European journal of American studies

10-3 | 2015 Special Double Issue: The City

Édition électronique URL : https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/11186 DOI : 10.4000/ejas.11186 ISSN : 1991-9336

Éditeur European Association for American Studies

Référence électronique European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015, « Special Double Issue: The City » [En ligne], mis en ligne le 31 décembre 2015, consulté le 08 juillet 2021. URL : https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/ 11186 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.11186

Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 8 juillet 2021.

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SOMMAIRE

PART ONE Spatial Justice and the Right to the City: Conflicts around Access to Public Urban Space

Introduction Aneta Dybska et Sandrine Baudry

Urban Discourses in the Making: American and European Contexts

Where the War on Poverty and Black Power Meet: A Right to the City Perspective on American Urban Politics in the 1960s Aneta Dybska

Who Has the Right to the Post-Socialist City? Writing Poland as the Other of Marxist Geographical Materialism Kamil Rusiłowicz

Segregation or Assimilation: Dutch Government Research on Ethnic Minorities in Dutch Cities and its American Frames of Reference Ruud Janssens

Public Art: Transnational Connections

“The cornerstone is laid”: Italian American Memorial Building in New York City and Immigrants’ Right to the City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Bénédicte Deschamps

Performing the Return of the Repressed: Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Artistic Interventions in New York City's Public Space Justyna Wierzchowska

Competing Claims to Housing and Public Space: Fighting Displacement in the Contemporary City

What Can Urban Gardening Really Do About Gentrification? A Case-Study of Three San Francisco Community Gardens Guillaume Marche

Resisting the Politics of Displacement in the San Francisco Bay Area: Anti-gentrification Activism in the Tech Boom 2.0 Florian Opillard

“Meet de Boys on the Battlefront”: Festive Parades and the Struggle to Reclaim Public Spaces in Post-Katrina New Orleans Aurélie Godet

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PART TWO Sustainability and the City: America and the Urban World

Introduction: How (Can) Cities Work Theodora Tsimpouki

Real Cities

Infrastructures of the Global: Adding a Third Dimension to Urban Sustainability Discourses Boris Vormann

Dealing with the Past Spatially: Storytelling and Sustainability in De-Industrializing Communities Julia Sattler

The Implementation of the URBAN Community Initiative: A Transformative Driver towards Collaborative Urban Regeneration? Answers from Spain Sonia De Gregorio Hurtado

Imaginary Cities

Urban Figures, Common Ground: JR and the Cultural Practices of Perception Petra Eckhard

Space Over Time: The Urban Space in William Gibson’s Techno-thriller Novels Anna Krawczyk-Łaskarzewska

Stanley Park, Literary Ecology, and the Making of Sustainability Georg Drennig

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PART ONE Spatial Justice and the Right to the City: Conflicts around Access to Public Urban Space

EDITOR'S NOTE

Edited by Aneta Dybska and Sandrine Baudry

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Introduction

Aneta Dybska and Sandrine Baudry

1 In 1968 the French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre defined the right to the city as a right to “urban life, to renewed centrality, to places of encounter and exchange, to life rhythms and time uses, enabling the full and complete usage of these moments and places, etc.”1 His idea caught on in the Western countries and, in recent years, has been widely used as a critical tool by American urban scholars. The study of urban dwellers’ access to space and greenery, as well as the uses these urban resources are put to, reveals the existing discrepancies between the American values of justice and equality on the one hand and day-to-day realities of urban life on the other. Since claims and demands for a more equitable living environment materialize in public spaces in the form of territorial conflicts, knowing who uses public space and how it is used can inform us on a multitude of aspects of contemporary American society. Among them are the relations between citizens and institutions in the making of an urban public, as well as the relations among citizens themselves.

Contemporary2 scholars of the right to the city have elaborated on Lefebvre’s at times vague formulations and abstractions on the right to the city. Indeed, Mark Purcell argues that “Lefebvre’s urban politics of the inhabitant would not lead necessarily to any particular outcomes,” in that the indeterminate character of the right to the city makes it unclear who will be empowered, and to what degree. Purcell argues that Lefebvre’s conception of the inhabitant is limited to the working class, thus reducing the right to the city to anticapitalist resistance, whereas it is clear that such divisions as race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation also are a ground for spatial exclusion and inequality.2 For example, Eugene J. McCann underlines the necessity of accounting for racial inequalities when applying Lefebvre's concept to North American cities.3 McCann reminds us that rights are not inherently positive, so that it is not enough to advocate for the right to the city; it is important to ask whose needs are being met, and to keep in mind that urban space will become more democratic through inhabitant participation only if we recognize the complexity and diversity of urban needs.4

In3 the capitalist city operating as a “growth machine”5 and driven by the incentive to accumulate capital with the privatization of land and real estate

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development, conflict emerges over the exchange value and the use value of land by the broad urban public. Since commodification of urban spaces breeds social exclusion and surveillance, it is also thought to threaten the political and social needs of urban citizens. A functional public sphere is the cornerstone of the civil society, whose inherent nature is to “limit[] the power of state, but also contribute[] to the development of common political debate and cultural exchange, which informs and influences collective decisions, allowing for the negative and positive meanings of freedom simultaneously to develop.”6 Public spaces such as parks, squares, playgrounds have their antecedent in the agora of the Greek polis and serve to facilitate participation in egalitarian and democratic processes.7 Functional public spaces are spaces for representation where, as Mitchell explains, diverse urban groups such as immigrants, veterans, the homeless, the queer youth of color, and urban gardeners can legitimately constitute themselves as political subjects within urban and national polity.8 It is in the public space that the otherwise invisible groups can draw attention to social, economic, and environmental injustice as mapped onto exclusionary urban geographies: displacement of low-income tenants, privatization of parks and playgrounds, as well as discriminatory access to work, education, transportation, food, and health care.

In4 its political dimension, the right to the city is contingent upon the existence of public spaces. Functional public spaces (the commons) constitute the foundation of urban democracy since they ensure the exercise of political freedoms by diverse urban actors. Geographer Don Mitchell makes a powerful claim in defense of the right to appropriate urban space: “in a society where all property is private, those who own none (or whose interests are not otherwise protected by a right to access private property) simply cannot be, because they would have no place to be.”9 The presence of the homeless in the public space is not voluntary, he insists. Unlike property owning individuals who voluntarily create a public outside of the private realm, the homeless pose a challenge to such a political order: their presence in public space is involuntary and permanent, and thus strikes at the political core of modern societies, that is, the division into the private/public realm on which the democratic system is built.10 To fall back on urban planner Ali Madanipour’s definition: Public space is a place of simultaneity, a site for display and performance, a test of reality, an exploration of difference and identity, an arena for recognition, in which representation of difference can lead to an awareness of the self and others, and to an examination of the relationship between particular and general, personal and impersonal. It is a place where many-sided truths co-exist and tolerance of different opinions is practiced.11

5 In recent decades, the right to the city has become the idiom of collective resistance against the sanitization of public spaces and their transformation into sites of socio- cultural exclusion and privilege. Cultural, economic, and ideological frictions play themselves out territorially, and space, rather than being a backdrop against which urban denizens articulate their demands, becomes an inseparable element of socio- cultural struggle. Thus public space can be looked at through the prism of inclusion and exclusion along the lines of gender, race, sexuality, religion, or home ownership. American city leaders and planners realized early on that public realm was indispensable for the citizens’ practice of their democratic right. For example, in 1872 New York City’s Union Square was planned by the authorities as an official place where the spirit of democracy would thrive precisely because it was designated as a meeting place, a public forum, a site of exchange of ideas and debate, an arena where conflicts

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would be fought out.12 A century after its design, Union Square Park shared the lot of many municipal parks that deteriorated during the 1970s fiscal crisis. Since the mid-1980s Union Square Park has undergone revitalization and gained new life with the opening of a farmers market as an anchor for commercial activity in the area.13 Today it is a subway hub with heavy pedestrian traffic and thousands of visitors. As in numerous other places in New York City, areas adjacent to the park were rezoned and opened to high-rise mixed-use construction. This was done at the cost of displacing old-time lower-class residents from affordable housing which was demolished to make room for corporate offices and upscale apartments. Now that the park’s open plaza and playgrounds have been gradually revitalized, local advocacy groups make sure that the commercial and consumer functions of the square (e.g. an upscale restaurant, shops and entertainment) do not override the park’s civic function as an official site of oppositional political rallies and demonstrations, community events, and festivities.14 Such reinscription of public spaces into sites of order, respectability, and safety stands at odds with the original design and intended function of Union Square as a site of encounter and exchange of ideas, of officially sanctioned disorder, where spontaneous political protest and discontent could be articulated.15

The6 right to the city activism and debates revolve, in a large part, around participation in political processes that shape the city. A group’s autonomy should be measured in terms of its ability to voice concerns and demands in the public, gain political recognition via visibility and exposure, and thus actively participate in the production of law and social space.16 Whether used as a political philosophy of change or as an analytical tool, the right to the city perspective shows that the hegemonic discourses of the municipal governments and the nation-state have always generated competing claims to space and space production. It can be an effective measure to countervail the emergent socio-spatial injustices, cultural hierarchies of the state, and profit-oriented public space management. For Edward Soja, the right to the city is coterminous with “seeking spatial justice,” “democracy and citizen’s rights” both at the level of the city and the metropolitan region.17 As Peter Marcuse explains, the right to the city is a “moral claim, founded on fundamental principles of justice.” It is not a single right but a set of manifold rights subsumed under the status of urban citizenship18—a right to quality education, health care, affordable and decent housing, a right to clean air, water, and sanitation, healthy food, public services, public space, and political representation. At its root, the right to the city activism sets out to transform the extant power relations in the capitalist city by building a new urban order premised on equality, self determination, as well as justice: economic, racial, immigrant, and environmental.

In7 the post-World War II period both North American and European cities, communist and capitalist alike, were overwhelmingly controlled by centralized state bureaucracies—a model that precluded the agency of urban citizens in the making of their own living and working environment. Lefebvre’s notion of autogestion (self- management), articulated in the atmosphere of the student revolt in 1960s France, aims at a radical reordering of power relations within the capitalist city whereby urban dwellers would be empowered to participate in local-level politics. Operating within the terrain of the civil society, autogestion “calls the State into question as a constraining force erected above society as a whole. . . . [and] tends to reorganize the State as a function of its development, which is to say it tends to engender the State’s

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withering away.”19 With this shift towards “prioritizing the social needs that are formulated, controlled, and managed by those who have a stake in them,” Lefebvre predicts the democratization of urban processes and a move towards a more just urban order.20 When implemented in the realm of urban planning and management, self- management stands for direct democratic processes that entail “efficacious contestation” in the place of hierarchical, state-controlled government, as well as “effective development” in place of the logic of accumulation and commodification. Finally, “born and reborn at the heart of contradictory society,” the concept of autogestion “coincides with that of freedom,” concludes Lefebvre.21

While8 in urban studies Lefebvre is credited for articulating an early version of the right to the city, his writings were preceded by the Port Huron Statement (PHS), a 1962 manifesto of American activist movement Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which insisted on participatory democracy as a legitimate alternative to the ailing, “apathetic democratic system,” that is, representative democracy. Written by Tom Hayden, the PHS expressed the radical youth’s disenchantment with both the American Cold War policy and the quality of social life at home: racism, poverty, state authoritarianism and paternalism, the “depersonalization” of individuals, and the suppression of their “unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self- understanding, and creativity.” The SDS activists voiced hope in “a democracy of individual participation” as a countermeasure to the widening chasm between the nation-state’s professed ideals and lived reality. The Port Huron Statement re-centered the individual, claiming that direct engagement in politics would “provide outlets for the expression of personal grievance and aspiration . . . [much as] illuminate choices and facilitate the attainment of goals” (PHS).22 Those demands would resonate a few years later in Lefebvre’s notion of autogestion, validating urban citizens as agents of social change.

Although9 the concerns raised by the right to the city idea have mostly been tackled by such radical geographers as David Harvey and Don Mitchell, or planners such as Peter Marcuse,23 researchers in American Studies are starting to pay attention to matters of urban inequality through the lens of Henri Lefebvre’s concept.24 This special issue brings together contributions by scholars from France, the Netherlands, and Poland ranging from fieldwork among contemporary right-to-the-city activist groups through archival research on 19th-century mobilizations to the analysis of artistic and literary renditions of urban inequalities. These diverse methodological and theoretical approaches provide a multiscalar look at conflicts around urban territories on the local, regional, national, and global scale, and remind us that right-to-the-city struggles existed well before the term itself was coined in the 1960s. They also show that the right to the American city is not limited to resisting the production and control of public space by corporate and state capital, but that it includes Italian Americans, African Americans and other minorities’ struggle for representation and control over their urban environment.

The10 first three papers of the issue, written by Aneta Dybska, Kamil Rusłowicz and Ruud Jansens, investigate urban discourses in the making in American and European contexts, through historical, political, and literary approaches respectively. Bénédicte Deschamps’ and Justyna Wierzchowska’s contributions that follow look at the role in the space of the city. Both read the claims for representation made by the culturally marginalized in the past and the name of the homeless today through the

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lenses of history and cultural studies. Finally, Guillaume Marche, Florian Opillard, and Aurélie Godet use field work and case studies to analyze how competing claims to housing and public space lead contemporary urban dwellers to organize at the grassroots to fight displacement.

Aneta11 Dybska adopts the right to the city perspective to the discuss the federal War on Poverty programs and Black Power agenda in the 1960s, with attention to their respective advocacy of community governance as a means of countering ineffective models of bureaucratic urban management and eradicating socio-spatial injustices. Both initiatives were filled with well-meaning idealism grounded in such democratic ideals as civic participation, fair chances, equal opportunities, and equal access to public goods for all urban actors. The War on Poverty’s concern with political empowerment through citizen participation was a public policy measure bent on the poor’s cultural mainstreaming, notes Dybska. Yet, as the ideological goals of the War on Poverty unfolded in the atmosphere of urban rebellion, demand for community control became the rallying cry of Black Power organizations. They saw neighborhood-level empowerment as a panacea to racial discrimination, oppression, and second-class citizenship. Although grassroots activism among ghettoized Blacks grew out of the political ferment of the students’ movement, it was fused with the ideology of black nationalism. Black Power organizations such as the Black Panther Party linked community control to emancipatory politics. They hoped to wield control over black neighborhoods as scattered outposts of a racial nation that, once strong and unified, would successfully integrate into the pluralistic American society.

Both12 War on Poverty and Black Panther Party survival programs yielded palpable results: they gave African Americans a sense of agency and energized large numbers of black youth to join an unprecedented tide of self-organizing and self-help activities. If both initiatives encouraged a form of autogestion at the community-level, they inevitably undermined the credibility of centralized state institutions. As effective and transformative as the experience of self-management must have been for African Americans, it nonetheless, “engender[ed] the State’s withering away,”25 as predicted by Lefebvre, Dybska concludes.

In13 a similar vein, Kamil Rusłowicz analyses Polish writer Mariusz Sieniewicz’s 2003 novel Czwarte niebo [Fourth Heaven]. Drawing on theories of space developed by David Harvey, Edward Soja, and Michel de Certeau, he investigates the social potential for the right-to-the-city activism in the material space of communist urban planning. The fictional district of Zatorze, in the north-eastern city of Olsztyn, Poland, is a former industrial community whose material environment was designed around a factory. Due to the collapse of the state-controlled economy followed by deindustrialization, Zatorze is suspended in the physical space of Fordism, yet unyielding to the neoliberal strategy of flexible accumulation.26 It is a clear instance of social and spatial inequalities, “a waste product”27 that emerges along with the region’s economic growth. Rusiłowicz adopts a multiscalar approach to show how the old time Zatorze residents enact their local identities through resistance to global capital and neocolonial dominance by forces beyond their control, be it economic or ideological. This defensiveness precludes the community’s openness to change.28 Making use of the panoptic, disciplining function of the communist-era architecture embodied in high-density apartment blocks, neighbors resort to individual spatial tactics and the visual surveillance of everyday street-level social interactions. Rusłowicz argues that through “the microbe-

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like, singular and plural practices which an urbanistic system was supposed to administer or suppress,”29 the social relations forged by the Concept-City of authoritarian planning have outlived communism and, like the panopticon, continue to regulate spatial practices at Zatorze. The ample social capital accumulated in the past does not translate into neighborhood activism or incentives for a creative grassroots makeover of the district. This kind of capital incapacitates rather than stimulates action, conserves the social status quo rather than overcomes inertia.

If,14 politically speaking, the right to the city takes its origin in the idea of participatory democracy and civic responsibility, then Zatorze can serve as a cautionary tale for other post-socialist cities transitioning to neoliberal capitalism. The old timers in Zatorze have a sense of entitlement to urban space but it is a far cry from Lefebvre’s notion of autogestion.

Ruud15 Jansens’ contribution to this volume, “Segregation or Assimilation: Dutch Government Research on Ethnic Minorities in Dutch Cities and its American Frames of Reference,” shifts the discussion of the right to the city to the realm of policy making and representation. Jansens shows that, ironically, the Dutch government’s commitment to increasing urban equality in the 1980s introduced into public discourse and national consciousness the concept of ethnic conflict, which led to minority groups’ misrepresentation and stigmatization. Jansens reveals that the state-level Minorities Policy geared towards greater social justice, in fact, produced a chasm within the Dutch society along the lines of ethnicity and citizenship. By carrying out a detailed study of governmental statistical reports released between the early 1980s and the mid-2000s, he traces the discursive evolution of the term “ethnic minority” as applied to immigrants and refugees on a par with second-generation Dutch citizens born of a foreign parent, this classification being soon superseded by the division into “autochtonen” (ethnic Dutch) and “allochtonen” (immigrants). The latter reveals that concern with the assimilation of “ethnic others” into the dominant culture gradually became the key concern of Dutch policy makers, with the stigmatization of the “allochtonen” as a by-product. By the early 2000s, it was not an uncommon belief that, if left to their own devices, non-assimilating immigrants would soon become a spatially segregated and culturally alien underclass, a threat to social order and a serious economic problem. Jansens’ study pinpoints the flaws in the application of classical 1920s theories of American urban sociology to the study of ethnicity and immigration in the Netherlands today. Impressed by Robert Park’s urban ecology, Jansens contends, Dutch statisticians and planners drew on the Chicago School scholarship in a selective manner and completely overlooked the contemporary revisions of those early theories, which challenged the assimilationist model and endorsed cultural diversity as constitutive of urban life. The Dutch officials’ discussions evoked the conflictual nature of ethnic relations but ignored the systemic explanations as root causes of the immigrants’ cultural nonconformity. Neither did they foreground the ethnic Dutch majority’s racial prejudice and discrimination as possible factors leading to social inequality.

Jansens’16 detailed study shifts in the discourse about immigrants shows that Dutch state policies, which initially aimed at achieving greater socio-spatial justice, diminished the “ethnic others”’ right to the city. He therefore demonstrates that understanding the mutual constitution of power, knowledge, and social policy is a necessary first step to guaranteeing that right.

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The17 “ethnic other” is also at the center of Bénédicte Deschamps’ article, but with an emphasis on strategies of representation, rather than state policy. “’The cornerstone is laid’: Italian American Memorial Building in New York City and Immigrants’ Right to the City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century” examines the strategies used by early Italian Americans to apply their right to the city. During that time of massive Eastern and Southern European immigration, Italians and other new arrivals were perceived by Americans as undesirable invaders, physically and culturally too different to hope for integration. The urban neighborhoods in which these immigrants settled were similarly stigmatized as being filthy, loud, and unfit for living. Underlining the relationship between urban space and social identity, Deschamps explains how Italian Americans sought to assert their place in American society. They extended “their walking geography” by stepping out of the Little Italies and into the middle-class neighborhoods where they made their presence visible by erecting monuments and gathering for inaugurations. She insists on the pivotal role of the Italian American elite, in particular Carlo Barsotti, director of the newspaper Il Progresso Italo-Americano, in advocating for these monuments to be built and negotiating strategic locations with the city authorities so that the statues of Italian heroes would be seen by as many New Yorkers as possible. Barsotti set out to expand the visibility and prestige of Italian Americans by “forcing Italian historical heritage on Americans, and giving Italians an excuse to occupy new areas of the city.” The goal was not only to claim a right to the city but also a place in the American collectivity, as well as to foster unity among Italian Americans themselves by forging a common ethnic identity. Yet, these efforts generated dissent, in particular from other ethnic groups which competed with Italian Americans for representation in public space; even within the Italian community, the allocation of funds to statues rather than community infrastructure was contested.

What18 links Deschamps’ analysis with Justyna Wierzchowska’s contribution are the uses of monuments in forging and negotiating collective identities. At different points in the history of New York, artistic and political interventions used public memorials to bring to focus and validate the life experiences of the otherwise underrepresented social groups: the immigrants, the homeless, and more recently war veterans. Space in the city is not an “indifferent medium,” Lefebvre insisted30 but an effect of power—a site of controversy and debate over who has the right to political representation and recognition. Public monuments function to: symbolically integrate minority group heroes into the nation-building narratives; leave a lasting mark of those groups’ cultural heritage on the fabric of the city; as much as articulate, in spatial terms, their aspirations of equal membership in the American body politic.

Wierzchowska’s19 paper deals with Polish-born artist Krzysztof Wodiczko’s public art installations in Union Square Park, New York. Sited in a traditional protest area where voices of dissent have been freely expressed, The Homeless Projection (1986) and Abraham Lincoln: War Veteran Projection (2012) offer a temporarily and fleeting subversion of the meanings evoked by public monuments. Casting images of the homeless and war veterans’ video testimonies onto three-dimensional statues, Wodiczko prompts a critical revision of American national narratives. Otherwise commemorating the nation’s past glories through such heroes as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Marquis de Lafayette, the public monuments used in Wodiczko’s work double up as screens against which alternative visions of the past and the present

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are projected. Those moments of reinscription are possible as long as the viewers become involved in the act of witnessing human suffering, deprivation, loss and grief, and social injustice. Wodiczko’s installations challenge the unitary vision of America as a nation-state and the alleged continuities between the founding principles of the Republic and its ideologies today, as embodied in the monumental statues of great national heroes. Wierzchowska argues that the projected images expose urban citizens to the traumas of others, thereby opening up space for a critical reassessment of meanings sedimented in the nation’s self-narratives. Unlike The Homeless Projection which took the shape of a proposal only, the War Veteran Projection was executed outdoors. It invited the urban citizens passing through Union Square Park to engage in a participatory mode of interaction whereby the viewing subjects act as prosumers,31 to use Henry Jenkins’ term, that is, as both consumers and producers of cultural and ideological meanings. The “embodied” experience of otherness, made possible by the existence of the public realm, lends itself to a psychoanalytic reading. Since public memorials usually commemorate a historical figure or an event, they serve to legitimate the hegemonic narratives of American national origins and collective unity. Wodiczko’s artistic interventions bring to the surface the repressed, traumatic aspects of national myth-making and symbolism. The grand and monumental statues of the nation’s political and military leaders are what Wierzchowska calls “aesthetic anesthetics”—they serve to maintain the totalizing narratives that disguise the contradictions built into the continuous reproduction of national identities. It is not coincidental, she contends.

While20 planting statues of Italians in public spaces and projecting images on statues of American national heroes are cases of artistic appropriation that contest blatant inequalities built into the production and control of space by capital, Aurélie Godet’s paper titled “‘Meet de Boys on the Battlefront’: Festive Parades and the Struggle to Reclaim Public Spaces in Post-Katrina New Orleans” straddles two key themes of the right to the city activism, namely, the appropriation of public spaces and anti-gentrification struggles. Godet also tackles the forging of collective identities through the use of public space, this time through mobile, short-term festive occupation. The article discusses three case studies of the post-Katrina carnival culture in New Orleans as a strategy of claiming urban space following the massive displacements caused by the hurricane and its aftermath. The natural disaster was used by the municipal government as an opportunity for urban renewal projects and gentrification of working-class neighborhoods. Through the lens of Abdou Maliq Simone’s conceptualization of people as infrastructure, Godet examines the ways in which a marginalized population draws on festive practices to politicize urban space in “the parading capital of the United States.” Since the 18th century processional rituals rooted in African and Caribbean traditions have served to embody cultural prestige and political power, and to turn New Orleans streets into lived spaces, but, according to Godet, after Katrina, music and parades came to be used with more intensity as tools to achieve the right to the city. Through three case studies—a funeral procession in 2007, a Mardi Gras Indian St. Joseph’s Night Procession, and the Krewe of Eris Parade in 2012 —she underlines “the enduring power of ritualised collective effervescence” to negotiate a local identity, as well as foster economic activity by attracting tourists. The analysis of these parades raises the question of the residents’ ability to control the urban space they inhabit when faced with increases in permit fees for public processions, a troubled relationship with the police, and internal discord about how

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subversive carnival krewes should be. Beyond the festivities, post-Katrina parades in New Orleans emphasize the role of people in re-injecting meaning into places damaged by a natural disaster, as well as the potential of the disenfranchised to induce debate about conflicts around access to public space despite limited access to formal political power.

The21 contributions by Guillaume Marche and Florian Opillard, like Godet, rely on field work, but they examine the geographies of gentrification in San Francisco, a highly gentrified city with a long history of grassroots activism, where social justice advocates have been fighting neoliberal models of urban governance and the commodification of land and housing.

Guillaume22 Marche’s paper focuses on how community greening can arguably work for the advantage of either side of displacement, showing that advocacy for the right to the city does not necessarily lead to greater equality. Indeed, even when land is scarce and real estate value increases, green public spaces such as community gardens attract individuals who represent what Richard Florida has dubbed the “creative class.” Not only do they drive the gentrification process but they do so with municipal support. On the other hand, residents involved in the community greening project tend to be more attached to their neighborhood and determined to fight displacement. In order to try and disentangle the apparent contradictions in the role of community gardens in gentrification and tenant displacement, Marche takes a close look at the organizational structures and motivations of three groups of gardeners through field work: a couple in a low-income neighborhood whose project soon garnered support from local residents, a single gardener in an already-gentrified neighborhood whose residents seek to beautify their surroundings, and a top-down greening initiative on the premises of a housing project. Marche’s comparative analysis reveals that the relationship between community gardening and gentrification greatly depends on the type of decision-making processes and the degree of community engagement. This paper brings out one of the paradoxes inherent in the application of the right to the city, namely, the claiming of that right by residents who want to beautify urban space through community greening, yet simultaneously deny it to the disempowered, so that it eventually becomes a tool of displacement.

Florian23 Opillard’s research, in turn, deals with San Francisco tenant associations organizing to resist the commodification of housing and the subsequent displacement of residents caused by hypergentrification due to the influx of tech industry workers during the “tech boom 2.0.” The paper explores strategies of resistance to tenant evictions in a “boiling political activism milieu” by studying the group styles of two activist collectivities, Eviction Free San Francisco and the Anti- Eviction Mapping Project, as well as their “repertories of contention,” a concept developed by Charles Tilly. Tenant eviction has gone up since the first tech boom in the late 1990s as a result of the landlords’ overuse of the 1985 Ellis Act, which allows them to get out of the rental market and remodel their buildings to sell them as individual luxury condos. Activist groups are targeting the speculation process—which involves the displacement of tenants—through whistle-blowing strategies such as collection of data and creation of maps, or the “public shaming” of speculators by releasing their names. Opillard discusses the impact of the San Francisco Anti-Displacement Coalition, to which the discussed activist groups belong, especially through the proposal and successful passing of legislation to disincentivize the flipping of property and ensure

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financial aid to displaced tenants. He also suggests the need for a change of scale in the study of gentrification processes and resistance, from the city to the urban region, which requires “a major change in the analysis of embedded patterns of racial and class segregation.”

The24 contributions in this special issue highlight how critical inquiry into the relationship between the socio-spatial processes and urban governance on the one hand and capitalist economies on the other helps shed light on the contingent nature of the city. This critical approach can be applied to the various methodological and theoretical frameworks developed by scholars in American Studies in order to explain contemporary as well as historical urban phenomena of space production and struggles for equality and representation in the city. Although the concept itself was born in France in the 1960s, the right to the city as an analytical tool or a form of urban activism can be used in understanding cities in other times and places, provided it is extended beyond the scope of working-class struggles central to Lefebvre’s work, to include categories of urban actors and processes of exclusion specific to each studied context.

NOTES

1. Henri Lefebvre, “The Right to the City” in Writings on Cities, eds. and trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000 [1968]), 179. 2. If Lefebvre were writing today, he would surely have taken into account the increasing racial diversity of European cities. 3. Eugene J. McCann, “Race, Protest, and Public Space: Contextualizing Lefebvre in the US city,” Antipode 31, no. 2 (1999): 163-184. 4. Mark Purcell, “Excavating Lefebvre: The Right to the City and its Urban Politics of the Inhabitant,” GeoJournal 58, no. 2 (2002): 99-108. 5. Harvey Molotch, “The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place” in Cities and Society, ed.Nancy Kleniewski (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2005), 17-27. 6. Ali Madanipour, Public and Private Spaces of the City (London: Routledge, 2003), 207. 7. Some urban scholars point to the exclusive nature of political life in the Greek Polis. See, for example, Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1989 [1961]), 135; Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: The Guilford Press, 2003), 132. 8. Mitchell, The Right to the City, 129. 9. Ibid., 34. 10. Ibid., 128-134.See Mitchell, The Right to the City, 128-134.As a case study Mitchell uses the early 1990s struggle of the homeless to reside in People’s Park in Berkeley, California. 11. Madanipour, Public and Private Spaces of the City, 206 12. Union Square became a public park in the 1830s and only in 1872 was redesigned by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux specifically as a meeting place. 13. For a few decades now, four times a week Unions Square has held the Union Square Greenmarket that sells regional farm produce, foodstuffs, and flowers. Lower Manhattan’s largest market, as the New Republic contributor Corby Kummer put it perceptively, is “about more than

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buying food”—it’s about striking up conversations, exchanging information, feeling part of a community and actively contributing to it. Along with subways and buses, a public food market is one of the only places left for people of different economic classes to encounter one another, and even ... strike up a conversation.” See Corby Kummer, “How to Create the Perfect Public Food Market,” New Republic, September 21, 2015, accessed September 23, 2015, http:// www.newrepublic.com/article/122670/how-create-perfect-public-food-market. 14. See “Union Square,” The New York Preservation Archive Project, 2014, accessed September 20, 2015, http://www.nypap.org/content/union-square; and “Union Square Park,” NYC Parks, accessed September 20, 2015, http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/union-square-park. 15. We are relying on Don Mitchell’s analysis concerning the struggle over People’s Park in Berkeley which, he argues, reveals a tension between two opposing visions of public space in general: order vs. disorder, entertainment vs. political protest, and control vs. freedom of interaction. See Mitchell, The Right to the City,128-129. 16. Mitchell, The Right to the City, 29. 17. Edward Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 7, 96. 18. Peter Marcuse, “Whose Rights to What City” in Cities for People Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City, eds. Neil Brenner, Peter Marcuse, and Margit Mayer (London: Routledge, 2012), 35. 19. Henri Lefebvre, “Theoretical Problems of Autogestion” in State, Space, World: Selected Essays, eds. Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 146-147. See also Aneta Dybska’s contribution to this volume, “Where the War on Poverty and Black Power Meet: A Right to the City Perspective on American Urban Politics in the 1960s.” 20. Ibid., 148. 21. Ibid., 149. 22. Tom Hayden, “The Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society, 1962,” msu.edu, accessed November 18, 2015, http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/ huron.html. 23. For a detailed discussion of critical urban theory see Neil Brenner, Peter Marcuse, and Margit Mayer, “Cities for People, Not for Profit: An Introduction” in Cities for People Not for Profit, 1-10. 24. As evidenced for instance by the success of the 2014 Paris conference, “The Right to the City in an Era of Austerity (1973-2014): Perspectives on the Past, Present, and Future of Urban Democracy in the United States and Great Britain.” 25. Henri Lefebvre, “Theoretical Problems of Autogestion,” 147. 26. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992). 27. Ibid., 95 28. Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2000). 29. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 96. 30. Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003[1970]), 154. 31. Henry Jenkins, “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture,” HenryJenkins.org, October 20, 2006, accessed September 25, 2015, http://henryjenkins.org/2006/10/ confronting_the_challenges_of.html.

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AUTHORS

ANETA DYBSKA Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw

SANDRINE BAUDRY Faculty of Applied Language Studies and Humanities, University of Strasbourg

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PART ONE Spatial Justice and the Right to the City: Conflicts around Access to Public Urban Space

Urban Discourses in the Making: American and European Contexts

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Where the War on Poverty and Black Power Meet: A Right to the City Perspective on American Urban Politics in the 1960s

Aneta Dybska

1 This paper looks back to the 1960s Black Power Movement in the U.S. as one of the unacknowledged antecedents of today’s right to the city movements. It draws on the right to the city both as an ideal of urban governance and a critical perspective through which urban histories can be re-told and diverse social practices investigated. I am particularly interested in two 1960s federal War on Poverty programs and how they were related to black grassroots movements. In that period, the federal government gave leeway to the local expression of collective grievances by encouraging the urban poor to become stakeholders in community-level politics. Incremental urban regeneration was the War on Poverty’s professed goal. To achieve this the state would devolve some of its functions to the level of the local community, bypass the unresponsive and ossified state and municipal bureaucracies, and thus gradually dismantle the racial and power inequalities. This ideological shift towards space-based politics and a recognition of the poor as collective political actors happened almost synchronously with Henri Lefebvre’s articulation of the right to the city idea in France. Yet, recourse to participatory politics during the Johnson era, a fundamental tenet of the right to the city activism today, turned into a fleeting political concern with fleeting rewards to local communities. As soon as grassroots mobilization inspired the urban poor to affect change, the federal government retreated from its unprecedented support for participatory politics. Its initial commitment to the recovery of direct democracy was followed by withdrawal from local political enfranchisement—a factor that triggered the piecemeal radicalization of urban Blacks. What citizen participation was to the anti-poverty programs, community control was to Black Power activism. Grounded in the philosophy of racial empowerment which had taken root in American cities during the Garvey movement of the 1920s, Black Power of the 1960s offered a

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viable alternative to the War on Poverty’s investment in participatory politics. While the latter ended up reinforcing the political and racial status quo, the former encouraged a nationalist and even a separatist agenda. The racial self-help programs run by such Black Power organizations as the Black Panther Party dethroned the state from its position as a sole redistributor of wealth and derailed its attempts at restoring national unity with policies bent on cultural conformity.

Due2 to modest scholarly interest in the political agenda of welfare programs of the Kennedy-Johnson era today, my discussion draws on critical analyses written in the 1960s and 1970s and is based on few case studies. But I would like to argue that it is the early scholarship on citizen participation published as the War on Poverty unfolded in the urban “battlefield” that foreshadowed the key preoccupations of the right to the city movements of today.

The3 right to the city is a political ideal that calls for a radical rearrangement of power relations in the capitalist city. Introduced into sociological parlance in the late 1960s by French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre, the right to the city stands for a right to “urban life, to renewed centrality, to places of encounter and exchange, to life rhythms and time uses, enabling the full and complete usage of these moments and places, etc.”1 Highly critical of the post-World War II France as “a bureaucratized society of organized consumption,” Lefebvre defied the primacy of capital and repressive state control in the production of urban space.2 As a solution to the excessively segregated and spatially divided city, he proposed the democratic control of urban processes as a prominent feature of local urban politics. The new forms of urban governance rested on what he called autogestion, that is, self-management at the grassroots. Lefebvre assumed that the devolution of power to lower scales would obliterate the state hierarchies and allow the participatory democracy to flourish.3 Political enfranchisement of urban citizens would pave the way for their commitment to the planning and development of their cities, as well as challenge the primacy of the exchange value of land that served the interests of power elites and corporate businesses.

That4 today urban activists and social justice advocates in all parts of the globe evoke the right to the city as an ideal of urban politics reveals the pervasiveness of the socio-spatial injustices brought on by the profit-oriented urban politics. Regardless of the state of affiliation, geographical location, or histories of urbanization, cities and metropolitan regions networked into a global system of local economies suffer the destructive effects of growth and capital accumulation. In this context, the right to the city articulates the ever pressing need for a re-orientation of political and socio- economic priorities. The contemporary urban justice movements insist on the revival of local democracies as a way of countervailing exclusionary urban geographies forged by the unconstrained market forces: poor schools, meager educational and employment opportunities, substandard housing, residential displacement, food deserts, lack of public transportation and health services, and paucity of recreational spaces. Thus etched into the fabric of the contemporary city, as into the French city of Lefebvre’s time, are the oppressive power relationships brought by the workings of capital and the muting of the affected publics. A fight for a more equitable access to public spaces, facilities, and public infrastructure necessitates a recognition of diverse urban actors (racial or sexual minorities, the poor, immigrants or otherwise disadvantaged) as relevant participants in urban politics.

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When5 in his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced his administration “declare[d] unconditional war on poverty in America,” one quarter of the U.S. population lived in poverty. Brought to national attention by liberal poverty scholars4 as well as the civil rights movement, poverty became the target of the largest federally-funded welfare program since F. D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. The quote from the President’s speech aptly illustrates the comprehensive nature of the program: . . . this attack, to be effective, must also be organized at the State and the local level and must be supported and directed by State and local efforts. . . . Our chief weapons in a more pinpointed attack will be better schools, and better health, and better homes, and better training, and better job opportunities to help more Americans, especially young Americans, escape from squalor and misery and unemployment rolls where other citizens help to carry them. Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom. The cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children. . . . We must help obtain more modern mass transit within our communities as well as low- cost transportation between them. . . . All of these increased opportunities -- in employment, in education, in housing, and in every field—must be open to Americans of every color. As far as the writ of Federal law will run, we must abolish not some, but all racial discrimination. For this is not merely an economic issue, or a social, political, or international issue. It is a moral issue . . . . All members of the public should have equal access to facilities open to the public. All members of the public should be equally eligible for Federal benefits that are financed by the public. All members of the public should have an equal chance to vote for public officials and to send their children to good public schools and to contribute their talents to the public good.5

6 The anti-poverty agenda that transpires from Johnson’s “declaration of war” does not essentially differ from the right to the city postulates. Both look up to an ideal of social justice that is achieved with public/urban policies bent on empowering the disadvantaged groups, and measured with greater equity. Redistributive at their core, equity-oriented programs aim to vest power in the hands of the socially invisible, economically disadvantaged and politically underrepresented. Such programs do not take away from the better off, but aim to eliminate a group’s disadvantage where it exists.6 But the War on Poverty programs did not set out to eliminate destitution by means of direct social aid alone; their understanding of equality was as social as it was political. In a manner that is reminiscent of the right to the city movement’s appeal to the civil and human rights, the War on Poverty was concerned with structural inequalities and institutional racism that the spatial segregation of the racialized poor clearly instantiates.

When7 looked at through the prism of the right to the city idea, the federal anti- poverty policies come across as a radical attempt at reorganizing the welfare model of urban governance. Weaving together political, economic, and cultural concerns, the Community Action Program and the Model Cities Program, at least at their inception, conceived of small urban geographies, neighborhood and block communities, as sites of participatory democracy rather than mere peripheries governed in a top-down authoritarian fashion by the state and municipal administrative machine.

The8 Johnson administration’s long overdue reaction to poverty was necessitated by the socio-political realities of the era: the civil rights activists’

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disenchantment with the peaceful strategies of fighting racial inequalities; the failure of the government to address the African Americans’ political and social demands, their continued racial oppression by the police and white-dominated institutions, and importantly, a simmering rage among the black youth in the North and the West who were excessively drawn to the separatist agenda of black nationalist organizations. The socio-political unrest in the nation’s racial ghettoes as well as the pervasiveness of poverty in the American society explain why the federal program embraced political enfranchisement as a conduit of change. But what may also account for the promotion of citizen participation in the 1960s is the broad scholarly and political appeal of anthropologist Oscar Lewis’s concept of “the culture of poverty.”

A 9result of Lewis’s study of the urban poor in Mexico, the concept of “culture of poverty” points to the mechanism behind the persistence of poverty, as “both an adaptation and a reaction of the poor to their marginal position in a class-stratified, highly individuated, capitalistic society.” Although its foundations are both economic and cultural, it is transmitted across generations and leads to the perpetuation of poverty.7 One way of looking at the War on Poverty programs would be to recognize their far-reaching goals. If translated into action, the language of “equal opportunity” and “fair access” that permeated President Johnson’s address would serve as an antidote to the “culture of poverty,” and harbinger of the cultural mainstreaming of the poor. Equal educational and professional opportunities as well as equal access to public goods and services, accompanied by equal political rights, appeared as viable strategies of including the nation’s poor into the cultural mainstream. In light of the “culture of poverty” thesis, putting authority in the hands of the impoverished local communities and encouraging them to take a pro-active stance carried the hope that they would slough off the cultural residue of deprivation.8 The 1967 Seattle Model Cities grant application concerning the Central area, the city’s all black neighborhood,9 offers substantive evidence of the Seattle authorities’ preoccupation with social dysfunction as a symptom of poverty: “single-parent families, lack of adequate child care facilities, school expulsions, disorganized homes, illegitimacy, mental illness, and poor use of leisure time.”10 The description bears a striking resemblance to the notorious 1966 Moynihan Report’s claim about the underclass black family as the source of persistent social problems and culprit in the intergenerational reproduction of poverty.11

Community Action and Model Cities Programs

The10 Economic Opportunity Act of August 20, 1964, was the bedrock of President Johnson’s War on Poverty. Established to administer the law’s implementation, the federal Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) brought to life, among others, the Community Action Program (CAP), which operated directly via local- based Community Action Agencies (CAAs). Usually run by private and public not-for- profit organizations, the CAAs were initially “exempt from direct political review or control at the local or state level.”12 Designed so that socially and economically disadvantaged citizens from blighted neighborhoods would partake in the planning and implementation of anti-poverty measures, the agencies offered literacy and skills training, health care, social and welfare services such as the pre-school Head Start program, food pantries, utility bill assistance, and drug rehabilitation. To increase local resident input, the OEO required that at least 1/3 of all the staff positions on

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community action agency boards be allocated to nonwhite community residents. Though the War on Poverty was not race-specific in its origin, it acquired a more racial and urban character when the nation’s black ghettoes erupted in riots. What may not immediately transpire from the anti-poverty program’s assumptions is a top-down legitimization of citizen participation, that is, granting political power to the poor (predominantly people of color confined to urban ghettoes) who lacked adequate democratic representation in the official power structures. In their informative study, Race and Authority in Urban Politics: Community Relations and the War on Poverty, David Greenstone and Paul E. Petersen make a compelling claim about the long-term goals of the community action programs: Although apparently addressed to the economic problems of the nation’s poor, community action, the heart of the war on poverty was in its content, origins, and consequences a political response to a political problem. Its content addressed the relationship of poor people to the American regime, not the economic relationships of poor people to the marketplace; its origins were rooted in a civil rights movement that focused on altering the country’s political, not its socioeconomic relationships; and its long-range impact has related to the political condition of black Americans, not their economic state. To judge the war on poverty as an economic failure is to misinterpret its character.13

11 Greenstone and Peterson are cautious to avoid any generalizations about the effectiveness of the community action program. Depending on place-based urban political traditions, the voice of the grassroots as a countervailing economic and political force met with varied responses from the local power structures. For example, unlike their counterparts in Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles, poor communities of color in New York and Detroit had a significant impact on the community-action programs.

The12 civil rights activists, neighborhood organizers, as well as black nationalists were drawn to black empowerment and community control as tools of change in a racially polarized society. They would not merely stop at securing the anti-poverty grants.14 Rather, encouraged by the government agenda of citizen participation in the urban rehabilitation process, the young generation of urban Blacks emerged as crucial players in local politics. The shared experience of racial oppression and spatial segregation became a potent force on the road to Blacks’ political enfranchisement. They did not shy away from a confrontational rhetoric which had increasingly been gaining popularity in black urban ghettoes across the nation. Seeing the black populations’ successful community-level organizing, the local political elites attempted to recover some of their diminishing political influence, and demanded that the federal government take action.

The13 exercise of political power through citizen participation suggested that, as John H. Strange notes, “if control of a publicly financed organization could be acquired, a significant redistribution of the rewards and benefits (jobs, prestige, security) of the political and social welfare systems could be attained. Participation here was equated with control.”15 This view substantiates Greenstone and Peterson’s claim about the political nature of the War on Poverty.

The14 residents’ take on the pending problems of day-by-day life in the ghetto stood at odds with the city authorities’ rendition of the problem in terms of the “culture of poverty.” The Model Cities Law and Justice Task Force (LJTF) articulated the residents’ grievances most forcefully.23 Though they saw a need for a better quality of

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social services, their main complaint pertained to mistreatment by the police, particularly brutality and unfair arrests. Improving neighborhood security and curtailing racial discrimination and legal injustice were the key demands that urban Blacks univocally agreed on. Framing the community-police relationship in terms of colonial-like occupation and oppression, the residents revealed a commitment to the politics of community empowerment.24

Rather15 than regain the urban poor’s trust in the federal government by way of the politics of inclusion, administrators of Community Action and Model Cities programs perpetuated the former’s racial disenfranchisement and their ultimate disenchantment with the state’s professed agenda of fighting poverty with citizen participation.26 Writing on the failure of the bureaucratic ideology of citizen participation in 1968, Krause perceptively noted that “this loss of hope in the efficacy of the community action program and the rejection of the ideology may very well have added to the frustration which explodes in riots.”27 The War on Poverty discourse of citizen participation appealed to young community organizers and activists precisely because it carried a promise of solving ground-level problems with governmental action.28 As long as the federal programs yielded palpable results such as effective neighborhood revitalization and increased employment, the community activists remained cooperative. Yet since the grassroots endeavors were torpedoed as soon as they proved effective, Black Power gained ground as an ideology of racial and political empowerment in segregated black neighborhoods.

