Workplace Protections in the United States (University of California Press, 2016). Alejandro Grimson is professor of anthropology, culture, and politics at Universidad de San Martín (Argentina). His first book, Tales of Difference and Equality, won the award for best thesis in communication in Latin America. After publishing The Nation and Its Limits and Intercultural Communication, and compilations such as Culture and Crises in Latin America, Grimson won the Bernardo Houssay Prize awarded by the Argentine Federal State. The Limits of Culture earned the American Award granted by the Latin American Studies Association. Currently he is also a researcher for CONICET (Argentina). Andrew Herod is distinguished research professor at the University of Georgia. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including Labor Geographies: Workers and the Landscapes of Capitalism (Guilford, 2000) and, more recently, Scale (Routledge, 2011) and (with Rob Lambert) Neoliberal Capitalism and Precarious Work: Ethnographies of Accommodation and Resistance (Edward Elgar, 2016). Stephanie Luce is professor of labor studies at the Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies at the City University of New York. She received her BA at the University of California, Davis, and both her PhD in

ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS      257

sociology and her MA in industrial relations from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She is the author of Fighting for a Living Wage (Cornell University Press, 2004) and Labor Movements: Global Perspectives (Polity, 2014) and coauthor of two other books: The Living Wage: Building a Fair Economy (New Press, 2000) and A Measure of Fairness (Cornell University Press, 2008). Her current research focuses on globalization and labor standards, labor-community coalitions, and regional labor markets. Lize Mogel is an artist who creates and disseminates “counter-cartography,” a practice that uses maps and mapping to challenge the mainstream narrative of a site. She connects the standard history and collective imagination about specific places to larger narratives about globalization and labor. She is the coeditor of An Atlas of Radical Cartography, among other publications. Gretchen Purser is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. She received her PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, and her BA in sociology from Smith College. Her research focuses on precarious work and the low-wage labor market, the reproduction and lived experience of urban poverty, and the politics of punishment in the United States. Her forthcoming book, Labor on Demand: Dispatching the Urban Poor, won the International Book Award in the California Series on Public Anthropology.

Index

Abbott, Greg, 85 Abercrombie & Fitch, 62 Acconci, Vito, 158 – 59,  171 Agamben, Giorgio, 123, 126 Alegre, Nathalie, 121, 132 Alfonsín, Raúl, 185 Alliance for a Greater New York (ALIGN), 1 – 3, 8, 16, 24, 117, 119, 131 – 32, 139 Alliance for a Just Rebuilding (AJR), 2, 121 – 22, 131 – 39 American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), 15, 57, 83, 87, 91, 219 Ammiano, Tom, 93 Arab Spring, 171, 175 Argentina, 23, 185 – 88, 190 – 92, 194. See also Buenos Aires Associación de Vendadores Ambulantes (AVA), 37 – 38 Auster, Paul, 186 Baltimore, 19, 46, 48 – 49, 57 – 58, 67 Barcelona, 13, 123 Battistoni, Alyssa, 123 Bayonne Bridge, 21–22, 99 – 100, 102 – 3, 105, 115, 118 – 19. See also New York City Berman, Marshall, 26 Bhowmik, Sharit, 42 big-box stores. See retail industry Bird, Elizabeth, 135 – 36 Black Lives Matter, 20, 76, 171, 177 Bloomberg, Michael, 40, 101 – 3, 111 – 14, 130 – 31, 135 – 37, 143, 147, 151 – 52 Borges, Jorge Luis, 182, 184 Boston, 13, 71 Boston Consulting Group (BCG), 131, 135 boycotts, 5, 14, 87, 208 Brandworkers, 76 Brazil, 141, 149 – 50, 156, 198. See also São Paulo Brenner, Neil, 7 Bronx, 28, 74, 113 – 14, 130, 219 Brooklyn, 3, 5, 39, 67, 74, 102 – 3, 108, 111 – 15 Brown, Willie, 90, 92 – 93 Buechler, Simone, 10