“All Power to the People”

The16 timing of the centerpiece legislation of Johnson’s War on Poverty was not coincidental. As the Economic Opportunity Act was written into law, the news of race riots on the East Coast circulated in the media. The Harlem Race Riot and Rochester Race Riots of July, 1964, and the Philadelphia Race Riot of late August, 1964, set off alarm bells about the gravity of interracial tensions in the country’s urban ghettoes. Those outbursts of spontaneous violence were all triggered by a rumor of a brutal police assault on a member of the black community.

Yet,17 contrary to popular opinion, such violence did not have the endorsement of black radical groups. For instance, the clenched fist of Black Power activists, often shown as a symbol of racialized violence, was a call for armed self-defense inspired with Malcolm X’s political philosophy. Disappointed with the civil rights struggle for dignity, equality, and basic political rights, young urban Blacks found Malcolm X’s notion of black nationalism a feasible alternative to the peaceful protests of the Civil Rights era. In April, 1964, a few months prior to the passage of the EOA and the race riots, Malcolm gave the famous speech “A Ballot or a Bullet” to a black audience in Cleveland. His words vividly captured the political mood of young urban America at the time: “No, I’m not an American. I’m one of 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the … victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So I’m not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver – no, not I! I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare!”29 The African Americans’ “political maturity,” Malcolm X believed, would show in the way they used their collective voting power to bring about social change. He put forward a new understanding of the civil

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rights struggle as a black nationalist project that would empower black communities politically and economically, on condition that their political targets were articulated and strategies of empowerment well-crafted. The “ballot”—the black citizens’ use of political rights— would challenge the political hegemony of the white power structure. “A ballot is like a bullet,” he urged his audiences to fight for political rights granted them as U.S. citizens and to hold the black political leaders accountable for their actions.30 Efforts to bring justice and equality in social and economic life rested on the Blacks’ collective “unity and harmony,” moral betterment and self-work. In words that foreshadowed the War on Poverty’s investment in national cohesion, Malcolm X made a realistic assessment of white power structure’s response to black nationalism: “The white man is more afraid of separation than he is of integration. And the white man will integrate faster than he'll let you separate.”31

In18 their 1967 political manifesto Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton professed “strategic separatism” as a temporary measure, a transient yet inevitable stage in the process of group empowerment leading towards future integration. To them, Black Power was about “proper representation and sharing of control.”32 Working within the ethnic paradigm, Carmichael and Hamilton called on African Americans to develop a political and institutional base—“a bargaining position of strength in a pluralistic society”—so that, like immigrant groups, they would gain “an effective share in the total of the society.”33 To this end, they gave priority to cooperative forms of economic activity, but insisted on the uniqueness of the black experience and cultural heritage.

A 19powerful response to institutional racism, with slum clearance programs as the most devastating instances of the technocratic approach to urban renewal, the Black Power ideology appealed to Blacks confined by zoning regulations to segregated inner-city neighborhoods. They wanted to eradicate the social and spatial injustices that race and class oppression perpetuated: destruction of long-standing ethnic neighborhoods, as well as the territorial dispersal of the poor to new areas, which created more congestion and segregation.34 Black Power advocates recognized that community control was crucial to African Americans’ political and social empowerment. Substandard and segregated schools, lack of municipal health clinics or public transportation were on their agenda, as were substandard, unhealthy housing, lack of sewage, or exploitative practices of white landlords. Although the governmental officials’ and grassroots activists’ political diagnoses overlapped significantly, only the latter considered building institutional alternatives in the event the extant political processes failed to bring about substantial change: black-controlled bodies such as school boards, law enforcement, municipal planning, and housing commissions should wield power in the black communities, Carmichael and Hamilton argued.35

In20 his 1968 political autobiography, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party, Bobby Seale gives a detailed account of how Huey P. Newton’s and his own participation in the anti-poverty programs in Oakland, CA, led them to establish a revolutionary black nationalist party that would operate in the streets and address the needs of the black community.36 Working in summer youth work program supervised by the North Oakland Neighborhood Anti-Poverty Center, Seale acted as a foreman to a group of 100 young unemployed men and women, many of whom would later become members of the Black Panther Party.37 His duty was to offer basic literacy training as well as act as an instructor showing his students how to perform small jobs such as

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cutting lawns or fixing broken fences. It seems that Seale was given the job to act as a role model and a leader: a college student, yet an insider to black youth culture, he would teach the black youth to emulate the mainstream culture’s norms and behaviors: “In the poverty program the young brothers many times would try to be slick and think they were pimps, or think they could out-gamble or out-talk or out-rap anybody. . . .They drank wine, shot dice, and things like that. I knew here was a way to reach these brothers because I wasn’t too much different from them. I knew how to drink wine, how to shoot dice, play cards and chase women.”38 Using his position he developed in his team members an awareness of black history and racial oppression and a need for collective action.39 What seems to have been the biggest irony of the federal program is that it was at the poverty center’s offices that Seale and Newton founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP), wrote down, copied and distributed the party’s ten-point program. More, Seale and Newton opened the first BPP office with the money earned in the anti-poverty program. It was also at the center’s law service section that Newton studied the gun law which he would later recite to the white police officers if they attempted to violate his or anyone else’s constitutional rights to carry guns. Clad in black leather jackets and black berets, as well as ostentatiously flaunting their weapons, the Panthers embodied a challenge to the political and institutional status quo. They patrolled the police in the neighborhood and, if necessary, intervened to stop a brutal assault and demanded equal treatment under law.

The21 Panthers’ community activism grew out of Seale’s and Newton’s engagement in the government program. Their agenda was not at odds with the anti- poverty program: it prioritized community work as well as armed self-defense. For instance, in a 1967 struggle over a traffic light, the Panthers used the administrative and legal framework of the anti-poverty program to urgently demand the installation of traffic lights at a dangerous intersection. They cooperated with the poverty center’s staff and advisory council, all of which were equally committed to the cause. Only when the Oakland City authorities postponed the installation until the end of 1968, apparently for technical reasons, did the Panthers make a public performance of their determination to make change happen. They announced that armed party members would direct traffic as long as necessary to ensure that no black resident, especially no child from the nearby school, would be hurt. It transpires from Seale’s account that the very threat of the gun-toting Panthers pushed the city to change tack and the traffic lights were erected by October, 1967.40

The22 Panthers set out to address the spatial injustices of class and race via recourse to the philosophy of Black Power, which in their case evolved from the embrace of revolutionary nationalism, linking nationalism and socialism, to the gradual acceptance of capitalist economics as a means of building self-determining and self-governing black communities.41 Their ten-point platform articulated the most severe problems ailing ghettoized African Americans: an ineffective segregated school system, poor access to medical services, undernourishment and sickness that came from destitution, hazardous housing conditions, a discriminatory criminal justice system, and excessive police surveillance. Between 1966 and 1982, the Panthers’ local affiliates across the nation ran an impressive list of community-based survival programs, with the collective input of the party’s members: the free breakfast program for schoolchildren, the free clothing program, free busing to prison program, free shoe program, free health clinics, free plumbing and maintenance program, free pest

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control program, as well as free black liberation schools.42 Newton’s speeches from the early 1970s, published in the volume To Die for the People, reveal his persistent belief in the empowerment of black communities through survival programs and a retreat from the earlier confrontational rhetoric and armed self-defense. He insisted that the survival programs would be “a political revolutionary vehicle . . . in [blacks’] quest for freedom,” while “any action which [did] not mobilize the community toward the goal [of raising Blacks’ political consciousness would] not [be] a revolutionary action.”43 The immense popularity of the survival programs indicates that they were desperately needed and testifies to the Panthers’ efficacy in engaging the black community in practical reforms that the citizen-participation oriented anti-poverty programs fell short of approximating.44

When23 after Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968 many black urban communities went up in flames, Oakland’s Blacks did not riot, loot, or burn their neighborhoods. Urged by Seale, they abstained from the use of violence. Government reports on the causes and prevention of violence pointed to the Panthers’ official distancing from spontaneous outbreaks of violence as a powerful anti-riot measure. Indeed, as Jones and Jeffries note, the Panthers’ official stance on riots was that they would impair progress and make the group prone to state-led surveillance.45 But whether the Panthers’ chapters advocated armed self-defense or focused their energies on free breakfast and free clinic programs was of little importance to the state. In 1967 the federal agency launched a counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO (discontinued in 1971) to target “Black Nationalist Hate Groups.” The clandestine FBI operations included such techniques as surveillance, harassment, arrest and detention, provocations, infiltration, and misinformation. Infrequently helped by the local police, the FBI managed to divide the party’s political leadership, incarcerate the most prominent members, disrupt their community work, deplete their financial resources, as well as undermined the Panthers’ credibility among the public at large.46 To make matters worse, when COINTELPRO activities were discontinued, intra-party conflict weakened the political and social capital it had accumulated. Starting from 1973, Newton resorted to the authoritarian concentration of power. He centralized finance management, assaulted and expelled established party members, and used extortion to run the party’s operations.47

Conclusions

With24 the rising prominence of the right to the city ideal worldwide as a paragon of new urban governance, many tend to be drawn to the idea of political participation as a panacea for the long discredited authoritarian mode of urban management. They find participation in local political processes fundamental to achieving social justice, which they render in terms of equality of opportunities, equitable access to affordable housing, quality education, healthy food, recreational facilities, and open public spaces. One key aspect of urban power struggles that needs attention, however, is the policy of the state towards the right to the city movements. Are they perceived as legitimate players in local politics, or as potential contenders for power, or else, as anti-statist elements that threaten to dismantle the state?

As25 the foregoing discussion has shown, both the War on Poverty and Black Power politics made an investment in restoring local democracies via citizen

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participation. The trust deposited in the state by the urban poor waned as soon as their grievances became secondary to the public officials’ contest for political influence. Indeed, when the time was ripe for making concessions to the demands of urban Blacks, the state enhanced its position as “a bordered power container”48 unwilling to relinquish its administrative, political, and military power over the nation’s segregated neighborhoods.

Black26 Power activism stands as a compelling example of autogestion as elaborated on by Lefebvre: “autogestion tends to reorganize the State as a function of its development, which is to say it tends to engender the State's withering away. Autogestion revives all the contradictions at the heart of the State, and notably the supreme contradiction, which can be expressed only in general, philosophical, terms, between the reason of the State and human reason, which is to say, liberty.”49 In the case of the 1960s Black Power movement, seeking independent statehood was, in some instances, a natural consequence of community control.50

NOTES

1. Henri Lefebvre, “The Right to the City” in Writings on Cities, eds. and trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000 [1968]), 179. 2. Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003[1970]), 178, 92. 3. Ibid., 150. 4. For example, Michael Harrington’s The Other America (1962) is reported to have influenced the federal anti-poverty policies of the era. 5. President Lyndon B. Johnson, State of the Union Speech, 8 January 1964. http:// www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/lbj1964stateoftheunion.htm 6. Susan S. Fainstein, The Just City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 36. 7. Oscar Lewis, “The Culture of Poverty,” Scientific American 215, no. 4 (October 1966): 21. 8. In the conservative 1980s “culture of poverty” became a mere code word for the cultural shortcomings of poor individuals, and bereft of structural considerations. For a detailed discussion, go to Stephen Steinberg, The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America (New York: Atheneum, 1981) and William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 9. Seattle was awarded the first Model Cities grant and the program continued between 1967 and 1974. 10. James Braman quoted in Elizabeth Brown, “Race, Urban Governance, and Crime Control: Creating Model Cities,” Law & Society Review 44, no. 3/4 (September/December 2010): 780. 11. For more go to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” in The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy, eds. Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967 [1965]), 39-102. 12. John H. Strange, “Citizen Participation in Community Action and Model Cities Programs,” Public Administration Review 32, Special Issue: Curriculum Essays on Citizens, Politics, and Administration in Urban Neighborhoods (Oct., 1972): 655.

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 27

13. David Greenstone and Paul E. Peterson, Race and Authority in Urban Politics: Community Relations and the War on Poverty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), xiv. 14. Ibid., xi, xiv. 15. Strange, “Citizen Participation,” 660. 16. Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 33. 17. Elliott A. Krause, “Functions of a Bureaucratic Ideology: ‘Citizen Participation,’” Social Problems 16, no. 2 (Autumn, 1968):139. Krause observes that: “In community action programs, in precisely those cases where both the action bureaucracy and the poor accepted, believed in, and acted upon their own stated ideology, they have been slapped down by the central OEO bureaucracy in Washington. Because the overall political climate grew increasingly conservative as more radical activity took place in action programs (in part as a reaction to this activity), local politicians put pressure on state and congressional leaders to pressure the federal OEO, which in turn had to tell its own local action agencies to “go easier” or to “cool it.” 18. Strange, “Citizen Participation,” 655. 19. The Model Cities program was authorized by the Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act of 1966. 20. H. Ralph Taylor and George A. Williams, Jr., “Housing in Model Cities,” Law and Contemporary Problems 32, no. 3 (Summer, 1967): 397-401, 408. 21. Ibid., 398. 22. Brown, “Race,” 781-782. 23. The right to vote on a proposal was given to residents only. 24. Brown, “Race,” 782-785. 25. Ibid., 784-788. 26. The city did, however, accept the residents’ proposal of establishing an “observer program,” which would involve placing a young black person in every police car patrol an objective observer to witness any abuse of power during the police-resident interaction and testify when needed. 27. Krause, “Functions,” 140-141. 28. Strange, “Citizen Participation,” 659. 29. Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet” in Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, ed. George Breitman (New York: Grove Press, 1990), 26. 30. At the time of the speech, Malcolm disapproved of the black leaders’ support for mainstream party politics and the Democrats’ ineffectiveness in pushing through the Civil Rights legislation. The Civil Rights Act would be passed a few months later, in July, 1964, and the Voting Rights Act a year later, in August, 1965. 31. Malcolm X, “The Ballot,” 38, 40, 42. 32. Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 120, 46. 33. Ibid., 44, 47. 34. Ibid., 156. 35. Ibid.,71, 41-42. 36. According to Robert O. Self, Oakland had a long tradition of black political organizing and coalition building with the labor organizations. One of the main destinations for black sharecroppers from the South in the 1940s and 1950s, Oakland was a typical industrial center of the WWII era. It was the site of the Southern Pacific Railroad, the Pullman Company, shipyards and the military industry (the Oakland Army Base and the U.S. Naval Supply Station developed around the city’s port and recruited blacks in large numbers). By the late 1950s Oakland had been severely affected by suburban flight, disinvestment and urban decay; urban renewal, which

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 28

claimed black property under eminent domain laws, destroyed thousands of housing units and led to community displacement and concentration of racialized poverty. The federal and state governments as well as private-not-for profits offered programs to stop the expansion of poverty among the working-class blacks. Via the introduction of civic councils and a range of community-based services, those early efforts, as Self informs us, “dramatically reengaged” black urban communities. The War on Poverty, with its ever-present stress on citizen participation, drew on the rich tradition of labor and community organizing. Robert O. Self, “‘Negro Leadership and Negro Money’: African American Political Organizing in Oakland before the Panthers” in Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles outside the South, 1940-1980, eds.Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard (New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 108-111. 37. Although an average Panther was a high school or college student, the Panthers’ backgrounds were diverse. For more, see Charles E. Jones and Judson L. Jeffries, “‘Don’t Believe the Hype’: Debunking the Panther Mythology” in The Black Panther Party Reconsidered, ed. Charles E. Jones (Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1998), 46. 38. Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party (London: Arrow Books Ltd., 1970), 53. 39. Ibid., 61-63. 40. Ibid.,123-126. 41. See for example Newton’s 1971 speeches “Black Capitalism Re-Analyzed I” and “Black Capitalism Re-Analyzed II (Practical Application)” in Huey P. Newton, To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton: Selected Writings and Speeches, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Writers and Readers Publishing, Inc., 1999), 101-108,109-111. 42. Jones and Jeffries, “‘Don’t Believe the Hype,’” 30. See also Newton, To Die,66-68. 43. Newton, To Die, 47, 53. 44. As regards the financial side of the operation, the party relied on donations from white philanthropists and corporations, church and community organizations, but black businesses were also expected to pay contributions to support the community programs, the logic being that those businesses prospered thanks to the black clientele. 45. Jones and Jeffries, “‘Don’t Believe the Hype,’” 40. 46. Winston A. Grady-Willis, “The Black Panther Party: State Repression and Political Prisoners” in The Black Panther Party Reconsidered, ed. Charles E. Jones (Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1998), 363-389. 47. Ollie A. Johnson, III, “Explaining the Demise of the Black Panther Party: The Role of Internal Factors” inThe Black Panther Party Reconsidered, ed. Charles E. Jones (Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1998), 391-409. 48. Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985), 120. 49. Henri Lefebvre, “Theoretical Problems of Autogestion” in State, Space, World: Selected Essays, eds. Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 147. 50. While the Panthers did not advocate territorial separatism, other radical black nationalist organizations did. The most pronounced claims to a sovereign territory were made by the Nation of Islam and the Republic of New Africa. For a detailed discussion of territorial nationalism, see William L. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 132-152.

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ABSTRACTS

This paper looks at the U.S. American federal War on Poverty programs as a progressive attempt at rejuvenating local communities with citizen participation in the post-Civil Rights era. The anti-poverty measures set out to enhance the political empowerment of impoverished communities of color that by the late 1960s had become increasingly segregated and socially polarized. The federal programs did so by encouraging participatory democracy at the grassroots level and with recourse to the rights discourse. Both these aspects of the War on Poverty mobilized the targeted communities to fight for greater social justice and, eventually but unintentionally, to self-organize under the slogan of Black Power. As will be shown in this paper, both the federally-sponsored War on Poverty and Black Power activism, as dialectically related to each other, can be regarded as natural antecedents of the right to the city movements in the contemporary U.S.

INDEX

Keywords: autogestion, Black Power, citizen participation, community action programs, model cities program, War on Poverty, “culture of poverty” thesis

AUTHOR

ANETA DYBSKA Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw

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Who Has the Right to the Post- Socialist City? Writing Poland as the Other of Marxist Geographical Materialism

Kamil Rusiłowicz

I

1 In 2011, following David Harvey’s call for the reconstruction of historical-geographical conditions that became the basis for social formations in late capitalism, Paul Giles proposed a geographical re-reading of the history of American literature that would account for “the multidimensional effects of globalization [that] have configured the premises of U.S. national identity in relation to a wider sphere.”1 Looking at the history of American literature geographically, Giles distinguishes two contradictory impulses that shaped the American letters during the post-Civil War period: assimilation and national integration on the one hand, and emphasis on local loyalties on the other. Yet, while seemingly antithetical, the two attitudes complemented each other through a dialogue between centrifugal and centripetal tendencies,2 with modernism establishing the local as the synecdoche of national identity at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century3 and late twenty- and early twenty-first-century writers “struggling to articulate the changed,

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 31 interdependent nature of the relationship between place and planet.”4

Giles’s2 The Global Remapping of American Literature has proved a successful endeavor for at least two reasons. Firstly, it follows a theoretical model based on the changes initiated in a country that, after World War II, became the world’s leading economy.5 Secondly, a country whose literature recognizes mobility as a national feature is more likely to manufacture subjects willingly undergoing reterritorialization than a country with a history of nostalgia for a national territory. And even though after World War II the immobilization through Fordist-influenced urban planning became the dominant economic model in the United States, American literature was able to enter a dialogue with the lifestyle promoted by the economy based on mass production. By way of comparison, while American writers responded to models of life that coincided with the objectives of the Fordist economy, thus building a tradition of critical representation of reality, the post-World War II Polish literature could not openly engage in a discussion with the official economic order and all polemics with Western models of life were under the scrutiny of the censors. As a result, with the fall of communism in 1989, a new generation of Polish writers found themselves unprepared for an engaged polemical discussion with the postmodern neoliberal world, a discussion that, both in literature and theory, had been taking place in the U.S. since the 1970s.

While3 Giles’s scholarship does not include the study of small American post-industrial towns (also largely overlooked by Harvey), it still manages to provide a complex literary map of the United States: the American South is analyzed in terms of local communities bound by strong kinship ties, with issues of race and economy as a background for social tensions; Philip Roth and John Updike are good examples of writing suburban America; and Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace write the postmodern, digital United States. Giles chooses both local and globally- affected literature to remap the history of American letters according to the latitudes delineated by Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity. At the same time such critically acclaimed novels as Richard Russo’s 2001 Empire Falls or Philip Meyer’s 2009 American Rust, although overlooked by scholars (including Giles), provide insightful comments upon deindustrialization. Similarly to Harvey’s geographical

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 32 materialism, which created its default Other – small factory or rural towns influenced by the shift from Fordism to flexible accumulation – Giles could overlook the problem of unsuccessful deindustrialization due to the bulk of American literature devoted to other pressing issues consuming the world of late capitalism. In other words, Giles’s analysis of American literature provides insightful comments on how American writers enter a dialogue with the globalized world theorized by Harvey, yet it overlooks the blind spot of Harvey’s criticism. The fact that Giles does not analyze such writers as Russo or Meyer seems a necessary consequence of following the theoretical model that does not list small factory towns among major problems of the globalized world.

If4 one were to look at the history of Polish literature from Giles’s perspective, one of the most general problems concerns geography. Poland’s historical and political relation to its territory is a complex dialogue between national identity and shifting geographical conditions. It is the case of a country that for over 100 years produced literature with no material, politically recognized referent. When in 1918 it reappeared on the political map of Europe, its new borders called for a redefinition of the nation’s relation to its former territories. Finally, after World War II it underwent another geographical remapping, simultaneously becoming dependent on the political and economic directives from Moscow. As a result of this final change, Polish literature needed to (but officially could not) define itself in relation to the oppressive regime whose imprint is still visible in the architecture of Polish cities. The second major obstacle addressed in the present paper regards the condition of the post-socialist city that resists adaptation to the globalized world of flexible accumulation. Even though Giles did not address the issue of the post- socialist city, small factory American towns excluded from his map of postmodern America bear a striking resemblance to many settings of the Polish literary production written after 1989. Thus the Other of Marxist geographical materialism – small factory towns that failed to successfully accomplish the process of deindustrialization – becomes one of the major literary landscapes of Poland written after the fall of Communism.

When5 in the 1980s Harvey was describing the transition from the Fordist economy to the economy of flexible accumulation that had been taking place in the

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 33

United States since the 1970s and spreading to other liberal democracies, Poland was still struggling to regain its independence from the communist regime. And when the Iron Curtain finally fell in 1989, the Polish society had to gradually adapt to the conditions of the globalized world. Those who adapted quickly to the rules of free market would profit. Their additional advantage was the ability to navigate within the economic grey zones that the state was yet unable to regulate. Others, brought up in the state- controlled economy that provided little space for individual initiative, waited for the new political order to fix the economy. Simultaneously, with censorship finally gone, the Polish society got free access to Western cultural models propagated by the most democratic medium of values and attitudes – American movies. Yet before movie theatres became an integral part of Polish shopping malls (that were yet to be built), and before the Polish society got connected to the Internet, the statistical Pole would learn about the American Dream from the vicissitudes of the Dynasty’s Carrington family. Thus those who waited for the economic crisis of the 1990s to end often did so in front of their TV sets, identifying with the Hollywood vision of America as a symbol of a better world.

As6 I argued elsewhere, Harvey’s critical theory, while providing a model of the transition from Fordism to flexible accumulation, seems to apply to large American urban centers, overlooking places that were unable to finish the process of deindustrialization. Those post-industrial “ghost towns” become the repressed Other of Harvey’s writing. On the one hand, their inhabitants are still trapped within the material space of functionalist architecture designed so that the workers’ lives would revolve around the factory. For the benefits offered by what usually was the main employer in the region, they paid with voluntary immobilization: for instance, if the largest employer in the region was a car factory, most of its employees would be given a position that did not require developing such skills as adaptability or geographical mobility. Therefore, while often menial and repetitive, by offering such advantages as full employment, social benefits, housing and welfare, this line of work seemed to successfully tie the workers to their unskilled position and, consequently, to geographical location. In the aftermath of the recession of 1973, many large plants got shut down or relocated and employment in industry got reduced. Those inhabitants of small American industrial towns, suddenly deprived of access to industrial jobs that

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 34 used to be the cornerstone of the economy based on mass production, became the target of worldwide neoliberal (ideological) engineering that promotes mobility and heterogeneity, and rewards its participants with access to the world of wealth advertized in movies, magazines, and on billboards. Unable to adapt to the rules of this new game, yet constantly reminded about the existence of the “right side of the tracks,” they became trapped within the material space of Fordism and ideological space of flexible accumulation.6

In7 1989 the Polish society regained civil and political rights and was granted economic freedom within the neoliberal global market. Simultaneously, it became exposed to Western popular culture promoting neoliberal values. However, the Polish towns and cities continued to function as repositories of the state-controlled past. As stressed by sociologist Karol Kurnicki, it is impossible to distinguish between an “ideological socialist city” and a “post-ideological post-socialist city,” for all cities are entangled in ideology, whether Marxist or neoliberal. And since ideology is reproduced in space by subjects, space becomes an arena where ideologies are legitimated or rejected. In other words, for an ideology to be successful it requires social legitimization – the more a society identifies with a given set of ideas, the less visible the ideology. On the other hand, if a society rejects a given set of values, urban space becomes the stage of social discontent. Thus, concludes Kurnicki quoting Žižek, one cannot proclaim the end of ideology, for the post-ideological order is merely more successful at concealing its ideological roots.7

During8 the Polish People’s Republic (1945-1989) cities became the space where society expressed its discontent with the worsening conditions of life and lack of political subjectivity, a discontent which ultimately resulted in the overthrowing of the communist regime. In the contemporary Poland, cities such as Gdańsk, Gliwice, Gorzów Wielkopolski, Cracow, Opole, Płock, Poznań, Racibórz, Świdnica, Toruń, and Warsaw witness the proliferation of the right to the city movements that – while never completely rejecting the neoliberal order – demand more control over the city. Based on the analysis of a literary representation of the transformation-era Poland, this article investigates the space in-between the socialist and neoliberal city. It is precisely because of the hybrid status that the post-socialist cities in Poland have become a

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 35

testing ground of neoliberal policies. The key questions I am going to address are: What is the position of the post- socialist city within the free-market neoliberal economy? How does the residue of the past built into the fabric of the functionalist space affect its inhabitants? What prevents the residents of the post-socialist city from entering what Harvey calls the space of flexible accumulation? And finally, how can the inhabitants of the post-socialist city reclaim public space?

The9 novel discussed in this article, Mariusz Sieniewicz’s 2003 Czwarte niebo [Fourth Heaven], provides an interesting depiction of the post-socialist city upon the arrival of the neoliberal ideology. The discussion that follows will analyze the spatial organization of the district where the novel takes place, juxtaposing it with social tensions brought about by the arrival of a private-owned cellphone company, leading to an investigation of the position of the post-socialist city within the global space of the free market. This discussion will, in turn, allow for an analysis of the post-socialist city as experienced by its citizens, making it possible to address the central question of this essay: who has the right to the post-socialist city?

II

10 Fourth Heaven opens with the description of Zatorze, an old district of the north-eastern city of Olsztyn where the novel takes place. Separated from the rest of the city by railway tracks, “The district came to a standstill in the shadow of the city that has been spreading blindly, swallowing up nearby forests, lakes, and meadows.”8 While the rest of the city grows, Zatorze remains a place without prospects dotted by such establishments as a milk bar for students and homeless people, a once-famous restaurant that has preserved its socialist décor, a closed-down cinema, and a kiosk with the cheapest beer in town.9 All of these function as the material reminders of the district’s economic collapse. Similarly, the railway tracks become a symbolic borderline that separates Zatorze from the rest of the city. On the one hand, then, Olsztyn from Sieniewicz’s novel seems to embrace the post-1989 imperative of economic (and spatial) growth, with regard to both the city’s size and the type of cityscape one would encounter if invited to its newer post-1989 districts (although such an invitation is never issued, as the characters rarely cross the tracks). On

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 36 the other hand, the stagnation of Zatorze is a clear marker of growing uneven regional development.

Expanding11 Ernest Mandel’s argument, Edward Soja stresses the fact that “[r]egional underdevelopment is an integral part of extended or expanded reproduction, creating large reservoirs of labour and complementary markets capable of responding to the spasmodic and contradictory flow of capitalist productivity.”10 From the point of view of profit-oriented economy, Zatorze seems to be a perfect space for neocolonization, both in terms of surplus labor and lack of goods and services. Yet the district proves remarkably self-sufficient. Local businesses are adapted to the needs and resources of the inhabitants, while a high level of unemployment seems a successful counterpoint to the initial attempts at including the district in the globalized world of consumption. Colorful billboards – one of the most recognizable signs of the advent of the new economic order in the post-1989 Polish literature – seem in Sieniewicz’s words “uncanny, stuffed there by force, by force made happy.”11 What is more, they are one of few modifications in the local landscape that has remained largely unchanged since the 1950s, when the working-class public housing estates were built adjacent to the prewar tenements. As the narrator puts it, “[t]he district was marked by the immutability gene and all improvements turned out unsatisfactory – often bringing results opposite to the expected ones, usually grotesque.”12 While it is true that most of the inhabitants of Zatorze have no resources to afford the advertized products, the grotesqueness of the billboards is not a result of the juxtaposition of human subjects with material objects. Rather, public space proves to be an independent actor capable of resistance. While it manages to combine the pre- and the postwar architectural orders, it refuses to absorb yet another layer of meaning, thus refusing to become a postmodern palimpsest. From the very beginning of Fourth Heaven, this refusal is given a spatial dimension of a clash between the communist architecture and the capitalist advertisements. The narrator seems to perceive the residents of the district as an equally immobile part of the landscape as the buildings they inhabit. Displayed “in the windows of the prewar tenements, [the tenants] looked like miniature figures from old postage stamps fading in the stamp album of the greatest philatelist – time,” notes the narrator.13 Instead of focusing on the inhabitants, the narrator describes the

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 37 urban space as a stage which determines human inertia. The colorful billboards – a sign of commercial desires that drive a large part of the economy of flexible accumulation – never become successfully incorporated into the urban landscape of the district, thus failing to reignite individual resourcefulness and become the sign of a successful transition from communism to capitalism. As long as they seem “uncanny,” the district remains trapped within the material space of the old regime and the “immutability gene,” reflected in the urban space, remains a constant reminder of the inhabitants’ exclusion from the post-1989 neoliberal cornucopia.

Giving12 an account of the debate about the connection between the “centers” of industrial production and the underdeveloped “periphery,” Soja points to the neo-Marxist scholars’ emphasis on the “core” countries as the source of exploitation and the resultant inequalities in the “peripheral” countries.14 This neo-Marxist distrust of the centre is mirrored in Sieniewicz’s novel. When a rich investor arrives in Zatorze, planning to open a cellphone factory there, one of the questions raised at the residents’ meeting concerns the involvement of foreign capital.15 Although the source of the distrust of foreign investors is never explained, it may be interpreted as a remnant of the communist-era official state ideology that indoctrinated Polish citizens into an unquestioned suspicion of capitalism as a source of class struggle and workers’ exploitation rooted in the capitalist class control over the means of production. With Marxism-Leninism no longer the official state ideology, the distrust may attest to the perseverance of the spatially-limited version of Marxism. While foreign capital is still perceived as causing workers’ alienation, domestic investors are more welcome by Zatorze’s population. This shows in the words of an unnamed female character in Fourth Heaven who expresses a utopian desire for independence from the “core,” unaware that any brand of capitalism, whether domestic or foreign, “builds upon regional or spatial inequalities as a necessary means for its continued survival.”16 For even though one can design a map where elements of global market are “so distributed and mixed across firms and sectors that they cancel themselves out . . . leading to no significant areal value . . . this conceivable spatiality of capitalism is an idealized equilibrium that rarely if ever occurs in the persistently disequilibrating world of capitalist development,” stresses Soja.17 The female character in Fourth Heaven expresses the

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 38 belief in that “idealized equilibrium” criticized by Soja. Interestingly, Sieniewicz’s novel modifies Soja’s theoretical model by adding to it a geographical limit characteristic for utopian discourses.18 While in Soja’s reading the limits of the global market are stretched to the point of losing significance, Fourth Heaven provides an illusion of an economy confined within the national borders. What is more, the inhabitants of Zatorze consent to entering the free market only after the utopian status of a self-sufficient national economy is recognized by the investor. Thus the inhabitants and the investor become equally responsible for creating and sustaining an idealized space capable of cancelling out regional or spatial inequalities. However, this economic utopia may be established only after one of the two equally implausible scenarios is implemented: either the “core” of the global market does not affect the Polish economy or Poland develops its own “core” independent of foreign influences and capable of exploiting its national “peripheries.” Thus Fourth Heaven depicts an economic paradox: on the one hand, it establishes a market with clearly delineated national borders, seemingly independent of more developed regions of the world; on the other hand, this economy is an unequivocal product of capitalist geographies of inequality described by Soja that Poland became part of after the fall of communism in 1989.

Marxist13 geographical materialists such as Soja and Harvey, by juxtaposing Marxist critique of capitalism with the analysis of geographical conditions that allow for the formation of economic power relations, prove that space is not an abstract entity that easily yields to rational planning. They oppose the notion of space as commodity that can be used and controlled. Instead, they perceive space as an active element in the process of forming economic relations. For instance, Harvey observes that the transition from Fordism to flexible accumulation was accompanied by a shift from vertical integration to vertical disintegration.19 While Fordism attempted to concentrate production in a single area, flexible accumulation disperses it across the globe. Therefore, claims Harvey, the crisis of overaccumulation in 1973 marks the beginning of the process of deindustrialization that not only dismantles the economic relations established by Fordism, but also affects the social tissue of communities shaped by their dependency on the factory. Thanks to the satellite communications systems “[i]t is now possible for a large multinational corporation . . . to operate plants with

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 39 simultaneous decision-making with respect to financial, market, input costs, quality control, and labour process conditions”20 in many different locations across the world. As a result, as multinational companies relocate parts of production to regions with cheaper rent and labor, areas shaped by Fordism often get abandoned by multinational capital. Harvey recapitulates this state of affairs by noting that“political economy … confine[s] our understanding of space and time to its absolute dimensions.”21 In other words, when considered in abstract, absolute terms, space is perceived as susceptible to colonization, which often results in profit as the main premise for relocating capital. In Harvey’s reading, capital treats space as prone to reshaping, often disregarding networks of relations it either encounters upon arrival or leaves behind. However, even though generally true for functionalist architecture and Fordism, the above statement gets amended with the advent of flexible accumulation: “the less important the spatial barriers, the greater the sensitivity of capital to the variations of place within space, and the greater the incentive for places to be differentiated in ways attractive to capital.”22 Zatorze14 exemplifies the paradox of flexible accumulation noticed by Harvey. As an underdeveloped part of the free global market it seems attractive to capital; yet, it remains a local geography shaped by spatial, social, and economic relations established during communism. The fact that Zatorze remains an underdeveloped place turns out to be the greatest obstacle in incorporating the district into the free market. Zatorze never becomes the abstract space of the neoliberal economy. Or, to put it another way, numerous borders that confine the space are reinforced rather than erased. The tracks separate Zatorze from the rest of the city in the same way as the national borders separate Poland from its still suspicious-looking political and economic allies. What is more, the cellphone company, by employing only women from the district, strengthens the exclusion of Zatorze from the rest of the city as this employment strategy prevents Olsztyn’s other inhabitants from crossing the tracks. This strategy of exclusion seems to fulfill a promise that the flow of capital can be controlled from and sustained within an underdeveloped part of the globalized world. Interestingly, the inhabitants of the district who express their distrust of the new company seem so preoccupied with the origin of the capital that they disregard the fact that the cases for cell phones are made in

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 40

China – a clear example that Zatorze has become part of the global free market. Therefore, as long as the money they are bought with is said to be Polish, the final product may be a result of the global uneven development that invites multinational companies to search for rent- and labor-friendly regions around the world. Even though the geographical transfer of value takes place, all its unwanted consequences, the major one being the arrival of capitalism with its tendency to exploit underdeveloped parts of the globe, seem to get cancelled within the symbolic borders of Zatorze. However, in order to maintain the illusion of self- sustainability, a visible façade of limits must be created, disguising places where spatial barriers get crossed. While the inflowing capital challenges the stability of the border between Zatorze and the rest of the city, its arrival is justified through the strengthening of another, national frame that the Zatorze population can identify with as Polish citizens. But shifting one border implies the instability of all frames, and the intrinsically contradictory process of negotiating limits to capital brings about unexpected consequences. While some inhabitants of Zatorze seek employment in the cellphone company, thus expressing their willingness to become part of the neoliberal economy, others openly express their radical opposition to any form of capital, whether foreign or national. For example, the speech given by two radicals, Owiewka and Lew, incorporates key elements of the post-1989 populist discourse: distrust of capital that must have its origin in exploitation; disappointment with consumerism; opposition to poverty and the collapse of Polish agriculture; fear of being under the influence of foreign superpowers such as China or Russia combined with the opposition to regulations introduced by the European Union; conviction that Poland is constantly being betrayed and sold; opposition to rewriting the Polish historical metanarrative in a way that would recognize such shameful events as the Jedwabne and Kielce pogroms, and March 1968; and finally, an attempt to name the enemy responsible for the above mentioned problems – politicians who squandered the achievements of the Solidarity movement, the Church, Jewish communists, and homosexuals. The speech ends with a comment on George W. Bush’s “war on terror” that is presented as a totalitarian attempt to claim territories that still remain outside the influence of the United States. Here Lew sympathizes with violent attempts at destabilizing the global order,

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 41 suggesting that a peaceful solution is part of the neoliberal ideology introduced by the United States with the Pope’s blessing, and therefore cannot bring about any change.23

However,15 an unsuccessful attempt at gaining social legitimization through negotiating local borders is not the only spatial reason for the cellphone factory’s failure. Equally important seems the way that restructuring is (not) conducted in the district. Commenting upon restructuring in a different context, Soja stresses that in order for the process to be successful, old social structures must first be disassembled (or their power over citizens’ lives at least undermined) to be replaced with new ones. During successful restructuring, “[t]he old order is sufficiently strained to preclude conventional patchwork adaptation and to demand significant structural change instead.”24 The factory in Fourth Heaven is not established on the ruins of the old order but next to it. The investor attempts to profit from the underdevelopment of the district, maneuvering between the well-established social frustrations stemming from impoverishment and growing nationalism. While the cellphone plant is erected in the place of the old cinema, the rest of the district does not undergo any restructuring, remaining the vestige of a culture incompatible with the neoliberal ideology. For Zatorze’s population, whose significant part remains unemployed, everyday afternoon walks become rituals acted out within the post-socialist space that solidify social inertia.25 Similarly, the spatial proximity of the inhabitants of Zatorze, a result of both the physical layout of the district and the flagship communist- era public housing architecture, seems to serve two interlinked purposes: sustaining habit and executing control. Firstly, it anaesthetizes the inhabitants to the unchanging rhythms of the district. Each Sunday afternoon they fill their window seats to observe the courtyards in front of their buildings, thus recreating a social ritual of habit.26 For while they may be observing the courtyard curious for something to happen (even though it rarely does), it is equally plausible that the incentive behind the ritual is not boredom but fear of change, and the gaze’s function is to freeze space and its inhabitants in a never- changing state of inertia. Therefore, the second function of socialist architecture that stems from constant visual surveillance is the creation of an environment susceptible to social control.

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In16 a manner similar to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, the communist-era apartment block disciplines its inhabitants to exercise control over themselves. As stressed by Michel Foucault, “the major effect of Panopticon [is] to induce in the inmate a state of permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.”27 Similarly to the Panopticon, which “sustain[s] a power relation independent of the person who exercises it,”28 socialist architecture places subjects within an environment capable of establishing power relations even without the regime that originated it. Additionally, even though it is theoretically possible to withdraw from the public space into the confines of one’s apartment, paper-thin and sound- transmitting walls make it impossible to erect an impenetrable border between the inside and the outside. Smells of cooked food, coffee, or perfumes escape apartments becoming public testimonies to private lives.29 Thus an attempt to escape the gaze of neighbors is merely a manifestation of one’s need for privacy that cannot be fulfilled. However,17 Zygmunt Bauman stresses the fact that the residents of the Panopticon, in exchange for their submission to constant surveillance, are granted the sense of security derived from the predictability of daily rhythms.30 All residents have to accept the rules that organize a given space, for these rules guarantee a community’s harmony. That is why when a person deemed unfit by the neighbors moves into an apartment block, the latter take steps that will result in that person’s eviction. By way of example, when a woman and her HIV-positive son move into the apartment block of the main protagonist of Fourth Heaven, the majority of tenants sign a petition addressed to the housing association demanding the woman’s eviction. Even though the tenants demand peace in exchange for the taxes and the rent they pay,31 the fact that the sick son never disturbed that peace (unlike the protagonist, Zygmunt Drzeźniak, who is a constant nuisance to other tenants, yet whose excesses never result in his eviction) points to a motive different than the one given by the tenants. One’s belonging to the local community endows one with the right to delineate borders that separate fellow citizens from strangers, making legitimization a process negotiated from within the district. Even though the woman and her HIV- positive son pay the same taxes as other tenants, their status of newcomers places them in an inferior position to

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 43 the Zatorze community. While economic capital may be a prerequisite for entry into a neighborhood, it is the well- established community that holds control over space by granting newcomers insider status. That is why Zygmunt Drzeźniak, whose “parents obtained a public housing apartment in the new district”32 during the communist era, never gets evicted. Although he is a constant nuisance to other tenants, his old-timer status protects him against eviction. Interestingly, with the collapse of the communist regime and the advent of the free market economy, public housing is no longer available. Money falls short of granting newcomers access to a close-knit community and the privilege to modify the rules of its functioning. Zatorze is an example of a community so indebted to its communist origin that any attempt at reinventing the collective in a post-socialist reality seems to lack social legitimization. As a result, a paradoxical situation occurs: while the communist regime lost social legitimization and was overthrown, the citizens cultivate the communist-granted base of community ties, successfully opposing the advent of neoliberal urban politics. And since it is impossible to turn back time and restore state-controlled housing cooperatives, any inflow of new inhabitants deemed unfit by the community will meet with the residents’ resistance.33

The18 above discussion presents a rather pessimistic view of the post-socialist city as a place organized by its internal logic that neither capital nor individuals can bend to their needs. At this point it seems appropriate to pose the final question: who does the post-socialist city described by Sieniewicz really belong to? To answer this question, I would like to propose a change of perspective. While Soja and Harvey provided valuable theoretical tools for analyzing the processes that take place in Zatorze upon the arrival of the neoliberal economy, Michel de Certeau’s theory of “spatial practices,” developed in his book The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) offers an illuminating perspective on the city as experienced by its citizens.

De19 Certeau begins his project of “spatial practices” with a description of Manhattan seen from the 1370 foot tower of World Trade Center. According to de Certeau, this scopic vision “continues to construct the fiction that creates readers, makes the complexity of the city readable, and immobilizes its opaque mobility in a transparent text.”34 To this God-like project of city planners he opposes the city of its ordinary practitioners, who, immersed in the fragmented

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 44 space of New York, are never granted the luxury of a totalizing viewpoint. Instead of becoming voyeurs, they experience the city through walking, their knowledge never limited to one, superior sense. The city as a concept devised by urban planners, claims de Certeau, rests upon the possibility of three operations: the creation of rationally organized space; the repression of the tactics of users; and the creation of the city as a universal and autonomous subject. In theory, the “Concept-city” redistributes its parts, simultaneously creating “waste products” to be readmitted into the city as it develops and becomes capable of reintroducing excess into a profitable economy of exchange. In reality, continues de Certeau, these processes do not account for space as experienced by its users, resulting in a totalizing project based on exclusion. The unprofitable peripheries can be readmitted into the city only after fulfilling scientific, political, or economic criteria, thus yielding to the requirements of the city seen as a transparent text.35 However, while “in discourse the city serves as a totalizing and almost mythical landmark for socioeconomic and political strategies, urban life increasingly permits the re-emergence of the element that the urbanistic project excluded.”36

If20 one considers Zatorze from the point of view of de Certeau’s analysis, it seems analogous to the “waste products” that the city produces as a consequence of its development. Both its economic status and the location situate the district at the periphery of Olsztyn, excluded, yet in theory susceptible to readmission. However, while de Certeau seems optimistic about the possibility of reclaiming the city through spatial practices of its inhabitants, the “walking rhetorics” of the characters in Fourth Heaven provide an interesting counterpoint to de Certeau’s view. According to de Certeau, functionalist totalitarianism seeks to eliminate from the city “local authorities” such as stories and legends that provide the abstract surface of the city with additional layers of meaning that the inhabitants encounter while traversing its districts. “Stories diversify, rumors totalize,” claims de Certeau, “stories are becoming private and sink into the secluded places in neighborhoods, families, or individuals, while the rumors propagated by the media cover everything and . . . wipe out or combat any superstitions guilty of still resisting the figure.”37 The juxtaposition of stories and rumors in The Practice of Everyday Life grants stories a diversifying power, capable

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of resisting the panoptic vision promoted by the city authorities.

Sieniewicz’s21 Fourth Heaven provides an interesting comment on the possibility of maintaining the dichotomy: stories/rumors discussed by de Certeau. Even though information in Fourth Heaven seems to follow along the two channels delineated by de Certeau, neither of them results in a greater diversification of the district. While the local media inform citizens about the opening of the factory, stressing the possibility of new employment for female inhabitants of Zatorze, informal exchange of information between neighbors focuses on the potential threats the factory will bring to the district. While the former use the neoliberal rhetoric of profit,38 the latter presents the businessman as Satan, appealing to the Christian background of the inhabitants, simultaneously providing a clear division between good and evil.39 By allowing the rumor to spread, the channel of informal exchange proves equally homogenizing as the official media. While the latter operate through formal, disembodied channels, the rumor spreads through informal, embodied encounters acted out in the urban space – a practice de Certeau believes to be more liberating.

After22 diagnosing the functionalist administration as oppressive, de Certeau proposes a strategy of resistance based on the analysis of practices that managed to resist homogenization and survive in the streets: one can analyze the microbe-like, singular and plural practices which an urbanistic system was supposed to administer or suppress, but which have outlived its decay; one can follow the swarming activity of these procedures that, far from being regulated or eliminated by panoptic administration, have reinforced themselves in a proliferating illegitimacy, developed and insinuated themselves into the networks of surveillance, and combined in accord with unreadable but stable tactics to the point of constituting everyday regulations and surreptitious creativities that are merely concealed by the frantic mechanisms and discourses of the observational organization.40 23 Zatorze in Sieniewicz’s novel seems to simultaneously fit and elude de Certeau’s project. Undoubtedly, the space of the post-socialist city is a reservoir of “singular and plural practices” which “have outlived” the decay of the communist regime. Their “illegitimacy,” however, is a more problematic issue. The example of the tenants from Zygmunt Drzeźniak’s apartment block shows that even though the communist panoptic administration is no longer in power, the inhabitants have created their own network of

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 46 surveillance rooted in the spatial practices established during the former political system. What during the Polish People’s Republic was seen as oppressive has become a strategy of resistance to the advent of the neoliberal ideology. Seen from the point of view of Olsztyn’s authorities, the inhabitants’ resistance to the new economic order must seem unwarranted. As the political and economic system changed, so did the official objectives of urban administration. No longer does it seem profitable to maintain the district’s exclusion. Yet while Olsztyn seems ready to readmit Zatorze into the circulation of capital, its inhabitants are disinclined to renounce their independence.

Fourth24 Heaven depicts a district whose internal spatial organization immunizes it to neoliberal managerial tactics. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, describing the working of Empire – what they define as a new political subject that emerged as a consequence of globalization and the decline of sovereignty of nation-states – claim that one mechanism of control it applies is the kind of inclusion that seemingly erases all differences between the members of the globalized world. “Setting aside differences means, in effect, taking away the potential of the various constituent subjectivities. The resulting public space of power neutrality makes possible the establishment and legitimation of a universal notion of right that forms the core of the Empire,” claim Hardt and Negri.41 The strategy of control through inclusion, made possible by lifting spatial barriers to the flow of capital, products, and people, results in individuals’ disempowerment. As they become members of the globalized world, they renounce any possibility to put pressure on multinational capital. What is more, since nation-states become dependent on multinational corporations, it is increasingly more difficult for work-based local communities to negotiate with state authorities. 42Fourth Heaven depicts a community unwilling to become part of Hardt and Negri’s Empire, refusing to renounce its strong local identity and the power that stems from it. With the railway tracks as a material marker of its socio-spatial and economic exclusion from the remaining part of the city, Zatorze recreates the mechanisms of exclusion within its own borders and forges a collective subjectivity incompatible with a perspective that invalidates the inside- outside dialectics. While de Certeau sees spatial practices as a liberating form of reclaiming the city and Hardt and Negri consider imperial inclusion as yet another form of

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 47 ideological control, Sieniewicz’s novel depicts a space that has not yet become part of Empire, nor do spatial practices of its inhabitants result in their liberation.

Interestingly,25 the opposition to the neoliberal order in Fourth Heaven is not an expression of a higher civic awareness that stands behind numerous initiatives undertaken by right to the city movements. Commenting upon the growing “deficit of the political” in the postmodern world, Hardt and Negri claim that “[t]he urban landscape is shifting from the modern focus on the common square and the public encounter to the closed spaces of malls, freeways, and gated communities.”43 In a similar manner Harvey proclaims that “[c]apitalist urbanization perpetually tends to destroy the city as a social, political and livable commons.”44 In order for the city to once again become a political idea capable of shaping civic responsibility, states Krzysztof Nawratek, cities need to strengthen their social capital. Ties between citizens are strong in places where an individual is weak, both in economic and political terms. One of the examples discussed by Nawratek concerns the period of the Polish People’s Republic when economic and political deficiencies resulted in strong ties between neighbors.45 Finally, working-class communities prove more efficient at controlling place than space, notes Harvey,46 which makes them the more likely subjects of successful social revolts. While oversimplified, the above discussion provides an interesting theoretical frame for the analysis of Zatorze, as Sieniewicz’s novel seems to comment upon the right to the city in an unexpected manner. Firstly, while it is true that the public spaces of Zatorze have not yet been claimed by capitalist urbanization, they fail to provide a successful background for civic responsibility. While right to the city movements tend to offer pragmatic solutions aimed at reshaping local landscapes in a way that takes into consideration the needs of the citizens, the inhabitants of Zatorze either go to work at the factory or oppose any change in the district, refusing to participate in the creation of a more inhabitant-friendly commons. Therefore, a hypothesis concerning the relation between the post- socialist city and the right to the city movements may be proposed: while, as claimed by Harvey, “capitalist urbanization tends to destroy the city as a social, political and livable commons,” it simultaneously creates a space where civic rights may be executed. Sieniewicz’s novel illustrates that the post-1989 Polish city has not yet shaped

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citizens capable of social engagement, and civic rights that the collapse of communism granted to the Polish citizens remain a potentiality. Fourth Heaven seems to suggest that the space in-between the socialist and neoliberal city is still marked by the inertia characteristic for the old regime that the citizens would overcome only in moments of high discontent. While right to the city movements adapt the neoliberal imperative of “customized production” to the social production of the city, the radicals in Sieniewicz’s novel are incapable of proposing any positive alternative for the district. Instead of engaging in restructuring, they blow up the cellphone factory at the end of the novel. Secondly, strong ties between the inhabitants of Zatorze do not produce social capital capable of reclaiming the district. What during the communist regime was a successful element of social protest, in a neoliberal world can only delay the inevitable advent of foreign capital. Therefore, the communist social capital accumulated within the post- socialist city, instead of becoming part of creative social restructuring, turns into an element of social control, strengthening the district’s exclusion. And thirdly, even though the inhabitants of Zatorze prove successful at controlling the district, their power may be the result of Zatorze’s peripheral role in Olsztyn’s cityscape, a semi- autonomy being the result of neglect and lack of interest. Sieniewicz’s novel seems to suggest that without a project (either public or private) that ensures a socially-responsible restructuring, and without citizens willing to execute their civic rights, districts such as Zatorze will either continue their economic collapse or become incorporated into the neoliberal order that will destroy their common squares and break social ties between inhabitants. The post-socialist city from Fourth Heaven turns out incapable of providing either.

III

26 Kim Dovey argues that “[t]he more that the structures and representations of power can be embedded in the framework of everyday life, the less questionable they become and the more effectively they can work. This is what lends built form a prime role as ideology.”47 Therefore, even though one can give a temporal marker of an economic or political change, and even though space may be a witness to a radical social protest, when the protesting crowds have dispersed with their needs seemingly satisfied,

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 49 space remains largely the same, consolidating old habits, prejudices, and divisions. Mariusz Sieniewicz’s Fourth Heaven proves that the fall of communism in 1989 was merely a historical marker unable to bring any social and economic change to places such as Zatorze.

Once27 again, Edward Soja provides a useful theoretical tool in the analysis of the post-1989 literary representation of the Polish city. Drawing upon Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, Soja coins the term Thirdspace which he defines as “a distinct mode of critical spatial awareness that is appropriate to the new scope and significance being brought about in the rebalanced trialectics of spatiality- historicality-sociality.”48 By juxtaposing what he believes are the two major modes of spatial thinking – materiality (Firstspace) and discourse (Secondspace) – Soja recognizes a shift in spatial thinking that extends beyond those traditional approaches and synthesizes them into the lived experience of space as the nexus of the material, the historical, and the social. The trialectics of the material, the historical, and the social in Sieniewicz’s novel result in a representation of a city whose historical debt to the previous regime is imprinted in the materiality of the district to such an extent that it continues to shape social interactions. As a result, any attempt at the district’s patchwork adaptation to the conditions of the neoliberal world that does not account for a significant spatial change meets with social protest.

Since28 it is impossible to change the dynamics of Thirdspace without reshaping the material, what would a positive spatial restructuring look like? Sieniewicz does not propose a solution, yet his novel seems to offer a rather pessimistic view on the right to the city movements’ potential within the space of the post-socialist city. Its citizens may either adapt to the economy of flexible accumulation and leave for cities more successful at completing the transition from Fordism to flexible accumulation, or they can stay and wait for the advent of the neoliberal economy. In no way do I want to suggest that neoliberal spaces are the only ones that need reclaiming. Rather, Fourth Heaven seems to suggest that the post- socialist city in its most extreme form (exemplified by Zatorze) is incapable of forming citizens that could successfully prevent the privatization of their commons if such an event were to take place.

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The29 present paper did not attempt to present an empirical model of privatization that took place in the post-1989 Poland, since literature creates fictional representations that stress one process at the expense of others. However, Fourth Heaven offers an interesting perspective on the processes that the post-socialist city had undergone after the collapse of communism in 1989. Sieniewicz depicts the city whose materiality, a result of functionalist, communist urban planning, continues to influence social life. He addresses the issue of unexercised civic rights, suggesting that as long as the material imprint of the old regime holds sway over the Polish cities, it is impossible to develop civic attitudes and a sense of entitlement to urban space. Paradoxically, then, until the global capital has claimed Polish cities and privatized public spaces, the only form of protest Polish citizens are capable of involves restaging the social discontent of the Solidarity movement era. Then, the post-socialist city, with its internal divisions strengthened by the spatial organization of districts and communist architecture, consolidates its symbolic borders. Communication is one of the prerequisites of building a responsible civic society. Fourth Heaven seems to suggest that the post-socialist city does belong to its citizens as long as they do not have to interact with the outside world. The moment the neoliberal world crosses the tracks that separate Zatorze from the more capital-friendly parts of Olsztyn, the district’s inhabitants prove unsuccessful in either adapting to the new economic order or resisting it. Sieniewicz depicts the post-socialist city as a remnant of the old regime, a vestige of idyllic economic stagnation that no individual effort seems capable of overcoming. Finally, the materiality of the post-socialist city is an important factor in convincing its inhabitants that it is the only city they have the right to.

NOTES

1. Paul Giles, The Global Remapping of American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 1. 2. Ibid., 114-115. 3. Ibid., 11.

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4. Ibid., 143. 5. In The Condition of Postmodernity, David Harvey describes the shift that took place in the American economy he calls the transition from Fordism to flexible accumulation. According to Harvey, changes initiated by Henry Ford (the introduction of the five-dollar, eight-hour workday, and development of new technologies used in mass production such as the assembly line) shaped the global postwar economy, resulting in a relatively stable economic growth. During the postwar era, employment in industrial production increased as did demand for mass-produced goods. However, the recession of 1973 showed that the postwar economic boom (1945-1973) reached the point where the market could no longer absorb mass-produced goods, resulting in many large plants being shut down or relocated to more rent-friendly regions of the Third World. Often unable to find employment that would require skills developed in their previous jobs, former employees of large factories were forced to show “flexibility with respect to labour processes, labour markets, products, and patterns of consumption” (147), thus adapting to the new economy Harvey christened flexible accumulation. In short, the core-periphery relation of Fordist employment got reversed. While in Fordist economy the core consisted of full time employees with skills easily available in the labor market, in the economy of flexible accumulation it got replaced by employees expected to be geographically mobile and susceptible to reskilling. Similarly, mass production got reduced, gradually replaced with growing employment in service-sector and information-management. See: David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992). 6. For a detailed discussion, see Kamil Rusiłowicz, “Between Fordism and Flexible Accumulation: Towards the Chronotope of a Post-Industrial ‘Ghost Town’,” in Americascapes: Americans in/and their Diverse Sceneries, ed. Ewelina Bańka, Mateusz Liwiński, and Kamil Rusiłowicz (Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL, 2013), 307-318. 7. Karol Kurnicki, “Produkcja miasta postsocjalistycznego,” Autoportret 4, no. 36 (2011): 38 39. 8. “Dzielnica zastygła w cieniu miasta, które rozrastało się na oślep, pożerając okoliczne lasy, jeziora i łąki.” Mariusz Sieniewicz, Czwarte niebo (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo W.A.B., 2003), 8. [all the quotations from Czwarte niebo in the text are my translations]. 9. Ibid., 9-10. 10. Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1990), 105. 11. “dziwaczne, wepchnięte na siłę, na siłę uszczęśliwione.” Sieniewicz, Czwarte niebo, 13. 12. “Dzielnicę cechował krnąbrny gen niezmienności i wszelkie ulepszenia dawały niezadowalające efekty – nierzadko przeciwne do oczekiwanych, a najczęściej karykaturalne.” Ibid., 13. 13. “Lokatorzy w oknach przedwojennych kamienic przypominali miniaturowe postacie ze starych znaczków pocztowych, które blakły włożone do klasera najlepszego z filatelistów – czasu.” Ibid., 13. 14. Soja, Postmodern, 110. 15. Sieniewicz, Czwarte niebo, 112. 16. Soja, Postmodern, 107. 17. Ibid., 113.

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18. Thomas More’s 1516 Utopia is the most famous example of a perfect state where geographical location serves as a crucial factor in establishing the island’s self-sustainability. The sea surrounding Utopia points to the fact that an ideal society can be established only within a total confinement. See Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Massachusetts: MIT Press Cambridge, 2001), 133. 19. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992), 284. 20. Ibid., 293. 21. David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 257. 22. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 296. 23. Sieniewicz, Czwarte niebo, 156-163. 24. Soja, Postmodern, 159. 25. Sieniewicz, Czwarte niebo, 61-62. 26. Ibid., 15-16. 27. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 201. 28. Ibid., 201. 29. Sieniewicz, Czwarte niebo, 14. 30. Zygmunt Bauman, Wolność, trans. Joanna Tokarska-Bakir (Kraków: Społeczny Instytut Wydawniczy Znak, 1995), 18-19. 31. Sieniewicz, Czwarte niebo, 150. 32. “rodzice dostali mieszkanie na nowym osiedlu.” Ibid., 33. 33. Interestingly, the owner of the cellphone factory seems aware of that fact and tries to use this local particularism to his own benefit. Firstly, the fact that the factory employs only local women may be a sign of the investor’s understanding that Zatorze remains a close-knit community that does not tolerate outsiders. Secondly, an attempt at recreating the social relations of the district within the factory may be seen as a way of assuring its productivity. In theory, eliminating internal tensions should increase the factory’s efficiency. 34. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 92. 35. Ibid., 94-95. 36. Ibid., 95. 37. Ibid., 107-108. 38. Sieniewicz, Czwarte niebo, 93. 39. Ibid., 70, 84. 40. De Certeau, Practice, 96. 41. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 198. 42. This seems to coincide with David Harvey’s theses on the urban revolution. According to Harvey, if workers are to be successful in defending their rights, a transformation must take place from work-based to community-based struggles. In addition, this transformation must be accompanied by a redefinition of the concept of work that would include non-industrial forms of labor. See David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2012), 138-139. 43. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 188. 44. Harvey, Rebel Cities, 80.

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45. Krzysztof Nawratek, Miasto jako idea polityczna (Kraków: Korporacja Ha! art, 2008), 46. 46. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 236. 47. Kim Dovey, Framing Places: Mediating Power in Built Form (London: Routledge, 2002), 2. 48. Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and- Imagined Places (Blackwell: Cambridge, 1996), 10.

ABSTRACTS

The article opens with a thesis that the post-socialist city is not part of the neoliberal world theorized by David Harvey. By way of comparison, the text discusses Paul Giles’s The Global Remapping of American Literature which is a successful endeavor because the history of American novel is abundant in examples that fit Harvey’s model. The fact that small American factory towns that were unable to successfully accomplish deindustrialization are not accounted for in Giles’s scholarship does not diminish the strength of the scholar’s argument. However, these towns – the blind spot of Harvey’s and Giles’s criticism – bear striking resemblance to the post- socialist city present in the post-1989 Polish literature. Therefore, the analysis of the post- socialist city may provide insightful comments on both Polish and American literary representations of small factory towns. Focusing on Mariusz Sieniewicz’s Czwarte niebo, the article analyzes how the post-socialist city remains a repository of the state-controlled past and resists adaptation to the globalized world of flexible accumulation. It attempts to answer the following questions: What is the position of the post-socialist city within the free-market neoliberal economy? How does the residue of the past built into the fabric of the functionalist space affect its inhabitants? What prevents the residents of the post-socialist city from entering what Harvey calls the space of flexible accumulation? And finally, how can the inhabitants of the post-socialist city reclaim public space?

INDEX

Keywords: Czwarte niebo, David Harvey, Edward Soja, flexible accumulation, Fordism, Mariusz Sieniewicz, Michel de Certeau, post-socialist city, right to the city, space

AUTHOR

KAMIL RUSIŁOWICZ Institute of English Studies, The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin

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Segregation or Assimilation: Dutch Government Research on Ethnic Minorities in Dutch Cities and its American Frames of Reference

Ruud Janssens

1 On 5 November 2004, after the murder of cineaste Theo van Gogh by a Muslim extremist in Amsterdam, The New York Times editorial under the heading “Deadly Hatreds in the Netherlands” stated: “Something sad and terrible is happening in the Netherlands, long one of Europe’s most tolerant, decent and multicultural societies.”1 In the two decades before the murder, immigration had led to heated debates in the Netherlands. The inflow of immigrants from (former) colonies like Suriname and the Dutch Antilles, labor migrants from Turkey and Morocco, and refugees from a range of countries raised concern about the social consequences for Dutch society. Reflecting the public debate about immigration, politicians made a range of statements from celebrating cultural diversity to condemning Islam and deploring the decline of civilization. Since2 about half of the immigrants lived in the four biggest cities of the Netherlands, the debate about immigration was often a discussion about ethnic groups in an urban setting. While the confrontations at the local level were regularly about the building of mosques, crime, run down neighborhoods, housing, unemployment, affirmative action, and discrimination, at the national level politicians wanted to formulate a social policy based on equality. National government officials were concerned about ethnic minorities in cities, because they read American sociological studies on immigration and city life, from Robert Park and the Chicago School in the 1920s to recent studies by Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou, and feared segregation, ethnic tensions, crime, and poverty. In their mostly statistical studies, government policy planners described how different ethnic minorities were from Dutch citizens and how important it was that immigrants should integrate into Dutch society. The word integrate might give the impression that policy planners would find it acceptable if

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immigrants kept (part of) their own culture, as long as they would fit in with Dutch society. As I will show, while policy planners used the word integration, they actually mostly meant assimilation, and expected immigrants to become similar to the Dutch. By using American analytic models, policy planners at the national level defined policies at the local level, while trying to force ethnic minorities to adapt to a Dutch way of life. In3 the 1980s, the Dutch government formulated a new Minorities Policy, in which it wanted to guarantee equal access for all Dutch citizens to social goods such as housing, jobs, and education. The government gathered new statistical data to support political initiatives for equality, which resulted in a political and public debate that set ethnic minorities apart from the rest of Dutch society. Soon the focus of the debate switched from equal access for all to the question whether ethnic minorities wanted or were able to become equals. The4 focus of this essay is on these statistics. Since they concerned housing, unemployment, and education, some government officials raised the question if social and economic problems impeded the achievement of equality by ethnic minorities. However, to avoid the stigmatization of any ethnic group, the government devised a national policy for all ethnic minorities. In order to establish the active role government officials had in defining an ethnic problem in the Netherlands, I will highlight two aspects of the policy. First, I will show how the definition of ethnic minorities contributed to the perception of social problems caused by the presence of immigrants. Second, I will analyze the governmental studies on immigrants in major Dutch cities, which drew heavily on American scholarly studies on immigrants and segregation. What began with the intention of giving ethnic minorities equal access to housing, jobs, and education, resulted in a focus on the differences between Dutch and immigrant culture. Using statistical data as their source, the government reproached ethnic minorities for not making an effort to assimilate. The way policy planners and makers defined minorities, minority problems, and threats to city life (if not Dutch society), drawing on the related statistics, shaped popular perceptions of immigrants and immigration policies. This process was filled with ironies, because government officials increased the magnitude of the social problems as well as cherry picked theories from American urban sociology from the 1920s onward, implementing misguided policies, which were rooted in skewed assumptions.

1. Dutch Government Studies of Immigrants

In5 1983, the Dutch Parliament adopted a new Constitution. After about twenty years of deliberation, the various Dutch political parties settled on a compromise. The new Constitution was based, in part, on the 1961 European Social Charter and the 1966 International Treaty on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. The Constitution included new fundamental social rights such as equal opportunity to make use of social, economic, and cultural policies. The new Constitution led to a new Minorities Policy, also adopted in 1983. Previously, the government had a different policy for each major ethnic group. With the new emphasis on equality in access and use of social and economic rights for all citizens, the Dutch government wanted to make sure that all groups were treated fairly. In order to be able to assess the situation of various social groups, the Dutch government needed new statistical material. The Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek (Central Bureau for Statistics; CBS) and the Sociaal & Cultureel

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Planbureau (Social & Cultural Planning Agency; SCP), both government institutions, had to gather the new data. As6 political scientist Marco Martiniello and sociologist Jan Rath pointed out in their 2010 collection of essays about migration studies, there were few scholars in Europe working on immigration before the 1990s.2 Sometimes government agencies contracted social scientists to write studies about immigration in The Netherlands, but mostly policy planners based their work on statistical material. When policy planners or social scientists needed a theoretical framework, they turned to American theories about immigration. Martiniello7 and Rath raised the question if the adaption of American concepts was such a positive development, since these ideas were developed in a specific cultural context. One of the examples Martiniello and Rath used to illustrate how some theoretical concepts could be mangled in translation is the term “ethnicity.” They pointed to Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan’s 1963 study Beyond the Melting Pot. Based on their research in New York City, Glazer and Moynihan found that various ethnic groups would shed their original ethnicity when they lived in the United States, and create a new ethnicity, based on their traditional culture and the new American culture in which they lived. As Glazer and Moynihan wrote: “Italian-Americans might share precious little with Italians in Italy, but in America they were a distinctive group that maintained itself, was identifiable, and gave something to those who were identified with it, just as it also gave burdens that those in the group had to bear.”3 Since the publication of Glazer and Moynihan’s work, the term ethnicity was used in relation to immigrant groups that could contain several identities: their culture could have elements from the home country, from American culture, and new elements created in the United States. Overall, they could still be considered American. In Martiniello and Rath’s reading, for Europeans, who often saw immigrants as a temporary migrant labor force, such bringing together of ethnic and national identities was inconceivable. In the European context, a different ethnicity implied a threat to the national culture of the host country.4 Martiniello8 and Rath raised two important points. First, in 2010, they were still convinced of American dominance in the theories and concepts used in European immigration studies. Second, while there is a considerable reservoir of negative images of immigration both in the United States and in Europe, there is hardly a European equivalent to the American optimistic view on immigration in the United States (with ideas such as the classic “melting pot,” President John F. Kennedy’s book A Nation of Immigrants, praising the contributions of all immigrants groups to American society and culture, or the more recent ideas about the advantages of multiculturalism). As I will show in my analysis, Dutch policy planners and makers think in terms of integration or assimilation, but not in terms of the contributions immigrants and their culture can make to Dutch society. Such an attitude by the Dutch government has actually made it harder for immigrants to adapt to the host culture.

2. The Definition of Minorities

The9 1983 equality-oriented Minorities Policy focused on “1) social and economic deficits, 2) legal status and discrimination, and 3) the limited participation and upsetting isolation in society” of minorities. The bill mentioned specific attention to education, housing, employment, and legal status as policy goals.5 The Minorities

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Policy defined the following groups as minorities “Antilleans, foreign employees, Moluccans, Surinamese, refugees, people in trailer camps, and gypsies.”6 Interestingly, the government did not include the largest immigrant groups: German, Indonesian, Turkish, and Moroccan immigrants. It is unclear why they made such a distinction, but the Minorities Policy may have listed only the groups they found most problematic.

2.1. Who is a Minority Member?

Since10 there was only a limited amount of statistical data available in the 1980s, government officials made a selection of the groups and topics they would research. Initially, they would focus on the “Mediterranean groups” (i.e. Turks and Moroccans), Surinamese, and Antilleans, leaving out refugees, trailer park people, and other foreigners mentioned in the Minorities Policy. They studied access to “public goods” such as education, employment, income, and housing. The11 new Minorities Policy led to changes in the registration of immigrants. It included Surinamese and Antilleans as minority groups, yet since most of them had the Dutch nationality, their numbers did not show up in the statistics. Only in 1992 did the Dutch government switch to a definition of ethnic minority that considered an individual’s place of birth, as well as that of their parents, decisive, so that Surinamese and Antillean people would be included in the statistics. Meanwhile the government explicitly stated they wanted to support socially disadvantaged minority groups rather than condemn or stigmatize them.7 The12 redefinition of ethnic minorities had important consequences. One result was that the overall size of ethnic minorities increased. Not only were Surinamese- Dutch and Antilleans included in the new statistics, but second-generation “immigrants” as well. According to a 1996 government report, if only first-generation immigrants were counted, there were 166,000 Turks, 140,000 Moroccans, and 181,000 Surinamese in the Netherlands on January 1, 1995. If the second-generation was included as well, the numbers increased to 264,000 Turkish-Dutch, 219,000 Moroccan- Dutch, and 278,000 Surinamese-Dutch citizens. The new definition of minorities led to an increase in the overall number of ethnic minorities from 1,387,000 to 2,572,000 persons (the total population of the Netherlands was 15.4 million at that time, which meant that ethnic minorities accounted for 16% of the Dutch population compared to earlier estimates of 9%).8 In spite of the intention of the government to solve social problems and not to stigmatize people, for politicians who wanted to discuss immigration and ethnic minorities in terms of problems, the size of the ethnic minorities (and the problems they might have in Dutch society, or Dutch society might have with them) almost doubled, only because of the statistics used. The13 new definition of ethnic minorities led to confusion in the governmental departments. Officials debated whether an individual belonged to an ethnic minority when he or she and one of his or her parents were born abroad, or when just one of his or her parents was born abroad. In 1999, the Ministry of the Interior and the Central Bureau for Statistics drew up a new definition of ethnic minorities, which was to be used by the Dutch government. In the new definition, a person belonged to an ethnic minority if one of his or her parents were born abroad.9 According to the new definition, there were 2.7 million ethnic minority members (nearly 17 % of the overall population) in the Netherlands on January 1, 1999.10

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The14 new government policy no longer spoke of ethnic minorities, but of “allochtoon” to refer to a person with at least one parent born abroad and “autochtoon” for Dutch people. The terms entered the public debate, and over time especially the term “allochtoon” acquired negative connotations, indicating a failure to assimilate.11 The15 terms autochtoon and allochtoon were not in line with the legal position of Dutch citizens and immigrants. According to Dutch law, a person has Dutch citizenship if one of his or her parents is a Dutch citizen.12 Whereas the Dutch statistics count an individual as an “allochtoon” in case one parent is a foreigner, Dutch law considers an individual to be a Dutch citizen if the other parent is Dutch. Consequently, government statistics compute more “allochtonen” than would register under the legal definition of a Dutch citizen.

Table 1. Allochtonen in the Netherlands in 2013

Immigrants by Nationality Numbers (absolute) in 2013

Total Population 16,779,575

Total Western 1,576,986

Indonesia 374,847

Germany 372,270

United States 35,357

Japan 7,387

Total Non-Western 1,966,095

Turkey 395,302

Surinam 347,631

Morocco 368,838

Dutch Antilles 145,499

China 61,890

Source: Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek.13

When16 the Ministry of the Interior and the Central Bureau for Statistics drew up their new definition of allochtoon, they also created two new subcategories: Western and non-Western allochtonen.14 The reason for this subdivision was “the different socio-economic and cultural position of Western and non-Western allochtonen.” If a group was close to the Dutch population socio-economically or culturally, it was considered to be “Western,” and if not, then the group was “non-Western.”15 According to this definition, “Western” and “non-Western’ were not so much geographic indications, but economic and cultural concepts. It was not clear how economic, social

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or cultural proximity to the Dutch society was defined, and whether an ethnic group could move from a “non-Western” to a “Western” status, or the other way around. This approach led to peculiar definitions of ethnic groups in Dutch society, especially if one took the geographical indication seriously. Indonesians (born in the colonial Dutch East Indies before Indonesia became independent in 1949) and the Japanese (“employees of large Japanese firms, living in the Netherlands with their families”) were placed in the Western immigrants category.16 The non-Western immigrant group included the Chinese, Moroccans, Turks, Surinamese, and Dutch Antilleans (the last two groups originate in (former) colonies of the Netherlands, just like Indonesia). By these definitions, the Western and non-Western immigrants were about equal in size in 2013 (there is an almost 390,000 person difference, see table 1). Yet by putting the wealthy Japanese immigrants and assimilated Indonesians in the Western category, the government emphasized integration as a distinctive feature of the “Western” groups.

2.2. Statistics on Unemployment, Education, and Housing

In17 1987, the Central Bureau for Statistics (CBS) published the first statistical overview on ethnic minorities, which began a series of yearly reports, either written by the CBS or the Social and Cultural Planning Bureau (SCP). These reports offered a great deal of information. Ranging from 150 to over 500 pages, they contained statistics and research methods. Gleaning data on a regular basis, researchers tried to establish trends, but they could hardly do so, given the fact that the data available before 2000 was scarce. Since we have the advantage of hindsight, I will offer an overview of the key statistics. Having already analyzed the statistics pertaining to the size of the ethnic minority population, I will now focus on the statistics on the job market, education, and housing. Minority policies were a political issue. Therefore, specific details within a particular category would change over time, and new types of data would be collected to answer new questions. If sometimes the research became more detailed, it offered new insights as well. Overall, though, the major trends are clear.

2.2.1. Labor Statistics and Immigrants

As18 regards to labor statistics, two kinds of data were emphasized. The first statistics concerned the rate of unemployment. It was always higher among ethnic minorities than among the Dutch. Yet, a positive development took place around the year 2000, when the unemployment rate among Turkish and Moroccan men dropped from above 30% to around 10%. This was due to a surge in prosperity in the Dutch economy. Although after 2000 unemployment numbers remained higher among ethnic minorities than among the Dutch, the gap was not as dramatic as in the early 1990s. This positive development could be interpreted as a sign of integration of Turks and Moroccans into Dutch society. The19 second kind of statistical data accounted for the factor of gender in access to the labor market. Women as a gender group scored overall lower in the category than men. In 1971, only 30% of women were part of the labor force, a number that increased to over 50% since 2000. In the 1970s and 1980s Turkish women had a higher labor market participation than Dutch women, but since 1990 the former scored substantially lower than the latter. Moroccan women always scored a great deal lower and Antillean women slightly lower than Dutch women. Surinamese women scored at the same level as Dutch women. After 2000, the participation rate of women in the

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workforce was used to show how modern or integrated certain ethnic groups were in Dutch society. Surinamese women were seen as very emancipated, since they had about the same participation in the labor market as Dutch women.

Table 2. Unemployment by ethnic group

1981 1991 1995 2000 2004 2011

Men

Total 6 7 5 3 4 4 population

Turks 15 34 36 9 12 11

Moroccans 20 39 32 12 24 13

Surinamese 27 17 7 10 12

Antilleans 32 25 8 16 21

Women

Total 11 13 7 5 6 4 population

Turks 39 48 37 12 18 12

Moroccans 37 66 27 12 19 12

Surinamese 35 16 11 13 9

Antilleans 48 29 9 15 14

Source: Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek.17

2.2.2. Education and immigrants

Politicians20 and government officials saw education as an important integrating factor. This refers both to teaching immigrants the Dutch language and introducing them, especially the second-generation immigrants, to Dutch culture.18 Over the years, the reports focused on two statistics: what kind of education students followed after elementary school and the overall education level of Dutch society. The statistics divided education into vocational training and advanced secondary education, the latter including university preparatory education.19 Among the Dutch students there is close to a 50/50 split, while among Surinamese and Antillean students around 70% have vocational training and 30% advanced secondary education. Among Turkish and Moroccan students this split was respectively 80% and 20%. Over the years, participation of all ethnic groups in advanced secondary and university preparatory education increased steadily.

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Another21 important education statistic is the educational level attained by people in the labor force. In 1983, the majority of the Turkish and Moroccan immigrants had only an elementary education at best. Within twenty years, these numbers dropped from 66% and 73% to 27% and 26% respectively. This meant that almost 3 out of 4 children of Turkish and Moroccan immigrants finished secondary education. It is true that in 2000 only 10% of them finished higher vocational education or had a university degree, but even that development is impressive, compared to a mere 1% seventeen years earlier. A 2012 report, which for the first time presented a comprehensive view on ethnic minorities and education, concluded that problems and eventually lower levels of education for certain minority groups were probably more closely related to the educational level of the parents than to the pupils’ and students’ culture of origin.20 The22 overall number of Dutch with higher vocational education or university education has increased over the last thirty years as well, from 12 to 27%. While it is beyond the scope of this essay to analyze the factors leading to the success of Dutch public education, over the last thirty years the Dutch school system, at all levels, has been very successful in getting more students to higher levels of education.

2.2.3. Housing

The23 category of housing is very complicated, because different reports studied different aspects of this topic. The basic question was whether ethnic minorities lived, on average, in worse housing conditions than the Dutch. The Minorities Policy asked for the following information: how many people lived on their own or shared a house, how many people shared a room, how many people lived in houses with only a little luxury, how many people lived in houses built after World War II, and how many owned or rented their house. Answers to some questions, like the one concerning house ownership or rental, were predictable since most ethnic minorities rented their house. Other questions, for instance the one about the luxury of the house, were hard to answer or to quantify. Many did not know when the house they lived in was built. This question was relevant, because, for instance, many pre-World War II houses had no bathtub, shower, or central heating. During the 1970s, many housing associations had begun to build mostly showers in the older houses. Maybe because the questions about housing did not deliver clear answers and because not only the government but also institutions like the housing associations played an important role in housing, starting from 1992, housing was not included in the statistical reports anymore.

3. Immigrants: A National Integration Issue or a Big City Problem?

It 24was in 1988 that the statistical reports mentioned for the first time that the largest ethnic minority groups lived in the four biggest cities. Of the Surinamese 56% lived in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague or Utrecht, and the same was true for 48% of the Moroccans, 36% of the Turks, and 30% of the Antilleans. Of the total Dutch population, only 11% lived in these four major cities.21 These statistics suggested that immigration problems basically were social and economic problems, limited to an urban setting. Instead of social problems, statisticians discussed immigration and the concomitant problems mainly in terms of culture. In 1989, the authors of the SCP

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report began to pay attention to minorities and Dutch culture. This interest in ethnic culture within Dutch society would later develop into the question whether and to what extent immigrants could or would integrate.

3.1. Robert Park and the Social Decline of Dutch Cities

The25 1995 SCP report returned its focus to the ethnic minorities’ spatial settlement patterns in the Netherlands. Negative reporting in the media by then had created a public image of ethnic minorities as living close together in specific neighborhoods in the four major Dutch cities, which were characterized by “social decline, corruption, and crime.” The SCP believed that this public image was not based on reliable data, which they wanted to provide.22 The26 authors of the report referred to American theories about ghettos and how a concentration of the poor increased poverty. They pointed out that the debate about immigration and settlement was not limited to the United States, but played out in the Netherlands as well. Their partial understanding (or reading) of the American sociological studies led not so much to a better insight into the problem of urban immigrants, but only slightly nuanced the negative media portrayal, without challenging the theoretical assumptions underpinning the media-generated image. Following the American example, the Dutch government believed that the immigrant problems in the Netherlands had to be addressed (in the way policy planners already proposed); otherwise, the social problems might get worse. The report made repeated references to, on the one hand, Robert Park and the 1920s Chicago School of Sociology (with their model of migrants moving from poor neighborhoods to middle class neighborhoods, while assimilating into society);23 on the other hand, to Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton’s 1993 book American Apartheid, which claimed that specifically African Americans migrants from the South lived confined to the racial ghettos of Northern cities, permanently segregated, unemployed, and poor.24 The Dutch authors noted that in the Netherlands there were no ghettos in the American sense; each ethnic minority knew poverty, unemployment, and crime, but they did not live segregated by ethnicity.25 The27 authors of the SCP report displayed a rather selective reading of Robert Park, Douglas Massey, and Nancy Denton. They took some basic ideas from these American authors, but missed out on some of the nuances of their scholarship that could have created more insight into the Dutch situation. Park was convinced that the second-generation of an ethnic group adapted to American life. He also posited the idea that diverse communities in big cities contributed to the happiness of individuals and would offer geniuses and adventurers the opportunity to play a significant role in society. As Park wrote: the segregation of the urban population tends to facilitate the mobility of the individual man. The processes of segregation establish moral distances which make the city a mosaic of little worlds which touch but do not interpenetrate. This makes it possible for individuals to pass quickly and easily from one moral milieu to another, and encourages the fascinating but dangerous experiment of living at the same time in several different contiguous, but otherwise widely separated, worlds. … The attraction of the metropolis is due in part … to

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the fact that in the long run every individual finds somewhere among the varied manifestations of city life the sort of environment in which he expands and feels at ease; finds, in short, the moral climate in which his peculiar nature obtains the stimulations that bring his innate dispositions to full and free expression. … In a small community it is the normal man, the man without eccentricity or genius, who seems most likely to succeed. The small community often tolerates eccentricity. The city, on the contrary, rewards it.26 Park28 had a more dynamic view of city and immigrant life and of the life of the “natives” than the Dutch statisticians. He also looked at the city from the perspective of individuals, while the statisticians were, naturally, expected to think in terms of groups, rather than individuals. The Minorities Policy also asked statisticians to think in terms of accessibility and equality, which tended to create a mode of thinking which rewarded the ethnic minorities’ conformity to the Dutch culture. Park, with his attention to the relationship between individuals and ethnic groups, was able to see the advantages of cultural diversity, an option never considered by the Dutch government officials. The29 statisticians were right in stating that Park thought in terms of assimilation, although they did not seem to be familiar with the remainder of his work. Their lack of understanding the context and critique of Park’s ideas showed that they were not really interested in the (American) debates on cities and immigrants; rather, they used Park to support their own ideas. Consequently, they overlooked different perspectives and helpful insights in the debate about immigrant culture, city life, and government policies. Park based his ideas on Social Darwinism, taking social conflict as the central assumption underlying his scholarship. He believed that it was not government interference but natural selection that would lead to the assimilation of ethnic minorities. He had little interest in the study of social inequality.27 To mention just one example, Louis Wirth, one of Park’s prominent students, had a different approach to the study of urban immigrants. He believed in a heterogeneous, culturally pluralistic society. According to Wirth, social planning was important— because it was bad government policies and lack of corporate responsibility, rather than the urban residents themselves that caused high crime rates and poor health in cities.28 Where Park’s ideas seemed identical to those of Dutch policy planners, his concepts based on natural selection were very different from the considerations of Dutch government officials and politicians. Wirth’s ideas were all about government planning, just as in the Dutch situation, but he believed in a culturally pluralistic society, and was far from blaming the ethnic minorities for social problems. Dutch politicians and policy planners did not even contemplate such concepts. As30 in the case of Park, the SCP report authors also missed a key part of Massey and Denton’s argument. They used American Apartheid to show that the living conditions of ethnic minorities in the Netherlands were not as bad as in the United States. The gist of Massey and Denton’s argument was that the African American ghettos were created by the Caucasian majority: “This extreme racial isolation did not just happen: it was manufactured by whites through a series of self-conscious actions and purposeful institutional arrangements that continue today.”29 Even though African Americans and Caucasians had lived in the same neighborhoods in nineteenth-century cities, when industrialization led to the migration of African Americans from the

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countryside to the cities, they ended up in segregated neighborhoods. Caucasians controlled the housing market, and it was their racism that created segregation. This argument could also be relevant for the Dutch situation, because it emphasized not so much the role of the ethnic minority, but the attitude of the majority toward the minority. In the Dutch statistical research on accessibility and equality for ethnic minorities occasional attention was paid to discrimination and the attitudes of the Dutch majority toward ethnic minorities. Overall, though, the research was about whether and how ethnic minorities in the Netherlands were assimilating into the lifestyle of the Dutch. If Massey and Denton’s argument about the importance of acceptance of minorities by the majority was valid, then the research in the Netherlands on the practices of ethnic minorities and their efforts to integrate was largely irrelevant. When31 the SCP report authors studied life in ethnic neighborhoods in the Netherlands, they focused, as did Massey and Denton, on one-parent families, crime, and segregation (in addition to the standard topics of education, health, and unemployment.30 Overall, the Turkish and Moroccan communities were more segregated than those of the Surinamese and Antilleans. Detailed research in Amsterdam showed that all neighborhoods were ethnically mixed, which meant that the Dutch and ethnic minorities lived together. Nationally, only in 5.3% of the postal code areas more than 70% of the population was of one specific, non-Dutch ethnic group. The authors believed that the geographic dispersal of ethnic minorities at the micro-level was a consequence of the municipal housing policies, which in its turn was due to a housing shortage (in the bigger Dutch cities, municipalities have policies to allocate housing to all citizens, both ethnic Dutch and immigrants).31 Also, the availability of housing for ethnic minorities in certain urban neighborhoods was a consequence of the suburbanization of the ethnic Dutch that was taking place since the end of the 1960s. According32 to the SCP authors, one-parent families in American ghettos were associated with poverty, lack of supervision, and bad education. Since there were hardly any one-parent families among the Turks and Moroccans, the SCP research focused on the Surinamese, Antillean, and Dutch families. As regards the Surinamese and Antilleans, half of the families were one-parent families, but in poor neighborhoods, the proportions were higher: two thirds of the Antilleans and three quarters of the Surinamese families were one-parent families. For about three quarters of the one-parent families, the head of the family was unemployed. If they had a job, they earned less than a two-parent family with one income. Members of Dutch one- parent families had more to spend individually than members of Surinamese and Antillean two-parent families – that might have been caused, in part, by the number of children per family, which was higher among Surinamese and Antillean families. Compared to the American context, the situation of Surinamese and Antillean one- parent families was much better, even though the latter were in a disadvantageous position in the Dutch society, stated the SCP report.32 In other reports, discussed above, Surinamese women were praised for their participation in the labor market on a level equal to Dutch women. Almost half of the Surinamese one-parent families were working women.33 So in some SCP reports, the Surinamese women were seen as progressive because they had a job, and in other SCP reports they were condemned for being a single parent, which was linked to poverty and the bad education of their children.34

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The33 SCP report saw education as a means to counterbalance the lack of education of the first-generation immigrants and the disadvantageous situation in poor neighborhoods. White flight did not only mean that Dutch families moved to suburbia, but also that these parents, especially if they had higher education, did not want their children to go to so-called “black schools,” that is, schools attended by minority children. The Dutch parents believed that the educational level of these schools was below standard. The SCP report did see differences in test results between school children from poor neighborhoods and rich neighborhoods, which they called confusingly “weak, but significant.” While they concluded that “white flight” resulted in, on average, poorer school performance in poor neighborhoods, they also pointed to schools in poor neighborhoods that did well, and to schools in richer neighborhoods that did not so well. Those findings made it hard to support the Dutch parents’ tendency to self-segregate by moving their children to “white schools.”35 Finally,34 the SCP report discussed crime. Referring once again to American studies, they saw crime as a possible reason why poor neighborhoods turned into ghettos.36 Although they stated that statistics and research concerning crime and population groups was limited, they also felt confident to conclude that a number of ethnic groups were overrepresented in crime, and that specific age groups scored above average as well. The researchers mentioned that they could not establish whether the crime rate increased because of the ethnicity of the criminals, or because of the low incomes of criminals (i.e. whether living in poverty led one to commit crimes, or whether criminality was more determined by ethnicity). Whereas age and gender were the likely determinants of crime, the researchers could not verify the relationship between crime and the place of residence. But the sense of insecurity and fear of crime were higher in poor neighborhoods than in other neighborhoods, leading to a tendency for all ethnicities to leave the neighborhood as soon as possible. Given the overrepresentation of ethnic minorities in these neighborhoods, and a relatively high presence of younger members of certain groups in crime, the researchers found this flight from the neighborhoods understandable.37 The35 SCP researchers concluded their report by discussing possible government policies for dealing with the problems related to poor neighborhoods with a high concentration of ethnic minorities. One policy would be to counter the concentration of ethnic minorities by moving them to other neighborhoods. A possible policy was busing. Yet no such policies were implemented at the national level. Some cities, mostly smaller ones, did try to prevent high concentrations of ethnic groups, both in education and in housing. Another policy was the so-called “compensation policy,” which set out to counter the negative effects of living in poor neighborhoods. Such policies were not necessarily aimed at ethnic minorities, but were more general programs concerning crime prevention, the creation of jobs, and the emphasis on the idea of community in poor neighborhoods. Most of these policies were also executed at the level of city governance.