Buenos Aires   assambleas (popular assemblies), 17, 179, 189 – 90, 193, 195 – 96   barrios populares (working class neighborhoods), 182 – 83, 185 – 86   cacerolazos (“pots and pans” marches), 179, 188 – 90, 193,  196   Capital area, 23, 181 – 88, 190, 192 – 95   cardinal directions boundaries, 23, 182 – 84, 187, 190 – 91   cartoneros (cardboard scavengers), 179, 186 – 87,  196   concentric circle boundaries, 23, 181 – 82, 186 – 87, 192 – 94   Constitución Station riots, 194 – 95   economic crisis impact, 23, 178 – 79, 185 – 88, 195 – 96   General Paz Avenue, 181, 187, 193   Greater Buenos Aires, 23, 180 – 84, 186 – 95   Libertador Avenue, 183, 194 – 95   piqueteros (road blockades), 17, 123, 179, 188, 190 – 93, 195 – 96   Plaza de Mayo protests, 188 – 89   police interactions, 184 – 85, 187, 189, 193 – 95   porteños (natives), 179, 183, 187   recuperated factories movements, 179, 188, 190 – 91   Riachuelo River, 181, 183, 189, 192 – 93   Rivadavia Avenue, 182 – 84   unemployment, 179, 185 – 93, 196   villas miserias (informal settlements), 180, 182, 192 Build it Back program, 131, 135, 137 Bullard, Robert, 116 Burger King, 75 – 76 Bush, George W., 135 business improvement districts (BIDs), 11, 32, 39, 66 Byron, Joan, 158 C40 Large Cities Leadership Network, 142, 147, 152 – 53, 156. See also climate change Caldeira, Teresa, 148 Castells, Manuel, 6, 10, 143, 205

259

260       INDEX

Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD), 148, 154 Celik, Ercüment, 43 Chicago   Black Lives Matter activities, 76, 177   education system, 126   growth rates, 9   Hyde Park development, 67   immigrant communities, 37 – 40   living-wage campaigns, 74   minimum wage campaigns, 74, 76   street vendors, 19, 28, 35, 37 – 40   Teachers Union strike, 5, 15 Chile, 9, 36, 126 China, 5, 9, 30 – 31, 35, 105, 206, 211 Chinese Progressive Association, 87 – 88, 92 Christie, Chris, 99 Clackamas Town Center, 67 Clean Air Coalition, 118 Clergy for a Just Living Wage, 88 climate change   C40 Large Cities Leadership Network, 142, 147, 152 – 53,  156   Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD), role of, 148, 154   Climate Works for All, 139   disasters, role in, 125, 129   energy-efficient construction, 142, 156   gray ecologies, 142 – 44, 148, 150 – 51, 153 – 57   greenhouse gas emissions, 139, 141, 146 – 47, 149 – 50, 154 – 55,  157   International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), 149   Maker Movement role, 114   New York City efforts, 114, 136, 139, 142   political contexts, 17, 142 – 45   See also São Paulo Clinton, Bill, 142 Clinton, Hillary, 77 Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports, 116 Coalition for Healthy Ports (CHP), 118 – 19 collective bargaining, 11, 15 – 16, 36 Collins, Jane, 50 community benefits agreements (CBAs), 72 – 73, 77 – 78 Community Development Block Grants, 91, 128, 130 crisis organizing, 21 , 120 – 24, 127 – 29, 132, 134, 138 – 39. See also disasters Cross, John, 30 Crown Heights Tenants Union (CHTU), 3 – 4, 7 – 8, 18,  24 Cuomo, Andrew, 118

Damiani, Bettina, 135 Davis, Mike, 157 day labor agency location strategies, 52 – 54 criminal history connections, 47 – 48, 51, 56 – 57 Day Labor Organizing Project (DLOP), 60 Day Laborers Organizing Committee (DLOC), 59 flexible exploitation, 51 – 52, 61 growth rates, 12 – 13, 47, 59 homeless connections, 47 – 48, 51 – 52, 56 – 58,  61 immigrants’ participation, 47, 57, 86, 91 minimum wage standards, 55, 58, 60 National Day Laborers Organizing ­Network,  57 opposition campaigns, 18, 57 – 61 poverty management role, 19, 48, 50 – 51, 54 – 59 protective legislation, 16, 57 – 58, 60 transportation needs, 48, 58 – 60 working conditions, 46 – 47, 54, 56, 60 De Blasio, Bill, 114 – 15, 131, 137 De Certeau, Michel, 181 De la Rúa, Fernando, 188 Del Rio, Manoel, 154 Demissie, Fassil, 30 Democratic National Convention, 165, 169 Department of Homeland Security, 86 Department of Labor, 67 DeVerteuil, Geoffrey, 50 Diogo, Adriano, 149 disasters Alliance for a Just Rebuilding (AJR) efforts, 2, 121 – 22, 131 – 39 Boston Consulting Group (BCG) program, 131, 135 Build it Back program, 131, 135, 137 climate change role, 125, 129 crisis-driven urbanization, 122 – 25, 128 – 30,  138 FEMA response, 128, 130 grassroots organizing, 22, 120 – 22, 124, 127 – 28, 131 – 32, 134 – 38 Hurricane Irene, 130 Hurricane Katrina, 22, 91, 120 – 22, 124, 126 – 34,  137 Hurricane Sandy, 2, 22, 120 – 22, 129 – 39 Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) aid, 120, 129, 134 – 35 political contexts, 123 – 24, 126 – 28, 130 – 38 Reconstruction Watch, 134 – 35