3.2. Alejandro Portes and Lack of Integration

In36 2002, the government decided that in odd years it would bring out a report on the results of its minority policies. In even years they would publish “Integration Monitors,” which would focus on the actual position of the minorities in society. The SCP would write the report on the results of the policies. The SCP selected the Institute

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of Sociological-Economic Research (Instituut voor Sociologisch-Economisch Onderzoek; ISEO) of the Erasmus University of Rotterdam to write the Integration Monitor, which was to cover statistics on “demographics, education, language, integration [‘inburgering’], income, health, social contacts, housing, concentration/segregation, racism, images, crime, and remigration.”38 The37 introduction of the Integration Monitor established new ways in which policy planners and politicians discussed ethnic minorities. Originally, the focus of the debate was creating successful policies to minimize and preferably erase the disadvantageous position of minorities in Dutch society. The statistics presented in the traditional fields of education and (un)employment showed a positive trend among ethnic minorities since 2000. The politicians who asked for more information, a request that led to the Monitor, wanted to check if the government policies for minorities were effective. They ended up with a new type of report that showed more categories in which Dutch people and immigrants were different. It is debatable whether these new categories were always relevant. The authors of the Monitor implied that a uniform population would form an ideal society; they did not consider whether diversity would offer any advantages, and they ignored the various lifestyles and social ideals among the Dutch. Statisticians38 had already been looking at cultural aspects of immigrants and integration in earlier years. In 1989, the Ministry of the Interior had asked the ISEO to investigate the “social position” of “allochtonen” and the use of social benefits by them. ISEO set up a research project titled Social Position and Facilities Used by Allochtonen and Autochtonen (Sociale Positie en Voorzieningengebruik Allochtonen en Autochtonen; SPVA), based on an extensive public opinion poll. Originally, the questions were mainly aimed at establishing whether ethnic minorities were actually in touch with the ethnic Dutch. For instance, members of ethnic minorities were asked which ethnic groups they met most often at work (overall 68.5% had contacts within their own ethnic group, and 50.9% with Dutch people) and in their spare time (69% within their own ethnic group, and 18.4% with Dutch people). In 1989, the ISEO researchers concluded that 9.2% of ethnic minorities did not interact with Dutch society, 13.9% slightly, while 22.9% strongly identified with the Dutch, and 6.8% very strongly.39 The39 2000 report took a more negative approach to integration than its predecessor in 1989. While the focus of the 1989 report was on the extent that immigrants tried to be part of Dutch society, the 2000 report emphasized the lack of social interaction of immigrant groups with Dutch society. As regards informal participation, the Surinamese and Antilleans socialized more with ethnic Dutch than the other minorities did. Especially the refugee groups did not socialize with the Dutch, most notably the Somalians (74% of whom were only in touch with members of their own ethnic group). Among the Turks 50% socialized exclusively within their own ethnic group, while that was true for 40% of the Moroccans, 22% of the Surinamese, and 13% of the Antilleans. About half of the Dutch population said they had friends from one of the four traditional major immigrant groups (50% socialized exclusively within their own ethnic group). Apparently as the highest form of socialization, the researchers regarded inter-ethnic marriages. Among the Surinamese 36% of the marriages were with a Dutch person, among Turks 11%, and among Moroccans 10%. What inter-ethnic divorce did to socialization and integration was not mentioned in the report.40

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The40 statistics for the 2000 Integration Monitor were based on the 1998 SPVA research, both written by Edwin Martens. He had explained in the 1998 report that education, labor, income, and housing described the social-economic position of the ethnic minorities, but he suggested that this information was incomplete. Social integration could only be measured if informal participation (i.e. contacts between ethnic minorities and the ethnic Dutch) and cultural (or normative) integration was included.41 Martens41 wanted to see more cultural or normative integration. In his reading, this type of integration was identical to the idea of modernization, which he defined as follows: The term modernization usually refers to the process in which an agrarian society transforms into an industrial or even post-industrial society. It is a process of increasing social differentiation, driven by science and technology. We are interested in the consequences of modernization at the cultural level, such as increasing rationalization and individualization. These can be considered as dimensions of rational thinking. On five of these dimensions we have collected information in the SPVA to see to what extent ethnic minorities had made progress to adjust.42 Martens’42 view on immigrants was condescending. He saw ethnic minorities as less modern and less rational than the ethnic Dutch. If Martens was serious about the difference between an agrarian and a post-industrial society, it is interesting to note that the SPVA research was executed in the four biggest cities and nine other big cities and towns in the Netherlands.43 The research among the Dutch was conducted in the same cities. Martens stated explicitly: “the data collected about the Dutch cannot be generalized to all Dutch people, because they are primarily intended for comparison with the ethnic minorities in the selected cities.”44 So, Martens consciously compared, in the context of modernization, people he associated with an agrarian society to Dutch city people. If his theory were right, it would automatically lead to a substantial difference between Dutch people and ethnic minorities. It would also mean that by only looking at Dutch city people, and excluding the Dutch in smaller towns and in the countryside, the Dutch would seem more modern than they were in general. Martens’ assumptions and approach should have raised serious doubts on the validity of his research results. Moreover, his statistics emphasized the backwardness and lack of integration of ethnic minorities. The43 Integration Monitor of 2000 used the five dimensions of modernization from the SPVA of 1998. Those five dimensions were: 1) emancipation of women; 2) individualization; 3) secularization; 4) democratization and respect for authority; and 5) general modern ideas.45 Based on their answers in opinion polls, all ethnic groups were divided into five categories of modernization, ranging from “very few” moderns to “very strong” modern.” The majority of Turks and Moroccans were in the “hardly modern” and “moderate modern” categories. Most Surinamese and Antilleans belonged to the “moderate modern” and “less strong modern” categories. Finally, the ethnic Dutch were in the “less strong modern” and “strong modern” categories. Based44 on these numbers, the authors of the report concluded that the major ethnic groups, especially Turks and Moroccans, were not as “modern” as the Dutch. The authors noted that all of these groups were diverse in their response to modernity

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in themselves. They also concluded that the Dutch people as a group “cannot be considered to be ‘integrated.’ . . . With them, too, a part of the population is less modern, even if it is less so than among the other ethnic groups.”46 The45 researchers went into even more details on how different groups within the ethnic categories looked at modernization. They ranked the various subcategories on a scale of 1 to 7 (with 7 representing “very strong” modern). According to these statistics, among Turks and Moroccans, women are more modern than men, while the opposite is true among the Surinamese, Antilleans, and Dutch. Apparently Turkish and Moroccan women had more progressive ideas about the emancipation of women, individualization, secularization, and respect for authorities than Turkish and Moroccan men had. All Turkish and Moroccan immigrants scored significantly lower than the Surinamese, Antilleans, and Dutch. The second-generation of all immigrant groups scored higher on the modernization scale than the first-generation, which could be an indication that these immigrant groups were integrating. Second-generation Antilleans were even more modern than the average Dutch person. Within all groups, younger people were more modern than older people. The “over 65 years” among the Dutch scored lower than eight age groups among the Antilleans and Surinamese.

Table 3. Median scores on the variable “modernization,” according to ethnicity, gender, generation, and age, on a scale from 1 to 7.

Turks Moroccans Surinamese Antilleans Dutch

Total 3.38 3.32 4.22 4.32 4.83

Men 3.32 3.26 4.25 4.43 4.84

Women 3.46 3.46 4.21 4.24 4.82

1st generation 3.30 3.24 4.12 4.17 --

2nd generation 3.70 3.77 4.62 4.96 --

Age 15-19 3.77 3.80 4.48 4.59 5.00

Age 20-24 3.48 3.65 4.47 4.48 5.19

Age 25-29 3.42 3.44 4.38 4.49 5.17

Age 30-34 3.42 3.38 4.29 4.30 5.15

Age 35-44 3.38 3.30 4.14 4.25 4.98

Age 45-54 3.17 3.09 4.13 4.18 4.87

Age 55-64 2.85 2.87 3.97 3.98 4.58

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Age over 65 2.78 2.87 3.79 3.70 4.27

Source: E.P. Martens & Y.M.R. Weijers, Integration Monitor 2000, 153.

The46 conclusion that there are diverging opinions among the Dutch population about norms, values, and lifestyles did not lead the authors to question whether their standards of modern or not modern were too absolute, even for the Dutch. Their judgment that ethnic groups were not modern, and therefore not integrated, led to a negative assessment of these groups, while it was debatable whether the standards of modernization should have been so strict. This was yet another example in which government officials depicted ethnic minorities as different from the ethnic Dutch, with a focus on culture (while ignoring social and economic issues). Politics47 was the final dimension of integration considered by the authors. They found in their opinion poll that a limited number of members of any ethnic group seemed interested in Dutch political issues, or in being a politician. A striking deviation from this pattern was that in the city councils of Amsterdam, Deventer, and Helmond the share of ethnic minority council members was in proportion to the overall share of the ethnic groups in the local population.47 The48 authors of the 2002 report introduced new socio-cultural integration statistics. They had gathered opinion polls in which Dutch citizens expressed their ideas about immigrants. In the period 1986 to 2000, between 29% (in 1986) and 44% (in 2000) of the Dutch believed that immigrants contributed positively to society, because they brought them in touch with others cultures. Around 75% of the Dutch found it a moral duty to welcome refugees. Yet a substantial part of the Dutch felt that immigrants should return to their country of origin after retirement (31% in 1986 and 21% in 2000), while at least half of the Dutch wanted immigrants who had received social security benefits for over a year to return to their country of origin as well (56% in 1994 and 50% in 2000). The majority of the Dutch wanted city councils to prevent immigrants from moving into their neighborhoods (83% in 1994 and 84% in 2000). Another new insight was offered by answers to the question how often Dutch people interacted with immigrants. 12% of the Dutch said they met on a daily basis with Turkish people, 11% with Moroccans, 12% with Surinamese, and 8% with Antilleans. More striking was the finding that 46% of the Dutch had never met a Turkish immigrant, 55% a Moroccan, 47% a Surinamese, and 65% an Antillean. The same statistical data could be read in another way. The ISEO authors wished to emphasize the overall averages, which stated that 80% of the Dutch met with foreigners, and 25% of the Dutch did so on a daily basis.48 The49 2002 Integration Monitor concluded with two scenarios. The first scenario, which the authors thought most likely, was that ethnic minorities would continue to do better in education and employment, which would lead to expansion of the middle class among ethnic minorities. The middle class would leave the poor neighborhoods, settle mainly in Dutch suburbia, and their contacts with Dutch people would increase. The second scenario assumed that ethnic minorities would continue to trail behind, which would lead to a permanent immigrant underclass, and a society without cohesion or solidarity.49 Although Park, Massey, and Denton were not mentioned, the report repeated the scenarios discussed in the 1995 SCP report. The50 authors of the 2003 SCP report expressed an increasing doubt that integration would happen over time. The assumption that second- and third-

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generation immigrants would become an integral part of society, and that the distance between Dutch people and immigrants would disappear, became debatable. They referred to the article “Should Immigrants Assimilate?” by Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou, which stated that the optimistic integration model was based on North- and Western-European immigrants in the United States, but was less applicable to new ethnic immigrant groups.50 Incidents in Dutch public life such as increasing conflicts in Dutch society after 9/11, the popularity of Muslim fundamentalist Abu Jahjah among second-generation Moroccan youth, and the rowdy behavior of “allochtone” youth during the national remembrance of the World War II deaths on May 4, 2003, led SCP authors to ask whether these incidents might be indications that segregation rather than integration was taking place. The51 article by American social scientists Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou, though, was not about integration, but about assimilation, as the authors state in the title of the article. The SCP researchers did not even consider the differences between the concepts of integration and assimilation (neither in the research by Portes and Zhou, nor in their own thinking about the Dutch situation). Yet on the basis of the Portes and Zhou essay, which studied recent Haitian immigrants in the United States, the SCP researchers claimed that integration of Turkish, Moroccan, Surinamese, and Antillean immigrants in the Netherlands might not take place. Part of Portes and Zhou’s argument was that Haitian youth assimilated into inner city life rather than mainstream culture, which led to the disappearance of solidarity and mutual support in the Haitian immigrant community.51 Terms like mainstream versus inner city culture, and the importance of solidarity and mutual support in the immigrant community were concepts not used in the Dutch debate about ethnic minorities, neither in the government reports, nor in the public debate.

Conclusion: Diversity among Minorities, Consistency of Discourse

Since52 2009, the Ministry of the Interior has added new categories of ethnic minorities to the studies. Since the number of refugees had increased substantially, they needed to be included in the minority studies. The government policy planners studied refugees from Iran, Afghanistan, and Somalia. Later on, immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe, like Poles, Bulgarians, and people from former Yugoslavia, were included in the statistics. Overall, these new groups are studied in the same way as the government officials studied earlier immigrant groups. On average, Iranians were doing well in education, the job market, and housing. Somalians were more likely to follow the patterns of Moroccans and Turks and in some cases scored lower. Events53 like 9/11 and the 2004 murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Dutch Moroccan extremist Muslim led to concern in the reports about a widening gap between the Dutch population and ethnic minorities, specifically Muslims. Since 2008, immigrants (even if they have already lived in the Netherlands for many years) have had to take a citizen exam to prove that they have mastered the Dutch language and Dutch social customs. It was not clear to what extent this citizen exam contributed to the integration of ethnic minorities. In54 some statistical categories, the position of ethnic minorities did improve over the years, but in other cases it declined. The second generation did well in getting a higher education. According to the 2012 report, among all ethnic groups

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unemployment remained significantly higher (around 12%) than among the Dutch (at 4%). Housing also continued to be a problematic category. The majority of the ethnic minorities continued to live in the four biggest cities in the Netherlands. Political refugees who were originally located at various places around the country within a few years moved to the four big cities as well. This concentration of ethnic minorities in major cities was mostly a consequence of the behavior of these groups, the researchers explained. Immigrants often thought it would be easier to get a job in a big city, and they preferred to live close to their compatriots. Recently,55 researchers moved away from the idea of segregation, and pointed to the fact that most of the groups identified more with the city neighborhood they lived in than with the Netherlands. This type of very local integration was deemed to be positive. The researchers also pointed out that immigrants often moved from one neighborhood to another and saw this mobility as an indication of social and economic improvement. They did not realize or recognize this development was in line with the theories of Robert Park about how the assimilation of immigrants could be tracked in them moving from poorer to richer neighborhoods. In general, since 2004 the reports paid little attention to American literature on immigration. The various researchers did refer to books on civic life, such as Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone or Francis Fukuyama's Trust, but they only footnoted them and did not go into details about the theories underpinning the studies. With56 the recent reports, researchers have had the opportunity to establish trends among immigrants and ethnic minorities over a period of more than 20 years. Not surprisingly, it turned out that the groups that had been the longest in the Netherlands integrated the best. When children, either as young immigrants or the second-generation immigrants, were educated in the Dutch school system, their chances of success were higher compared to immigrants who had no Dutch education. Although overall ethnic minorities reached a lower level of education than the Dutch, they were catching up. The main conclusion seems to be that, over time, and in spite of problems in fields like employment, integration of ethnic minorities into Dutch society would happen in two or three generations. Such a conclusion indicated that the focus of politicians and statisticians on culture as an explanation for social and economic differences between the Dutch population and immigrants was misleading. Although57 politicians intended the 1983 Minorities Policy as a measure to ensure equal access to key social groups, such as housing, jobs, and education, the result was that immigrants were, in many respects, set apart as ethnic minorities. In order to track and measure the situation of minorities in Dutch society, government officials both expanded the number of people studied, and made a clear distinction between well-integrated Western immigrants and less-immigrated non-Western immigrants. Even when ethnic minorities were doing relatively well, for example around 2000, new categories such as modernization were added with the effect of emphasizing dissimilarity. Though politicians and government officials alike had expressed in the 1980s that they did not want the Minorities Policy to set immigrants apart from the rest of society, in the end the policy itself did so. In58 general, politicians and government officials focused on immigration statistics. When they tried to predict the future position of ethnic minorities, they regularly referred to American sociological literature on immigration. The American literature was not studied seriously; rather, various government officials tended to pick and choose whatever was convenient for the policies. Based on the premises of the

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Minorities Policy, politicians expected ethnic minorities to integrate, or rather assimilate, into Dutch society. Notably the works by Denton and Massey and Portes and Zhou were used as a warning that an American-type of segregation could take place in the Netherlands. In other words, Dutch government officials used American scholarly literature on ethnic minorities to warn politicians and the public that social problems could become even worse, unless political action was taken. In that sense, the role of the American literature was to emphasize the looming threat of social turmoil. In59 1985, four sociologists, Frank Bovenkerk, Kees Bruin, Lodewijk Brunt, and Huib Wouters, published a study of ethnic groups in Utrecht, the fourth largest city in the Netherlands. They found that the ethnic Dutch objected to non-Dutch cultures in their city. When it was about nuisance caused by neighbors, the Dutch were bothered by ethnic minorities as much as they were by their fellow Dutchmen. Both local and national government irritated the Dutch just as much as ethnic minorities did. Beset by such problems as the decay of poor neighborhoods and unemployment, Dutch locals reproached the government for positive discrimination (while understanding that ethnic minorities would make use of such arrangements). The idealistic, egalitarian intentions of the 1983 Minorities Policy contributed to ethnic conflict, because the ethnic Dutch felt that ethnic minorities got preferential treatment. The researchers found many examples where Dutch citizens had realized that when they phrased their problems in terms of ethnic conflict, local and national government would all of a sudden respond to their complaints.52 In other words, politicians had expressed in the Minorities Policies their idea that minorities and Dutch people should have equal access to social goods, and Dutch citizens became aware that by emphasizing ethnic conflict politicians helped them to achieve their political and social goals sooner. As shown above, government officials collecting data to inform the execution of the Minorities Policy also stressed cultural differences between the Dutch population and ethnic minorities. All in all, the 1983 Minorities Policy contributed to ethnic conflict in Dutch society.

NOTES

1. 1 I would like to thank Don Weber and Charlotte Hille for their generous and insightful criticism of the first draft of this paper. All errors are mine. The New York Times editorial is quoted by Jaap Verheul in “Could this Have Happened in Holland? Perceptions of Dutch Multiculturalism after 9/11,” in Derek Rubin and Jaap Verheul, eds., American Multiculturalism after 9/11: Transatlantic Perspectives (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 191. 2. Marco Martiniello and Jan Rath, "Introduction," in Selected Studies in International Migration and Immigrant Incorporation, eds. Marco Martiniello and Jan Rath (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 11. 3. Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1970), xxxiii. 4. Martiniello and Rath, Introduction, 15.

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5. Nota Minderhedenbeleid, Handelingen Tweede Kamer, 16102, no. 21, 1982-1983 sess., (September 15, 1983b), 9. 6. Antilleans, Moluccans, and Surinamese are people from (former) Dutch colonies. The Dutch Antilles is a group of islands in the Caribbean, including Aruba, Bonaire, Curacao, Sint Maarten, Saba, and Sint Eustatius, which became an autonomous part of the kingdom of the Netherlands in 2010. Suriname, in South America, became independent in 1975. The Moluccas is an island group in Indonesia. When Indonesia became independent in 1949, many Moluccans wanted to have their own independent state, which the Dutch government promised to them. The Dutch government could not deliver on its promises. A large group of Moluccans, a majority of whom had served in the Dutch colonial army (Koninklijk Nederlands-Indisch Leger; KNIL), moved to the Netherlands, where they declared the independent Moluccan Republic (which has only been recognized by the state of Benin). 7. Minderhedenbeleid 1992, Handelingen Tweede Kamer, 22314, no. 11, 1991-1992 sess., (July 2, 1992), 1-19. 8. J. A. A. de Beer, "Hoeveel Allochtonen Zijn Er in Nederland?" in Allochtonen in Nederland 1996, eds. F. W. M. Hulse and P. van der Laan (Voorburg/Heerlen: Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, 1996), 27; "CBS Statline: Bevolking Kerncijfers." Centraal Bureau voor Statistiek, http:// statline.cbs.nl/StatWeb/publication/? DM=SLNL&PA=37296ned&D1=a&D2=0,10,20,30,40,45,50,60,62-63&HDR=G1&STB=T&VW=T (accessed October 24, 2013). 9. Han Nicolaas and Arnoud Sprangers, "Migranten, Vreemdelingen En Vluchtelingen: Begrippen Op Het Terrein Van Asiel En Buitenlandse Migratie," Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, http:// www.cbs.nl/nl-NL/menu/themas/veiligheid-recht/publicaties/artikelen/archief/2012/2012-10- bt-btmve-migratie.htm (accessed August 22, 2013). 10. Ingeborg Keij, "Standaarddefinitie Allochtonen," Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, http:// www.cbs.nl/NR/rdonlyres/26785779-AAFE-4B39-AD07-59F34DCD44C8/0/index1119.pdf (accessed August 22, 2013). 11. Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, "Begrippen: Overzicht," http://www.cbs.nl/nl-NL/menu/ themas/bevolking/methoden/begrippen/default.htm (accessed August 13, 2013). 12. Dutch government, "Rijkswet Op Het Nederlanderschap, 1984," http://wetten.overheid.nl/ BWBR0003738/geldigheidsdatum_13-08-2013 (accessed August 13, 2013). Until 1985 only when the head of the family was Dutch did the child get Dutch citizenship. In 1985, the law was changed and the child was granted Dutch citizenship if one of the parents was Dutch. See Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, Minderheden in Nederland: Statistisch Vademecum 1987 (Den Haag: Staatsuitgeverij, 1987). 13. Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, "Bevolking; Generatie, Geslacht, Leeftijd En Herkomstgroepering, 1 Januari 2013," http://statline.cbs.nl/StatWeb/publication/? DM=SLNL&PA=37325&D1=a&D2=a&D3=0&D4=0&D5=0,3-4,46,59,94,101,137,152,220,237,247&D6=9-17&HDR=T&STB=G1,G2,G3,G4,G5&VW=T (accessed August 13, 2013). 14. Nicolaas and Sprangers, “Migranten, Vreemdelingen En Vluchtelingen: Begrippen Op Het Terrein Van Asiel En Buitenlandse Migratie,” 1. 15. Keij, “Standaarddefinitie Allochtonen,” 2. 16. Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, “Begrippen: Overzicht.” It is striking to note that in the former Dutch East Indies, colonial authorities also put the Japanese in the category “European,” and not in the category “Alien Orientals,” in which the Chinese could be found. See J. E. Ellemers and R. E. F. Vaillant, Indische Nederlanders En Gerepatrieerden (Muiderberg: Dick Coutinho, 1985), 15-16. 17. Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, Minderheden in Nederland: Statistisch Vademecum 1987, 51; Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, Minderheden in Nederland: Statistisch Vademecum 1992, 108;

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Allochtonen in Nederland 1996, 99; Allochtonen in Nederland 2001, 108; Jaarrapport Integratie 2005, 85; Rik van der Vliet, Jeroen Ooijevaar and Ronald van der Bie, Jaarrapport Integratie 2012 (Den Haag/ Heerlen: Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, 2012). 18. Ibid., 70. 19. For the translation and explanation of Dutch educational terms, see Nuffic Glossary, at http:// nufficglossary.nuffic.nl 20. Vliet, Ooijevaar and Bie, Jaarrapport Integratie 2012, 70. 21. Ibid., 24. 22. P. M. T. Tesser et al., Rapportage Minderheden 1995 (Den Haag: Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau, 1995), 9. 23. See Robert Ezra Park, Ernest Watson Burgess and Roderick Duncan MacKenzie, The City (Chicago, Ill.: The University of Chicago Press, 1925). 24. Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 25. Tesser et al., Rapportage Minderheden 1995, 15, 426. 26. Park, Burgess and MacKenzie, The City, 40-41. 27. See Park Dixon Goist, “City and ‘Community’: The Urban Theory of Robert Park,” American Quarterly 23, no. 1 (Spring 1971): 46-59, Richard C. Helmes-Hayes, “'A Dualistic Vision': Robert Ezra Park and the Classical Ecological Theory of Social Inequality,” The Sociological Quarterly 28, no. 3 (Autumn 1987): 387-409, Stanford M. Lyman, “Civilization, Culture, and Color: Changing Foundations of Robert E. Park’s Sociology of Race Relations,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 4, no. 3 (Spring 1991): 285-300, and Edward Shils, “The Sociology of Robert Park,” The American Sociologist 27, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 88-106. 28. See Wolfgang Vortkamp, “Partizipation und Gemeinschaft: Louis Wirths Soziologie der Moderne in der Tradition der Chicagoer Schule,” Soziale Welt, Jahrgang 49, Heft 3 (1998): 275-294, and Roger A. Salerno, “Theory and Action in Louis Wirth’s ‘Urbanization,’” International Social Science Review, 67, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 51-59. 29. Massey and Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass, 2. See also page 83. 30. Ibid., 4-7. 31. Ibid., 413-420. 32. Ibid., 442-443. 33. I could not locate any statistics specifically on working Surinamese single mothers. According to the 2005 government statistics, of the 58,000 non-Western single mothers, 22.000 had a job. The statistics were not further specified to ethnic group. CBS, Statline. http:// statline.cbs.nl/Statweb/publication/? DM=SLNL&PA=71957ned&D1=a&D2=0-1&D3=3,9-11&D4=4-12&HDR=T&STB=G2,G1,G3&VW=T (accessed December 29, 2014). 34. Although the policy planners did not refer to American studies on the links between poverty and one-parent families, an awareness of this discourse might have been helpful in analyzing the Dutch situation. Especially Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1965 paper “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” led to an intense debate in the United States. Moynihan claimed that one- parent families with absentee fathers led to poverty and unemployment among African Americans. In the public debate in the United States, Moynihan was accused of racism and anti- feminism, while civil rights activist William Ryan coined the phrase “blaming the victim” in his response to Moynihan’s ideas. The response by scholars to Moynihan’s thesis included studies in which the problem was not so much determined by ethnic culture, but rather by poverty. In some studies poverty was defined in the economic sense, while other studies discussed it in the context of a society-wide culture of poverty, which led to one-parent families. The Dutch policy makers, by assuming that one-parent families led to poverty, took the same position as American

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conservatives in their response to the Moynihan report, who not just stated that family instability caused crime and poverty but also emphasized ethnic culture in this context. An understanding of the American debate on this issue might have informed the Dutch policy makers' emphasis on the cultural explanations over economic and social causes. (For the debate on the Moynihan report, see, for instance, Frank F. Furstenberg, “If Moynihan Had Only Known: Race, Class, and Family Change in the Late Twentieth Century,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 621 (January 2009): 94-110; Douglas S. Massey and Robert J. Sampson, “Moynihan Redux: Legacies and Lessons,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 621 (January 2009): 6-27; L. Alex Swan, “A Methodological Critique of the Moynihan Report,” The Black Scholar 5, no. 9 (June 1974): 18-24, and William Justus Wilson, “The Moynihan Report and Research on the Black Community,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 621 (January 2009): 34-46. 35. Tesser et al., Rapportage Minderheden 1995, 453-466. 36. The authors did not refer to their reading of Robert Park, who had noted, somewhat ironically, that crime showed how well the second-generation integrated, changing from the crimes of their parents to the kinds of crimes the majority of the Americans committed (Park, Burgess and MacKenzie, The City, 27-28). 37. Tesser et al., Rapportage Minderheden 1995, 466-472. 38. Brief Van De Minister Voor Grote Steden En Integratiebeleid, Handelingen Tweede Kamer, 26333, 1998-1999 sess., (June 8, 1999). 39. T. Ankersmit, Th. Roelandt, and J. Veenman, Minderheden in Beeld: Sociologisch-Economische Positie Van Allochtonen (SPVA 1989; P1234) (Amsterdam: Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information Services, 1989). 40. E. Martens and Y. Weijers, Integratiemonitor 2000 (Rotterdam: Instituut voor Sociologisch- Economisch Onderzoek ISEO, 2000 ),100, 103-104. 41. Edwin Martens and Instituut voor Sociologisch-Economisch Onderzoek, Minderheden in Beeld: SPVA-98 (Rotterdam: Instituut voor Sociologisch-Economisch Onderzoek ISEO, 1999), 79. 42. Martens and Instituut voor Sociologisch-Economisch Onderzoek, Minderheden in Beeld: SPVA-98, 89. (quote translated from Dutch by the author). 43. The cities and towns were: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, Utrecht, Eindhoven, Enschede, Almere, Alphen aan den Rijn, Bergen op Zoom, Hoogezand-Sappemeer, Delft, Dordrecht and Tiel (Ibid., 7). 44. Ibid., 1-2. 45. Martens and Weijers, Integratiemonitor 2000, 105. 46. Ibid., 106, 126. 47. Ibid., 118. 48. Ibid., 96. 49. Ibid., 152. 50. Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou, “Should Immigrants Assimilate?” The Public Interest 116 (Summer 1994): 18-33. 51. Ibid., 21. 52. Frank Bovenkerk et al., Vreemd Volk, Gemengde Gevoelens: Etnische Verhoudingen in Een Grote Stad (Meppel: Boom, 1985), 20, 146.

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ABSTRACTS

While formulating a national policy for ethnic minorities since the 1980s, Dutch government officials interpreted immigrant problems in the cities through American sociological studies. The way the officials defined minorities and immigrant problems as well as their cherry picking of American research contributed to the failure of policy planners to formulate policies to create equality for all Dutch citizens. On the contrary, the officials’ reports increased ethnic conflicts in Dutch society.

INDEX

Keywords: Allochtoon, Antilleans, assimilation, autochtoon, Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, crime, education, ethnicity, housing, immigrants, Instituut voor Sociologisch-Economisch Onderzoek, integration, Integration Monitor, minorities, Minorities Policy, modernity, Moroccans, multiculturalism, Netherlands, policy planners, poverty, refugees, segregation, Sociaal & Cultureel Planbureau, Sociale Positie en Voorzieningengebruik Allochtonen en Autochtonen, Somalians, statistics, Surinamese, Turks, unemployment, United States of America, urban life

AUTHOR

RUUD JANSSENS Amerikanistiek, Universiteit van Amsterdam

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PART ONE Spatial Justice and the Right to the City: Conflicts around Access to Public Urban Space

Public Art: Transnational Connections

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“The cornerstone is laid”: Italian American Memorial Building in New York City and Immigrants’ Right to the City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Bénédicte Deschamps

1 At the end of the nineteenth century, the massive arrival of Eastern and Southern European immigrants in the United States was often depicted in the local press as an “invasion” of “undesirable” crowds. Permeated with eugenic ideology, the New York newspapersresented the “dark faced Italians” who were “swarming through the doors of Barge Office.”1 This “miserable lot of human beings” was deemed a potential nuisance in a society which needed cheap labor but had difficulties welcoming foreign workers on an equal footing.2 At a time when rapid industrialization was contributing to shaping the cities, the question of space became crucial. Indeed, immigrants were somehow seen as usurping an urban territory which was not theirs, and which they were allegedly altering for the worse. Thus, Italians, like other groups, were constantly criticized for clustering in specific neighborhoods that were “filthy beyond description” and “unfit for a human being to live in.” While some associations campaigned “to rid [the] city of the presence of swarthy sons and daughters of sunny Italy,” conflict, tensions or derision could be observed whenever the latter tried – even temporarily – to trespass

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the limits of their wards and invest public areas, be they streets or parks.3 Yet the elite of what was then called the Italian “colony” was quite aware that “space is political” and that to gain recognition and acceptance, their fellow countrymen should claim a right to the city.4 This paper will analyze how Italian Americans used memorial building to get a greater exposure as an ethnic group and transcend the boundaries of the skimpy Little Italies. It will argue that, by disputing space with the city authorities for the erection of monuments, immigrants also questioned the place they had been assigned in American society and history, and tried to redefine their role as political actors of the city.

1. Carving Ethnicity in the City

2 In New York City, the man who led that struggle for appropriating public space in the name of Italian Americans was Carlo Barsotti (1850-1927), the directing manager of the leading Italian-language newspaper Il Progresso Italo- Americano. At the same time a banker and a boarding house landlord, he had left Tuscany when he was twenty- one and had rapidly shown great abilities as a businessman. 5 In the paper he founded with Vincenzo Polidori in 1880, he pressed readers to “rise and walk towards the highest hopes that might smile at the emigrant in America,” a goal he believed could be reached also very concretely by building memorials outside of the Little Italies.6 Increasing Italian Americans’ visibility was a process which did include “rising and walking” in the city, and memorials provided the immigrants with opportunities to do so. Thus Barsotti dedicated much of his time to raising funds and lobbying for the construction of various monuments to the glory of Italian heroes, among whom were Giuseppe Garibaldi at Washington Square Park (1888) and on Staten Island (1896), Christopher Columbus at Columbus Circle (1892), Giuseppe Verdi between Broadway and 73rd Street (1906), Giovanni da Verrazzano in Battery Park (1909), and Dante Alighieri between Broadway and Columbus Avenue, near Lincoln Square (1921).

Barsotti3 was certainly not the only editor to invest so much energy in memorial building, within or outside immigrant communities. In fact, the first monument to be erected by Italian Americans in New York City was a bust of Risorgimento’s leading political thinker Giuseppe Mazzini.

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It had been inaugurated as early as 1878 in Central Park, under the initiative of sculptor Nestore Corradi (1811-1891) and the Unione e Fratellanza benevolent society, with the support of the Italian-language weekly L’Eco d’Italia, owned by Giovanni Francesco Secchi de Casali (1819-1885).7 More generally, ethnic newspapers made a point of marking urban space to promote ethnic pride and show the American public an expression of their collective identity that was redefined in their terms, and staged outside of their despised neighborhoods. Although the Washington Post claimed “the Italian’s devotion to commemorating” was “a national trait particularly strong in his race,”8 paying tribute to great historical figures by organizing celebrations, parades and pageants or by building monuments was a compulsion shared by most immigrants.9 As John Bodnar has shown, the latter expressed their patriotism with multiple forms of commemorations aiming at affirming their ethnic identity as “a positive force helping them create the nation,” thus contributing to forging a public memory of their own experience in the United States.10 It is not surprising, then, that the New York City Art Commission was overwhelmed with requests from all ethnic groups, each of them wanting to leave its imprint on the urban space, revisiting its immigrant past, and inscribing its presence in the vast panorama of urban activities.11

The4 initiatives led by Il Progresso Italo-Americano are therefore to be understood against this backdrop. To Barsotti, promoting Italianità (a sense of Italian pride) with memorials was essential because carving the name of Italians and his own in the Carrara marble of those monuments was a way of marking his environment. The building process seemed almost of a carnal nature as it allowed Italian Americans to actually dig into the flesh of the city. When referring to the construction of the Columbus statue, Il Progresso Italo-Americano underscored that Italian workers had excavated sixty thousand cubic feet of earth from 59th Street and 8 th Avenue to form the hole that was then filled with quicklime and cement as a foundation of a seventy-feet-high granite column supporting the Genoan sailor. For this project, the Italian laborers, whose contribution to the development of the local infrastructures usually remained unacknowledged, had accepted to work for free because they knew they were leaving a trace for everyone to see.12 In the same line of

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thought, when the Garibaldi and the Columbus memorials were laid, Barsotti buried copies of his daily in the foundations, as if he conferred the press the power to fecundate the American soil with seeds that would grow into flags of Italianness.13 This feeling was imparted by his readers who congratulated him for showing that, from scratch, “a scrap of paper like Il Progresso Italo-Americano” could “make monuments of bronze and granite rise up” in America.14 Italian immigrants, therefore, wished to impress Americans with their art and the legendary mastery of Italy’s sculptors was meant to contrast with the squalor of their tenements. Planting statues obviously aimed at enhancing their image not only in New York City’s public sites but also in the press, a strategy which proved to be only partly successful. In 1909, even though the New York Tribune praised Italians for “doing their part toward the decoration of the city,” it had to admit “few New Yorkers realize[d] the extent to which they ha[d] contributed to the city’s beautification.”15 The path to recognition of Italian merits was long and tortuous.

2. Breaking Boundaries, Switching Roles

5 Yet modifying the cityscape did help Italian Americans map themselves into the future social space of the United States, if anything because it extended their walking geography. At a time when “new immigrants poured into” the “modern city,” thus making the urban population “increasingly fluid and unstable,” the creation of monuments gave them reasons to stroll outside the boundaries of their enclaves.16 Historian Bernard Lepetit explains that, “confronted with an existing space,” foreigners develop practices which allow them to make this new environment their own, not only by building their own places, but also through what he calls a “deambulatory usage” which ranges from religious processions to the daily commuting of workers between their homes and the factory.17 Barsotti himself understood that the city’s restlessness and constant movement could serve his purpose of putting the Italian-American community on display. For example, when the City of New York decided the Garibaldi statue was to be laid in Washington Square, many of his countrymen complained that the spot was “unsuitable and unbecoming” because it was not as decorous a place as other landmark squares of the city. There was too much agitation around it. Barsotti,

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 82 on the contrary, defended that choice on the ground that “the creation of a statue honoring a European hero in one of the rare places of passage of the city was quite unusual, yet not unheard of.”18 The location was deemed strategic: the monument was to be seen by an ongoing flow of American passersby, including the “ancient and aristocratic New York families” living in the “magnificent houses” surrounding Washington Square. At the same time, the site was at the crossroads of “main streets” like “Fifth Avenue, University Place, the outlets of Broadway and 6th avenue” where “all the Italian societies converged for the parade of the XXth of September,” 19 and where the Garibaldi statue would be “exposed to [their] sight, memory and admiration.”20 It therefore matched two of Barsotti’s implicit requirements: forcing Italian historical heritage on Americans and giving Italians an excuse to occupy new areas of the city. The inauguration of memorials was indeed a moment when the Italian population was breaking the barriers separating the Little Italies from bourgeois New York. In 1907, as the original Garibaldi statue was moved to Staten Island and replaced by a new more artistic piece by the same sculptor, the American press was struck by the unexpected and overwhelming fluidity of Italian Americans, noting that, in addition to Mulberry and Elizabeth Streets, “the uptown Little Italies” had “sent hundreds downtown.” The tide of men and women had “daubed the square with color” and “beneath the Washington Arch they made a picture that could hardly have been classed as American.”21 With their parades, immigrants were consciously seizing quarters from which they were estranged by their social condition. Such movement was often regarded with condescension or amused contempt, since most celebrations brought with them not only the orderly marches or processions planned by the Italian élite to earn Americans’ respect, but also boisterous crowds of ordinary people whose joyful customs contrasted with the local decorum. Quite revealing in that regard is the following description of the laying of the Columbus Statue, published by the New York Times in 1892: Fifth Avenue was treated to such a color display as it had not seen in many a long month. All Little Italy swarmed out of Mulberry Bend and the streets south of Washington Square to see the great procession of the Italian societies march up the avenue and to Fifty-third Street and Eighth Avenue, where the cornerstone of the statue to Christopher Columbus was to be laid. It was something unusual for the avenue, and the regular promenaders were to be seen gazing at the spectacle from the chamber windows, while the Italian peripatetic vendors thronged the sidewalks, and Italian mothers in rainbow attire dandled their children in arms on

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the steps of millionaires’ palaces. The column of men in uniforms seldom seen above Bleecker Street marched up between the rows of brownstone houses to the lively music of the Italian national air. It was Italy’s Day, and the dwellers along the avenue could only look and smile, and perhaps wish for a fraction of the sense of enjoyment and the enthusiasm displayed by these same Italians.

6 Once the ceremony was over, concluded the newspaper, “all Little Italy disappeared from its unaccustomed surroundings.”22 Surprise and embarrassment seemed to prevail in this account of what was presented as an intrusion into areas normally reserved to a certain class of New Yorkers. The temporary displacement of population went with a change of roles. The immigrants who were marching under the banners of their fraternal organizations, displaying with pride the colors of their humble professions (tailors, barbers, etc.) became the center of American passersby’s attention. In this process, rich Americans were pushed up against the buildings, to the margins of sidewalks, a place where a number of immigrants were usually waiting to sell their goods and services. Such a reversal of positions was a source of discomfort that could generate mockery. Some lamented with cruel irony that “not a shine or a chestnut was to be had” down those colorful processions and that should anyone have “yelled ‘next’ the parade[s] would have been disrupted.”23 Nonetheless, the Italian-American leaders thought those pageants and the publicity they brought in the press enhanced the image of their countrymen in the United States, and created a favorable context for a more general reflection on the Italians’ contribution to American history.

3. Claiming a Space in the City, Finding a Place in the Nation’s History

7 The idea that monuments participated in the civic education of the people was not new and it found many supporters in the City Beautiful Movement of the 1890s. For example, art historian George Kriehn praised historical bronzes and sculptures for teaching patriotism to Americans. He also believed nothing could be a “more effective agent in making good citizens” of the “foreign population” who could not read English books but could “read monuments which appeal to the eye.”24 Carlo Barsotti and other prominent figures of the Italian colony were using similar arguments, but they were targeting the American public. By granting Italians a space in the city, they meant to give them a place

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 84 in the past of America, the latter justifying the former. In other words, they intended to rewrite history, correcting its omissions and errors, so as to show that Italians were not invading a foreign land but that, on the contrary, they were settling in a place that their ancestors had contributed to discovering, and that they could claim as their own too.

Two8 historical figures played a major part in that quest for legitimacy: Christopher Columbus and Giuseppe Da Verrazzano. Columbus supposedly embodied the fraternity bonds existing between Italy and America and allowed the Italian-American elite to develop a kind of rhetoric immigrants relished. As Barsotti liked to recall, the “man who had discovered the New World and had opened it to the conquests of civilization, labor, industry, wealth and glory was Italian.”25 Italy was, therefore, presented as “the mother of the great discoverer” and America as “the DAUGHTER of its genius,”26 a line of argumentation which was quite convenient as it reinvented an organic bond between the United States and Italy, while making eternal the debts the New World had contracted towards Italians. It was, obviously, to remind Americans of this debt that Italian Americans launched a campaign to make October 12 a national holiday known as Columbus Day, the celebration of which also led to a greater appropriation of public space.27

After9 Columbus, Barsotti looked for new heroes that could further justify the presence of Italians in the United States. Verrazzano, who was known for having sailed in the Bay of New York as early as 1524, stood out as a perfect choice. In 1909, the editor of IlProgresso Italo-Americano thus commissioned Italian artist Ettore Ximenes to sculpt a statue which he hoped would be planted in City Hall Park, a symbolically-charged place where the already existing monuments immortalized the proud Anglo-Dutch past of the city. The point was to fill in what he considered a historical gap: Henry Hudson was not the first explorer to have discovered the bay and the river that were unjustly bearing his name and this honor should be granted instead to Verrazzano. The New York Art Commission, which questioned the artistic quality of the bust and was reluctant to challenge the predominance of the Anglo-Dutch heritage of the park, denied his request.28 Yet it took more than a rebuff to discourage Barsotti, who kept harassing the commission until the latter allowed Ximenes’s work to find refuge in Battery Park, south of Manhattan. He defended his project all the more fiercely as he wanted the memorial

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 85 to be unveiled during the great festivities organized in the fall of 1909 for the tercentenary of the discovery of the bay by Hudson. Barsotti won that battle and succeeded not only in being assigned a space in what was to be the center stage of the Hudson-Fulton pageantry, but also in imposing the Italian name of Verrazzano on the program of a historical event dedicated to the memory of an English sailor. It was no small victory, considering that city planning was controlled by advocates of historic preservation, who, as historian Randall Mason recalls, favored the creation of specific places where immigrants could pay tribute to their heroes. In New York City, “tacit negotiations” were indeed taking place about “the geography of memory sites and their political symbolism,” resulting in the “zoning of particular narratives in particular places.”29 A touch of ethnic plurality was welcome, but only as long as it did not interfere with the official tale of the nation or irrupt into areas designed for American civic education. Getting Verrazzano to be admitted in the Hudson-Fulton celebration meant making room for the heritage of undesirable immigrants in a festival that was praising mainly the contribution of early northern European colonists. It was a tour de force which, as American newspapers remarked, “ought to have caused old Henry Hudson to turn in his grave,” but which Barsotti fully savored.30 His obstinacy led the whole national press to discuss Verrazzano and his compatriots’ claim.31 The Hudson-Fulton commission was thus forced to admit the Italian navigator was “the earliest European visitor to these waters,” although they insisted the stream had been “correctly named” because Hudson was “the first to give an authentic record of careful exploration of the river,” making it known to mankind, as the true definition of the term “discoverer” required.32 Even though the name of the celebration was maintained, the very fact that the commission had to justify itself could be interpreted as an achievement.

It10 was Barsotti’s granddaughter, an American girl of Italian ancestry, who unveiled the monument which she hoped would show “all the children of New York” that “it was an Italian who discovered the island of Manhattan.”33 As for Barsotti, he took pride in the “boldness of IlProgresso Italo-Americano,” which had met the “noble challenge” of planting the statue in Battery Park.34 This was an act of “vindication”by which he wanted to right the wrong inflicted on Italians.35 Beyond what he called the “justice of history,” what was at stake was not so much the past as the

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present of Italians in America. The bronze was meant to become a symbol of the qualities nativist politicians and scientists denied his countrymen. The Italian ambassador’s address during the festivities reflected such preoccupations. While eugenic principles were gaining momentum, he chose to pay “tribute to the sublime Latin genius, the grand Latin genius which led its sons to conquests of science not less than of letters and art.” Implicitly replying to the racist theories of the time, the diplomat claimed that “the union of the two races – the Latin and the Anglo-Saxon – in what he called ‘this noble American land,’ formed a race more complete and more perfect, which promised to advance more and more in the high road of civilization.”36 Clearly, the Verrazzano and Columbus memorials also served as tribunes for voicing Italian immigrants’ grievances, and claiming a political space at the city and state levels. Indeed, Barsotti resorted to the same strategy each time he wanted to launch a new commemoration project, transforming all those heroes – including Dante Alighieri – into “symbols of italianness” who heralded the hopes of the “New immigrant Italy.”37

4. Conquering New Spaces for Unity or Division?

11 It is obvious that the United States’ collective memory was then rather selective and left little room for new immigrants. Yet, as mentioned above, building memorials had a wider scope than the mere celebration of old glories. To use historian Christine M. Boyer’s words, city monuments became for Italian-Americans “artifacts and traces that connect[ed] the past with the present in imaginative ways, and help[ed] to build a sense of community, culture and nation.”38 On the one hand, erecting bronzes and marble columns was supposed to get so-called “old stock” Americans to look at Italians as legitimate co- users of the city. On the other hand, it aimed at bringing together Sicilians, Neapolitans, Genoans, and others, easing the process of national identity building within an ethnic group whose members hardly felt Italian yet, as the unification of Italy (1861) was still rather recent. Laying stones was, therefore, intended as an opportunity to foster unity within and without the community. Nevertheless, that goal was not easily reached. Both the American and the Italian authorities looked at the mushrooming of statues with a critical eye. While the Garibaldi monument in

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Washington Square was criticized for being “the least artistic statue in this unhappy city,” the unlucky fate of other Italian bronzes delighted the U.S. press, which did not necessarily support the message of national pride those memorials conveyed.39 Far from generating admiration, the Verdi statue was said to diversify “the not too attractive square at the junction of Broadway and Amsterdam with a touch of the grotesque” and to provide “a background of unconscious but lasting humor for the row of waiting taxicabs.”40 Dante’s bust, which found a place in the city only after years of hectic negotiations between Barsotti and the New York City Art Commission, became a source of particular strain and sarcasm.41 When Il Progresso Italo- Americano’s editor suggested that it be laid in Times Square, Commissioner Stover confessed he had “grave doubts as to the appropriateness of placing a man who wrote the divine comedy in such a bustling, happy crossroads,” for “if ever a monument [was] to grace the square it should be an American of the Americans.”42 As for the New York Tribune, it held that that just because the city was “so hospitable to peoples of the Old World,” it could not “afford to be equally hospitable to their enthusiasms when they take the form of statues,” as there was no “room in the parks for all the national poets and heroes, even of the foreign groups who cut a figure at the polls.”43

Other12 ethnic groups also contested the public space Italians had been granted, and the memorials became targets for potential dissenters. The Garibaldi statue, for instance, was deemed “a thorn in the eye” of the Irish who thought the monument was the “apotheosis of the most ferocious and implacable enemy of the papacy and of the church” and who therefore seized every opportunity to spit on it. On such occasions, Washington Square witnessed episodes of physical conflict, Italians giving a “good hiding and fist fighting lesson” to those who dared disrespect the statue.44 Mayor Abram Hewitt himself “received several protests for consenting to review the Garibaldi Italian jubilation over the looting of the Pope’s temporal possessions” whereas he had refused to attend the Saint Patrick parade.45 As Michael Kammen has shown, commemorations were not just moments of consensus.46 They were also staging competing memories.

The13 Little Italies were not exempted from dissensions either. While the city authorities were suspected of wanting to sacrifice municipal space on the altar of political

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 88 patronage, Barsotti was accused of wasting and even embezzling funds from his contributors. Italian-American radicals such as anarchist leader Luigi Galleani (1861-1931) systematically tried to undermine Barsotti’s efforts because not only did they see memorials as worthless and politically unacceptable,47 but they also claimed the money sent to Il Progresso was being misappropriated. Barsotti “will flood New York with great monuments of stone,” “pocketing huge money in addition to applauses” because he has “understood the spirit of the colony and knows how to exploit it,” explained Galleani’s newspaper Cronaca Sovversiva in 1910.48 Such an allegation was recurrent even among his competitors, who mocked his “mal della pietra,”49 a disease which led him to build memorials all over the city and made him rich.50 Dubbed the “Statue Man” by the U.S. press, Barsotti was certainly raising monuments so as to get the attention of both the Italian consulate and the city authorities and be seen as a leading figure of the “colony.”51 While many Italian benevolent societies contributed to collecting funds and organizing the commemorative parades, he was the first to benefit from the light he shed on Italian historical figures. So intense was his thirst for fame that he tried to get his own name carved on the pedestal of the statues whenever he got a chance to.52 What he did with the funds cannot be ascertained. Yet the numerous campaigns led against him by Italian-American businessmen like Vincenzo Polidori, the editing manager of Cristoforo Colombo53 show that the stakes were high. Barsotti’s detractors also questioned the very necessity of financing statues when the Little Italies needed hospitals, schools, and libraries. Memorial building was thus anything but consensual, even within the ethnic community.

The14 Italian-American newspapermen’s drive to lay statues in New York and other cities of the United States was undoubtedly motivated by a quest for self-promotion. When Barsotti and his competitors dedicated time and money to mark the territory they lived in, they wanted to leave a personal imprint as much as they hoped it would help their countrymen force their way through new areas of the American public space. But there was more to it. Barsotti did see space as a reality that endured, to paraphrase Maurice Halbwachs.54 He cared about posterity and wanted to reshape the geography of memory sites in the city by impressing lasting landmarks of Italian heritage on New York maps. To sculptor Ettore Ximenes, who had designed two of the monuments sponsored by Il Progresso

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Italo-Americano, Barsotti had confessed that he paid little attention to criticisms because the future was his only preoccupation. “As long as Columbus looks at those small creatures who press around him today, and stays on his pedestal,” he explained, “as long as people bow to Verdi and now to Verrazzano, I feel happy,” because “monuments remain while petty talks, gossips and calumny die away with men.”55

NOTES

1. “Blue-Eyed Immigrants,” Sun, 6 April 1891, 5. 2. “Undesirable Immigrants,” New York Times, 6 November 1879, 3. On anti- Italian prejudice, see: Salvatore J. LaGumina, ed., Wop! A Documentary History of Anti-Italian Discrimination in the United States (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1973) and William J Connell, Fred Gardaphé, eds., Anti-Italianism: Essays on a Prejudice (New York: Palgrave, 2010). 3. “An Anti-Italian League,” Sun, 17 July 1887, 12. 4. Henri Lefebvre, “Reflections on the Politics of Space,” in State, Space, World: Selected Essays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 170. See also: Grégory Busquet, “Political Space in the Work of Henri Lefebvre: Ideology and Utopia” [translation : Sharon Moren], Justice Spatiale | Spatial Justice 5 (Dec. 2012-Dec. 2013), http://www.jssj.org. 5. Howard Marraro, “Carlo Barsotti,” in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. 6, ed. Alberto GhisalbertiDizionario biografico degli italiani, vol.6, (Rome: Istituto della enciclopedia italiana, 1964), 541-542. 6. Il Progresso Italo-Americano,Per la mostra del Lavoro degl'Italiani all'estero, Esposizione Internazionale di Torino pel cinquantenario dell'Unità nazionale (New York, 1911), 43. 7. “In Memory of Mazzini. Unveiling the Bust in Central Park,” New York Tribune, 30 May 1878, 8. The bust was sculpted by Giovanni Turini. 8. “Italians Love Monuments,” Washington Post, 22 October 1910, 6. 9. See for instance: Jürgen Heideking, Geneviève Fabre, eds., Celebrating Ethnicity and Nation, American Festive Culture from the Revolution to the Early 20th Century (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001); Terence Schoone-Jongen, The Dutch American Identity: Staging Memory and Ethnicity in Community Celebrations (New York: Cambria Press, 2008). 10. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, andPatriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1992), 69-70. 11. See Michele H. Bogart, The Politics of Urban Beauty. New York and its Art Commission (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 22-24; 108-114. The author dedicates well documented pages to the building of the Verrazzano and Dante statues promoted by Barsotti.

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12. “Il 4°. Centenario della Scoperta d’America,” in Guida Italiana e calendario universale del Progresso Italo-Americano per gli Stati Uniti, il Canada, il Messico etc (New York: Tipografia del Progresso Italo-americano, 1893), 9. 13. “Per Garibaldi: La collocazione della pietra del monumento,”Il Progresso Italo-Americano, 1 June 1888, 1; “The Columbus Memorial Arch,” The Architectural and Building Monthly, 1 October 1892, 10. 14. “Lettere,” IlProgresso Italo-Americano, 10 February 1888, 1. 15. “Columbus Day Joys,” New York Tribune, 10 October 1909, A5. 16. Kevin Mattson, Creating a Democratic Public : The Struggle for Urban Participatory Democracy During the Progressive Era (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 15. 17. Bernard Lepetit, “Proposition et Avertissement,” in Les étrangers dans la ville, Minorités et espace urbain du bas Moyen-Age à l'époque moderne,eds. Jacques Bottin and Donatella Calabi (Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'homme, 1999),14. 18. “Per Garibaldi: L'Inaugurazione del Monumento,” IlProgresso Italo- Americano, 7 June 1888, 1. 19. This parade celebrated the completion of Italian unity with the capture of Rome on September 20, 1870. 20. “Perché il Monumento a Garibaldi in New York sarà eretto in Washington Square,” Il Progresso Italo-Americano, 2 March 1888, 1. 21. “Italians Dedicate Garibaldi Memorial,” New York Times, 5 July 1907, 6. 22. “The Cornerstone is Laid,” New York Times, 17 September 1892, 8. 23. “Verrazzano Bust Unveiled,” Sun, 7 October 1909, 5. 24. George Kriehn, “The City Beautiful,” Municipal Affairs 3/ 4 (December 1899): 600. 25. “Per Cristoforo Colombo,” Il Progresso Italo-Americano, 22 July 1890, 1. 26. “To Stand Forever,” New York Tribune, 13 October 1892, 3. 27. This battle was finally won in 1968 at the federal level, but some states had already adopted Columbus Day as a legal holiday as soon as the 1910s. For more details see: Carol J. Bradley, “Towards a Celebration: The Columbus Monument in New York,” in Italian Americans Celebrate Life. The Arts and Popular Culture, eds. Paola A. Sensi-Isolani and Anthony Julian Tamburri (Staten Island, NY: American Italian Historical Association, 1990), 81-94; Bénédicte Deschamps, “Italian Americans and Columbus Day: A Quest for Consensus Between National and Group Identities (1840-1910),” in Celebrating Ethnicity and Nation, eds. Jürgen Heideking and Geneviève Fabre,, 124-139; and “La scoperta dell’America narrata dai giornali italo-americani, 1880-2000,” in Comunicare il passato: Cinema, giornali e libri di testo nella narrazione storica, eds. Simone Cinotto and Marco Mariano Comunicare il passato: Cinema, giornali e libri di testo nella narrazione storica(Turin: L’Harmattan Italia, 2004), 409-438; Stefano Luconi, “Le celebrazioni del cinquantenario e i prominenti italo-americani negli Stati Uniti,” Archivio Storico dell’Emigrazione Italiana 7 (2011):41–50 and “Columbus and Vespucci as Italian Navigators: The Ethnic Legacy of Explorations and Italian Americans’ Search for Legitimacy in the United States,” in Florence in Italy and Abroad from Vespucci to Contemporary Innovators (Florence: Florence Campus Publishing House, 2012), 62-77; and Kathleen Loock, Kolumbus in den USA: Vom Nationalhelden zur ethnischen Identifikationsfigur (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2014). 28. Michele H. Bogart, The Politics of Urban Beauty, 109-110.

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29. Randall Mason, The Once and Future New York: Historic Preservation and the Modern City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 62. 30. “Henry Hudson's Peary Luck,” New York Tribune, 14 September 1909, 12. 31. See, for instance, “Verrazzano Saw the River First,” Evening Statesman, 6 October 1909, 8. 32. “Hudson River Correctly Named. Hudson-Fulton Commission Tell Briefly of Discovery of Stream,” Daily People, 1 March 1909, 2. 33. “Verrazzano Bust Unveiled,” Sun, 7 October 1909, 5. 34. Il Progresso Italo-Americano,Per la Mostra del Lavoro degl’Italiani all’Estero, 100. 35. “La gloria di Giovanni da Verrazzano scopritore del North River rivendicata agli italiani dal ‘Progresso,” IlProgresso Italo-Americano, 27 June 1909, 1; “Verrazzano Bust Unveiled,” op.cit. 36. Address by Marquis Paolo Montagliari as reported in Edward Hagaman Hall, dir., THE HUDSON-FULTON CELEBRATION 1909, The Fourth Annual Report of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration Commission to the Legislature of the State of New York (Albany: J. B. Lyon Company, State Printers, 1910), 481-482. 37. Agostino de Biasi, “Il monumento a Dante Alighieri in NuovaYork,” Il Progresso Italo-Americano, 27 mai 1910. 38. Christine M. Boyer, The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 309. 39. “The Fine Arts,” The Critic: A Weekly Review of Literature and the Arts, 16 May 1896, 358.

ABSTRACTS

This paper will analyze how, at the end of the nineteenth century, Italian Americans used memorial building to get a greater exposure as an ethnic group, transcend the boundaries of the Little Italies, question the place they had been assigned in American society and history, and redefine their role as political actors of the city.

INDEX

Keywords: Carlo Barsotti, commemorative space, ethnicity, Italian Americans, Italian immigration, memorials, New York City, politics of memory., urban planning

AUTHOR

BÉNÉDICTE DESCHAMPS Department of Anglophone Studies, Paris-Diderot University

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Performing the Return of the Repressed: Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Artistic Interventions in New York City's Public Space

Justyna Wierzchowska

1 In this paper, I want to discuss two projections1 by Polish-born and New York-based artist Krzysztof Wodiczko that make use of public space and treat it a vehicle of artistic and political interventionism. Addressing major ailments of modern society— homelessness and the psychological effects of war—the two projections share the location of Union Square in New York, and the mode of execution: casting images on neoclassical statues featuring American national heroes and the Allegory of Charity. While the first projection, The Homeless Projection: A Proposal for Union Square[for the city of New York] (1986), 2 has never in fact been executed on location, 3 the other one, Abraham Lincoln: War Veteran Projection, was on view every evening for a month between October 8 and November 9, 2012. During that time “the immobile statue [of Abraham Lincoln] was animated with gestures and voices that made it part of the public debate on war and the fate of veterans.”4 The 1986 projection was conceived in the context of a massive yet controversial revitalization of the city of New York carried out throughout the 1980s, the latter brought a heart-jerking comment on the psychological effects of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the case of both, the statues of American heroes functioned as ideologically-charged screens upon which expressions of the usually marginalized ailments were cast. The projections offered a critique of what after Frederick Engels Rosalyn Deutsche has identified as “beautified surfaces, suppressed contradictions, and relocated problems.”5 My goal in this paper is to present the subversive potential of the two works, but at the same time discuss their inherent problematics. It is my belief that while such artistic interventions are philosophically charged and intellectually sophisticated, they necessarily fail to effectively deliver the rich theoretical framework to a wider audience. At the same time, by enabling spectators to go through an “embodied experience,” the projections may affect them in

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an immediate way. This “embodied experience” may translate into a crack in the spectators’ perception of what is commonly taken for granted, and, eventually, into their individual questioning of the dominant ideology.

Since2 the 1970s, Krzysztof Wodiczko has engaged in artistic/political interventions in the public space and has carried out almost a hundred projections in various cities around the world.6 He works in the urban space and he believes that the “city is the stage and stake of democracy.”7 His choice of ideologically-charged structures, located in the public space, very often in busy city-centers (as is the case of Union Square), involves an element of surprise, as one may actually happen to witness a projection and there is no entry fee. In his projections, Wodiczko temporarily appropriates the most spectacular sites of hegemonic authority such as civic buildings, monuments and memorials by projecting upon them images and/or testimonies of the excluded (e.g. war veterans, immigrants, the homeless, the victimized etc.).8 A very good example of Wodiczko’s work is a 1986 projection carried out in Pittsburgh, PA, on the façade of the Allegheny County Memorial Hall. The Allegheny Hall is the largest memorial to honor all branches of military veterans in the USA, commemorating over 600 recipients of military awards, medals, stars and crosses in the “Hall of Valor.” On its façade, Wodiczko displayed an image of a huge accordion played by the bony hands of a skeleton. The image perfectly filled in the silhouette of the building, with the neoclassical columns smoothly incorporated as a core part of the image. Thus Wodiczko projected a sign that might be associated with the dance macabre over a building that celebrates the military in its most alluring dimension: unambivalently heroic and honorable. More than that, he did so on an architectural structure that, by its noble, classical, and authoritarian look, effectively aestheticizes and thus conceals the incoherence and contradictions of its contents. This way the building itself, mostly because of its ethically-questionable grandeur and fake ideological neutrality, became part of the dance macabre.

The3 Allegheny Hall example demonstrates how civic architecture, which acts like a stabilizing agent of the official version of history and the present-day recognition of political authority,9 is taken by Wodiczko as a starting point for his artistic interventionism. When during a projection another, conflicting image/narrative is cast on its surface, the very often unconsciously internalized acknowledgement of the hegemonic discourse is suddenly brought to attention. Because the image/narrative projected on the surface undermines the coherence of the one underneath, the original meaning is evoked with its inherent contradictions. This way, during a projection, when the cold, petrified, and obdurate structure is flooded with an elusive image or an emotionally-charged narrative, the taken-for-granted narrative is suddenly deconstructed. The viewers may feel prompted to reflect upon the official intended meaning and function of civic architecture and a sense of abuse it elegantly and effectively conceals. As a result, a new, conflicting unity is created: what is projected and what it is projected onto are held together by two converging frames: the edges of the slide and the shape of the structure underneath. Over the years, such clashing of the official historical-political narrative with that of the unrepresented or repressed has become Wodiczko’s artistic trademark, as, in the words of Rosalyn Deutsche, he often makes the “excluded material … [return] within the vehicle of its repression.”10

As4 the chief intellectual framework for his artistic interventionism, the theoretically vocal Wodiczko lists the scholarship of Chantalle Mouffe, Michel Foucault

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and depth psychology. He is also very much aware of the tradition of post-Marxism (Gramsci, Habermas) and philosophy of the Other, as elaborated in the works of Emmanuel Levinas, Étienne Balibar and Giorgio Agamben. This all offers rich material for academic interpretations, which has been done extensively and convincingly by such scholars as Deutsche, Dora Apel, Bożena Czubak, and Ewa Lajer-Burcharth.11 What is more, in “Subversive Signs,” Hal Foster locates Wodiczko among artists who understand the status of art not as a formal or perceptual experiment, but as “a social sign entangled with other signs in systems productive of value, power and prestige,” a sign that “seeks out its affiliations with other practices (in the culture industry and elsewhere).” Within this framework, the artist “becomes a manipulator of signs more than a producer of art objects” in order to “intervene in ideological representation and languages of everyday life.”12 This is why Foster calls such artistic practices “subversive signs,” for they have a potential to disrupt existing chains of signifiers which are usually so sedimented in the collective worldview that they function as natural and neutral. Additionally, Wodiczko’s art shares similarities with the Situationist movement. As noted by Nicolas Whybrow: the experience of art, like the experience of the city, is embodied. It is dependent on participating entities who engage or interact with art, with the environing field of the city …. [The spectators] are, therefore, as much producers as consumers or recipients. The radical move out of the museum [is] a “reaching out” of art generally towards incorporating both participation and the everyday […].13

5 Similarly to the Situationists, Wodiczko’s move “out of the museum” into the “environing field of the city” enhances the spectators’ active participation in the projection and their going through an “embodied” experience. This experience can never be fully ritualized or refuted, for sensory experience is always immediate and the spectators can be drawn into becoming active participants of the event.

It6 follows that Wodiczko’s emphasis on the direct and relational (or even therapeutic) character of his work locates him among artists, who, since the 1980s, have engaged in critiquing the political from a position that has absorbed the developments within humanities, especially psychology and cultural studies. The emphasis put on the relational character of art has been inspired by psychologists such as Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, and John Bowlby.14 As Rosalyn Deutsche has noted: “contemporary art, especially since the 1980s, has stressed that a work of art is not a discrete entity but, rather, a term in a relationship with viewers.” Such art necessarily questions “rigid forms of identity” and perceives the subject as constantly on the make by coming into contact with other people. Since this subject-making has a relational character, there is “a convergence between contemporary art and psychoanalysis.”15 This understanding of the subject goes against the grain of what traditionally has passed as historiography in which “unitary, preconstituted, and self-possessed”16 subjects perform actions in the name of a people. Deutsche notes that especially feminism has “explored the role played by totalizing images in producing and maintaining heroic, which is to say, warlike subjects.”17 Wodiczko shares the feminist/ psychoanalytic critique of subjectivity, maintaining that the subject is fundamentally a “question,” formed “by the relationship between the self and the other in the polis.”18 Thus, according to Deutsche, he belongs within “the feminist practice of contemporary art that produces what have been called critical images, images that undo the viewing subject’s narcissistic fantasies.”19In accordance with Deutsche’s observations, Wodiczko perceives subjectivity as neither monolithic nor fully self-aware, which makes it

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possible for art to produce shifts in its complex and opaque structure. Already in the 1980s, Wodiczko explained the psychoanalytical aspect of his art: he projects at night when “the building sleeps, when it dreams its nightmares” and when “the excluded [elements] come back as ghosts to haunt the places that expelled them.”20 He thinks of his projections as of “public psychoanalytical séances, unmasking and revealing the unconscious of the building, its body, the ‘medium’ of power”21 through an act of “emotional artistic communication.”22 This is why he finds his projections effective only when there is “an emotional engagement and a critical detachment.”23 Because the projection simply happens to individual spectators and disturbs them by acting directly on their minds, senses and bodies, it produces short-circuits, forestalling the routinely followed mind-paths.24

As7 I am going to demonstrate in this essay on the example of the two Union Square projections, the above reservoir of ideas underpins Wodiczko’s artistic interventionism and translates into the ways in which he comes in a dialogue with civic urban architecture. Wodiczko notes that the major reason for civic architecture’s ideological effectiveness is that its symbolism is hardly ever questioned, this is why it retains a “disciplining function.”25 He puts it in the following way: “The [civic] building is not only an institutional ‘site of the discourse of power,’ but, more importantly, it is a meta-institutional, spatial medium for the continuous and simultaneous symbolic reproduction of both the general myth of power and the individual desire for power.”26 Since most city inhabitants pass by those grand structures every day without paying attention to them and yet, subconsciously or not, acknowledge their authority, civic architecture remains a mute yet powerful supporter of the biopolitical status quo and successfully legitimizes the official narrative. Wodiczko notes: Circulating around and between the buildings, we cannot stop moving. We are unable to concentrate and focus on their bodies. This establishes an absent-minded relation to the building, an unconscious contact, a passive gaze. By imposing our permanent circulation, our absent-minded perception, by ordering our gaze, by structuring our unconscious, by embodying our desire, masking and mythifying the relations of power, by operating under the discreet camouflage of a cultural and aesthetic “background,” the building constitutes an effective medium and ideological instrument of power.27

8 This way civic buildings and memorials act as purely aesthetic anesthetics (note the pun here: aesthetics/anesthetics): with their perfect proportions and neoclassical façades, they are aestheticized masks that cover up the violence and tragedies that happened in their name. They allow for a smooth and officially legitimized (or even enhanced) repression of the traumatic dimension of the celebrated or commemorated event. What is more, because of people’s “daily inattention,” to use Bataille’s term,28 their original meaning is often not even acknowledged and thus becomes almost irrelevant. What remains is the aura of authority that radiates from such architecture, often experienced as a physical sensation when passing by a governmental building: the site of Prime Minister, the building of Congress, a prison, etc. It is an impression that the building’s gaze hits the skin on one’s cheeks as one physically feels the power and the possible abuse the building is imbued with.

The9 idea of bringing together conflicting narratives is very much present in the two Union Square projections that I now would like to focus on. In both, Wodiczko took “advantage of the prestige of historical symbolic structures … that bear witness to events and stand for their authority”29 and protested “the monopolization of collective

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memory with a working on various different memories.”30 In both, the artist cast images of the repressed (of the homeless and of suffering war veterans) against the beacons of authority and tradition – the statues of American national heroes. His choice of the place was also not accidental. Union Square, located at the meeting point of Broadway, Park Avenue and 14th Street, and bordering with Chelsea, East Village, and Greenwich Village, belongs among American National Historic Landmarks and is known for its long tradition of political demonstrations and gatherings. Opened to the public in 1839, in 1882 Union Square hosted the first Labor Day parade in the U. S. and until today functions as a meeting place in times of social unrest. For example, after the attacks of 9/11, the square became the first spontaneous gathering site for people who came to mourn the victims, light candles and hold vigils in their honor. Significant is also the very topography of the Square. Filled with a carefully designed oval park, Union Square hosts the “majestic presence”31 of four neoclassical statues that Wodiczko used in his projections: the statues of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Marquis de Lafayette, and the previously mentioned Allegory of Charity. Placed in the square’s most representational venues, with the monumental equestrian bronze statue of George Washington occupying the very center of the park, the statues honor American national heroes and reward charity. All four statues were unveiled in the late 19th century as part of the municipal art movement that was to “create order and tighten social control in the American city”32 in the turbulent times of the city’s rapid industrialization and large immigration. As pointedly noted by Christine Boyer: [N]eoclassical imitations of Greek and Roman sculptures were designed to conceal social contradictions by uplifting “the individual from the sordidness of reality” through the illusions of order, timelessness, and moral perfection that neoclassicism was supposed to represent.33

10 Significantly, the same kind of rhetoric was used in the 1980s when New York was undergoing intensive and extensive revitalization that produced the context for Wodiczko’s 1986 Homeless Projection. For example, the 1980s senior architecture critic of The New York Times Paul Goldberger praised the square’s “finest statuary” that preserves its merit even if “a derelict is relieving himself beside it.”34 Echoing Boyer, Rosalyn Deutsche identifies the use of the statues in the process of the city’s revitalization as an attempt to “restore to the city a surface calm that belies underlying contradictions.”35TheHomeless Projection visually brought the contradictions into the open. Onto the surface of the statues he cast images of homeless people that completely filled the statues in: thus the equestrian Washington was as-if put in a wheelchair, Lafayette and Lincoln became handicapped social outcasts, and the Allegory of Charity turned into a begging mother, clinging to her hungry children. The projection was the artist’s response to the whitewashed sense of history and injustice covered up by the falsely depoliticized language of aesthetics and past glory. It also offered a critical comment on the link between “the production of cultural space and the production of homeless,”36 triggered by New York’s revitalization.

What11 is more, Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection coincided with the redevelopment of Union Square’s park itself, which, in the official narrative, involved the eviction of the “socially undesirable population.”37 In fact, as part of the revitalization of Union Square’s area, “luxury condominiums, lavish corporate headquarters and high-rent offices … proliferated … [eroding] the existing low-income housing stock, thereby destroying the conditions of survival for hundreds of thousands of the city’s poorest residents”38 who were removed from the revitalized areas. This social abuse was

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masked under an aesthetic narrative which, in the case of Union Square, exploited the symbolic potential of the statues of American celebrated figures (Washington, Lincoln) for self-legitimization. The “majestic presence” of “bronze statues as representatives of eternal values – aesthetic and moral”39 functioned as “an aesthetic disguise for revitalization” and was manipulated into what Wodiczko calls “a journey-in-fiction”40 that is presenting the revitalization as something unambiguously positive and desired by all, purposely silencing its human cost. As Denis Hollier has noted on a more general note, “art’s political neutrality is the favorite alibi for operations that are neither neutral nor artistic.”41 In his projection, Wodiczko exposed this hypocrisy and made visible the fact that by revitalizing an area, the city does not get rid of its social problems – they forcibly disappear in one place just to appear in another. This was the case with New York’s redevelopment: it is estimated that by 1989 there were 10,000 people living on the streets of the city.42 What is more, the revitalization questioned the very idea of the public space being an arena available to all, as, in fact, it turned out to be fully accessible only to those wealthy enough to live elsewhere. The most vivid manifestation of this exclusion was the decision to bulldoze the park “in preparation for the first phase [of the restoration] … [which] thoroughly reorganized the park’s patterns to permit full surveillance of its occupants,” thus assigning architecture “the role of policing urban space.”43 Thus the public character of Union Square turned out to be conditional upon the hegemonic constraints imposed by the city establishment and business.

In12 2012, in War Veteran Projection,Wodiczko returned to Union Square, this time animating Lincoln’s statue only. By overlapping its shape with talking images of American war veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq, he focused on another area of pain usually excluded in the mainstream discourse. In this projection, returned male and female soldiers delivered individual testimonies of the psychological effects of combat they could not foresee. One after another they painfully confessed: “I could not be close to anybody,” “I’ve [become] an undifferentiated schizophrenic,” “I can see my eyes just tired and lifeless,” “The daydreams, they sneak up upon you … and you don’t know how to defend yourself,” which was intertwined with descriptions of horrific experiences they had been through and to which they, as soldiers, had frequently actively contributed.44 In the testimonies, the emphasis was put on the emotional costs of war that very often are not acknowledged in the mainstream media which usually tend to focus on the physically injured and the dead. This mainstream narrative operates with statistics and claims to present “facts,” usually silencing or depreciating the psychological dimension of war. In his New York Times article, Nicolas Kristof quotes Iraq veteran Ben Richards who explains that “Coming from an Army ethos … you’re not even entitled to complain unless you’ve lost all four limbs.” Contrary to the mainstream image, Kristof observes that “traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder … are the signature wounds of the Iraq and Afghan wars.”45 Further he states that: The United States is now losing more soldiers to suicide than to the enemy. Include veterans, and the tragedy is even more sweeping. For every soldier killed in war this year, about 25 veterans now take their own lives.46

13 These words appeared in the official trailer of Wodiczko’s 2012 projection, released by nonprofit organization More Art that was responsible for producing the projection. 47 Kristof’s observation was a significant reference point for the artist, as War Veteran Projection clearly has a therapeutic dimension. In a two-fold process, Wodiczko first

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encouraged the veterans to work out the best linguistic expression for the way they felt. Then for a month, their recorded testimonies, accompanied by their moving images, were displayed on the Lincoln statue in Union Square, a witness to a multitude of previous protests and lamentations. The veterans’ individual voices, gestures and interrogations were blurred with the authoritarian, immobile, lofty statue of Lincoln, an icon of American patriotism in its tragic dimension. This way, there was “a passage from individual testimony” to “a public action” and thus “a secret trauma” became part of “social criticism.”48 Crucially, as observed by Bożena Czubak, “[the veterans’] voices and testimonies of wartime and post-war traumas contradicted the media universalization of wars and their victims, transformed into objects of noncommittal empathy.”49 Wodiczko then did not address the mainstream discourse on its own terms, instead he provoked the spectator to ask the question of “What kind of vision might overcome apathy and respond to the suffering of others?”50 It echoed the observations put forward in the book authored by Wodiczko, titled The Abolition of War (2012). There, the artist quotes Bronislaw Malinowski, Roy L. Prosterman and Margaret Mead who juxtapose the universalizing language of war with that of the individual suffering. They emphasize the tragically effective role of perceiving the “enemy” through the lens of collective identities that divide the world into “us” and “them.” This split perception dehumanizes “them” and allows for an ideologically justified killing of “non- individualized members of the other community”51 who become a legitimate target that needs to be annihilated.

Wodiczko’s14 effort to disrupt the above perceptual jump from the empathetic individuality to the rationalized collectivity is, in my view, the unifying element of all his art. This attempt is also reflected in the two projections carried out in Union Square. Despite the differences, The Homeless Projection and War Veteran Projection have been designed to appeal not only to one’s intellect (rationality), but also – to one’s emotional and physical sensitivity (empathy). Additionally, in both,what is projected and the projection’s addressees are individual people. More than that, when comparing the two projections, one notes Wodiczko’s growing radicalism. The immobile slides of undifferentiated homeless people of the 1986 projection, in 2012 gave way to moving images of singular veterans sharing their intimate and painful stories. The artist has also increased the collaborative engagement on the part of himself and the veterans, but also on the part of the spectators who are prompted to empathetically witness the traumatic stories. This therapeutic effect is further strengthened by Wodiczko’s making use of Foucault’s observations on parrhesia (“fearless and free speaking”). Unlike Foucault, the artist emphasizes the singular and relational character of the encounter between the teller and the witness which is evoked during the projection. He claims: “It must be assumed that those who bravely come forward with the otherwise unsolicited, often unspeakable truth need others who can open themselves up to bravely listen, open their ears.”52 Significantly, for Wodiczko, this individual encounter between the teller and the witness constitutes the foundation not only of his projections, but also of democracy as such: Foucault’s demand for the ethics of the “self” and “care of the self” on the part of the potential parrhesiastic speaker … becomes today the Democratic Project. … [W]ithout a solid social, psychological, cultural, artistic, technological support and without the help of the community … the potential fearless speakers … will remain unable to open up and openly speak out in public space. They will remain silent. … They need, what I call monument therapy.53

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15 Even though the The Homeless Projection and War Veteran Projection differ, they share this basic belief in the validity of an individual, multi-layered encounter between a “fearless speaker” and an emphatic witness. It is through this encounter that a larger democratic awareness can be built, based on a nominalistic rather than collective perception of others. In the remaining part of the paper, I would like to take a closer look at the two projections and discuss their inherent problematics, addressing questions concerning their status, politics of representation, and – eventually – effectiveness.

First16 of all, Wodiczko’s choice of Union Square as a place to display his projections brings to mind Gramsci’s idea of the compromise equilibrium, according to which the privileged presuppose “that account be taken of the interests and the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised.”54 By choosing a public square that has long functioned as a protest area, Wodiczko safely stays within the constraints imposed by hegemony, carefully negotiating the level to which his art can be effective.This rings in accord with Henri Lefebvre’s understanding of the capitalist “production of space.” Under this logic, Union Square has been produced as a public space, thus one of its very functions is to be a vent for various voices to speak. This public space is an “allowed for” or even, to some extent, a “designated” space for voicing protest. As Rosalyn Deutsche notes in the context of New York’s 1980s revitalization, the very word “public” very often functions as a major semantic pacifier: Citing “the public,” whether this word is attached to art, space, or any number of other objects, ideas, and practices, is one means of providing the uneven development of New York with democratic legitimacy. … Rather than a real category, the definition of “the public,” like the definition of the city, is an ideological artifact…55

17 What is more, by assigning the public space the role of a protest area, it becomes falsely depoliticized, turning its subversive potential into that of an assigned a priori function. Let me quote Deutsche again: “Instrumental function is the only meaning signified by the built environment” which comes from the fake assumption of the “functionalization of the city, which presents space as politically neutral, merely utilitarian.”56 Within this logic, various urban spaces are given various functions: shops are for shopping, train stations for commuting, parks for strolling, and protest areas for voicing protest. It is acknowledged that people need a place to protest: professor of philosophy Paul Scheffer explains that it is crucial to allow people to express their anger and frustration with words, to verbally demonstrate it. Without this vent, anger easily turns into violence. As he notes, “Debate makes hot heads cool down.”57 So while the choice of Union Square to some extent deprives the protest of its disruptive, anarchistic potential, in the same move it locates the protesters in a culturally silent protest area. If one can speak of the “proper uses of the city” within the Lefebvrian paradigm of the production of space,58 then the proper use of Union Square is to gather, demonstrate and critique. Thus Wodiczko, by projecting the city’s ailments in a hegemonically recognized public space, has necessarily used the city “properly.” This, however, as I am going to argue later on, may have made his message more, not less effective.

Another18 significant aspect is that the very idea of the public sphere seems problematic. In her essay on the public space, Nancy Fraser has convincingly critiqued Jürgen Habermas’ classic discussion of the public sphere as a singular entity. Instead, she claims that there are numerous public spheres and very often those that have not

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achieved a status of an “officially recognized public space” prove more effective. With this in mind, Fraser considers two relevant questions: 1) Is a single public sphere always preferable to a nexus of multiple publics?; and 2) Should discourse in public spheres be restricted to deliberation about the common good rather than to “private interests” and “private issues”?59 Pointedly she argues that: [P]ublic spheres themselves are not spaces of zero degree culture, equally hospitable to any possible form of cultural expression. Rather, they consist in culturally specific institutions – including, for example, various journals and various social geographies of urban space. These institutions may be understood as culturally specific rhetorical lenses that filter and alter the utterances they frame; they can accommodate some expressive modes and not others.60

While19 I find the observations by Deutsche and Fraser illuminating, it seems to me that in his two Union Square projections, Wodiczko cleverly used their reservations to his advantage. Clearly, by projecting images upon the emblematic statues on an “official” public arena (that is: using the city “properly”), he did not challenge the function assigned to the place by the urban planners. However, as his projections were not spontaneous protests, but carefully designed artistic gestures, they acquired a performative character. In other words, in both cases, they were prearranged, staged acts of protest display. Referring to Foster’s observations on the manipulation of signs, what Wodiczko did was combine the socio-political aura of Union Square with the authority of a recognized artist and a university professor in a performative act of public projection. The two projections were not acts of protest per se, but its performances. This performative re-enactment of the protest idea by an established artist and scholar fundamentally changes the status of the event. Locating the projections (artistic performative acts) in a place of great cultural saliency translates singular images/testimonies into a manifesto. In effect, Wodiczko turns a “private issue” of individual suffering (homelessness and war trauma) into an artistic and political statement.

However,20 the conflation of the private with the political on the level of an individual spectator poses, in my view, major difficulty. The reason is that it prompts the spectator to realize that the official discourse and one’s own world view are to a large extent communicating vessels: often what is repressed in the hegemonic discourse translates into one’s own repressions. Such realization often proves difficult or even impossible, as repression generally provokes resistance and denial. It is a fundamental belief of classical psychoanalysis that repression is a powerful defense mechanism that protects the subject, therefore confronting the repressed is always painful. As the repressed contents allow for a superficial integrity of the subject, the subject is very resistant to any attempts of bringing the repressed into consciousness. Acknowledging the repressed involves uncovering a trauma in a painful move, which dismantles the subject’s structure and ruins one’s carefully elaborated self-image. This is why it seems that Wodiczko was very clever in choosing the location of Union Square as his vehicle to bring back the repressed dimensions of culture. Confronting them may be easier in the context of a place that has a long tradition of hosting various “returns” of the repressed.

Last21 but not least, in the 2012 projection, Wodiczko exploited the medium of individual testimony, a medium which has been brought to saliency, but at the same time has become formalized or even ritualized by the literature of the Holocaust. Again, the artist’s choice proves to be a two-edged sword. Even though testimony may seem

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overexploited or even clichéd, still, by its strong associations with the traumatic narratives of the Holocaust, it is a powerful, heavily cathected connotative tool. By resorting to this particular genre, Wodiczko’s War Veteran Project effectively counteracts the official narrative, triggering in the viewers a certain emotional and reflexive mood, which may not even be consciously realized. By appealing directly to the spectators’ senses, emotions, and minds, Wodiczko exposes them to an experience which is not only to be reasoned, but first of all – lived. This experience ignites a train of emotional and semantic associations that may alter their mind frame.

In22 conclusion, I want to stress that the possible effectiveness of Wodiczko’s artistic interventionism rests on the assumption that his art is relational and that this relation is not abstract, but singularly created when a spectator empathetically witnesses a projection (goes through a lived “embodied” experience). In his projections, Wodiczko connects “the psychic with the political,”61 following the feminist tradition which “has long insisted on the inseparability of the personal and the political and on politics concerned with subjectivity.”62By skillfully manipulating cultural signs (e.g. “Union Square,” “Washington,” “Lincoln,” “patriotism,” “the public space,” “the testimony,” “the witness”), he cuts across the boundaries of art and activates in the spectators trains of semantic associations. This intention is reflected in Wodiczko’s words, calling on for an amalgamate of experience: “To get fit and fully able in terms of democracy, the city has to look at itself from the perspective of its ailments: physical, social and psychological.”63 Lately, the artist seems to be growing impatient. The already mentioned book Abolition of War is very prescriptive, as Wodiczko calls for a total abandonment of war, which he hopes one day will become a regrettable historical institution. Even if not yet effective, it is still worth trying. Because, as Wodiczko claims, “democracy is a job, you don’t find it, you make it.”

NOTES

1. By projection I mean here casting an image or a prerecorded audio&video material onto the surface of a statue/monument/building. The term will be discussed in detail later in this essay. 2. While the original title was The Homeless Projection: A Proposal for the City of New York, it was then changed to The Homeless Projection: A Proposal for Union Square. For more detail check Rosalyn Deutsche’s “Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection and the Site of Urban ‘Revitalization,’” in Krzysztof Wodiczko, ed. Duncan McCorquodale (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2011), 116. 3. This projection exists only in the form of a proposal that was exhibited at 49th Parallel, Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art. 4. Bożena Czubak, ed., Krzysztof Wodiczko: War Veteran Projections (Lublin: Galeria Labirynt 2013), 64. 5. Rosalyn Deutsche, “Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection and the Site of Urban ‘Revitalization,’” in Krzysztof Wodiczko, ed. Duncan McCorquodale (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2011), 127.

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6. One can find an illustrated and theorized guide to Wodiczko’s projections in, among others: Bożena Czubak (ed.) Krzysztof Wodiczko: Art of the Public Domain (2011) and Duncan McCorquodale (ed.) Krzysztof Wodiczko (2011). 7. Wodiczko quoted in: Bożena Czubak, “Art of the Public Domain,” in Krzysztof Wodiczko: Art of the Public Domain, ed. Bożena Czubak (Sopot: Państwowa Galeria Sztuki: 2011), 16. 8. In the early projections, Wodiczko made use of still slide images, with time he gradually turned to projecting prerecorded audio-visual narratives. 9. Wodiczko has called civic architecture “a spectacle of images of social stability.” In: Bożena Czubak, “Art of the Public Domain,” 18. 10. Deutsche, “Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection,” 132. 11. For example see: Dora Apel, “Technologies of War, Media, and Dissent in the Post-9/11 Work of Krzysztof Wodiczko,” in Krzysztof Wodiczko, ed. Duncan McCorquodale (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2011); Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, “Borders,” in Krzysztof Wodiczko: Guests/Goście, ed. Bożena Czubak (Warszawa: Galeria Narodowa Zachęta, 2009); Bożena Czubak, “Art of the Public Domain,” in Krzysztof Wodiczko: Art of the Public Domain, ed. Bożena Czubak (Sopot: Państwowa Galeria Sztuki: 2011). 12. Hal Foster, “Subversive Signs,” in Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (New York: The New Press, 1985), 99-100. 13. Nicolas Whybrow, Art and the City (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2011), 15. 14. The therapeutic aspect of art is discussed in more detail in the article by Eva Marxen, “Therapeutic Thinking in Contemporary Art or Psychotherapy in the Arts,” The Arts in Psychotherapy 36 (2009), 131-139. 15. Deutsche, Hiroshima after Iraq: Three Studies in Art and War. (New York: Columbia University Press 2010), 7. 16. Ibid., 5. 17. Ibid., 4. 18. Leung qtd. in Deutsche, Hiroshima after Iraq, 5. 19. Deutsche, Hiroshima after Iraq, 67. 20. Denis Hollier, “While the City Sleeps: Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin,” in Krzysztof Wodiczko, ed. Duncan McCorquodale (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2011), 197. 21. Wodiczko, “Public Projection,” 49. 22. Krzysztof Wodiczko, “Art of New Public Domain,” in Krzysztof Wodiczko: War Veteran Projections, ed. Bożena Czubak (Lublin: Galeria Labirynt 2013), 21. 23. Wodiczko, “Public Projection,” 49. 24. In Poland, there is another artist whose art is reminiscent of Wodiczko’s. Joanna Rajkowska, by creating unfamiliar contexts and locating them in familiar yet traumatic places, experiments with participants’ reactions and opens up new dimensions to address the past and demand a new type of discourse. In her public installations, she makes things visible in a new way by directly affecting the senses of the recipients: confronted with her works, they cannot resist being somehow affected, feeling something. I have analyzed several of her public installations in the article “Polish Colonial Past and Postcolonial Presence in Joanna Rajkowska’s Art” published in At the Cross-Words: Theorizing Race, Ethnicy and Postcolonialism, Ewa Luczak, Justyna Wierzchowska and Joanna Ziarkowska ed. (Frankfurt, Berlin, New York: Peter Lang, 2011). 25. Czubak, “Art of the Public Domain,” 17. 26. Krzysztof Wodiczko, “Public Projection,” in Krzysztof Wodiczko, ed. Duncan McCorquodale (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2011), 48. 27. Wodiczko, “Public Projection,” 48-49. 28. Hollier, “While the City Sleeps,” 200. 29. John Rajchman, “Critical Guests,” interview with Krzysztof Wodiczko, in Krzysztof Wodiczko: Guests/Goście, ed. Bożena Czubak (Warszawa: Galeria Narodowa Zachęta: 2009), 10.