INDEX      261

redevelopment inequalities, 22, 120 – 22, 127 – 32, 134 – 39 Sandy Regional Assembly (SRA), 132, 134 – 37,  139 September 11 terrorist attacks, 22 – 23, 120 – 22, 124, 126 – 30, 132 – 34 Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency (SIRR), 136 – 37 Dole, Christopher, 59 Domino’s, 75 Doussard, Marc, 47 Duhalde, Eduardo, 193 Dunkin’ Donuts, 62 Durkheim, Émile, 181, 200 East LA Community Corporation (ELACC), 37 – 38 Eastern Environmental Law Center, 118 Elden, Stuart, 210 Environmental Justice Alliance, 132, 139 environmental justice movements, 21 – 22, 103 – 5, 113, 116 – 19, 127, 132, 139 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 104 – 5, 111 – 12 European Union, 5, 154 Fairbanks, Robert, 50 fast food industry, 6, 20, 62, 67 – 69, 72, 75 – 77. See also retail industry Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 128, 130 FIFA, 42 – 43 Fight for $15 campaign, 2, 8, 20, 63, 71, 75 – 78. See also minimum wage finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) economies, 9 – 10, 103, 107 – 9, 111, 119, 125, 129, 143 First Amendment, 161, 169 Fitch, Robert, 108 Flag Container Terminal, 105, 111 – 13, 115 Food Bank, 59 food trucks. See street vendors Foucalt, Michel, 199, 216 – 18 France, 5, 74 Franz, Martin, 65 Friedman, Milton, 126 Gallery Place, 67 Gauteng Hawkers Association, 35 Geddes, Patrick, 202 General Growth Properties, 66 Germany, 72, 74, 198 Gezi Park (Istanbul), 5, 18, 72 Gillen, Victoria, 113

Glass, David, 65 global warming. See climate change Goldhirsh Foundation, 38 Good Jobs NY (GJNY), 134 – 35 Gordon, Colin, 66, 205 Gotham, Kevin Fox, 124 Gottdeiner, Mark, 18 Gould, Deborah, 123 Gowan, Teresa, 50 Gowanus Canal, 111 – 13, 115 greenhouse gas emissions, 139, 141, 146 – 47, 149 – 50, 154 – 55,  157 Grossman, Richard L., 116 HABITAT, 42 Haddad, Fernando, 153, 155 Hart-Cellar Immigration Act, 32 Harvey, David, 13, 18, 151 – 52, 197 – 98, 200, 203 – 4 Hasenfeld, Yeheskel, 54 Hayden, Dolores, 202 Hill v. Colorado, 161 Hobbes, Thomas, 126 homelessness, 46 – 48, 50 – 54, 56 – 58, 61, 201. See also day labor Hong Kong, 18 Houston Alianza Mexicana, 88 Centro de Recursos Centroamericanos,  88 day labor industry, 86, 91 demographic profile, 84 – 85 Down with Wage Theft campaign, 20–21, 88, 92, 94, 96, 98 economic environment, 84 – 87, 89, 91, 94, 96 – 97 Familias Inmigrantes y Estudiantes en la Lucha, 88 Fé y Justicia Worker Center, 87 – 88, 91 – 92,  96 Greater Houston Hotel and Motel Association, 94 Greater Houston Partnership, 94, 97 Houston Apartment Association, 96 – 97 Houston Interfaith Worker Justice Center (HIWJC), 91 – 92 Hurricane Katrina impact, 91 immigrant communities, 20, 80 – 84, 87 – 89, 91 – 92, 94, 96 – 98 Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, 88 Justice and Equality in the Workplace Project, 88 Justice for Janitors, 87 labor unions’ presence, 85, 87, 89, 91, 94