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30. Czubak, “Art of the Public Domain,” 19. 31. Paul Goldberger quoted in Deutsche, “Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection,” 113. 32. Deutsche, “Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection,” 121. 33. Qtd. in Deutsche, “Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection, 121. 34. Qtd. in Deutsche, “Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection,” 113. 35. Rosalyn Deutsche, “Uneven Development: Art in New York City,” October 47 (Winter 1988), 5. 36. Hollier, “While the City Sleeps,” 198. 37. Deutsche, “Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection,” 114. 38. Ibid., 113. 39. Ibid., 128. 40. Qtd. in Deutsche, “Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection,” 114. 41. Hollier, “While the City Sleeps,” 194. 42. “New York City Tableaux: Tompkins Square,” in Krzysztof Wodiczko, ed. Duncan McCorquodale (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2011), 206. 43. Deutsche, “Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection,” 126. 44. Czubak, Krzysztof Wodiczko: War Veteran Projections, 65-71. 45. The emotional aspect of war is now starting to be noticed by American mainstream culture. For example, in the TV series Homeland it is given prominent visibility. Still, it is not presented as being acknowledged or processed, as main protagonists (both the veteran and the CIA agent) are not offered any psychological help. The veteran is put under CIA’s surveillance, the agent is medicated. 46. Nicolas D. Kristof, “War Wounds,” New York Times, 10 August 2012, http:// www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/opinion/sunday/war-wounds.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 . 47. On the official website of More Art one reads: “More Art is a federal nonprofit organization dedicated to producing meaningful and engaging works of public art in New York City.”More Art garners the power of public art to encourage social change and bridge the gaps existing between underserved communities and the general public in New York City. We make art accessible to all by fostering artistic collaborations between contemporary artists and local communities and locating all our projects in freely accessible public spaces. We support artists in their creative endeavors and provide a public platform of expression for artists and community members to express themselves through art” (http://moreart.org/mission-history/). 48. Andrzej Turowski, “Przemieszczenia i obrazy,” in Krzysztof Wodiczko, ed. Duncan McCorquodale (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2011), 294. In his text, Turowski referred to another projection by Wodiczko carried out in Tijuana, Mexico in 2001. However, as the projection also made use of individual testimonies, I believe that Turowski’s observations may be applied to the projection carried out in Union Square as well. 49. Czubak, “Art of the Public Domain,” 22. 50. Deutsche, Hiroshima after Iraq, 64. 51. Krzysztof Wodiczko, Obalenie wojen ( Kraków: Muzeum Sztuki Współczesnej, 2012), 9-11. 52. Krzysztof Wodiczko, “Monument, Parrhesia, Projection,” in Krzysztof Wodiczko: Art of the Public Domain, ed. Bożena Czubak (Sopot i Warszawa: Państwowa Galeria Sztuki i Fundacja Profile: 2011), 166. 53. Wodiczko, “Monument,” 167. 54. Qtd. in John Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), 216. 55. Deutsche, “Uneven Development,” 10,12. 56. Ibid., 6. 57. Paul Scheffer, “Spierajmy się, jak razem żyć.” Gazeta Wyborcza, No. 7 (8340), 10-11 January, 2014. 19.

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58. For a more detailed discussion of the proper use of city spaces, see: Rosalyn Deutsche’s “Uneven Development.” 59. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text 25/26 (1990), 62. 60. Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 69. 61. Deutsche, Hiroshima after Iraq, 62. 62. Ibid., 4. 63. Wodiczko, “Monument,” 166.

ABSTRACTS

This essay discusses two projections by Polish-born artist Krzysztof Wodiczko carried out in Union Square in the city of New York. The Homeless Projection: A Proposal for Union Square (1986) and Abraham Lincoln: War Veteran Projection (2012) address major ailments of modern society: homelessness and the psychological effects of war. By casting images on the statues of American heroes, the artist clashes the official historical-political narrative with that of the unrepresented or repressed. In the two projections carried out in Union Square, Wodiczko makes use of the public space to performatively re-enact social protest in a culturally salient locus. The article presents the subversive potential of the two projections and discusses their inherent problematics, referring to observations by Jürgen Habermas, Nancy Fraser, Rosalyn Deutsche, and others.

INDEX

Keywords: Afghanistan, contemporary art, homelessness, Iraq, Krzysztof Wodiczko, public space, Union Square, war

AUTHOR

JUSTYNA WIERZCHOWSKA Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw

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PART ONE Spatial Justice and the Right to the City: Conflicts around Access to Public Urban Space

Competing Claims to Housing and Public Space: Fighting Displacement in the Contemporary City

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What Can Urban Gardening Really Do About Gentrification? A Case- Study of Three San Francisco Community Gardens

Guillaume Marche

Introduction: Of Gardens and Gentrification

1 Among other characteristics, San Francisco is known for its relatively small acreage of 46.9 square miles and its high population density of 17,620 people per square mile, making it the second-most densely populated major city in the United States after New York City. Due to its attractiveness, the City by the Bay’s population is steadily increasing, which leads to a housing shortage, and the value of real-estate in San Francisco has skyrocketed since the early 1990s, especially since the late 1990s’ “dotcom” bubble, and it is currently being pushed by the new “tech” bubble. This has resulted in a steady process of gentrification over the past twenty years, which has intensified in the recent past, with new, sometimes unexpected neighborhoods being affected: while gentrification in areas like the Mission has been going on for twenty years at an increasing pace, it is moving further and further south, spilling over into adjacent neighborhoods such as Bernal Heights and Potrero Hill. Gentrification has more recently overflown into historically working-class, ethnic- and racial-minority, or generally disreputable neighborhoods like Bayview, the Western Addition, South of Market and the Tenderloin, some of which are regarded nowadays as a new frontier of middle- to upper-middle-class, mainly white, residential expansion.

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Gentri2 fication is one particularly critical aspect of the territorial conflicts that are habitual in San Francisco, given the city’s contested transformations ever since its initial period of post-war growth in the 1960s.1 And the disputed uses and appearance of public spaces is among the guises this contestation assumes. From a Lefebvrian perspective, indeed, the right to the city is not only a question of access to urban resources, but also a matter of being able to shape and transform them. Thus, beautification assumes political significance since it may, on the one hand, enhance the attractiveness of otherwise disreputable neighborhoods: murals or urban greening initiatives—such as community gardens and urban farms—are interventions in public spaces that improve the quality of residents’ lives. Yet, on the other hand, they may express a claim for legitimate use of urban space and for an equitable living environment, so that it is unclear whether they heighten the gentrifying transformation of such neighborhoods, or whether they may support inhabitants’ resistance to being pushed out.

In3 fact, most scholarship on urban greening focuses on areas such as New York City, where land is scarce, real estate values are high, and more or less informal garden projects have been viewed as forms of resistance to urban development and capitalist urban growth.2 This is mainly true of studies of historical contexts where local governments have viewed urban greening as a form of insubordination to be suppressed, while more recently, since the early 2000s, even the municipality of New York has sought to coopt urban greening into its own smart growth agenda. Scholarship—as well as the media—has also paid attention to recent urban gardening and farming initiatives in the context of the Great Recession, typically in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and in Detroit and other cities deeply affected by the foreclosures and evictions resulting from the subprime crisis.3 In such environments, local residents’ (literally) grassroots initiatives are a concerted form of resistance, both to food deprivation, in a way that harks back to the Great Depression, and, more generally, to the loss of civil and economic empowerment.

But4 San Francisco represents a different environment where land is scarce, real estate values are getting higher, and city government authorities do support urban growth projects—in Mission Bay or the Waterfront front for example. Yet, more or less informal garden projects are also actively encouraged by city government authorities. If San Francisco is to ride the urban growth wave and reap benefits in terms of tax revenue, it would seem to make more neoliberal business sense to favor intensive urban development. But the fact is that, along with murals and other forms of beautification, urban greening initiatives in general fit in with the alternative urban model that San Francisco represents and which makes it so attractive to what Richard Florida has named the “creative class.”4 The municipal government’s support for such forms of bottom-up urban improvement is thus consistent with its desire to maintain high real estate prices in

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order to accommodate, and even support, the city’s attractiveness for high-income tier residents and thus salvage its revenue basis and its status as a world-class metropolis. Yet, San Francisco is a reputed haven of municipal liberalism, with social services and a century-old ethos of social inclusion and egalitarianism that has very few equivalents—especially on that scale—in the United States.5 Thus, the City of San Francisco is faced with an internal conflict since it has a rather ambivalent attitude when it comes to balancing poor people’s socioeconomic rights with the tax revenue generated by urban development and the resulting influx of households in the upper income bracket.

In5 this context, an important question when it comes to garden projects is whether they may be a way for communities besieged with ever-expanding, apparently unstoppable gentrification to resist it and make a territorial claim on their neighborhoods, or if it may actually be detrimental and counterproductive insofar as greening contributes to turning otherwise fairly unpalatable neighborhoods into attractive areas for 21st-century middle- to upper middle-class urban “pioneers.” Or may garden projects actually result from gentrifiers’ desire to “improve” their neighborhood and thus succeed in enhancing that very attractiveness? Or do these questions make sense at all? Do urban greening initiatives have any impact whatsoever, or are the macroeconomic mainsprings of San Francisco’s changing demographics simply out of proportions with whatever control ordinary folks can possibly exert over their situations? Thus the issue here is not so much how city denizens interact—i.e. conflict or cooperate—with municipal government institutions, as how residents interact with each other in seeking to grapple with broad economic and social processes that largely escape their control.

6 This study is based on fieldwork conducted in San Francisco in 2012 and 2013 and examines three very distinct community gardens, which will henceforth be referred to as “organized garden projects”—after Mary Beth Pudup—in order not to take their community-building dimension for granted, since this is one of the issues these examples raise.6 The first of these organized garden projects is located in a section of the only remaining predominantly African American neighborhood in San Francisco, which is currently undergoing rather fast gentrification, partly due to its location on a hillside offering outstanding views of the San Francisco Bay. The latter two garden projects studied here are located on either side of the same hill in the southeastern part of the city: while the north side of the hill has been gentrified since the 1990s, the south side has long been home to a historical public housing project largely inhabited by African Americans. As of the time of fieldwork, this housing project dating back to the 1940s was in the process of being redeveloped, that is to say torn down and built up again into a mixed-income neighborhood. I begin by presenting and contrasting the first two cases, because they are opposites in many ways—the most evident of which being the

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divergence between an area that is yet in the process of gentrification and a neighborhood that has already been gentrified. I subsequently analyze the third case and compare it with the former two, because it stands as a counterexample since it was not initiated from below, by the residents, but from above, by the agency in charge of the neighborhood’s renovation. Yet, it proves to be more than a mere “control” case, since it evinces dynamics that the previous binary does not suffice to explain.

1. Organized Garden Projects as a Form of Resistance

7 The first example studied here is almost a textbook variety of an organized garden project initiated in a lower-income neighborhood by two local residents, an older African American couple, who gained the interest and support of their neighbors and triggered a collective, community-based initiative to plant on “little plots of dirt” on median strips, on unused street sides, on sloping narrow triangular plots near intersections.7 The project was started in 2001, it has grown to have a budget of $168,000 in public grants, one full-time paid staff member and operates 4 different gardens within a range of a few blocks. In this sense, it is not a purely informal, guerrilla-style urban-greening initiative: it has rules and organization.8

8 In particular, one of its rules is that before anyone can start a garden or make significant changes to an existing one, they have to seek agreement from the collective—which means it is not so spontaneous, but this springs from a commitment to building community by getting decisions to be made in a communal way. This is a way to ensure that the residents always have a say in deciding what the spaces near which they live are going to look like, which is particularly poignant in a context where the neighborhood is undergoing major change that is not of the residents’ choosing. What makes it all the more important is that the City is facilitating the remodeling of such neighborhoods in transition through a “smart growth” agenda of walkable, green neighborhoods and sustainable urbanism, an agenda that authors like Noah Quastel and Melisa Checker, among others, have shown is characteristic of “environmental gentrification.”9

In9 so doing, the residents manifest that they have come to terms with the fact that their neighborhood is going to be remodeled and changed, but they want to have some say in how this is to be done.10 They come across as an embattled community whose members have reinforced their community ties in the past ten years in order to improve their quality of life. Tellingly, the evil they were fighting at first was crime and insecurity on the block, which they addressed by fostering solidarity among neighbors, talking to each other, looking after each other. In this sense, they should not be characterized as a besieged community that is resistant to any sort of change. In fact, scholarship suggests that smart growth does not have to result in

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enhanced gentrification and de facto racial segregation.11 But this low- income, predominantly African American community is now faced with gentrification—a giant that it cannot possibly defeat but which it can at least attempt to domesticate.

10 Faced with the threat of the disappearance of the neighborhood’s identity and history, they want to preserve it not just through artifacts, but also through practices. In addition to greening, the organized garden project, for example, sponsors the creation of murals that celebrate the community’s heritage, as in the mural dedicated to the project’s founders. These green and beautified spaces are not just ends in themselves, but they are meant to facilitate collective practices, such as meeting at the mural, sitting on a bench and discussing future planting ideas. In fact, the organization counts addressing gentrification as one of its missions and accomplishments.12 The participants do not delude themselves that their small-scale efforts may guarantee David’s triumph over Goliath, but they offer a response that reflects both a fairly sensible appreciation of the uneven balance of powers and a determination not to give in to the adverse circumstances. In other words, they do not seek to fight face-on, but they do so in an oblique, indirect way, and thus generate empowerment.

2. Beautification as a Vehicle of Gentrification

11 The second case for this study is situated on the already gentrified northern side of a hill, a residential neighborhood that is fairly remote from the center of San Francisco but offers a pleasant environment with fairly low density, a good choice of local stores, cafés and restaurants, and extremely picturesque views of both the San Francisco Bay and the city. The garden project was started in 2008 on the initiative of a single person whose apartment overlooked a vacant plot of land on a freeway off-ramp across the street and who just wanted to make it look less ugly by greening it. The resulting garden thus sprang from a purely individualistic desire to improve the appearance of a familiar urban environment. It was only subsequently that the community side of things kicked off. Once neighbors noticed the initiative, they made encouraging comments and supported the initiator when she decided that the garden was growing too big to keep under the radar. If she had had a choice, she would have much rather kept it not just informal, but also as private as possible, considering that the land is public property. Interestingly, the initiator draws a very sharp contrast between her initial move and what the garden has grown to become, namely a gathering place, a connection among neighborhood residents.13

In12 a sense, there is a strong similarity between the two organized garden projects in that both foster a bond among participating neighborhood residents; in both cases the stakes are to claim ownership of one’s environment by placing an imprint on its physiognomy. But there are two fundamental, corollary differences

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between the two projects. First, the former project’s organization follows a bottom-up, collective decision-making process, whereas the structure of the latter, as per the garden project initiator’s own admission, is essentially that two people make decisions and everyone else is invited to volunteer. This, she considers, makes for more efficiency and less waste of time in lengthy discussion. With her practical turn of mind and her great sense of individual initiative, she is keen to ward off anything that stands in the way of the goals she has set for herself. Second, one is a case of residents whose neighborhood is being gentrified and who seek to leave a physical imprint on their environment so as to symbolically preserve their legacy, whereas the other consists in residents with socioeconomic privilege claiming ownership of the turf they seek to improve through a beautification initiative.14 For example, although she is a tenant—in an area that still has a stable percentage of tenant-occupied housing units verging on two thirds, i.e. comparable to San Francisco as a whole—the initiator is a professional in the creative sector with a cosmopolitan background. She is rather representative of the neighborhood’s gentrification, as measured by—compared to the rest of city—a roughly twice higher, faster growing median household income, percentage of residents with a Master's degree or more, and percentage of households with an annual income of more than $150,000.15

Consistently,13 the latter organized garden project has appealed to a 70-strong team of neighborhood residents who volunteer one Saturday morning a month to improve the neighborhood’s aesthetic standards by creating a pleasant, relaxing environment. Both the initiator’s discourse and the organization’s website do mention the goal of educating visitors and volunteers about botany, but the pictures on the garden’s website emphasize an image of natural beauty and harmony, and the founder’s language enhances “an escape from the city” over education.16 By contrast, if websites are a good indicator of what organizations purport to do, the former organized garden project’s website shows inhabited and embodied gardens—places where practices represent and signify the ethnic, racial, and generational diversity in the make-up of the community.17 Generational transmission is especially important in this case where preserving the memory of a waning African American, working-class heritage has become part and parcel of the project.

The14 take on gentrification at the already gentrified neighborhood’s organized garden project is quite different. For example, one of the projects for developing the initiative is to address the dire state of disrepair of a particular block down the street from the garden—a no-through-way block which, in the words of the garden’s initiator, “is disgusting: there’s lots of graffiti, and dumping, and homeless encampments.”18 As a neighborhood community association, the organization has submitted a plan to clean up the block by building a retaining wall and leveling out the ground in the dip where homeless people usually sleep because they can hide, and then planting trees to

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separate the street from the unused plot of land below, adding a sidewalk and greening it. The organized garden project’s website shows awareness of how the real estate market will respond to such an improvement: “Current homeowners can also expect their property values to rise as a result of this work: we encourage you to join in with this project!”19 In the words of the garden’s initiator, “joining in” means that she and the single other main project leader “basically call the shots and reach out to professionals [living in the neighborhood] as needed.”20 The class-inflected nature of the project and its gentrifying intent are rather blatant. That situates this project on a different plane than the usual type of environmental gentrification where, in the words of Noah Quastel, “gentrifiers face systematic moral predicaments as the roles they perform in competitive housing markets undermine their values.”21 Not much of a moral predicament is to be noticed here.

15 As a provisional conclusion, if we wonder whether organized garden projects may help communities besieged with gentrification to resist it, or if they contribute to turning unattractive neighborhoods into destinations of choice for gentrifiers, the answer should be both. That is to say, an organized garden project can imply one or the other, or it can imply both as the people in charge of the first one studied here are well aware. This is also what Nathan McClintock has shown in his work on urban agriculture's inherent contradictions between its radical/ reformist potential and its neoliberal potential.22 But if we instead wonder what it is about a garden that determines whether it leans toward the empowerment of a neighborhood’s current residents, or toward their displacement, the answer would seem to be—following the insight of Efrat Eizenberg23—that it depends on whether the garden is individualistic in essence or communitarian. But I would argue, further, that it is also a matter of how horizontal and grassroots the decision- making process is—as at the first garden project studied here, where consensus-based decision-making is the rule—or vertical, top-down —as in the second case here, where one or two people “call the shots.” A third example will help further explore this issue.

3. Top-down Greening Initiative and Bottom-up Community-building?

16 The third organized garden project studied here is located on the southern side of the same hill as the previous one, which is home to two 1940s housing projects that are being redeveloped into a mixed-income neighborhood by a private company contracted to redesign the neighborhood.24 The redesigning process included consultations with the community to ask what type of facilities they would like included, one of which was a garden to grow vegetables. Thus, in 2010, raised beds were made out of wood and set up outside the housing project’s family resource center. Importantly, this was created as a temporary garden, since after the redevelopment was completed a new one was

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created one block down the hill in early 2013, so this was a first step in a work in progress. Part of the redevelopment project involved fixing the neighborhood’s geographic isolation by restoring the perpendicular gridiron pattern of the streets in the area so as to reconnect it with the rest of the city’s fabric, and particularly with the north side of the hill. Of course this is a double-edged sword, because it is undeniably an objective improvement for housing-project residents to be connected to the rest of the city, as many of the social issues they are faced with are correlated with isolation, such as lack of access to employment or to healthy food. But reconnecting this area will also make it more attractive, draw in higher-income residents and ultimately shoot up real estate value and rents. In this social engineering project, neighborhood revitalization is typically imbued with a reformist uplift ambition which involves “inculcating a strong work ethic and steady work habits,” as Pudup says of turn of the twentieth-century school gardens, which is an explicit part of the interviewed Junior Community Builder’s discourse.25

But17 additionally, the social uplift endeavor consists in inculcating healthy dietary habits and an ethos of self-help. The city’s contractor in the redevelopment initiative presents itself as “not a service provider,” and insists that its “three full-time staff are working with community leaders and organizations to increase their capacity to serve residents and increase resident involvement in existing programs.” Thus various community-building “programs and projects” are underway, including a “Monthly Healthy Living Workshop” where a registered dietician “teach[es] a Healthy Living Workshop which combines healthy cooking demonstrations, education, and exercise.”26 Such a program is not identical with the garden project, yet it is directly connected with it, both in terms of location—the premises are contiguous—and of vision— encouraging involvement and agency through education. The organization thus seems to follow a rather vertical dynamic where knowledge and skills are handed down from organizers to recipients.

At18 the same time, however, participation in the activities triggered by the garden is real. On “garden workdays,” twice a week, residents do spend time at the garden and engage in lively, congenial socializing. Anecdotal evidence is provided by the fact that the interviews I recorded on location are sometimes hard to transcribe due to the loud talking and laughing in the background.27 Residents have indeed taken to the moveable mural-painting workshop, the Zumba and meditation classes, the walking club and gardening sessions that are offered by the agency created by the contractor to connect with the residents.28 This tends to confirm one of McClintock’s insights, which runs counter to the standard narrative that seemingly radical endeavors accidentally serve neoliberal interests. According to McClintock, seemingly neoliberal or neoliberal-friendly policies may inadvertently facilitate or even foster more radical or subversive appropriations.29 In the organized garden project under study, the claim of community ownership of the neighborhood in fact resulted from the redeveloping

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agency’s seemingly less-than-candid commitment to “broadly engage the community in both master planning and community building efforts.”30

19 What is striking, though, when contrasting the dynamics around this organized garden project with the first one in this study, is the fact that it is built on a service-providing model, with paid staff and a preset calendar of activities. This pattern, however, is very much in keeping with San Francisco’s reputed model of municipal liberalism that relies on a decentralized network of localized, community-based service- providing organizations and where social welfare goes hand in hand with a democratic rhetoric of civic engagement and participation.31 But there is a fine line between grassroots community-building and the more top-down, missionary reformist endeavors this project represents. We may venture that the difference is not just a question of top-down versus bottom-up initiative. Heeding the insight of David Adams and Michael Hardman, attention must also be paid to the participants’ motivations and interpretations of the use of space.32 In this sense, the first garden in this study indeed presents a much less ambiguous model altogether than the third one, for despite its six-digit budget, it has in fact a rather light-weight organization, which is essentially an enabling structure. That is to say it does not have a preset agenda, but an open- ended one, and the emphasis is less on the content than on the process —not on the what, but on the how.

Conclusions

20 The point of this study has not been to offer a definitive answer to the question of whether organized garden projects counteract or encourage gentrification, for the answer to such a question has to be a mixed one. And the study’s purpose has not been to pass favorable judgment on some projects and unfavorable judgment on others, although that is partly unavoidable. Rather, my goal has been to better understand how apparently very similar gardens, in fact, involve very different, possibly antithetical dynamics. The variations among the three examples I have examined show that whereas the second garden under study rather unambiguously enhances gentrification, the third one stands halfway between facilitating and merely accompanying it, while the first one resists it, but mainly in a symbolical, immaterial—although by no means insignificant—way.

These21 differences have to do less with what kind of greening or gardening goes on in the various projects than with the type of decision- making process and with the way the residents’ community is engaged. This is also where we can situate the difference between a service- provider-to-client relation, on the one hand, and community- empowerment, on the other. Ultimately, in order to understand what urban gardening can really do about gentrification, it is crucial to focus on motives and meanings. Thus, beautification does not, in and of itself,

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either enhance gentrification or fend it off. It is the meaning that participants inscribe in their practice that endows, or fails to endow, organized garden projects with collective empowerment potential. This, in turn, means that low-income communities besieged with gentrification may, and do, use gardening as a weapon against their disappearance. Such practices can be deemed hopeless, considering the disproportionate extent of the problem they seek to address, and indeed they cannot actually reverse the trend of gentrification. But, like the “weapons of the weak” identified by James C. Scott, they unobtrusively challenge gentrification’s legitimacy and hence, symbolically, its irresistibility.33

NOTES

1. Rich E. DeLeon, Left-Coast City. Progressive Politics in San Francisco, 1975– 1991 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1992); Stephen J. McGovern, The Politics of Downtown Development. Dynamic Political Cultures in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. (Louisville: University of Kentucky Press, 1998); Chester Hartman, City for Sale. The Transformation of San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 2. Karen Schmelzkopf, “Urban Community Gardens as Contested Space,” Geographical Review 85/3 (1995): 364–381; “Incommensurability, Land Use, and the Right to Space: Community Gardens in New York City,” Urban Geography 23/4 (2002): 323–343; Christopher M. Smith and Hilda E. Kurtz, “Community Gardens and Politics of Scale in New York City,” Geographical Review 93/2 (2003): 193–212; Miranda Martinez, “Attack of the Butterfly Spirits: The Impact of Movement Framing by Community Garden Preservation Activists,” Social Movement Studies 8/4 (2009): 323–339; Sandrine Baudry, “Reclaiming Urban Space as Resistance: The Infrapolitics of Gardening,” Revue française d’études américaines 131 (2012): 32–48. 3. John Gallagher, Revolution Detroit: Strategies for Reinvention (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013); Yuki Kato, Catarina Passidomo, and Daina Harvey, “Political Gardening in a Post-disaster City: Lessons from New Orleans,” Urban Studies 51/9 (2014): 1833–1849. 4. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class and How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 5. William Issel, “Liberalism and Urban Policy in San Francisco from the 1930s to the 1960s,” The Western Historical Quarterly 22/4 (1991): 431–450; Philip J. Ethington, The Public City. The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); DeLeon, Left-Coast City. 6. Mary Beth Pudup, “It Takes a Garden: Cultivating Citizen-Subjects in Organized Garden Projects,” Geoforum 39/3 (2008): 1228–1240.

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7. Author’s interview with the garden project’s managing director (21/07/2012). 8. Sandrine Baudry, “Les community gardens de New York City: de la désobéissance civile au développement durable,” Revue française d’études américaines 129 (2011): 73–86. 9. Noah Quastel, “Political Ecologies of Gentrification,” Urban Geography 30/7 (2009): 694–725; Melissa Checker, “Wiped Out by the ‘Greenwave’: Environmental Gentrification and the Paradoxical Politics of Urban Sustainability,” City & Society 23/2 (2011): 210–229; Carolin Mees and Edie Stone, “Zoned Out: The Potential of Urban Agriculture Planning to Turn Against its Roots,” Cities and the Environment 5/1 (2012): Article 7; Eliot M. Tretter, “Contesting Sustainability: ‘SMART Growth’ and the Redevelopment of Austin's Eastside,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37/1 (2013): 297–310. 10. Author’s interview with the garden project’s managing director (21/07/2012). 11. Rolf J. Pendall, Arthur C. Nelson, Casey J. Dawkins, and Gerrit J. Knaap, “Connecting Smart Growth, Housing Affordability, and Racial Equity,” in The Geography of Opportunity: Race and Housing Choice in Metropolitan America, ed. Xavier N. De Souza Briggs (Washington: Brookings Institution, 2005): 219– 246; Andrew Aurand, “Density, Housing Types and Mixed Land Use: Smart Tools for Affordable Housing?,” Urban Studies 47/5 (2010): 1015–1036. 12. Garden project website, online (accessed 05/04/2014). 13. Author’s interview with the garden project’s initiator and managing director (31/07/2012) 14. Jackelyn Hwanga and Robert J. Sampson, “Divergent Pathways of Gentrification: Racial Inequality and the Social Order of Renewal in Chicago Neighborhoods,” American Sociological Review 79/4 (2014): 732–734; Richard Van Deusen, “Public Space Design as Class Warfare: Urban Design, the ‘Right to the City’ and the Production of Clinton Square, Syracuse, NY,” GeoJournal 58/2-3 (2002): 149–158; Sonia Arbaci and Teresa Tapada-Berteli, “Social Inequality and Urban Regeneration in Barcelona City Centre: Reconsidering Success,” European Urban and Regional Studies 19/3 (2012): 287–311. 15. United States Census, Census Explorer, http://curvaceousness/ censusexplorer (accessed 28/04/2015); San Francisco Planning Department, San Francisco Neighborhoods Socio-Economic Profiles, American Community Survey 2005–2009 (May 2011). This is one of the neighborhoods in the San Francisco metropolitan area with the highest creative class share of its population (Richard Florida and Sara Johnson, Class-Divided Cities: San Francisco Edition, The Atlantic Citylab, 1 April 2013, http://www.citylab.com [accessed 28/04/2015]). 16. Garden project website, online (accessed 05/04/2014); author’s interview (31/07/2012). 17. Garden project website, online (accessed 05/04/2014). 18. Author’s interview (31/07/2012). 19. Garden project website, online (accessed 05/04/2014). 20. Author’s interview (31/07/2012). 21. Quastel, “Political Ecologies of Gentrification”: 705. 22. Nathan McClintock, “Radical, Reformist, and Garden-variety Neoliberal: Coming to Terms with Urban Agriculture's Contradictions,” Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability 19/2 (2014): 147–171.

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23. Efrat Eizenberg, “The Production of Contesting Space: Community Gardens and the Cultivation of Social Change,” paper presented at the “Open Space: People Space’ conference, the OPENspace Research Centre, Edinburgh, UK, October 27-29, online (accessed 30/03/2014); “The Changing Meaning of Community Space: Two Models of NGO Management of Community Gardens in New York City,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36/1 (2012): 106–120. 24. Author’s interview with a Junior Community Builder for the garden project (27/06/2012). 25. Pudup, “It Takes a Garden”: 1230; author’s interview (27/06/2012). 26. Neighborhood redevelopment project’s website, online (accessed 22/02/2015). 27. Author’s interview with two garden project volunteers and one garden project manager (27/06/2012). 28. Neighborhood redevelopment project’s website, online (accessed 22/02/2015). 29. McClintock, “Radical, Reformist, and Garden-variety Neoliberal”: 159. 30. Neighborhood redevelopment project’s website, online (accessed 22/02/2015). 31. DeLeon, Left-Coast City, 13–25; McGovern, The Politics of Downtown Development, 33–39, 87–143. 32. David Adams and Michael Hardman, “Observing Guerrillas in the Wild: Reinterpreting Practices of Urban Guerrilla Gardening,” Urban Studies 51/6 (2014): 1103–1119. 33. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

ABSTRACTS

San Francisco is known for its small acreage and high population density. Due to its attractiveness, the city has been subjected to a housing shortage, skyrocketing real-estate rates, and a steady process of gentrification over the past 20 years in particular. Access to public spaces and deliberation, negotiation, and conflicts over the proper uses and appearance of such spaces is one aspect of the visible, contested transformation of San Francisco. Whether and how urban territories are appropriated or embellished can be rather contentious, for beautification may enhance the attractiveness of otherwise disreputable neighborhoods. Traditionally working- class, ethnic- and racial-minority areas are thus regarded nowadays as a new frontier of middle- to upper-middle-class, mainly white residential expansion. Organized and informal garden projects are interventions in public spaces that improve the quality of residents’ lives and hence raise the question whether they heighten the gentrifying transformation of such neighborhoods, or whether they may support inhabitants’ resistance to being pushed out. This question is especially crucial since the municipal government is a strong proponent of urban greening and the City of San Francisco has a rather ambivalent attitude when it comes to balancing poor people’s socioeconomic rights with the tax revenue generated by urban development and the

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resulting influx of households in the upper income bracket. This contribution examines three significantly different garden projects in San Francisco. What in a garden project makes it lean toward the empowerment of a neighborhood’s current residents, or toward their displacement? Or does this question simply make sense at all? Can urban gardening have any impact whatsoever on such large-scale socioeconomic phenomena as the city’s changing demographics? Are garden projects even intended to address gentrification and the changing face of the city? And if so, are they somehow effective, simply pointless, or can they actually be detrimental and counterproductive?

INDEX

Keywords: community-building, empowerment, gentrification, resistance, San Francisco, urban garden projects

AUTHOR

GUILLAUME MARCHE University Paris-Est Creteil

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Resisting the Politics of Displacement in the San Francisco Bay Area: Anti-gentrification Activism in the Tech Boom 2.0

Florian Opillard

1 Since Neil Smith’s works on the Lower East Side as “New Urban Frontier”1 much has been said on gentrification processes and their contextual variations. The wide range of scholars who draw on the concept to refer to processes of social change, displacement, and dispossession, attests to its gains in legitimacy and applicability far beyond the American academic field.2 Yet we need to point to the issues which this increased use of gentrification as a lens for the study of urban processes tends to provoke. As Anne Clerval puts it, “the voices that defend a ‘positive’ interpretation of gentrification are in reality contributing to a depoliticization of the analyses of urban transformations, in favor of an interpretation in moral terms.”3 Is it possible then to remain critical of gentrification without washing the concept out of its contentious and political content? How can critical geography produce knowledge that does not end up being instrumentalized by the institutions it indeed denounces?

2 Along with its extended use, the word “gentrification” has become so related to San Francisco that it has become rare to read about one without the other: San Francisco is precisely one of the places that contributed to the spread of gentrification’s scope. Being one of the most gentrified cities in the United States and the most expensive to live in right before New York City,4 San Francisco is also well known today for facing a crisis often named a “tech boom 2.0.” The recent developments, which occurred in the past three years, mostly concern the structuring of an “anti-displacement movement” in the city, supposedly driven by an unprecedented surge of capital through the installation of well paid “tech workers” from the Silicon Valley. The activists who have already fought the “first tech boom” in the late 1990’s appear today as a structuring mosaic of individuals, anti-eviction direct action groups, artistic and mapping collectives, and non-profits slowly building up political power and visibility.

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3 It is precisely the building of that collective cohesion in the recent San Francisco Anti- Displacement Coalition (SFADC) that this research seeks to explore, drawing from both San Francisco’s hyper-gentrification context5 and its boiling political activism milieu.6 It advocates for an analysis of the city’s gentrification processes displacing the researcher himself or herself from a distant observer to a participant observer, from a producer of abstract and objective knowledge to a co-producer of situated and contextual savoir-faire.7 This shift in the researcher’s position as an actor of social movements allows this analysis to reconstruct the process of gentrification and resistance to it from a day-to-day perspective. Therefore, gentrification and resistance are not seen as distinct and isolated social phenomena that develop independently. In the case of San Francisco, although they are often depicted as the two sides of a Class War 2.0, they both shape one another through complex relations of power, including domination, domestication or dissension,8 that materialize in both public spaces and the public sphere. These relations of power are the battlefields that this study of resistance to loss and displacement analyzes, concentrating on the recent emergence of a citywide coalition.9

4 This article first describes the way in which the current entanglement of the city-scale neoliberal policies and a strong influx of capital from the tech industry is building up San Francisco’s Tech Boom 2.0. This context is secondly approached through the lens of ethnographic work among two of the most active and recent activist groups in the Tenants Movement, from their meetings to their actions in public spaces. Finally, this article attempts to offer an overview of the movement’s political outcome along with its scale shift from San Francisco to the Bay Area.

1. Is San Francisco’s Gentrification a Tech Boom 2.0?

5 San Francisco’s social movement has made quite a lot of noise these past months in the local and national media. The “anti-tech” movement, as many activists and reporters called it, seems to have gained visibility since activists started blocking Google and Facebook private shuttles, among others. The debate over the goal of the movement – to fight the “tech takeover” or to stop displacement – has been focused on the role that tech corporations play in the city’s hyper gentrification. From this debate emerged the name of the current phase of gentrification: the Tech Boom 2.0. In this section of the article, I will first try to contextualize the debate over the role of the tech industry in the process of gentrification in San Francisco. The first tech boom in the years 2000 will serve as a precedent for both displacement and the organizing against the tech industry. I will then draw attention to the differences between these two episodes and point out the material and symbolic changes that the city is currently experiencing. I will finally account for the politics that fuel such a process, focusing on the question of the memory of the displacees.

1.1 A Tech Boom 2.0?

6 In many discussions between activists in meetings, around a coffee or even in the documents written by their organizations, references to the dot-com boom in the year 2000 are very common. Not only is the dot com boom the last crisis that is still remembered by the many who were displaced and who fought displacement, but it is

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also a common reference called upon to measure today’s social crisis in the city. It is thus very important to understand this first crisis as a measurement standard that orientates the debates over the magnitude of today’s tech boom. The famous speculative bubble that grew at the end of the 1990’s fueled much investment in the Bay Area, and more particularly in the city of San Francisco. At the time, entrepreneurs and computer software designers rushed to the city with the goal of making easy money by starting an Internet company. In a city where more than 60% of housing is renter occupied and where districts like the Mission and Chinatown concentrate low and very low income populations,10 the sociology of these workers was quite homogeneous and often differed from that of the people already living in the city: young white and single entrepreneurs with no children, what the acronym Yuppies, for young urban professionals, summed-up at the time. According to the activists’ narratives, the anger against the Yuppies grew, as the rush for easy money became a rush for commercial space. Mostly, this space was found in the South of Market (SOMA) district and in the Mission District, two of the remaining working-class districts of the city. Finding space there was accomplished by a phenomenal rise in evictions of Latino and working-class tenants who did not seem to be as profitable for landlords as the young entrepreneurs would be. The cohabitation between old and new residents became harder as spatial proximity highlighted the social, cultural, and economic gap. Regardless of the actual solidarities within the existing communities, new residents often saw the possibility of moving into the Mission as both daring and risky as they confronted the city’s new urban frontier.11 The community’s response to these waves of evictions is still exemplary today for its strength and visibility. In the Mission, the building of a strong coalition called the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition is still taken as an example of vigorous community organizing against gentrification, as it brought together a wide variety of actors and revealed strong ties between community organizers, local activists and artists.12

7 What, then, do the dot-com boom and the current tech boom have in common? The 1996 election of Mayor Willie Brown – a powerful businessman and free market advocate –resonates with the election of Edwin Lee, the current Mayor, often referred to by local activists as “one of the most pro-tech mayors that the city’s ever had.” The parallel can also be made for the Board of Supervisors, whose political orientation was contested in 2000 by the progressive coalition in the ballot. One of the best examples of the current pro-tech policy of the mayor and Board of Supervisors is, undoubtedly, the Twitter tax-break approved in 2011. It exempts Twitter from paying about 22 million dollars payroll tax over six years13 on the condition that the corporation settles its office space in Mid-Market. As a result, the Mid-Market and the SOMA districts experienced dramatic changes over the past 3 years. The rapid accumulation of capital and the installation of a residential economy around new offices forced the already distressed, existing communities out, along with the rush of engineers brought to the city center by their company’s private shuttle service.14 Yet, comparable as it may be to the one in the 2000s, the current social crisis seems to differ widely when it comes to fighting back. According to a local activist who fought the first boom: During the first boom, things were pretty clear and straightforward: evictions intended to find office space for a given startup using the Ellis Act, everything was on the table. Today, we’re not only facing Ellis Act evictions, but the number of buyouts and the strategies employed by obscure companies make it way harder to fight back!15

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8 Resulting from an unprecedented capital influx, the rapid gentrification of the city seems a lot harder to grasp for activists slowly building power on a local scale: tenants simply cannot afford the time to mobilize. Another reason is the complexity of the speculation process itself. The following sections will attempt to deconstruct this process as well as its political implications.

1.2 The Politics of Displacement, Spatial Reinvention and Forgetting

9 There is a misinterpretation in the way that the media spread the “anti-tech” discourse. This leads the reader to think that the gentrification process mainly sets its origins in the rush of tech workers in the city, hence accusing them of displacing “real San Franciscans” and implying that tech workers do not belong in the category. This debate misleads us on both the gentrification process and the communication strategy that the social movement produces. In San Francisco, real estate developers take advantage of the rent gap that the surge of rich engineers participates in creating, making a “quick buck”16 out of rent controlled housing. Instated for the apartments built before 1979, rent control is a non-renewable resource that is often bypassed by developers through the use of the Ellis Act, a state law that allows the owner of a building to get out of the rental market, on the condition that they take out all of their properties of the same building at once. The loophole in the Ellis Act – no justification is needed to use the Ellis Act – allows corporations to buy entire buildings, Ellis Act all the tenants, remodel and sell each apartment piece by piece as luxury “condos,” thus exempting them from rent control. Taking advantage of the legislation, some real estate developers have made the use of the Ellis Act their business model, entering and exiting the rental market several times. The case of Elba Borgen, one of what the Anti- Eviction Mapping Project calls the “dirty speculators” lightens the speculation process through the use of the Ellis Act (Figure 1). Elba Borgen is accused, by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project to have used the Ellis Act 27 times under her name and under the name of a Real Estate company to evict tenants from apartments she previously bought since 2001.17

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Figure 1

“A Revolving Door of Evictions.” The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project’s visual of Elba Borgen’s itinerary on San Francisco’s rental market. Source: http://tenantstogether.org/downloads/ Ellis%20Act%20Report.pdf

10 “The Speculator Loophole: Ellis Act Evictions in San Francisco,” a report released by the non-profit Tenants Together and the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, stresses that 79% of the Ellis Act evictions in 2013 concerned properties that were bought 5 years earlier or less (Figure 2).18

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Figure 2

“Percentage of Ellis Evictions by Ownership Length, 2013” Source: http://tenantstogether.org/ downloads/Ellis%20Act%20Report.pdf

11 The analysis of the speculation processes through the Ellis Act, which leads only a small part of the total number of evictions, is nevertheless only the tip of the iceberg. The number of owners proposing buyouts to their tenants is both harder to evaluate and much higher, and that is a notable difference between the years 2000 and today. Buyouts are said to have skyrocketed since 2006 with the city’s attempt to regulate the condominium conversions following an Ellis Act. As the Anti-Eviction Mapping puts it: Since [2006, buyouts] have skyrocketed, with landlords using the threat of an Ellis eviction as a club to coerce tenants into taking a buyout. In addition, by threatening and Ellis eviction and bullying the tenant into a buyout, landlords can also avoid the restrictions on re-rental which are attached to Ellis evictions and re-rent the apartment at a much higher rent.19

12 In this current context, gentrification is harder to objectify and therefore much easier to depict as immanent to an uncontrollable market economy. On the contrary, and as Smith puts it, “gentrification is not random; developers do not just plunge into the heart of slum opportunity, but tend to take it piece by piece.” Smith describes how these developers have a “vivid block-by-block sense of where the frontier lies,”20 making them well aware strategists for the bleaching of the city. Cleaner and whiter, cleaner because whiter, whiter therefore cleaner, “bleaching” designates the fact that, as Nancy Raquel Mirabal puts it referring to Chester Hartman, “urban renewal and the politics of space are connected to the preservation of whiteness. When it comes to gentrification, whiteness holds currency. […] In other words, creating spaces where white bodies and desires and, most importantly, consumption, dominate and shape the neighborhood.”21 These politics of space are well known in San Francisco as most of the African American migrants have already been displaced out of the city, and as the Latino community has been experiencing displacement with much violence since the 1970s. Yet, the process by which space can be made available for consumption by white bodies is not natural either. Rather, “[f]or the collective memory of space to be

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reconstituted, there needs to be a mutual forgetting of what came before the constructions of new buildings, restaurants, and businesses.”22 These politics of forgetting are systematically accompanied by politics of “spatial reinvention” along with the promotion of the “new” over existing communities of color. In San Francisco, the examples of spatial reinvention are very common, from the social cleansing operation “Clean up the Plaza” in the heart of the Mission23 to the renaming of the Mission as “The Quad – A Newly Defined Metahood” by a real estate agent.24

1.3 Old and New Landscapes of Power: The Material and Symbolic Shifts in Gentrifying San Francisco

13 Drawing on Sharon Zukin’s notion of “Landscapes of Power,”25 this part will insist on the way in which changes affect every dimension of everyday life in a context of hyper gentrification. The example of the Mission District will be used to analyze the dramatic changes that illustrate the tensions at play in the city between local cultural capital (the Latino community), the influx of capital through urban motilities (the surge of engineers) and global financial capital (real estate speculation strategies). These elements contribute to shifts that can be witnessed in the landscape which embodies the struggles over the material and symbolic appropriation and control over space.

14 There is a striking dichotomy in the Mission District that reveals at multiple scales the progressive shift that the district is experiencing. Walking along Valencia Street, one can point out the contrasts with Mission Street, the parallel street 50 meters away. Valencia street is dotted with small vibrant businesses: curiosities shops, minimalist style coffee shops,26 clothing stores that make holding a PhD a requirement for their models,27 modern design sound system stores and concept stores. The co-owner of the said sound system store, a young binational French-US citizen entrepreneur described his work as “an ephemeral project. I just decided to help a friend rebuild this place for the store to function. […] I don’t really know what I’ll be doing in 3 months: the project’s almost over and… you know, you gotta move on.” When asked about the kind of people who buy devices in the store, he described the clients as “mainly rich locals, young entrepreneurs that can afford it. Tourists just stop by and take a peak, but that’s it.”28 In this whole part of the Mission, white bodies are wandering, buying, relaxing or bicycling. Fifty meters from there, on Mission Street and towards the south of the Mission, one enters the Latino Mission with its taquerias, its murals glorifying the community’s struggles for social justice, its Latino community centers, and most importantly its dwellers’ brown bodies.

15 The making of this socio-spatial fracture happens both in an insidious and a sudden way that punctuates everyday life. Insidious is the constant condo-conversion process that is transforming the landscape of Victorian facades into luxury six-story secure live-work buildings, as well as the progressive rarefaction of warehouses and working class jobs. Along with this background noise of social shift, the rhythm of the Private Shuttles, endlessly stopping at public stops or jamming traffic is a constant reminder of tenants’ evictions in the making.29 Finally, the evictions,30 the controversial killing of Alex Nieto by the SFPD in Bernal Heights on March 21, 2014,31 the arrest of activists on the fringes of marches are the sudden cymbal crashes that shake or mobilize both the activists and their communities. They are pieces that add up to the progressive social cleansing and criminalization of poverty in the city, of which the current fight over

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Plaza 16 is the most striking. This Plaza is located in the north of the Mission, at the intersection of Mission, 16th Street and the BART. It is today subject to a debate over the campaign to “Clean up the Plaza,” started by a coalition of merchants, business owners and neighbors fed up with “the blight of this corner,” advocating for a “better access to safe, clean and walkable transportation corridors.” This group came along with a ten-story condo development project allowed by the Planning Commission. This development is seen as a means for the city to support the displacement of poverty along with its ugliness – i.e. the “junkies, ‘smash and grab’ thieves who prey on parked cars, prostitutes, the mentally ill, the substance addicted, and assorted other criminals and lost souls,”32 – which the 24/7 presence of a police car right next to the plaza has already started doing.