262       INDEX

Houston (continued) Mayor’s Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs, 91 political environment, 85 – 87, 89, 91, 94, 96 – 98 Restaurant Opportunities Center, 87 Save Jobs for Houston Committee, 94 wage campaigns, 20, 80 – 81, 85, 87 – 89, 91 – 92, 94, 96 – 98 Wage Theft Prevention Ordinance, 92, 94, 96 – 97 Hurricane Irene, 130 Hurricane Katrina, 22, 91, 120 – 22, 124, 126 – 34,  137 Hurricane Sandy, 2, 22, 120 – 22, 129 – 39 Hyde Park, 67 Hyman, Richard, 211 Illinois Food Truck Association, 39 immigrants Chicago presence, 37 – 40 day labor participation, 47, 57, 86, 91 domestic labor, 31, 95 Houston presence, 20, 80 – 84, 87 – 89, 91 – 92, 94, 96 – 98 Immigration Reform and Control Act, 83 labor unions, role of, 14 – 15, 57, 82 – 83, 85, 87, 89, 91 – 95 Los Angeles presence, 37 – 38, 40 New York City presence, 22, 31 – 33, 37, 39 – 40, 104 – 6 Northern California Coalition for Immigrant Rights, 86, 88, 95 religious allies, 83 – 84, 87 – 88, 92 – 93,  96 San Francisco presence, 80 – 81, 83 – 98 Secure Communities program, 85, 87 street vendor industry participation, 19, 26, 28 – 29, 31 – 34, 37 – 40 urban space impact, 5 – 6, 36, 82 wage standards, 83, 86, 88 – 89, 91 worker centers, role of, 14, 21, 83, 87, 94 worker demands, 14, 82, 90 India, 5, 9, 19, 28, 40 – 42, 64 Indonesia, 74, 211 Informal Economy Monitoring Study, 31 – 32 informal labor, 6, 12 – 13, 20 – 21, 24, 27 – 33, 36, 40 – 44, 57, 64, 116, 197, 211 Institute for Justice (IJ), 38 – 40 International Coalition of Women and Credit, 42 International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), 149 International Labor Organization (ILO), 30, 42 International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, 208

International Longshoremen’s Association, 205 – 6 International Monetary Fund, 185, 201 International Research Network on Autowork in the Americas (IRNAA), 207 – 8 Istanbul, 5, 18, 72 Jansen, Per, 60 Jobs with Justice, 1 Jorge, Eduardo, 147, 150 – 51 Justice for Janitors, 87, 217 Kalhan, Anuradha, 65 Kassab, Gilberto, 146 – 47, 149 – 53 Kazis, Richard, 116 Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC), 75 Kerr, Daniel, 59 Keynesianism, 10 – 11, 30, 110 Kill Van Kull tidal strait, 103 – 6 Kimmelman, Michael, 2 – 3 King Jr., Martin Luther, 19 Kirchner, Cristina, 196 Klein, Naomi, 126, 150 Koch, Ed, 33 Kosteki, Maximilliano, 195 LA2050, 38 labor movements, 1, 9 – 10, 13 – 15, 18, 27 – 28, 36 – 40, 44 – 45, 81 – 82, 87, 95 – 97, 217,  219 labor community coalitions, 1 – 5, 13 – 16, 20 – 22, 41 – 42, 63 – 64, 70 – 74, 77 – 83, 86 – 88, 92 – 98, 102 – 4, 116 – 19, 121 – 22, 127, 131 – 34, 137 – 38. See also labor unions labor unions American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), 15, 57, 83, 87, 91, 219 Chicago Teachers Union, 5, 15 collective bargaining, 11, 15 – 16, 36 community benefits agreements (CBAs), 72 – 73 Crown Heights Tenants Union (CHTU), 3 – 4, 7 – 8, 18,  24 Houston, 85, 87, 89, 91, 94 immigrant community, role in, 14 – 15, 57, 82 – 83, 85, 87, 89, 91 – 95 influence levels, 11, 77, 85 International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, 208 International Longshoremen’s Association, 205 – 6 Laborers International Union, 132 minimum wage efforts, 16, 63 – 64, 76 – 77

INDEX      263

National Labor Relations Board rulings, 76 – 77 National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act impact, 14 New York City, 3 – 4, 7 – 8, 19, 131 – 32,  208 public sector role, 11 retail industry participation, 15, 68, 72 – 73 Retail Wholesale Department Store Union, 16 “right to work” legislation impact, 14 San Francisco, 20, 83, 85, 87, 89, 92 – 93, 95 Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), 41 – 42 Service Employees International Union (SEIU), 9, 16, 59, 75, 77, 92, 95, 217 street vendor representation, 26 – 27 strikes, 2, 5 – 6, 10, 14 – 17, 75 – 76,  78 Teamsters, 206 UNITE HERE, 9, 59 – 60, 92 United Food and Commercial Workers, 16 worker centers, role of, 14 – 15 Lambert, Susan, 68 Lanier, Bob, 94 Lautenberg, Frank, 99 layoffs, 11, 94, 116 Le, Amy, 39 Le Corbusier, 218 – 19 Leadership for Urban Renewal, 38 Lefebvre, Henri, 6, 8 – 9, 27 – 28, 34, 197 – 200, 203, 209 – 10, 213 – 15 Levada, William, 96 Livingstone, Ken, 142 living-wage campaigns Chicago, 74 Cincinnati, 60 Clergy for a Just Living Wage, 88 community benefits agreements (CBAs) promotion, 72 Houston, 80 – 81, 89, 91 Los Angeles, 72, 75 New York City, 2, 4, 74 San Francisco, 20, 80, 89 – 90, 92 – 97 Washington, D.C., 74 Workers Rising, 2, 4 See also minimum wage London, 13, 62, 126, 151, 157 Los Angeles American Merchant Marine Veterans Memorial, 215 Democratic National Convention, 165 East LA Community Corporation (ELACC), 37 – 38 immigrant communities, 37 – 38, 40 Justice for Janitors, 217 living-wage campaigns, 72, 75

Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), 16 Los Angeles Food Policy Council, 38 Los Angeles Street Vending Campaign, 38 minimum wage campaigns, 76 – 77 retail industry, 71 – 72, 75 street vendors, 17, 19, 28, 34 – 35, 37 – 38, 40 Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), 120, 129, 134 – 35 Luft, Rachel, 127 Luxemburg, Rosa, 203 Maantay, Julianna, 109 – 10 Macri, Mauricio, 196 Maker Movement, 114 Maluf, Adalberto, 156 Manhattan, 1 – 3, 5, 28, 33, 102 – 3, 107 – 9, 114, 129 – 30, 173,  208 Marxism, 9, 199, 203 – 4, 206 Mauss, Marcel, 181 Mayer, Victoria, 50 McCann, Eugene, 201 McDonald’s, 69, 75 – 77 McTague, Colleen, 60 Medicaid, 69 Menem, Carlos, 185 Milwaukee, 50, 217 minimum wage ALIGN, role of, 2, 8 Black Lives Matter connections, 76 Chicago campaigns, 74, 76 day labor standards, 55, 58, 60 fast food industry demands, 75 – 77 Fight for $15 campaign, 2, 8, 20, 63, 71, 75 – 78 Houston campaigns, 21, 80 – 81, 85, 87 – 89, 91 – 92,  94 labor unions’ efforts, 16, 63 – 64, 76 – 77 legislation, 74 – 75 Los Angeles campaigns, 76 – 77 National Labor Relations Board rulings, 76 – 77 New Orleans campaigns, 75 New York City campaigns, 2, 8, 75, 77, 138 phased growth, 75 San Francisco campaigns, 75 – 76, 80 – 81, 85, 88 – 97 Seattle campaigns, 75 – 76 urban policy influence, 16 Washington, D.C. campaigns, 74 Mosher, A., 213 National Association of Street Vendors of India (NASVI), 28, 40 – 42 National Day Laborers Organizing Network, 57