2. From Chats to Discourses, from Meetings to Marches, from Bodies to Performances: Entering the Activism Milieu

16 How can one resist to such a hyper-gentrification context33? The following developments borrow from fieldwork interviews and participant observation done with two specific collectives that intend to fight the processes of gentrification: Eviction Free San Francisco and the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. While some of their members participate in both groups, their functions seem distinct but complementary and coherent with the structuring of a growing Tenants Movement.

2.1 Two Cases of Group Styles

17 The study of activism in the context of neoliberal urban policies appears key to understanding the frames of a social movement in the making. One of these frames – the definition, function and actions of the groups in which activism is shaped – can be investigated through the lens of “group styles.” As defined by Nina Eliasoph and Paul Lichterman, group styles are “recurrent patterns of interaction that arise from a group’s shared assumptions about what constitutes good or adequate participation in the group setting,”34 they participate in shaping individual activist trajectories, they ground the Tenants Movement in the day to day embededness of capitalist patterns of domination.

18 Eviction Free San Francisco (EFSF) is a mutual help and direct action group that seeks to “hold accountable and to confront real estate speculators and landlords that are displacing our communities for profit.”35 The meetings usually gather twenty to thirty people. The backbone of the group is composed of five people, who created the collective in the summer of 2013; they prepare the meeting agendas, take stacks36 in meetings and debate on the propositions to submit to a vote. Most of them have known each other for some time now and participate in several activist collectives and projects. Some of them are professional organizers (e.g. working for the Housing Rights Committee) while others are participating as volunteers. Many of them are tenants fighting their own eviction or having fought it in the past and who are willing to give back. The collective is open to anyone who wants to participate, and everyone attending the meeting gets to vote on the propositions made, with the condition that

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the discussions occurring during the meeting cannot be made public. Journalists are therefore kindly asked to manifest themselves and leave.

19 At the beginning of each meeting, the facilitator enunciates the “meeting culture (ground rules),” which everyone is invited to follow (Figure 3).

Figure 3

Eviction Free San Francisco’s meeting Ground Rules and Meeting Culture, April 2014. Credits: Florian Opillard.

20 These rules specifically show the group’s preoccupation with the reproduction of society’s intersectional structures of domination (race, sex, and class) within the group. They invite structurally dominated and silent minorities to step up. The willingness to challenge structures of domination within the group itself makes it necessary to clearly define the meeting agenda, the time devoted to each item and to take stacks. Such a structure creates a safe and designated space for structurally oppressed and silenced minorities to take up their own right to speech. It is not rare to witness harassed tenants both describe the symbolic violence which they face every day and express their gratitude towards the group. Unlike Eliasoph and Lichterman, who point to the existence of “Language of Expressive Individualism” and “Active Disaffiliation” in civic groups,37 I argue that the EFSF is best characterized by the language of individual restraint and group celebration, along with a discrete but active affiliation. In each meeting, group celebration is expressed on two occasions: at the beginning of each meeting when the group comments on the past actions, and at the end of the meeting, when each participant gets to express their own feelings about the group. For that matter, while this moment could be the peak of individual expression, people tend to shirk their own interest and declare their willingness to help for the benefit of the group.

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21 The second group that this research focuses on differs in its organization and its aims. The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AMP) is a “data-visualization, data analysis, and digital storytelling collective documenting the dispossession of San Francisco Bay Area residents. The project seeks to de-isolate those displaced and act as a tool for collective resistance.”38

22 The collective rarely gathers all of its members in one place. It is composed of approximately sixty people in total, many of whom occasionally give a hand, grant an interview, help encoding or organizing the collected data. The bonds between the participants are therefore difficult to capture, and often maintain blurry as a strategy. The group and its activities revolve largely around its main figure, Erin McElroy, an experienced activist close to the anarchist circles who dedicates her time and energy to the cohesion of the collective’s branches and communication with universities,39 city institutions or the press. The division of labor is, therefore, fairly easy to read: while “the tech guys” encode the website or make the maps at the SudoRoom40 in Oakland, another group generally meets in the Tenants Union’s building to discuss ongoing projects. While the EFSF is composed of many tenants with low economic capital, the AMP comprises mostly highly educated and politicized young activists, all of them aware of both the part they play in the gentrification process and the ways to fight it.

23 Unlike the EFSF, the meeting culture in the AMP is not stated at the beginning of each meeting. Once again, it is very rare to witness people putting their individual interests before the ones of the group: people are invited to propose their skills to the group, be it encoding, networking, mapping, distributing surveys. Yet, “negative experiences”41 are not unheard of: during a meeting, a 45-year-old white man who expected to be given some interesting work to do as a cameraman explained: “I just want to say right away that I feel like this project is not going the way I think would be profitable for me, because some people are calling dibs. I don’t want to have to deal with the leftovers.” By expressing his frustration, this person put himself before the group and felt the pressure of the others, all agreeing on the fact that both the primary frame (conducting a meeting) and the secondary frame (building political tools and raising awareness) were broken: this “white privileged male who has a high idea of himself and of his work,” as described by a member of the meeting, interrupted it by transgressing the speech norms.

2.2. Repertories of Contention

24 Along with the analysis of group styles, the analysis of the repertories of contention42 of the two organizations reveals the groups’ complementarity: while the AMP blows the whistle on “dirty landlords and serial evictors,” the EFSF focuses on their direct targeting and “public shaming.” The circulations of activists in both groups and their close relationships might explain their working together. Yet, it seems that, although six people are consistently participating in the work of both collectives, they belong to distinct activism patterns and traditions.

25 As a direct action group, the EFSF exemplifies anti-capitalistic community activism, which is deeply rooted in the city’s political history since the 1950s.43 Rebecca Gourevitch, an activist working for the Tenants Union and the EFSF, explained the influence of the Occupy movement, from which many of the current collectives in the Bay Area derive. The EFSF “first meetings started just like Occupy,” in 2013, as the Anti-

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Displacement Coalition fought the eviction of Mrs. Lee’s family a 74-year-old Chinese- speaking lady, who became the very icon of the movement.44 The fight over cases of evictions mostly revolves around three modes of action: protesting in public spaces, rallying, and publicly denouncing “greedy” landlords and speculators. Protesting is probably the most common and the least specific action that the EFSF implements. The group holds several meetings prior to the protest in the Tenants Union’s house on Capp Street, setting date and time, banners and signs, itinerary and speakers. The march organized on April 12, 2014, “To End Displacement of San Francisco’s Educators”45 is a great example of the logistics of such a protest. Noting that more and more teachers were coming to the group to report their own eviction, the group decided to combine a Google Bus blockade with a march making several stops to highlight cases of eviction in the Mission. In this case, the activists employed spatial strategies to direct the media attention to the bus blockade and the march. The discussions in the preparation meetings insisted on space as both a frame and a strategic tool for the activists to master: the knowledge of the streets, the limitation of their visibility prior to the blockade and the necessary occupation of space with enough bodies to block the street revealed a necessary control over public space. Along with protests, the EFSF’s more specific mode of action consists in launching campaigns to publicly discredit “greedy landlords” responsible for the eviction of tenants by giving out their names, addresses, phone and fax numbers, and encouraging activists to drive out to their home and talk them out of evicting. This mode of action is often considered radical by the local media, since the publication of names and addresses points fingers at individuals who are not considered responsible for their company’s policies.

26 Despite its actions, the group has not so far dealt with significant police pressure,46 although the protests in public spaces are never made official. Rather, the itineraries are often negotiated on site with police officers in charge, making it possible for the 300 people to protest and block the streets.

27 The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project’s modes of action correspond to the pattern of tech activism, specific to the Bay Area, and most of its activities are implemented by the activist milieu of the East Bay. Using technology as a tool to implement and empower community activism, the group makes maps, using both their own collected data and the available data on evictions and housing ownership. The first and most visible project that the group implemented was the No-Fault Evictions and the Ellis Act Evictions Maps.47 Erin McElroy insists on the use of maps as tools to “show a chronology and an accumulation of evictions [,] to be able to say: ‘what does this represent over time in terms of the destruction of our neighborhood.’”48 In fact, the two maps below have had a great resonance in the Tenants Movement. They identify areas that are being struck the most by the displacement of tenants (Figure 4).

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Figure 4

San Francisco Ellis Act Evictions map by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. Source: http:// www.antievictionmappingproject.net/ellis.html.

28 Along with the mapping, the group investigates landlords who “make evictions their business models,” as claimed repeatedly during the protests. The group has edited three main lists of “dirty landlords”: the Dirty Dozen – Worst Evictors, Dirty Thirty – Evicting the Disabled and Elderly and the Dirty 2.0 – Tech Evictors. These lists mobilize the volunteers to research the practices of landlords and companies that evict for profit, collecting personal and professional information and spreading their photos in the media. Giving a face to the processes of evictions – a tactic shared by the EFSF – contributes to deconstructing the anonymity of the state and corporate apparatuses, which dissolve and fragment political responsibility. Lastly, the group distributed more than two hundred surveys to get in touch with displaced tenants and build the Oral History Project. Those who were willing to go further were contacted to tell more about their eviction and be recorded. Prior to the interviews, the volunteers in the group attended a workshop on oral history held by an activist and trained oral historian from the CUNY Graduate Center. The “Narratives of Displacement and Loss” map collects and geolocalizes oral stories of evictions; it aims to grasp the emotional and memorial thickness of space and place,49 and to fight the politics of renaming evoked earlier.50

29 Both collectives appear as two components that bring their own activist culture and their group style to the growing San Francisco Anti-Displacement Coalition. They bring small victories and participate in building a common political discourse over spatially fragmented fights. In the last section of this article, the analysis of the structuring of this coalition will lead to a scale shift from San Francisco to the Bay Area.

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3. Political Outcome of a Growing Political Coalition

30 In what ways can the above description of two of the most recent and dynamic groups of the forming coalition shed light on both the recent turns in the gentrification processes and the local communities’ responses? According to Rachel Brahinsky, “The “Google bus,” which is what people in the Bay Area call the mass of private, tech commuter buses that fill the rush-hour streets, is not essentially the problem. In fact, it may be the seed of the solution.”51 Precisely because it is provocative, Brahinsky’s assertion might be the key to an analysis of the current situation: the community response to the political, material and symbolic processes of dispossession that tenants are facing, despite its micro-scale fights, has gained significant power and coverage in the latest months.

3.1 The Building of the San Francisco Anti-Displacement Coalition

31 On February 7, 2014, after a series of Neighborhood Tenants Conventions, the Tenderloin Community School hosted the biggest Citywide Tenants Convention that the city had seen in years. Many important figures of the now official “Tenants Movement” spoke on the microphone, some of them obviously at ease in front of such a big audience, like Erin McElroy, or Ted Gullicksen, director of the Tenants Union. After some organizers spoke about the importance of continuing the fight to stay in their homes, came Mrs. Lee’s time to speak, who claimed that she would not go away and would rather be taken out of her home by the sheriff in person. Six of the eleven city supervisors were present: Calvin Welsh, a famous figure of the tenants’ fights since the 70’s; Randy Shaw, the director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic; and other political figures and journalists, including a French and a British team. The outcomes of this convention were discussed through the vote on the propositions that the Anti- Displacement Coalition could pass on to the Board of Supervisors. One of them, called the Real Estate Sales Tax, was likely to gain support among the activists in the forthcoming months, “and if the board doesn’t vote it, then we’ll pass it through the ballot in November!” said Sara Shorts, the executive director of the Housing Rights Committee. This convention appears to have laid the first stone of a complex and hierarchized structure, the San Francisco Anti-Displacement Coalition, which gathered tenants on many occasions: it rallied to Sacramento to push Mark Leno’s bill in State Assembly (February 18), pushed David Campos’ Relocation Bill for victims of the Ellis Act (March 17), marched to denounce the police murder of Alex Nieto in Bernal Heights (March 29), or marched in the Mission to fight Benito Santiago’s eviction (April 2nd). This coalition, although it benefits from the experience accumulated by both the organizing and the activism milieu, is not per se a territorial organization. It is rather composed of distinct groups which converged in the political fight for Proposition G (real estate sales tax) in the ballot initiative, and which are planning to do so on November 2015’s ballot.

32 The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and Eviction Free San Francisco are a part of this coalition; both are based in the Mission district, where the fight against loss and displacement is historically strong. The Tenants Union, whose famous fighter for tenants rights and former Director Ted Gullicksen passed away in November 2014, acts as one of the main territorial resources of many gravitating groups: it offers a

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workspace, material and technical support (mainly to the EFSF and the AMP) in the Mission district, legal resources by editing the Tenants Handbook and volunteer tenants counseling. The Housing Rights Committee, another “housing clinic,” provides space for direct action meetings, sign making and tenants’ legal support, backs the Tenants Union in its missions. More than that, these two organizations appear as a crucible for young housing activists and organizers who learn from years of fighting experience and political fights by gravitating in these sociability circles. Other organizations like Our Mission No Eviction and Causa Justa: Just Cause handle work that is more specifically directed towards and led by black and Latino residents, while the Chinatown Community Development Corporation actively supports the Chinese community. Before the campaign for Proposition G on the Ballot, the coalition rarely appeared as a united front on punctual marches or rallies. Rather, each organization would individually take on their own part and coordinate with each other, making the coalition a communicational and juridical entity heading the fight in City Hall and on the Board of Supervisors.

3.2 From Public Spaces to the Public Sphere: Debates in the Media through the Political Agenda

33 The tenants’ fight in City Hall, on the Board of Supervisors and in the streets is precisely what has been drawing so much media and political attention in the past year. Starting with the Occupy movement in 2011, from which many of today’s activist sociability networks emanate, the fight over loss and displacement continually grew as both the number of evictions, buyouts and tenant harassment cases exploded, and as the tech shuttles became a crystallizing fight. The first bus blockades in November 2013, organized by Heart of the City Collective, rapidly spread the word of transnational corporations such as Google or Facebook targeting the Bay Area. They also contributed to the construction of an “anti-tech” discourse along with the spreading of the icon of the “techie,” an image of the self-centered libertarian tech employee making the Bay Area their playground. This term has nevertheless been challenged for its lack of complexity, a reproach some of the members of the movement have acknowledged by participating in encounters52 between employees of tech companies and the main organizations described here. These encounters were at first rarely mentioned in the media,53 since the need for a loud and clear political message fuels the construction of reified categories. It is only after some of leading activists started publishing pieces in the media that the discourse started to complexify,54 and, along with it, the political fights at the city and state level.

34 In San Francisco, David Campos, supervisor of the Mission district, is at the front of the fight for tenants’ rights. Through the support of Tenants Organizations, he introduced a bill at the Board of Supervisors in April 2014 that proposed to increase the relocation fee for any tenant evicted through the use of the Ellis Act. The board voted on this proposition after Scott Weiner, supervisor of the Castro, insisted on making sure that the fee would not have a dissuasive effect on what he called “mom and pop” landlords. In fact, this measure is meant to help tenants who are being evicted with a short-term notice face the cost of eviction, although Campos clearly states that Limited Liability Corporations which use the Ellis Act as a tool for speculation would not have a hard time bypassing the measure.

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35 The November 2014’s Ballot Initiative is another example of the political outcome of the SFADC’s organizing. Proposition G emerged after a series of Tenants Conventions held in 2014. This proposition intended to dissuade speculators from flipping properties by taxing the profits of each real estate sale,55 a measure that Harvey Milk had already introduced in 1978. Although the proposition was defeated in the Ballot (No: 53.91% ; Yes: 46.09%), a much bigger fight the fight over proposition G gave a clear image of the political forces battling over San Francisco’s housing crisis as it crystallized progressive forces in the city. Maria Zamudio, organizer at Causa Justa: Just Cause and strong advocate for Proposition G, states that “While it did not win this year, Prop G was a part of a larger progressive narrative that did win.”56 This movement may actually have achieved more than simply the creation of a progressive narrative, or maybe the narrative itself has material effects that activists are currently witnessing. Gen Fujioka, in the online journal 48Hills, released on January 5, 2015, provides an analysis 57 of the Ellis Act evictions showing that while the number of evictions had been increasing dramatically from 2010 to 2013, the number of units withdrawn from the rental marked through the use of the Ellis Act significantly slowed down during the last months of 2014 (Figures 5 and 6).

Figure 5

Annual rate of rental units officially withdrawn under Ellis Act – 2010-2013. Source: http:// 48hillsonline.org/2015/01/04/facing-eviction-threat-tenants-push-back-slow-ellis-evictions-2014/

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Figure 6

Annual rate of rental units officially withdrawn under Ellis Act – 2013-14. Source: http:// 48hillsonline.org/2015/01/04/facing-eviction-threat-tenants-push-back-slow-ellis-evictions-2014/

3.3 From San Francisco to the Bay Area

36 The fight against the Ellis Act, and more generally against displacement in San Francisco, is nevertheless not limited to the city itself, and through the year 2014, a series of political fights crystallized progressive forces and indicated a scale shift in their organizing from the city of San Francisco to the Bay Area and the State of California. Two of the fights that put San Francisco on the state scene are the fight over California’s seventeenth state assembly district and Mark Leno’s bill to reform the Ellis Act in State assembly. Although both fights ended up as defeats for progressives, they both indicate the importance of the recent organizing and activism pushed by what James Tracy called “organizations […] that resuscitated the art of disruptive action in confronting displacement,”58 among which are the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and Eviction Free San Francisco. In the fight over a State Assembly’s seat, another democrat joined David Campos in the race: David Chiu, President of the Board of Supervisors. Whereas David Campos was largely supported by labor organizations (second source of donations after small Real Estate developers), the AMP has shown that David Chiu received 26% of his donations from “large Real Estate developers” and “problematic donors”59 and raised twice as much in campaign donations. The fight was, therefore, presented as the one of David against Goliath. The maps drawn by Professor Corey Cook from the University of San Francisco60 reveal the territorial dimension of the vote (Figures 7 and 8):

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Figure 7

June 2014 Primary Election map – David Campos

Figure 8

June 2014 Primary Election map – David Chiu

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37 Along with the clear orientation of the endorsers, the geography of the vote reveals that the stakes of this battle over State Senate are clearly marked between real estate developers in downtown San Francisco and the housing advocates voters in the Mission, the Haight and the Tenderloin. The same goes for the fight in the State Senate for Mark Leno’s Bill that intended to allow the city of San Francisco to locally reform the Ellis Act, making it impossible for landlords to evict tenants through the use of the Ellis Act in the 5 years following the purchase of a given property. An important local campaign allowed Mark Leno’s bill to go to the State Senate, mobilizing many organizing and activist groups, along with statewide organizations such as Tenants Together or the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE). One of the big points of this campaign was certainly the Renters day of Action on February 19, 2014, a rally that brought more than 500 tenants to State Capitol in Sacramento, including renters from “Merced, Fresno, Sacramento, Concord and Oakland.”61 Although this piece of legislation concerned San Francisco, the regional aspect of this fight confirmed San Francisco as the political showcase for progressive politics. It seems clear that housing issues in San Francisco cannot be limited to the city itself. Rather, as Brahinsky puts it, “We need to stop talking about San Francisco and start talking about the San Francisco Bay Region.”

38 To start talking about the San Francisco Bay Region implies a major change in the analysis of embedded patterns of racial and class segregation, “This means that […] the region needs to be respected. Oakland is not a playground, a new frontier, or a place of last resort; it is a place with a history and a present.”62 As a matter of fact, this scale shift can already be observed in local activism. For example, Causa Justa: Just Cause is an influent non-profit which focuses specifically on the racial processes at stake in gentrification, while its members are for the most part Latino or black. Its actions mostly take place in Oakland, where the fight over racial and class discrimination is strong in the context of the emergence of Oakland as the new frontier for gentrified San Franciscans. In terms of organizing, a growing part of the work is now being done outside of San Francisco, and the relocation of 2014 and 2015’s Anarchist Book Fairs at the Crucible in Oakland where a panel on gentrification reunited activists from the whole urban region, or the creation of an activist group called Defend the Bay Area in March 2014, including activists mostly from Oakland and San Francisco, prove that social scientists are missing the reality of gentrification, displacement and the resistance to it by only focusing on San Francisco. That weakness is common and simple to enunciate: research on gentrification generally deals with urban change rather than with the displacees, urban policy rather than the process of displacement, gentrified areas (San Francisco) rather than the displaced people. Thus, those who are pushed out disappear from the social landscape; they simply do not fit in the new symbolic and political landscapes of power that replace them. Social science research does play a role in this odd silence: many researchers, usually white and middle-class, feel much more comfortable dealing with, for example, young white middle class couples than with the recently arrived illegal immigrants who barely speak the language.

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Conclusion

39 In the past year, activism in San Francisco has proved particularly dynamic. Private Shuttle blockades, street protests or strong pieces of legislation passed by the Board of Supervisors evoked some of the most active years of city scale coalitions like the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition in the years 2000. The “techies” seem to have replaced the “yuppies,” the dot-com 2.0 replaced the first wave of gentrification. Nevertheless, the ethnographic lens advocates for a more complex and detailed analysis of the construction of these artificial categories. A closer look at the two collectives, which highly contributed to the surge of media attention, allows us to better situate both historically and geographically this moment as the yet un- institutionalized response to almost entirely institutionalized speculation practices on housing. Focusing on these groups provides a better understanding of how the activism context not only disrupts tech buses from working, it also contributes to the design of legislation within the realm of political opportunities that, despite being rejected by a majority of the 200,000 voters, compose strong moments of cohesion and construction of local and statewide progressive politics.

NOTES

1. Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (New York: Routledge, 1996), 288. In his book, Neil Smith describes the way in which Manhattan’s Lower East Side is being fought over and seen by real estate developers as an urban territory to take back from the working class. In these struggles over land occupation, the image of the “frontier” is often conveyed, making the Lower East Side the new frontier to be conquered and civilized. 2. Loretta Lees, Tom Slater and Elvin Wyly, The Gentrification Reader, (New York: Routledge, 2010), 648; Anne Clerval, “La gentrification à Paris intra muros: dynamiques spatiales, rapports sociaux et politiques publiques, Thèse de doctorat (Université Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne, 2008), 602. 3. Anne Clerval, “‘Gentrification or Ghetto’: Making Sense of an Intellectual Impasse,” Métropolitiques, 29/01/2015, http://www.metropolitiques.eu/Gentrification-or-ghetto- making.html. 4. Tracy Elsen, Tuesday, “For the Fourth Month Straight, SF's Median Rent Tops NY's”, Curbed San Francisco, last modified December 2, 2014, http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2014/12/02/ for_the_fourth_month_straight_sfs_median_rent_tops_nys.php. 5. Loretta Lees defined super-gentrification in the Journal of Urban Studies in 2003 as the “transformation of already gentrified, prosperous and solidly upper-middle-class neighborhoods into much more exclusive and expensive enclaves,” For more see Lees, “Super-gentrification: The Case of Brooklyn Heights, New York City,” Urban Studies 40, no. 12 (November 2003): 2487-2509. Hyper-gentrification is a term used to describe the wide-spread gentrification of already gentrified urban areas as an equivalent to Neil Smith’s “gentrification generalized” or “third- wave gentrification.” The blog Vanishing New York published an article describing this process: Jeremiah Moss, “On Spike Lee & Hyper-Gentrification, the Monster that Ate New York,” Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, 3 March 2014.

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6. Setting its reality into published words may appear as a form of betrayal of the constantly evolving, multi-layered and not yet enfolded reality of what a social movement can be. This paper is not to be understood as a rigid analysis of what this mobilization is, but rather as a contextual description of its structuration process. 7. Michael Burawoy, “The Extended Case Method,” Sociological Theory 16, no.1 (March 1998): 4-33. 8. Catherine Neveu, “Démocratie participative et mouvements sociaux : entre domestication et ensauvagement?,” Participations, De Boeck Supérieur, no.1 (2011/1): 186-209. 9. This article borrows from the author’s PhD in the making: “A Comparative Ethnography of Anti-gentrification Activism in Two Neoliberal Urban Contexts (San Francisco, United-States – Valparaíso, Chile),” School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, 2013-2016, Paris. 10. The city of San Francisco started releasing in 2009 data through the Housing Elements, revealing that in districts like the Mission in 2014, 80% of the inhabitants were renters, while the average rent for a two bedroom apartment was approximately four times higher than what a very low income (VLI) family makes per month. Very Low Income families make between 0 to 50% of the Area Median Income, whereas Low Income Families make 51 to 80% of the Area Median Income. Housing Elements can be found here: http://www.sf-planning.org/index.aspx? page=3899, last accessed June 8, 2015. 11. Smith, The New Urban Frontier,288. 12. Karl Beitel, Local Protest, Global Movements: Capital, Community, and State in San Francisco (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013), 220. 13. See the tax-break by the numbers at Eve Batey in News on Jun 24, 2014 (10:53 am), “San Francisco's Mid-Market Tax Break By The Numbers,” Sfist, http://sfist.com/2014/06/24/ san_franciscos_mid-market_tax_break.php. 14. The debate over the political decision regarding the Private Shuttle Program would also exemplify the power of the tech industry over local politics. More about this debate in this article: Tim Redmond, “Investigation: SF gave the Google buses a “handshake” pass for years. Now will the violators finally get tickets?,” 48hillsonline, last modified February 20, 2014, http:// 48hillsonline.org/2014/02/20/investigation-sf-gave-the-google-buses-a-handshake-pass-for- years-now-will-the-violators-finally-get-tickets/, and in this one: Joshua Sabatini, “Emails show ‘handshake agreement’ for tech buses using SF transit stops,” The Examiner, last modified February 25, 2014, http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/emails-show-handshake- agreement-for-tech-buses-using-sf-transit-stops/Content?oid=2715002. 15. Anti-eviction Mapping Project’s meeting, San Francisco Tenants Union, February 2014. 16. Description of the group Eviction Free San Francisco on their Facebook page: https:// www.facebook.com/EvictionFreeSummer/info?tab=page_info. 17. Ellis Act Report by the San Francisco Tenants Union. http://tenantstogether.org/downloads/ Ellis%20Act%20Report.pdf. 18. Ellis Act Report. 19. See also the map that accompanies this explanation at http:// www.antievictionmappingproject.net/buyouts.html. 20. Smith, The New Urban Frontier, 23. 21. Nancy Raquel Mirabal, “Geographies of Displacement: Latina/os, Oral History, and the Politics of Gentrification in San Francisco’s Mission District,” The Public Historian 31, no.2 (May 2009): 7-31. 22. Ibid.,17. 23. See the Internet website: http://cleanuptheplaza.com/, accessed June 8, 2015. 24. See Jennifer Rosdail’s website for a description of the “quadsters” at Jennifer Rosdail, “The quad – A Newly Defined Metahood”, accessed June 8, 2015 http://jenniferrosdail.com/the-quad- is-born/.

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25. Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World (Oakland: University of California Press, 1993), 338. 26. The coffee shop Four Barrel is one of the only coffee shops to benefit from so much space facing its front door, allowing it to have seats and bike racks on the sidewalk. You do not need to be a consumer to sit. In other words, everyone can theoretically wander in front of it. Paradoxically enough, the mostly black population living in the projects facing Four Barrel does not wander; they generally do not even walk on the same side of the street. 27. Betabrand, on 780 Valencia Street: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2014/03/ san-francisco-clothing-retailer-betabrand-makes.html. 28. Interview, Valencia Street, February 21, 2014. 29. A Berkeley study by Alexandra Goldman analyses that rents have gone up 20% around bus stops: Alexandra Goldman, The “Google-Shuttle Effect”: Gentrification and San Francisco’s Dot Com Boom 2.0, Professional Report, Master of City Planning (Berkeley: University of California, Spring 2014). The Anti-eviction Mapping Project has revealed that evictions have risen by 69% within four blocks of the bus stops between 2011 and 2013: http:// www.antievictionmappingproject.net/techbusevictions.html. 30. To carry the metaphor further, see the movie Boom, the Sound of Evictions, available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=9FfOHVu_noY&list=PLOEIqpRJkeOB5EPygX6Y6d5z_Cx11RkUq, last accessed June 8, 2015. 31. This website gathers information about Alex Nieto’s murder: http://justice4alexnieto.org/, last accessed June 8, 2015. 32. Julia Carrie Wong, “The Battle of 16th and Mission: Inside the Campaign to “Clean up” the Plaza and Build Luxury Housing,” 48hillsonline, last modified March 18, 2014, http:// 48hillsonline.org/2014/03/18/battle-16th-mission-inside-campaign-clean-plaza-build-luxury- housing/. 33. Lees, Slater, and Wyly, Gentrification,344. 34. Nina Eliasoph and Paul Lichterman, “Culture in Interaction,” American Journal of Sociology 18, no. 4 (2003): 735-794. 35. See the group’s website: https://evictionfreesf.org/?page_id=5, last accessed June 8, 2015. 36. This expression is used in meetings to designate the list of speakers created to facilitate the meeting. See “Taking Stacks (Meeting Facilitation Technique),” Cultivate.coop, last accessed June 8, 2015, http://cultivate.coop/wiki/Taking_Stack_%28Meeting_Facilitation_Technique%29. 37. Eliasoph and Lichterman, “Culture in Interaction,” 735. 38. See the group’s website: https://antievictionmap.squarespace.com/about/, last accessed June 8, 2015. 39. Stanford students made a San Francisco Eviction Story Map with the collaboration of Erin McElroy: http://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapTour/?appid=0c0a337c534146c2bf6f2fab1932eaef, last accessed June 8, 2015. 40. This group defines itself as an “open membership hackerspace. . . . interested in and working toward positive social change.” See their website: https://sudoroom.org/wiki/Welcome, last accessed June 8, 2015. 41. Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 586. 42. Tilly’s “repertoires of contention” refer to a set of contextual tools that groups and individuals use within social movements. Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1978), 349. 43. Beitel, Local Protest,220. 44. Interview with Rebecca Gourevitch, March 22, 2014. 45. For a complete description of the event, see the group’s website: https://evictionfreesf.org/? p=1531, last accessed June 8, 2015.

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46. Although a significant increase in police presence was felt during the march after the police murder of Alex Nieto, on March 21, 2014. 47. All the maps referred to are available on their website, at https:// antievictionmap.squarespace.com/. 48. Interview with Erin McElroy, February 18, 2014. 49. Yi-Fu Tuan, “The City and Human Speech,” Geographical Review 84, no. 2 (Apr.1994): 144-151. 50. The interactive map was released in May, 2015, http:// www.antievictionmappingproject.net/narratives.html, last accessed June 8, 2015. 51. Rachel Brahinsky, “The Death of the City? Reports of San Francisco’s Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated,” Boom: A Journal of California 4, no. 2, Issue title: “San Francisco Matters” (Summer 2014): 43. 52. A description of one of them can be found in SF Gate’s report: http://www.sfgate.com/ technology/article/Tech-workers-housing-activists-clash-at-happy-5270076.php. 53. Reports are often twisted and focus on the issues rather than the bridges that already exist between the tech world and activism in San Francisco: Ellen Huet, “S.F. Tech Workers, Housing Activists Clash at Happy Hour,” SF Gate, Updated 8:45 pm, Wednesday, February 26, 2014, http:// www.huffingtonpost.com/rolla-selbak/sf-tech-worker-and-an-act_b_4870767.html. 54. See Erin McElroy’s publications: Erin McElroy and Kelsey Gilmore Innis, “Tech Workers and the Eviction Crisis,” Model View Culture, last modified February 25, 2014, https:// modelviewculture.com/pieces/tech-workers-and-the-eviction-crisis and Jim Edwards, “Meet the Woman at the Heart of San Francisco's Anti-tech Gentrification Protests,” Business Insider, last modified May 25, 2014, http://www.businessinsider.com/erin-mcelroy-and-san-francisco-anti- tech-gentrification-protests-2014-5?IR=T. For a straightforward deconstruction of the anti-tech dimension of this movement, read Erin McElroy and Tim Redmond, “There Was Never an Anti- tech Movement in SF,” 48hillsonline, last modified February 17, 2014, http://48hillsonline.org/ 2015/02/17/never-anti-tech-movement-sf/. 55. See description of the proposition here: http://ballotpedia.org/ City_of_San_Francisco_Transfer_Tax_on_Residential_Property_Re- Sold_in_Five_Years,_Proposition_G_%28November_2014%29, last accessed June 8, 2015 56. Gen Fujioka, “Who Really Won the SF Election?” 48hillsonline, last modifiedNovember 11, 2014, http://48hillsonline.org/2014/11/11/real-winners-losers-nov-4-election/. 57. Gen Fujioka, “Facing the Eviction Threat: Tenants Push Back and Slow Ellis Evictions in 2014,” 48hillsonline, last modified January 4, 2015, http://48hillsonline.org/2015/01/04/facing- eviction-threat-tenants-push-back-slow-ellis-evictions-2014/. 58. James Tracy, Dispatches against Displacement: Field Notes from San Francisco’s Housing Wars (Oakland: AK Press, 2014), 150. 59. Anti-Eviction Mapping Project’s website, http://www.antievictionmappingproject.net/ chiu.html, last accessed June 8, 2015. 60. See Professor Corey Cook’s Twitter account: https://twitter.com/CoreyCookUSF/media, last accessed June 8, 2015. 61. Randy Shaw, “Rally at State Capitol Ignites Ellis Act Teform,” Beyond Chronicle, last modified February 19, 2015, http://www.beyondchron.org/rally-at-state-capitol-ignites-ellis-act-reform/. 62. Brahinsky, “The Death of the City?,” 50.

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ABSTRACTS

Drawing from an ongoing ethnographic work in the Tenants Movement in San Francisco, this article seeks to analyze both the gentrification context and its activist response during the year 2014. After a wave of evictions that the city has had to face in the years 2000, now called the first tech-boom, signs indicate that in 2013 and 2014, a strong influx of capital through companies of the tech industry has driven the phenomenal surge of evictions, buyouts and tenants harassment in the city. Focusing on two of the activist collectives and organizations that intend to fight this now called “tech-boom 2.0”, I describe the practical ways in which organizing collectively from weekly meetings, marches, rallies leads to the design by a city-scale coalition of pieces of legislation that crystalize and structure the progressive forces in San Francisco and the Bay Area.

INDEX

Keywords: anti-gentrification activism, tech boom-2.0, Tenants Movement, San Francisco Bay Area

AUTHOR

FLORIAN OPILLARD École des hautes études en sciences socials (EHESS)

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“Meet de Boys on the Battlefront”: Festive Parades and the Struggle to Reclaim Public Spaces in Post- Katrina New Orleans

Aurélie Godet

Introduction: Katrina and the Disruption of Public Space

1 Katrina did not just kill hundreds of Louisiana residents when it made landfall in August 2005,1 it also fundamentally altered the geography and demography of its largest metropolitan area. In the wake of the hurricane, about half of New Orleans homes – 108,371 dwellings – suffered flooding at least four feet deep.2 Thousands of community members were displaced as a result, leaving entire neighbourhoods, such as the working-class Lower Ninth Ward and New Orleans East districts, empty.3 The urban renewal schemes that were unveiled and implemented six months after the disaster to remedy “a housing crisis of historic proportions”4 clearly accelerated the pace of gentrification: under the guise of reconstruction and disaster clean-up, the inner city got rid of its impoverished neighbourhoods and of its oldest healthcare providers, including Charity Hospital, which provided the only subsidized health and trauma care in the city. Public spaces were either privatized to maximize consumption or policed more actively.5 Rather than striving to recreate the services that enabled residents to function in daily life (day-care facilities, public transportation, public schools, etc.), municipal authorities focused on tackling the city’s “culture of violence.” The need for safety became of greater concern than the effects of a long history of race and class oppression,

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deindustrialization, suburbanization, and neoliberal social and economic politics involving cuts in education, health care, and welfare.

Drawing2 on a substantial (and growing) literature on public spaces and democratic rights,6 New Orleans’s parading culture7 and the city’s post-Katrina mood,8 this article wishes to study how, outside the framework of party politics and representative democracy, socially, racially or politically marginalized New Orleanians have relied on local festive practices to reclaim the streets of New Orleans since August 2005.

The3 first part of our analysis will introduce a three-pronged typology of parades in the Crescent City based on a historical overview of New Orleans’s parading culture. We will then proceed to consider how the place-making practices of carnival krewes, social aid and pleasure clubs, and Mardi Gras Indian tribes have all reflected and informed citizens’ responses to displacement after Katrina. Drawing on Abdou Maliq Simone’s conceptualization of people as infrastructure – which emphasizes “collaboration among residents seemingly marginalized from and immiserated by urban life”9 and a series of three case studies, this section of the article will refocus the discussion on the rebuilding of New Orleans around its citizens, taking the embodied festive practices of New Orleanians as a lens through which to examine the politicization of public space in post-Katrina New Orleans. Finally, we will reflect on the relationship between parades and democracy and show how contemporary celebrants are expanding and redefining political discourse by eschewing formal rational dialogue aiming at consensus.

1. History and Typology of Parades in New Orleans

4 To the extent that New Orleanians consider processional rituals to be an essential part of their lives and continually invent new excuses to take to the streets, New Orleans can undoubtedly be called the parading capital of the United States.10 The history of parading in New Orleans actually dates back to the 18th century and is rooted in African and Caribbean religious and festive practices11 as well as European traditions, including the medieval tradition of the royal entry12 and the informally organized public revelry of the Parisian carnival of the 1830s. 13

In5 the 18th century, the focal points of the parading geography in New Orleans were the Place d’Armes (today’s Jackson Square) and Congo Square. The Place d’Armes (or Plaza de Armas, as it was called from 1762 to 1803) was laid out by Louis H. Pilié in 1721 as an open-air market, a site for the public execution of disobedient slaves, and a military parade ground. Congo Square, located just outside the ramparts of the original French settlement, was set aside for use by enslaved Africans and people of African descent as a market and social gathering place14 Little documentation about Congo Square festive

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rituals has been preserved,15 but it seems that Africans from disparate areas of West Africa all practiced their various drumming and dancing styles (calinda, bamboula, and congo) there, and spoke and sang in different tongues simultaneously. The tradition possibly began as early as the 1750s and ended in the 1880s.16 In 1845, a municipal ordinance prohibited outdoor music and dancing without permission from the mayor. After Reconstruction, the New Orleans City Council renamed the square after the Confederate general P. G. T. Beauregard, and, like many other public places, it was reserved for white use and remained so until the 1960s.

In6 the 1880s, public street processions for religious holidays and fraternal organizations’ anniversaries, energized by the syncopated music of marching bands, extended the festive traditions cultivated in Congo Square to the entire city. Meanwhile, all-white, elite carnival organizations such as the Mistick Krewe of Comus, the Knights of Momus, the Krewe of Proteus, and Rex appropriated Creole Mardi Gras customs to stage a modern form of Mardi Gras spectacle parade meant to project cultural prestige as much as political power.17 Under their influence, carnival became a major civic event and part of a municipal marketing strategy meant to attract out-of-town businessmen and, soon, international tourists.18

Today,7 despite the great diversity of its forms (St. Patrick’s Day parades, St. Joseph’s Day parades, Halloween parades, jazz funerals, commemorating processions such as the Maafa,19 or the semi-organized foot parades of the Jefferson City Buzzards, Fountain’s Half-Fast Walking Club and the Joan or Arc Project),20 public parading in New Orleans takes three main forms.

1.1. Mardi Gras Krewe Parades

8 Best known are probably the annual spectacle parades associated with Mardi Gras. Staged by predominantly white social organizations, or “Mardi Gras krewes,” these parades feature tractor-driven, thematically decorated floats interspersed with high-school marching bands. Each krewe perpetuates a narrative of aristocracy, with its honorees acting as kings, queens, princesses, dukes, maids, etc. Masked club members and their guests ride high above street level on the floats, throwing beads, doubloons, stuffed animals, or other tokens to the cheering crowds that line the streets of New Orleans. For a parade to be featured on the “official” Mardi Gras schedule, it must apply for a municipal permit. Traditionally, the New Orleans Municipal Code allowed for 34 parade permits to be issued to non-profit carnival organizations to parade during the two weeks prior to and on “Fat Tuesday.” Under new rules passed by the New Orleans City Council in 2014, that number has been brought down to 30 – though any organization granted a permit in the prior carnival season will be able to hold onto its permit if it meets the minimum participation requirements.21

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1.2. Second-Line Parades

9 Another popular form of procession is the semi-structured, quasi-weekly second line parades held by social aid and pleasure clubs (SAPCs).22 Choreographed by predominantly black working-class clubs,23 such parades are built around a narrative of “fictive nouveau riche”24: club members dress up in bright-coloured three-piece suits with matching hats, wear silk-embroidered sashes across their chests, birds other ornaments on their shoulders, and carry fans, walking canes, or umbrellas. Escorted by the police, club members dance along a pre- planned route – almost entirely through African-American neighbourhoods like Treme, Central City, Carrollton –followed by a brass band of ten to twenty musicians and a “second line” of participants, including dancers, chanters, percussionists, and walking community members.

1.3. Mardi Gras Indian Tribe Parades

10 Related to the second line tradition are the Mardi Gras Indian tribe parades. Orchestrated by black or biracial (African/Native American) men, women, and children, they keep up a fiction of Indian royalty while strolling through the backstreets of the city on Mardi Gras day, St. Joseph’s night and “Super Sunday” (the Sunday nearest to Saint Joseph’s Day). A tribe generally includes a spy boy, a flag boy, a big chief, and a big queen,25 each dressed in elaborate, hand-stitched “Indian suits” of beads and feathers. They are followed by percussionists and chanting choruses of neighbourhood and family supporters. While the holiday spectacle parades and the Sunday second line parades are officially authorized, Mardi Gras Indian processions are not. Tribes today maintain the historic practice of parading along unplanned routes without a city permit.

2. The Politics of Parading in New Orleans

11 Parading is not an isolated, one-time event in New Orleans. The activities involved in the production of parades extend to almost every aspect of daily life. The physical and sonic presence of parade participants must thus be interpreted as a way of inhabiting the time- space of the city, of transforming the abstract space (or bureaucratically shaped space) of the streets into a lived space (or concrete space) – to use Henri Lefebvre’s terminology.26

By12 the same token, parading has never been a purely festive practice in the Crescent city. The collective agency of the crowd, which LSU anthropologist Helen Regis primarily locates in the corporeal, the visual, and the spatial,27 has repeatedly provided opportunities to claim social, economic, and political power and/or disrupt the racial ordering

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of urban public space. For the white business or professional elite of the city, late 19th-century parades were a way to project prestige as well as satirize the racial order deriving from Radical Reconstruction.28 For the 20th-century black working class, occupying the streets of the Tremé neighbourhood with music was a way to fight invisibility and thus articulate a “right to the city.” Thomas Brothers thus writes that the pre-civil rights era second line parade, as a “public display of African American vernacular culture,” could be interpreted as a “symbolic act of resistance to Jim Crow.”29

Though13 discernible since the mid-19th century, the convergence of parades and urban politics has, we believe, become even clearer in New Orleans since Katrina. Regularly taking to the streets with messages such as “We are New Orleans” or “This is our city,” parade participants seem more intent today on showing that they are “owners” of public space and that the city is consubstantial with its residents’ cultural traditions.

Among14 dozens of examples gleaned from press cuttings, academic articles, and our own experience of carnival in New Orleans, we selected three cases we deem representative of the city’s parading culture and post-Katrina ethos: a controversial jazz funeral procession in honour of tuba player Kerwin James (2007), a surprisingly strife-free Mardi Gras Indian St. Joseph’s night procession (2012), and a chaotic Krewe of Eris Mardi Gras parade (2011). Our hope is that, taken together, these samples will provide insights into both black and white citizens’ responses to displacement after Katrina and will illuminate fundamental aspects of the politicization of public space in post-Katrina New Orleans.

3. Reclaiming Public Space in New Orleans since Katrina: Three Case Studies

3.1. The 2007 Jazz Funeral Procession in Honour of Kerwin James

15 As Helen Regis has convincingly demonstrated since 1999, second lines are sources of empowerment for New Orleans’s black working-class population. “The majority of participants in the second-line tradition are not owners of homes, real estate, or large, public businesses. Yet through the transformative experience of the parade, they become owners of the streets,” she notably observed in 2001.30 During the long hours of Sunday second lining, neighbourhoods are mobbed with participants singing, dancing, walking. Traffic is halted as paraders – a diverse cohort of marchers, dancers, and second liners often numbering from 1,000 to 5,000 people – come out of the door and funk up four or five miles of bad New Orleans road. Streets temporarily become vibrant public squares defined by subaltern groups who design their own use of them. “Shut that street down… I’m coming through here. That’s what it feel [sic] like,” a Prince of Wales Social Aid and Pleasure Club member

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explains.“The tourists … be trying to see what’s going on, they taking pictures, but we own the streets that day,” proclaims another.31

Despite16 the defiant, self-centred tenor of such declarations, those designs are inclusive and participatory. Dancing, as well as tuba-and- drum call and community response,break down the barriers between audience and performers. Unlike float riders in Mardi Gras, who glide along the parade route perched high above following onlookers, the celebrants of second line parades exist on the same plane as the observing crowd, only set apart physically by a rope.32 The format of a moving stage as the structuring element reinforces the expectation of collective participation. Insofar as second liners fashion a distinctive, egalitarian public square, they illustrate Don Mitchell’s observation: “ What makes a space public – a space in which the cry and demand for the right to the city can be seen and heard – is often not its preordained “publicness.” Rather, it is when, to fulfil a pressing need, some group or other takes space and through its actions makes it public.”33

In17 making a space public, second liners make a democratic move. For that reason, the first parades sponsored by social aid and pleasure clubs that took place after Katrina (the Black Men of Labor Social Aid and Pleasure Club paraded on November 26, 2005, and the Prince of Wales Social Aid and Pleasure Club followed on December 18) were embraced as signs of the city’s cultural and political recovery.