264       INDEX

National Labor Relations Board, 76 – 77 National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act, 14 National Restaurant Association, 94 National Right to the City Alliance, 22, 198 Natural Resources Defense Council, 118 New Jersey, 99, 103 – 4, 108, 116 New Orleans, 75, 91, 120, 125 – 33, 137 – 38. See also Hurricane Katrina New Unionism Network, 5 New York City air quality, 21, 100, 105, 107, 111, 115 Alliance for a Greater New York (ALIGN), 1 – 3, 8, 16, 24, 117, 119, 131 – 32, 139 Alliance for a Just Rebuilding (AJR), 2, 121 – 22, 131 – 39 Bayonne Bridge project, 21–22, 99 – 100, 102 – 3, 105, 115, 118 – 19 Board of Estimate, 107 Boston Consulting Group (BCG) program, 131, 135 Build it Back program, 131, 135, 137 Business Improvement Districts (BIDs), 32, 39 cargo container shipping, 21, 99 – 100, 105 – 6, 108, 111, 116 – 18 Chinatown neighborhood, 125, 128 – 30, 137, 139 climate change efforts, 114, 136, 139, 142 Community Development Block Grants, 128, 130 demographic profile, 105 – 6, 112, 114 Department of Buildings (DOB), 159 Department of City Planning, 105 Economic Development Corporation, 102 economic environment, 100 – 103, 106 – 8, 114 – 16 environmental gentrification, 100 – 102, 112 – 13, 119,  139 Environmental Justice Alliance, 132, 139 finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) economies, 103, 107 – 9, 111, 119, 125, 129, 143 Flag Container Terminal, 105, 111 – 13,  115 Good Jobs NY (GJNY), 134 – 35 Gowanus Canal, 111 – 13, 115 Hurricane Sandy impact, 2, 22, 120 – 22, 129 – 39 immigrant communities, 21, 31 – 33, 37, 39 – 40, 104 – 6 Independent Budget Office, 116 Industrial Business Zone (IBZ), 113, 115 industrial gentrification, 100 – 101, 103, 113 – 15,  119 Jobs with Justice, 1

Kill Van Kull tidal strait, 103 – 6 labor unions’ presence, 3 – 4, 7 – 8, 18, 24, 131 – 32,  208 living-wage campaigns, 2, 4, 74 Lower East Side neighborhood, 128 – 30, 137 – 39 Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), 120, 129, 134 – 35 minimum wage campaigns, 2, 8, 75, 77, 138 New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), 113 – 14 New York Food Truck Association (NYCFTA), 34, 39 – 40 North Shore Community Coalition for Environmental Justice (NSCCEJ), 117 – 18 North Shore Waterfront Conservancy of Staten Island (NSWC), 104 Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, 2 – 4, 8, 20, 24, 76, 114, 122 – 23, 132 – 33, 159, 171, 173, 175 Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ), 99, 115, 117 – 18 Red Hook neighborhood, 112 – 13, 130, 137 rent policies, 1, 3, 8, 102, 112, 137 retail industry, 62, 68, 71, 75, 77, 130 Rockaway neighborhoods, 130, 137, 139 September 11 terrorist attacks impact, 22 – 23, 120 – 22, 124, 126 – 30, 132 – 34 Special Garment Center District, 208 – 9 Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency (SIRR), 136 – 37 street vendors,  19, 28 – 29, 31 – 37, 39 – 40 Workers Rising, 2, 4 World Trade Center, 108, 120, 128 zoning regulations, 101 – 3, 107 – 13, 119, 159 Newsom, Galvin, 92 North Shore Community Coalition for Environmental Justice (NSCCEJ), 117 – 18 North Shore (Staten Island), 21, 99, 102 – 6, 109 – 19 North Shore Waterfront Conservancy of Staten Island (NSWC), 104, 118 Northern California Coalition for Immigrant Rights, 86, 88, 95 Oakland, 19, 48, 53, 55, 58, 71 Obama, Barack, 86, 99, 115, 135 Occupy Wall Street (OWS), 2 – 4, 8, 20, 24, 76, 114, 122 – 23, 132 – 33, 159, 171, 173, 175 OECD, 30 Olsson, Giula, 62 Panama Canal, 99, 106 Paris, 5, 13, 18, 151, 157, 202, 214

INDEX      265

Parker, Annise, 86, 94 Parker, Robert, 51 Peck, Jamie, 11, 52, 57 Pereyra, Sebastián, 190 Perón, Juan Domingo, 188, 193 – 94 Perry, Rick, 85 Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ), 99, 115, 117 – 18 Portland, 67, 217 precarious workers, 5 – 7, 10 – 12, 20, 27 – 33, 36, 43 – 50, 53, 55 – 60, 91, 111, 116, 129 Procter & Gamble, 106, 109 Puerta del Sol (Madrid), 5 Queens, 102 – 3, 113 – 14,  130 Rabin, Yale, 110 Red Hook, 112 – 13, 130, 137 retail industry apparel stores, 62 Commercial Workers, Retail Wholesale Department Store Union, 16 community benefits agreements (CBAs), 72 – 73 employee benefits, 68 employment figures, 67 – 68 fast food outlets, 6,  20, 62, 67 – 69, 72, 75 – 77 global corporations, impact of, 20, 62 – 65, 69, 78 – 79 growth rates, 9, 12 – 13, 20, 62 – 65, 78 job creation, 66 – 70 labor union participation, 15, 68, 72 – 73 local incentive programs, 66 – 67, 69 – 73, 78 – 79 Los Angeles, 71 – 72,  75 mergers and acquisitions, 62, 65, 79 New York City, 62, 68, 71, 75, 77, 130 office supply stores, 62, 65 opposition campaigns, 19–20, 63 – 64, 70 – 73 regulatory policies, 65 – 66, 73 – 74, 78 – 79 revenue generation, 64 – 66, 78 San Francisco, 73 – 76 tax increment financing (TIF) zones, 66 United Kingdom, 65, 69 urban space impact, 9,  20, 62 – 64, 66 – 67, 70, 78 – 79 wage standards, 20, 63, 67 – 69, 74 – 79 work hours, 67 – 69, 74 See also individual companies Retail Wholesale Department Store Union, 16 Riano, Quilian, 159 right-to-the-city movements, 1, 6 – 7, 13, 17, 19 – 24, 27 – 29, 34 – 37, 45, 48, 71, 81 – 84, 101 – 2, 122, 138, 141 – 48, 186 – 87, 197 – 202, 217 – 19

Rio de Janeiro, 183 – 84 Roever, Sally, 31 – 32 Romero, Luis Alberto, 186 Ruskin, John, 202 Ryan, Matt, 132 – 34, 136 – 37,  139 Salvation Army, 59 Sammon, Peter, 96 San Francisco Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), 93 Bay Area DACA Collaborative, 86 Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition, 86 Black Lives Matter Bay Area, 76 Board of Supervisors, 89 – 90, 92 – 93 Chinese Progressive Association, 87 – 88, 92 Clergy for a Just Living Wage, 88 Coalition for Ethical Welfare Reform, 93 demographic profile, 81, 84 – 85 Deporten a la Migra (Deport INS/ICE), 86 Due Process for All Ordinance, 85 economic environment, 84 – 86, 90, 93, 95 Golden Gate Restaurant Association, 93 homelessness, 50 immigrant communities, 80 – 81, 83 – 98 Immigrant Legal and Education Network, 86 Immigrant Rights Commission, 85 – 86 La Raza Centro Legal, 87, 92 labor unions’ presence, 20, 83, 85, 87, 89, 92 – 93,  95 living-wage efforts, 20, 80, 89 – 90, 92 – 97 minimum wage campaigns, 75 – 76, 80, 85, 88 – 97 Mission Agenda, 88, 95 Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition, 88 Northern California Coalition for Immigrant Rights, 86, 88, 95 Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs, 86 Office of Labor Standards Enforcement (OLSE), 85, 89 – 91 People Organized to Win Employment Rights, 87, 93 political environment, 81, 85 – 86, 89 – 90, 92 – 95, 97 – 98 retail industry regulation, 73 – 76 wage theft prevention campaigns, 20, 80, 88 – 89,  91 Young Workers United, 87 Sanders, Bernie, 77, 115 Sandy Regional Assembly (SRA), 132, 134 – 37, 139. See also Hurricane Sandy Sandy Tracker, 135 Santillán, Dario, 195

266       INDEX

São Paulo Apoio support hub, 148, 152, 154 Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD) assistance, 148, 154 downtown core reliance, 141 – 42, 147, 150 – 52 energy-efficient construction, 142, 156 environmental legislation, 140 – 42, 146 – 50, 153 – 56 European Union assistance, 154 Forum for a Living Center, 152 Free Fare Movement, 150, 155 greenhouse gas emissions, 139, 141, 146 – 47, 149 – 50,  154 housing policies, 23, 140 – 42, 144, 147 – 48, 151 – 55 Nova Luz development project, 151 – 53, 155 political environment, 13, 141, 146 – 53, 155 Prestes Maia occupation movement, 152 – 53,  155 transit policies, 18, 141 – 42, 144, 146 – 47, 149 – 50, 155 – 56 weather extremes, 145 – 46, 154 Workers’ Party (PT), 147 – 49, 153 – 55 Sassen, Saskia, 9 Savage, L., 217 Seattle, 2, 13, 75 – 76, 163 Secure Communities program, 85, 87 Segal, Paula Z., 159 Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), 41 – 42 Seoul, 13, 26, 217 September 11 terrorist attacks, 22 – 23, 120 – 22, 124, 126 – 30, 132 – 34 Serra, José, 149, 151, 153 Service Employees International Union (SEIU), 9, 16, 59, 75, 77, 92, 95, 217 Sewell, William, 123 Shenzhen (China), 9 sick leave, 16–17, 80, 89 – 90 Smith, Neil, 124, 204 social movement unionism, 14 ,  16, 25, 43 – 44 Solnit, Rebecca, 126 South Africa, 5, 17, 19, 35, 42 – 44 Southern California Mobile Food Vending Association, 37 – 38,  40 Spain, 5, 18 Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency (SIRR), 136 – 37 squatting, 12,  17, 150, 152, 198, 213 Standing, Guy, 53 Staten Island, 21, 99 – 100, 103 – 7, 113 – 14, 117, 130, 132. See also New York City

street vendors Associación de Vendadores Ambulantes (AVA), 37 – 38 Beijing, 30 – 31,  35 Chicago, 19, 28, 35, 37 – 40 criminalization, 27 – 29, 31, 34 – 35, 37, 40, 42, 44 displacement, 28, 40, 42 – 44 East LA Community Corporation (ELACC), 37 – 38 food trucks, 28 – 29, 34, 37 – 40, 44 growth rates, 12 – 13, 26, 30, 37 immigrants, role of, 19, 26, 28 – 29, 31 – 34, 37 – 40 India, 17, 19, 28, 40 – 42 Los Angeles, 17, 19, 28, 34 – 35, 37 – 38, 40 New York City,  19, 28 – 29, 31 – 37, 39 – 40 permit process, 29 – 34, 37 – 39, 41 – 42 Philippines, 36 police interactions, 27, 29, 31, 34 – 36, 42 political demands, 6, 29, 36 – 37, 40 public space appropriation, 19, 26 – 27, 31 – 32,  36 social stratifications, 26 – 27, 32 – 34, 37 – 38 South Africa, 17, 19 Southern California Mobile Food Vending Association, 37 – 38,  40 Street Vendor Project (SVP), 28 – 29, 31, 33 – 37, 39 – 40,  42 StreetNet International federation, 28, 40, 42 – 44 VAMOS Unidos, 28 – 29, 31, 34 – 35, 37, 39 vendor unions, 26 – 27 working conditions, 26, 29 – 32, 34, 44 workplace challenges, 26, 29, 32 – 34 strikes, 2, 5 – 6, 10, 14 – 17, 75 – 76, 78, 205 Stuart, Forrest, 50 Superfund program, 104, 112 Suplicy, Marta, 149, 155 Supreme Court, 14, 161 Svampa, Maristella, 190 Swider, Sarah, 30 – 31, 35 Teamsters, 206 Texas Tech University, 167 Texas Workforce Commission, 85, 92 Theodore, Nik, 52, 57 Thurman, Beryl, 104, 113 Tickell, Adam, 11 Tolbert, Bobby, 120 – 21 Toronto, 142, 217 trucking industry, 6, 21, 99, 103, 105, 108, 116 – 19

INDEX      267

Trump, Donald, 115 Turkey, 5, 72 UNITE HERE, 9, 59 – 60, 92 United Food and Commercial Workers, 16 United Kingdom, 65, 69 United Nations (UN), 12, 42, 149 Urban Agenda, 1 Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, 3 urbanization, 8 – 9, 12, 20, 24, 27 – 30, 44 – 45, 122 – 25, 128 – 30, 138, 157, 186, 192, 199 – 203,  212 US Gypsum Company, 106, 109 VAMOS Unidos, 28 – 29, 31, 34 – 35, 37, 39 Villa, Raúl, 181 Viña del Mar (Chile), 9 Vural, Leyla, 219 wage theft, 16, 20, 80 – 81, 85, 87 – 88, 91 – 92, 94, 96 – 98,  154 Walker, Dick, 204 – 5 Walmart, 65 – 66, 69, 71

Walsh, Jess, 218 Washington, D.C., 67, 74 Watson, Vanessa, 202 – 3 Weber, David, 39 Weber, Max, 199 welfare, 7, 16, 30, 50, 55, 59, 78, 93, 96, 138, 186, 195, 201 Wendy’s, 75 Wills, Jane, 210 Wilson, David, 52, 54 Women’s World Banking, 42 worker centers, 14–15, 21, 83, 87 – 88, 91 – 92, 94, 96, 136 Workers Rising, 2, 4 World Class Cities for All (WCCA), 28, 42 – 44 World Cup, 42 – 43 World Social Forum, 148, 198 World Trade Center, 108, 120, 128 World Trade Organization (WTO), 163 Zhang, L., 211 Zuccotti Park, 2, 5, 17, 120, 159, 173. See also Occupy Wall Street (OWS)