On18 January 15, 2006, four and a half months after the storm, a coalition of 32 social and pleasure clubs came together to put on an “All-Star Second Line.” Participants wore black T-shirts bearing the slogan “ReNew Orleans” on the front and their club’s name on the back. The event drew 8,000 people from across the socioeconomic spectrum – including more middle-class blacks and whites than usual, partly because, as the first big post-Katrina second line, it was embraced by everyone seeking evidence that New Orleans’s black cultural traditions and the city itself were back. It also drew large numbers of displaced New Orleanians. Thousands of them drove or flew in from Baton Rouge, Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta (and some from as far away as San Francisco, New York, and Portland) to participate in the parade, to check on their homes, neighbourhoods, friends, and family, and articulate publicly an intention, and perhaps a right, to return to the city. The second line’s route made note of the destruction of African American neighbourhoods before and following the flooding and spoke to the hope of rebuilding those areas.34

Tragically,19 what was supposed to be an ode to renewal was marred by a shooting near the Zulu Club headquarters on Broad Street and Orleans Avenue that wounded three residents. New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) Superintendent Warren Riley used the incident as an excuse to bulk up the numbers of officers assigned to every second line and to raise parade permit fees from approximately $1,250 per club (right before the hurricane) to $4,445.35 Considering this decision as an attempt to drive most clubs off the street, Prince of Wales president Joe

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Stern and New Orleans Bayou Steppers president Michele Longino formed a coalition of local parading groups that challenged the fee increase in court. The American Civil Liberties Unions (ACLU), which filed the lawsuit on its behalf, argued that the new fees threatened the very existence of the tradition by denying paraders the right to free expression under the First Amendment. The complaint also alleged that Fourteenth Amendment protections had been compromised because the police escort and bonding requirements imposed on the clubs were unreasonable and excessive. Attorneys for the police argued, on the other hand, that second lines were lightning rods for violence and that they were private events, distinct from public holiday parades protected under the city’s Mardi Gras Code (chapter 34 of the Municipal Code), thus allowing the city to set fees at its discretion. Ultimately, the ACLU was successful, and in May 2007 the NOPD settled, agreeing to return the fee to its original level and give the paraders an hour on the street after the parade to socialize.36 The judgment paved the way for weekly second lines to play their cathartic role in the renewal of black working- class neighbourhoods and of the city.37

On20 October 6, 2007, the streets of Tremé filled with sound again, this time for an impromptu jazz funeral in honour of the New Birth Brass Band tuba player Kerwin James, who had died of complications from a stroke several days earlier. As dozens of musicians played the hymn “I’ll Fly Away,” the police showed up and told the mourners to disperse. When the musicians continued playing, officers waded into the crowd, physically quieting the musicians. They ended up arresting drummer Derrick Tabb and his brother, trombonist Glen David Andrews, for disturbing the peace and parading without a permit. After negotiations between community organizations and the NOPD, the procession continued the following night under permit.38

Like21 the debate about fee increases, the Kerwin James funeral incident gave New Orleanians the opportunity to discuss issues of violence and gentrification as well as the city’s dissimilar treatment of New Orleans’s black and white cultural traditions. One prominent concern was the right of community members to control public space. There was disagreement among Tremé residents as to whether the mourners should have agreed to parade with a permit the following night. Some argued that to do so actually meant giving up claims to both space and tradition. Others hinted that applying for a permit was a way to legitimize a cultural practice and, more practically, obtain welcome protection from delinquents who might disrupt the event. Commentators also puzzled over the NOPD’s general tendency to enforce or ignore official municipal regulations depending on the context. In response to a police statement according to which the celebrants had broken the law and the city tolerated no exceptions to the ordinance that prohibited playing music on the street after 8 p.m., some people pointed out that exceptions to city ordinances were made all the time for Mardi Gras parades and other touristy events in the French Quarter – the city’s “Creole Disneyland.”39 Others noted that

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police intervention had come at the request of some of the newer residents of the gentrifying Tremé, interpreting the incident as proof that the latter’s “right to the city” was taking precedent over that of the long-time working- or lower- middle-class residents of the neighbourhood. The irony of seeing newcomers trying to regulate Tremé’s cultural life when they had precisely been drawn to the area by its rich cultural history was not missed, and led to renewed debate over the city’s future in the local and the national media.

3.2. The 2012 Mardi Gras Indian St. Joseph’s Night Procession

22 Our second case study, although still revolving around the question of parading without a permit, features different actors – Mardi Gras Indian tribes instead of social aid and pleasure clubs. Its outcome (appeasement, after decades of friction) also deviates from the course set by the Kerwin James incident.

Mardi23 Gras Indian rituals in New Orleans have always been associated with resistance since their appearance in the 1890s. Reid Mitchell thus maintains that masking Indian was a shared political meaning among African Americans to which whites did not have access, “a form of black protest that claimed ritual space in a Jim Crow New Orleans.”40 Tribes, whose names tend to blend Native American and African influences with New Orleans geography (Creole Wild West, Wild Squatoolas, Wild Tchoupitoulas, Eighth Ward Hunters, Mandingo Warriors, Congo Nation, Guardians of the Flame, Yellow Pocahontas, Wild Treme and many others) would claim control of their neighbourhoods through masking, parading, and fighting. These tools were hardly the panoply of formal, representative democracy, and there was an exclusionary character to the tribes that the fighting exhibited. Still, masking and parading were expressions of self-governance in black neighbourhoods.

Over24 time, physical violence yielded to artistic rivalry.41 Lisa Katzman’s 2007 film, Tootie’s Last Suit, documents the competition that Allison “Tootie” Montana, former big chief of the Yellow Pocahontas tribe, had with his son, Darryl, over who was the “prettiest” Indian.42 Katzman conveys the seriousness of purpose involved in the Indians’ creations. Enormous amounts of skill, time and dedication go into making the complex feather-and-bead costumes that are donned on Mardi Gras and St. Joseph’s night – a sort of mi-carême, or Mid-Lenten break.

During25 the fall and winter leading up to Mardi Gras, members of the tribes practise their dancing and singing in African American sections of the city. Through these weekly rehearsals, children are nurtured in musical and dance traditions. Michael Smith observes that “certainly the most significant aspect of the Black Indian tradition are the tribal organizations and friendships, which continue all year long, and the ‘practices’ on Sunday evenings […] where the dancing,

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drumming, and communal traditions are continued.”43 For the tribes and their neighbourhoods, all this activity contributes to community, fosters a distinctive public life for African Americans, and provides constructive responses to crime and violence in the city. In Katzman’s documentary, Darryl Montana alludes to troubles he used to have; it is clear that he has left them behind to embrace the life-affirming traditions of African American masking.44 There is a clear recognition among Black Indians of how involvement in the tribes’ parades directs people’s attentions to constructive and culturally meaningful connections in New Orleans’s black neighborhoods.

Some26 actually argue that “Mardigridian” parading constitutes a form of “democracy without (or rather despite) government,”45 insofar as it displays a self-consciousness about using the streets in spectacular and inclusive ways to articulate African American traditions. This political self-consciousness is about resistance, resilience, shared energy, community spirit, and support for a participatory African American public space. As Ned Sublette states, “The Indians embody resistance. You can sum it up in four words: ‘We won’t bow down’.”46

Since27 Mardi Gras Indians tribes have always refused to ask for parade permits, they have long been confronted to threats of arrest or police harassment. Police-Indian relations reached a low point on March 19, 2005 when the NOPD raided a gathering of hundreds of Indians at A. L. Davis Park in Central City on St. Joseph’s Night, ordering them to remove their Indian suits or be arrested, as recounted in a 2005 Gambit article by Katy Reckdahl.47Indians, who take pride in policing themselves, sanctioning members who engage in or advocate violence, were naturally outraged. The incident resulted in a City Council hearing in June 2005 (two months before Katrina made landfall) that ended abruptly when Allison “Tootie” Montana collapsed at the podium from a fatal heart attack as he was discussing the police brutality that he had experienced during his fifty-two years of participating in the tradition. In the wake of the hurricane, police intimidation continued, with police officers regularly demonstrating antagonism toward gatherings of Indians and disrupting ritualistic meetings of prominent Big Chiefs in 2009, 2010, and 2011.48

In28 2011, however, a Sound Ordinance Task Force put together by Councilwoman Kristin Gisleson Palmer proposed a revision to the edict limiting music on the streets that a member of the mayor’s staff described as “more enforceable for police, and more respectful to musicians.”49 Then, at a City Hall meeting of the City Council’s Governmental Affairs Committee, chaired by Councilwoman Susan Guidry, police and Indians sorted through issues that had long divided them. At the meeting, attended by every NOPD district commander, Deputy Superintendent Kirk Bouyelas announced that the New Orleans Police Department would no longer arrest Indians or use sirens and lights to force them off the streets. Bouyelas said that the department would also require most officers patrolling Indian parades to be on foot

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rather than inside squad cars and that they would be taught at a district and academy level to have a “positive attitude” toward the centuries-old tradition. When police suggested that Indian tribes should get permits to parade the streets, Jerome Smith, founder of the Tambourine and Fan youth organization which teaches children about New Orleans culture, including the Mardi Gras Indian tradition, said “You cannot police a bird. The streets belong to the people.” Susan Guidry subsequently made it clear that that suggestion was no longer on the table. As a result of these extensive negotiations, the St. Joseph’s Night parade in 2012 was the first in years not to involve dust-ups between police and Mardi Gras Indians.50

Figure 1

Posters bearing Jerome Smith’s quote were put up in Uptown New Orleans in anticipation of St. Joseph’s Night 2012. Image courtesy of Anthony Turducken DelRosario.

Such29 a detente may of course be interpreted as yet another sign that Mardi Gras Indian traditions are becoming more mainstream, sanitised, and domesticated as they find new audiences.51 The odds of that happening seem low, however. Interest in the Indian masks and suits may spread, but the culture itself cannot really be reproduced elsewhere, for it is entirely in and of New Orleans. Its heart lies not in the public performances, dramatic though they are, but in the traditions passed down in song and in the countless hours spent alone in a room conjuring history with a needle, some thread and thousands of sequins, feathers and beads.

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3.3. The 2011 Krewe of Eris Parade

30 Our last case study veers away from the field of black performance traditions and deals with a (mostly) white carnival group. Carnival krewes are often portrayed as bastions of privilege, whiteness and masculinity.52 While many organizations do conform to this description, the world of Mardi Gras in New Orleans is far more complex than these sources let on. Traditional organizations (be they “old-line krewes” such as Comus, Proteus, Momus, and Rex, or “super-krewes” such as Bacchus, Endymion, and Orpheus) have always been challenged by alternative parades with differing definitions of revelry and conceptions of public space. In the 1910s, Zulu lampooned the wealthy “big shots” who paraded around on Mardi Gras in expensive and extravagant costumes. Its members’ uniform (blackface and grass skirts) was meant to ridicule the demeaning portrayal of their African American neighbours by poking fun at the minstrel stereotype. Zulu has since been incorporated into the licensed festivities, to the point that it closes the official parade schedule together with Rex. In 2000 the Krewe of Muses decided to challenge the male-dominated carnival by organizing an all-female parade, complete with girlie throws such as decorated shoes, lighted necklaces, purses. It is now one of the most popular parades of the carnival season. An up-to-date list of alternative parades would include such krewes as ‘Tit Rex (which parades with miniature floats to denounce the escalating costs of Mardi Gras), Krewe Delusion (the Big Easy’s newest satirical parade, from which a dozen “innerkrewes” emanate), the science-fiction-themed Intergalatic Krewe of Chewbacchus, as well as the Krewe of Eris.

Named31 after the Greek goddess of discord, Eris is a foot parade that both honours and transgresses New Orleans parading traditions. Its founders, Ms. Lateacha and Lord Willin, used to participate in New Orleans’s downtown-based, punk Krewe du Poux, until they decided to experiment with another aesthetic in 2005. Their original aim was to “give back” to the city where they wintered every year. “I wanted to contribute and give something back to New Orleans instead of just taking and absorbing culture,” Latachea explained in a 2011 interview.53 By choosing to incorporate a brass band (the Eris band), original tunes (the triumphant “Eris Anthem,” written by a musician called JR who teaches would-be band members to play in the weeks leading to the parade) and by selecting a different theme every year (“Planet Eris” in 2007, “The Swarm” in 2008, “Mutagenesis” in 2011, “Eris Dawns” in 2013), Latachea and Lord Willin paid homage to indigenous festive traditions – what they call “the roots of Carnival” in New Orleans.54 Eris, however, deliberately went against the grain by advocating an explicitly anti-authoritarian perspective. Inspired by James Gill’s book about the history of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Lords of Misrule, its founders sought to bring something rowdier to the contemporary parades. “Even the first year, it was just an open call for creative chaos,” Lord Willin explains.55 While other carnival organizations are prohibitively

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expensive to join in, or simply closed to new members, Eris is free, open, and the costumes and floats are all designed and made by participants. Furthermore, although all krewes are required by law to obtain a permit in order to march, Eris has consistently refused to even apply for one, preferring instead to express its freedom by marching without permission.

Katrina32 was a turning point for the krewe, as it was for so many of New Orleans’s residents. The krewe’s theme that year was “Noveaux Limbeaux,” a phrase meant to “capture the mood of uncertainty that was pervading the city” after the levees broke.56 The founders of Eris were not sure whether they should parade at all, but they did so to send a message of hope as well as to reclaim public space. “I like[d] the idea of having a beautiful parade,” says Victor Pizzaro, a 40-year-old member of the krewe who takes a dim view of the post-Katrina influx of do-gooders from New England and the Pacific Northwest. “And this was [also part of] a greater conversation about what’s happened with New Orleans since the storm. […] Ultimately, it’s about empowerment, it’s about getting people to be able to create.”57

The33 2006 parade took two hundred brightly costumed artists and activists from the 1892 site where Homer Plessy, a black shoemaker from the Tremé, had been removed from a “whites only” car on an East Louisiana Railroad train, to Bywater (part of the city’s Ninth Ward), with its shiny paraphernalia of gentrification (art galleries, cafés), in order to protest attacks on free space, the abrupt inflation of rent in poor neighborhoods, and the razing of hundreds of houses for a new upper-end hospital, all of which stemmed from “an effort to […] homogenize the city’s culture.”58

In34 the years leading to 2011, the parade’s embrace of decentralization became more patent. “[Originally, Latachea and I] put in a lot of long hours bottom-lining Eris. […] Then […] we quit being in charge and Eris became a group decision-making process.”59 A side effect of that structurelessness was the emergence of discord within the ranks. In 2010, following repeated conflict with the New Orleans Police Department, members debated whether they should occupy Jackson Square or continue following their usual route through the Marigny and French Quarter. Lateacha clearly favoured the second option: [Jackson Square] is a very controlled space. Last year the cops were arrayed there waiting for us. New Orleans police hold grudges, and these days they figure out ahead of time when we’re happening. We used to have the advantage that they were all at Bacchus, but now they’re ready. Even if we ‘liberated’ Jackson Square, it would only be for five minutes. That doesn’t seem worth what it would cost. I think Eris reclaims enough space through movement, and keeping moving is a big part of Eris. By focusing on taking a single space, you sacrifice continuing feelings of liberation for a single moment of liberation. There are times when that’s worth it, but as someone who believes in the longevity of Eris, I don’t think this is one of them.60

35 To some, it seemed as if the krewe was not quite living up to its revolutionary or insurrectionary, inspirational beginnings. “So Eris is

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the goddess of chaos,” one krewe member named Peter explained in 2012. “[T]o me it actually does mean a lot. You summon that and you’re begging to overturn the social order. […] You have to stand behind what you say. If you’re saying, ‘I want to see chaos,’ you know? Sometimes that’s people doing things you don’t expect and that’s going to end up in a little bit of a battle.”61

When36 Latachea expressed her desire to see the krewe be more active beyond just the yearly parade and compared the possibility of an expanded Eris to the way traditional social aid and pleasure clubs operate, helping build community spirit and sponsoring regular social or fundraising events, people like Peter decided to bring in more anarchistic-minded friends to the parade, which led to renewed conflict with the NOPD.

On37 the night of March 6th, 2011 (known as “Sunday Gras”), the parade was re-routed, avoiding Decatur Street in the French Quarter and Jackson Square. The year’s theme, “Mutagenesis,” was meant as a satire of corporate contamination and state collusion as illustrated by the BP oil spill. The krewe’s open-ended call for a “creative response” was answered by a joyous group of about 250 Erisians dressed as the fish, shorebirds, and other Gulf creatures whose ecosystems had been disturbed by the April 2010 environmental disaster (much like Katrina had disrupted theirs in 2005). The 2011 parade, however, also attracted participants who wished to not just dance wildly in the streets but to leap on top of cars, throw residential dustbins about, and paint phalluses on random objects. As the spectacle neared its end, Eris was met by members of the New Orleans Police Department’s Fifth District. A skirmish ensued. As often in these circumstances, reports go from pure, unprovoked police brutality, to reckless vandalism from krewe members. It does seem, however, that revellers were tased, batoned, and pepper-sprayed, that brass instruments were crushed, and that phones and cameras documenting the raid were destroyed. In the end, twelve arrests were made.62 A few days later, on Ash Wednesday, the NOPD shut down the ARC, a warehouse space that had for years been home to Plan B Community Bicycle Shop and the Iron Rail Library and Bookstore, for lack of permit. As it happens, the founder of Plan B was also a member of the Krewe of Eris. Clearly, this raid was more than mere revenge on the police’s part. It was a way of making sure that the city’s definition of public and private space would prevail over that of its more nonconformist residents.

Since38 the ill-fated 2011 parade, Eris has become even more clandestine, refusing interviews and corresponding with its members via text messages only. In 2012, it gathered at a secret address for 127 minutes before parading without a permit through the city’s Ninth Ward while the city-sanctioned Mardi Gras went about raging uptown.63 The parade was shut down quickly, and the future of the krewe is now uncertain, with some of its members advocating a return to leadership, the limitation of its ranks to a more carefully defined body, and the

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initiation of a courteous dialogue with the city of New Orleans on issues of reconstruction and gentrification,64 and others recommending a continuation of the anarchic approach revolving around the illegal occupation of the city streets.65 “My fear is that if there is a permit, the police will be with us the whole time and I personally don’t like being around police,” one krewe member explained in 2012. “I don’t like being around cops. I want to have a certain level of freedom. I’m not looking to fuck up someone’s car or break someone’s window, but I am looking to have that experience, that existential experience of freedom that the police rob you of with their immediate presence.”66

To39 people like Peter, Eris is a political gesture meant to foreground an alternative to the prevailing vertical model, or “the pyramid,” which they argue curbs creativity and pits people against each other. They suggest that “anything from a farm to a factory to a parade to a movement” could be organized according to a “horizontal model” and that the results would be much better for the city of New Orleans and the world at large.67

Conclusion: Democracy in the Crescent City’s Streets

40 The parades discussed in this paper have been central to the post- disaster recovery of the city, not only because of their ability to stimulate economic activity or to appeal to tourist interests, but because of the meaning they have for participants. Partakers in these rituals have created “mytho-poetic spaces rich with reinvented symbols of the past”68 that have allowed them to negotiate their identities in the face of adversity. While outsiders may be struck by the resilience of the city and its culture, insiders emphasize the enduring power of ritualised collective effervescence. The perpetual calendar of parades69 provides a stable reality within a complex, fragmented, and unpredictable world. Individual identities associated with such a culture extend into everyday life and sustain the meaning of the experience.

Writing41 about Johannesburg, Abdou Maliq Simone suggests that one way to think about an urban area after “the policies and economies that once moored it to the surrounding city have mostly worn away” is to consider people as “an infrastructure – a platform providing for and reproducing life in the city.”70 It is the residents of the city who find ways to reconnect, to build new ways of interacting with meaningful places in their lives – even if they have been dramatically transformed. These meaning-filled experiences help to explain how the impetus to parade can, even momentarily, upstage the work of rebuilding a city.

What42 these three case studies also make clear, however, is that parading in post-Katrina New Orleans cannot be reduced to a festive, communal practice. Debates and commentary about parading fees and parade safety provide a window onto disputes and conflicts involving the right to residency in the city, the ownership of its culture, and the use of public space.

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Like43 other scholars before us, we see parades as “mobile public spheres,”71 constituted in real time, but also as events that open up a broader, ongoing space for reflection on key issues pertaining to the future of urban areas. In that sense, parades are “battlefields of contention,”72 displays of power through which parade participants make claims on contested spaces.

Parades44 do not intrinsically create “deep” or full emancipatory democracy because they are often disconnected from major centres of power. Instead of discursive forms found at marches with an explicitly political program (signs, banners, and speeches), parade participants in New Orleans “speak” through practices linked to black and white performance traditions. Second lines, Mardi Gras Indian processions, and carnival parades do not explicitly or directly speak to changing specific public policies, and so they are not part of formal governmental policy determination.73

Still,45 under conditions of substantial inequality and government disregard of the disempowered, parading is a public activity that recognizes lack of access to formal political power and improves the quality of life. In other words, parades constitute a form of “democracy despite government.” They allow the disempowered and disenfranchised to claim a public place and to give voice to their cultural and political beliefs. Anarchist Mardi Gras parades like those organized by the Krewe of Eris function at least in part as populist reclamations of space rooted in New Orleanian cultural practices. Second lines and Mardi Gras Indian parades also provide opportunities for an egalitarian, open, and participatory discourse. They memorialize past events and foster hope for the future. Their brand of politics may not be immediately operational, but it can overtly speak to local, state, or federal government oppression.

Parades,46 therefore, challenge the character of public space and the terms of political discourse. They reject the privatisation and instrumentalisation of public space and call for its communal and expressive use. They seek to expand political discourse beyond formal rational dialogue aiming at consensus and to extend that discourse into civil society. They open spaces for alternative modes of expression, reminding us that “because civil society is heterogeneous, so too should be what counts as politically relevant dialogue or expression.”74

In47 the future, our research will look at how New Orleans’ local parading culture has influenced and benefited from the rise of global democratic performance. Political scientists, social movement theorists and cultural geographers have made us aware of forms of micro- political resistance that have challenged the corporatisation and securitisation of the city. An increasing tactical feature of such resistance has been the deployment of leisure practices to challenge the dominant norms and ideologies governing the use of urban space.75By comparing the festive reclaiming of the city with other forms of urban mobilization such as the 2011-2013 Occupy NOLA actions and the 2009

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Reclaim the Streets “protestival” (protest + carnival) that marked the 10th anniversary of the WTO protests in Seattle and ended in six arrests by New Orleans police, we intend to show that the boundary between established festive organizations and newer grassroots urban social movements is slowly eroding in New Orleans (to wit the birth of the anarchist Guise of Fawkes Krewe in 2014) and that such erosion points to a more global merging of the carnivalesque with the political in urban settings. In the wake of Katrina New Orleans’s civic life may be transitioning from practices anchored in “genealogies of performance”76 derived from Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean to new forms of public intervention derived from an international, globalized culture of urban protest.

NOTES

1. The 2008 official death toll lists one fatality in Kentucky, two each in Alabama, Georgia, and Ohio, 14 in Florida, 238 in Mississippi, and 1,577 in Louisiana. It is estimated that some three-quarters of Louisiana’s Katrina-related deaths occurred in New Orleans, where about 70 percent of the victims were age 60 and older. See Peter Katel, “Rebuilding New Orleans: Should Flood-Prone Areas Be Redeveloped?” CQ Researcher16.5 (2006): 97-120. http://www.cqpress.com/ product/Researcher-Rebuilding-New-Orleans.html. 2. Bring New Orleans Back Commission, “Action Plan for New Orleans: The New American City.” Urban Planning Committee, 2006. . The water did not recede until late September. 3. By 2010, the city’s population was still only 71 percent of what it was in 2000. By 2012 it was back up to 369,250 – 76 percent of what it was in 2000. See Melissa Schigoda, “Hurricane Katrina Impact,” Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, August 19, 2011 http://www.hurstvillesecurity.com/ images/page_uploads/Recovery%20- %20Hurricane%20Katrina%20Impact%20Fact%20Summary%20%28GNOCDC%29%20%28Aug%202011%29.pdf Allison Plyer, “Facts for Features: Katrina Impact,” Data Center Research, 2014 http://www.datacenterresearch.org/data-resources/katrina/facts-for-impact/. 4. Sheila Crowley, “Where Is Home? Housing for Low-Income People After the 2005 Hurricanes,” in Chester W. Hartman and Gregory D. Squires, eds, There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, and Hurricane Katrina (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2006), 121. 5. See John Arena, Driven from New Orleans: How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Promote Privatization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); George Lipsitz, “Learning from New Orleans: The Social Warrant of Hostile Privatism and Competitive Consumer Citizenship,” Cultural Anthropology 21.3 (2006): 451-468; Siri J. Colom, “The Politics of Visibility:

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Contentious Struggle over Public Housing in Post-Katrina New Orleans,” Conference presentation, Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, New York City, 2013; http://citation.allacademic.com/meta/ p650211_index.html; Paola Branciaroli, “Public Spaces in New Orleans Post Katrina. Plans and Projects as Instruments for Urban and Social Revitalization,” Italian Journal of Planning Practice 3.1 (2014): 93-109; Renia Ehrenfeucht, “Art, Public Spaces, and Private Property along the Streets of New Orleans,” Urban Geography 35.7 (2014): 965-979. 6. Marcel Hénaff and Tracy B. Strong, Public Space and Democracy (Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: Guilford Press, 2003); Mark Purcell, Recapturing Democracy: Neoliberalization and the Struggle for Alternative Urban Futures (New York: Routledge, 2008); Kevin Mattson, Creating a Democratic Public: The Struggle for Urban Participatory Democracy During the Progressive Era (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 2010); Lisa Keller, Triumph of Order: Democracy and Public Space in New York and London (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Nancy S. Love and Mark Mattern, Doing Democracy: Activist Art and Cultural Politics (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2013). 7. Samuel Kinser, Carnival American Style: Mardi Gras at New Orleans and Mobile (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 1990); Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum- Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Wesley Shrum and John Kilburn, “Ritual Disrobement at Mardi Gras: Ceremonial Exchange and Moral Order,” Social Forces 75.2 (1996): 423-458; Reid Mitchell, All On a Mardi Gras Day. Episodes in the History of New Orleans Carnival (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Helen A. Regis, “Second Lines, Minstrelsy, and the Contested Landscapes of New Orleans Afro-Creole Festivals,” Cultural Anthropology 14 (1999): 472-504; Marcia G. Gaudet and James C. McDonald, Mardi Gras, Gumbo, and Zydeco: Readings in Louisiana Culture (Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 2003); Rachel Breunlin and Helen A. Regis, “Putting the Ninth Ward on the Map: Race, Place, and Transformation in Desire, New Orleans,” American Anthropologist 108.4 (2006): 744-764; Cynthia Becker, “New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians: Mediating Racial Politics from the Backstreets to Main Street,” African Arts 46.2 (2013): 36-49. 8. Clyde A. Woods, “Do you Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans? Katrina, Trap Economics, and the Rebirth of the Blues,” American Quarterly 57 (2005): 1005-1018; Nine Times Social Aid and Pleasure Club, “Coming Out the Door for the Ninth Ward” (New Orleans, LA: Neighborhood Story Project, 2006); Matt Sakakeeny, “Resounding Silence in a Musical City,” Space and Culture 9 (2006): 41-44; Bruce Boyd, “‘They’re Tryin’ to Wash Us Away’: New Orleans Musicians Surviving Katrina,” Journal of American History 94.3 (2007): 812–819; Michael White, “New Orleans African American Musical Traditions: The Spirit and Soul of a City,” in Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke, eds., Seeking Higher Ground: The Hurricane Katrina Crisis, Race and Public Policy Reader (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 87-106; Chelsey Louise Kivland, “Hero, Eulogist, Trickster, and Critic: Ritual and Crisis in Post-Katrina Mardi Gras” in Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke, eds., Seeking Higher Ground: The

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Hurricane Katrina Crisis, Race and Public Policy Reader (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 107-128; Rachel Breunlin, Ronald W. Lewis, and Helen A. Regis, “The House of Dance and Feathers: A Museum by Ronald W. Lewis” (New Orleans, LA: UNO Press/Neighborhood Story Project, 2009); Joel Dinerstein, “Second Lining Post-Katrina: Learning Community from the Prince of Wales Social Aid and Pleasure Club,” American Quarterly 61 (2009): 615-637; Eric Porter, “Jazz and Revival,” American Quarterly 61.3 (2009): 593-613; R. E. Barrios, “You Found Us Doing This, This Is Our Way: Criminalizing Second Lines, Super Sunday, and Habitus in Post-Katrina New Orleans,” Identities 17 (2010): 586-612; Catherine Michna, “Hearing the Hurricane Coming: Storytelling, Second-Line Knowledges, and the Struggle for Democracy in New Orleans” (Ph.D. dissertation, Boston College, 2011); Rachel Carrico, “On Thieves, Spiritless Bodies, and Creole Soul: Dancing through the Streets of New Orleans,” TDR: The Drama Review 57.1 (2013): 70-87; John O’Neal et al., “Performance and Cross-Racial Storytelling in Post-Katrina New Orleans: Interviews with John O’Neal, Carol Bebelle, and Nicholas Slie,” TDR: The Drama Review 57.1 (2013): 48-69; Matt Sakakeeny,Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Snedeker, Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2013); Romain Huret and Randy J. Sparks, Hurricane Katrina in Transatlantic Perspective (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014). 9. Abdou Maliq Simone, “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg,” Public Culture 16.3 (2004): 407. 10. For the sake of convenience, we will henceforth adopt Diane Grams’s definition of parading as “a processional activity sponsored by a nongovernmental social or cultural organization, taking place on city streets, and involving costumed performers and live music from marching bands, brass bands, or percussionists with chanting choruses.” Diane M. Grams, “Freedom and Cultural Consciousness: Black Working-Class Parades in Post-Katrina New Orleans,” Journal of Urban Affairs 35.5 (2013): 502. 11. Lipsitz, Time Passages, 1990; Cherice Harrison-Nelson, “Guardians of the Flame: Upholding Community Traditions and Teaching with Art in New Orleans,” In Motion Magazine (1996); Roach, Cities of the Dead, 1996; Henry Schindler, Mardi Gras: New Orleans (New York: Flammarion, 1997); James Gill, Lords of Misrule: Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans (Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 1997); Regis, “Second Lines, Minstrelsy, and the Contested Landscapes of New Orleans Afro-Creole Festivals”; Arthur Hardy, Mardi Gras in New Orleans: An Illustrated History, 1st edition (Metairie, LA: Arthur Hardy Enterprises, 2001); Gaudet and McDonald, Mardi Gras, Gumbo, and Zydeco. 12. Rosary O’Neill, New Orleans Carnival Krewes: The History, Spirit and Secrets of Mardi Gras (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2014), 34-42. 13. Kinser, Carnival American Style. 14. Freddi Williams Evans, Congo Square: African Roots in New Orleans (Lafayette, LA: University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 2011). New Orleans was not the only city that had a place for slaves to freely gather. There was a place in Philadelphia, for example, where slaves met during the colonial period. That space, also called Congo Square, is now called Washington Square.

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15. Early references to Congo Square almost all come from notes taken by city outsiders, especially American European travellers such as Christian Schultz (1808), Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1819), and James Creecy (1834). Locals did not seem to find it worthy of documentation, except in arrest records. Indeed, some of the best evidence of African creative practices in New Orleans comes from the laws that were intended to control or prohibit them. See Jerah Johnson, “New Orleans’s Congo Square: An Urban Setting for Early Afro American Culture Formation,” Louisiana History 33.2 (1993): 117-57; Joseph Roach, “Carnival and the Law in New Orleans,” TDR: The Drama Review 37.3 (1993): 42-75; Evans, Congo Square. 16. Gary A. Donaldson, “A Window on Slave Culture: Dances at Congo Square in New Orleans, 1800-1862,” Journal of Negro History 69.2 (1984): 63-72. 17. Kinser, Carnival American Style; Roach, Cities of the Dead; Gill, Lords of Misrule; O’Neill, New Orleans Carnival Krewes. 18. Kevin F. Gotham, Authentic New Orleans: Tourism, Culture, and Race in the Big Easy (New York: New York University Press, 2007); Paul Spindt and Toni Weiss, “The Economic Impact of Mardi Gras Season on the New Orleans Economy and the Net Fiscal Benefit of Staging Mardi Gras for the City of New Orleans” (New Orleans, LA: Carnival Krewe Civic Fund, 2009). http:// www.rexorganization.com/Downloads/2009/MardiGrasStudy.pdf. 19. From a Kiswahili word meaning “great tragedy,” the Maafa (pronounced “mah-AH-fa”) is a procession held every July since 2000 in memory of the transatlantic slave trade. It begins at Congo Square and ends at the Algiers ferry landing. 20. The City of New Orleans’s current parade permit application form even includes “foot races/marathons/walkathons” in its list of parades. City of New Orleans One Stop Permits and Licenses, “Special Event Permit Guide and Applications,” NOLA.gov, 2015. http://www.nola.gov/getattachment/Cultural- Economy/Special-Event-Guide.pdf/. 21. New Orleans City Council, “Regular Meeting News Summary,” NOLACityCouncil.com, 24 April 2014. http://www.nolacitycouncil.com/news/ meetingsummary.asp?id={A94D6270-0F39-4B23-B5B1-FAAD83071990}. 22. Since Katrina the annual second line schedule has grown to include about 45 clubs, parading on 39 Sundays between the last Sunday in August and Fathers Day in mid-June. Weekends that do not have a second line parade include: Sundays that fall in the heat of summer (end of June through August), two weeks before Mardi Gras, and the last weekend in April and first in May when the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival takes place. During Mardi Gras many SAPC members mask Indian; during Jazz Fest, many clubs and tribes are paid to parade through the festival grounds. See Joel Dinerstein, “Rollin’ Wid It. 39 Sundays: Second-Line Season,” in Solnit and Snedeker, eds., New Orleans: Unfathomable City, 107-115. 23. Social aid and pleasure clubs were originally established to provide economic assistance and proper burials for those without means. Recreational activities soon complemented the mutual aid functions of the fraternal groups. 24. Grams, “Freedom and Cultural Consciousness,” 502. 25. Mardi Gras Indian culture used to be an exclusively male preserve – “a warrior culture” – but it appears to be slowly changing. Cherice Harrison- Nelson has been masking as the Big Queen of the Guardians of the Flame since 1996. See Harrison-Nelson, “Guardians of the Flame”. While many groups start

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their parades from bars or taverns, her gang, which includes several other women and a number of children, got permission in 2011 to leave from St Augustine’s, a beautiful Catholic church in Tremé built by free black people in the early 19th century. 26. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1991). Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. 27. Regis, “Second Lines, Minstrelsy, and the Contested Landscapes of New Orleans Afro-Creole Festivals”; Helen A. Regis, “Blackness and the Politics of Memory in the New Orleans Second Line,” American Ethnologist 28.4 (2001): 752-777. 28. The 1877 carnival, for example, celebrated the violent end of Reconstruction in Louisiana and the re-establishment of white rule. The Krewe of Momus took as its theme, “Hades – A Dream of Momus” and offered a virulent caricature of local, state, and national Reconstruction leaders, including President Ulysses S. Grant, who was portrayed as Beelzebub, and General William Tecumseh Sherman, who was mocked as Baal. Other prominent Republicans who came under fire included James G. Blaine and Frederick Douglass. The final float showed the entire ship of state going up in flames. The satire was so outrageous that some Louisiana Republicans suggested that the organizers should be arrested. If the message were not clear enough, Comus’s parade, which closed the season, celebrated the superiority of “The Aryan Race.” See Gill, Lords of Misrule, 125-128. 29. Thomas D. Brothers, Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 22. 30. Regis, “Blackness and the Politics of Memory in the New Orleans Second Line,” 756. 31. Quoted in Joel Dinerstein, “39 Sundays,” 111. 32. Carried by four celebrants (two in front and two in back) to keep the dancing second line off the moving stage, this is the only structuring device that controls the movement of the crows. 33. Mitchell, The Right to the City, 32. 34. Katy Reckdahl, “The Price of Parading,” Offbeat Magazine, 1 November 2006. http://www.offbeat.com/articles/the-price-of-parading/. 35. That number was later reduced to $2,220, until another shooting brought it back up to $3,760 in March 2006. 36. Lewis Watts and Eric Porter, New Orleans Suite: Music and Culture in Transition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 42-43. 37. The debate on parade fees has nevertheless left its marks: the present day fee of $1,985 has forced some clubs to pool their resources and stage a single parade involving several clubs, each having their own division and their own brass band. 38. Matt Sakakeeny, “Under the Bridge: An Orientation to Soundscapes in New Orleans,” Ethnomusicology 54:1 (2010): 16. 39. Jonathan Mark Souther, New Orleans on Parade: Tourism and the Transformation of the Crescent City (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006): 159. 40. Mitchell, All on a Mardi Gras Day, 116. 41. Historian Samuel Kinser explains that Indian masking gradually “substitute[d] aesthetic for fighting prowess.” Kinser, Carnival American Style, 160.

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42. Lisa Katzman, Tootie’s Last Suit (New York: Lisa Katzman Productions, 2007). 43. Michael P. Smith, Spirit World : Pattern in the Expressive Folk Culture of Afro-American New Orleans (New Orleans, LA : New Orleans Urban Folklife Society, 1984), 85. 44. Katzman, Tootie’s Last Suit. 45. Peter G. Stillman and Adelaide H. Villmoare, “Democracy Despite Government: African American Parading and Democratic Theory,” in Love and Mattern, Doing Democracy, 485-99. 46. Neil Sublette, The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square (Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press, 2008), 294. “We won’t bow down/On that dirty ground” is a couplet that is at the centre of the most famous Mardi Gras Indian chant, “Indian Red.” 47. Katy Reckdahl, “St. Joseph’s Night Gone Blue,” Gambit, 29 March 29 2005. http://www.bestofneworleans.com/gambit/st-josephs-night-gone-blue/Content? oid=1244049. 48. On March 19, 2010, for instance, a squad car with its siren blasting disrupted nearly twenty Indians fanned out along St. Bernard Avenue during a ritualistic meeting of two prominent leaders, Big Chief Victor Harris from Spirit of FiYiYi and Second Chief David Montana from the Yellow Pocahontas. See Katy Reckdahl, “New Orleans Police Handling of Mardi Gras Indian Events Draws Praise/Criticism,” Times-Picayune, 20 March 2010. . On Mardi Gras Day 2011, police broke up a meeting of the Red Hawk Hunters and 9th Ward Hunters. See Watts and Porter, New Orleans Suite, 52. 49. Larry Blumenfeld, “Beyond Jazzfest, Ruffled Feathers in New Orleans,” Village Voice, 22 June 2011. http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-06-22/music/ beyond-jazzfest-ruffled-feathers/2/. 50. Katy Reckdahl, “Crackdown a Decade Ago Touched Off Powder Keg,” The New Orleans Advocate, 19 March 2015. http:// www.theneworleansadvocate.com/news/11880449-123/decade-after-st-josephs- day. 51. Pointing to Indian performances at mainstream events such as Jazz Fest or to museums displaying used Indian outfits (the custom used to be to burn them after St Joseph’s night), critics are quick to point out that what used to be an underground art form is becoming “an ethnic commodity that symbolizes black New Orleans.” Becker, “New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians,” 49. 52. Jennifer Atkins, “Setting the Stage: Dance and Gender in old-Line New Orleans Carnival Balls, 1870-1920,” Ph.D. dissertation (Tallahassee: Florida State University, 2008);Diane M. Grams, “Community parading and Symbolic Expression in Post-Katrina New Orleans” in Horace R. Hall, Cynthia Cole Robinson, and Amor Kohli, Uprooting Urban America: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Race, Class & Gentrification (New York: Peter Lang, 2014), 287-300; O’Neill, New Orleans Carnival Krewes. 53. Quoted in Jules Bentley, “Interview with the Krewe of Eris Founders,” The Raging Pelican 2 (2011). http://ragingpelican.com/interview-krewe-of-eris- founders/. Very few interviews of this founding couple exist, as Eris – like many anarchist organizations in New Orleans – cultivates secrecy. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid.

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56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Adam Chandler, “What the Occupy Movement Can Learn From a New Orleans Subculture,” The Atlantic, 24 April 2012. http://www.theatlantic.com/ national/archive/2012/04/what-the-occupy-movement-can-learn-from-a-new- orleans-subculture/256281/. 62. Eight of the cases were eventually resolved – including four with plea deals and one with dropped charges – while the Orleans Parish district attorney’s office moved three others to municipal court. One arrestee, William Watkins III, was given a jail term of 45 days. Two failed to appear for court hearings. See John Simerman, “Krewe of Eris Prosecutions in Scuffle with Police Produce Mixed Results,” Times-Picayune, 28 September 2011. http://www.nola.com/ crime/index.ssf/2011/09/krewe_of_eris_prosecutions_in.html. We were unable to find out what happened to Damien Weaver, who was charged separately from the other eleven because he faced the only felony counts in the group – battery of a police officer with injury and attempt to assist an escape. 63. Chandler, “What the Occupy Movement Can Learn From a New Orleans Subculture.” 64. These authority-minded members half-jokingly refer to themselves as “Eris Alpha.” 65. In 2012, most of the latter joined a splinter group called “The Krewe of Witches” that set a boisterous course through the streets of New Orleans one night before the Eris parade. 66. Quoted in Chandler, “What the Occupy Movement Can Learn From a New Orleans Subculture.” 67. Ibid. 68. Grams, “Freedom and Cultural Consciousness,” 509. 69. According to Diane Grams, the total number of parades has grown from near thirty in the parade season following Katrina’s landfall (September 2005- mid-June 2006) to about 150 in 2011. Ibid, 526. 70. Simone, “People as Infrastructure,” 411, 408. 71. Watts and Porter, New Orleans Suite, 33. 72. Gotham, Authentic New Orleans, 200. 73. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. On August 31, 2009, for example, a coalition of social aid and pleasure clubs organized a parade to protest the destruction of Charity Hospital (which provided two-thirds of the care for the uninsured in NOLA until 2005) in the face of plans for a new medical centre that would require demolition of parts of Mid-City New Orleans rebuilt since the storm. 74. Stillman and Villmoare, “Democracy Despite Government,” 328. 75. Paul Gilchrist and Neil Ravenscroft, “Space Hijacking and the Anarcho- Politics of Leisure,” Leisure Studies 32.1 (2013): 49-68. 76. Roach, Cities of the Dead, 25.

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ABSTRACTS

New Orleans has been the parading capital of the United States for close to two centuries. Since Hurricane Katrina, parades have become more important than ever, as many residents have called festive organizations home to reclaim urban space and say “We are New Orleans” or “This is our city.” This article will consider how the place-making practices of Mardi Gras Indian tribes, social aid and pleasure clubs, and carnival krewes have all reflected and informed citizens’ responses to displacement after Katrina. Drawing on Abdou Maliq Simon’s conceptualization of people as infrastructure and a series of three case studies, it will refocus the discussion on the rebuilding of the Crescent City around its citizens, taking the embodied festive practices of New Orleanians as a lens through which to examine the politicization of public space in post-Katrina New Orleans.

INDEX

Keywords: carnival, gentrification, Katrina, Mardi Gras Indians, New Orleans, parades, public spaces, right to the city, second lines

AUTHOR

AURÉLIE GODET Paris-Diderot University

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PART TWO Sustainability and the City: America and the Urban World

EDITOR'S NOTE

Edited by Theodora Tsimpouki

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Introduction: How (Can) Cities Work

Theodora Tsimpouki

1 “What is a City?”1 So begins the collection of essays in the recently published Cambridge companion to The City in Literature (2015). “Why Cities” 2 is the opening line of another recent publication edited by Robert Inman, and entitled Making Cities Work (2009). While the first question concerns the origins of social and political life, the second views cities as the main source of global economic growth and productivity. To these overriding questions pertaining to the urban enigma, I would like to pose another one: “How (can) Cities Work?” Although the impact of urbanization in recent decades and the key role that cities play in “sustainable development” have been widely acknowledged, sustainability discourses have remained for the most part theoretical, and pertaining to the global rather than the specific and the local. By sustaining the question of how cities can work, this collection of essays attempts an opening toward diverse approaches to individual cities both as geographical realities and spaces of creative intervention and artistic intertextuality.

2 This Special Issue originated from a Salzburg Global Seminar held in September 2013, under the title “Sustainability and the City: America and the Urban World.” The volume brings together six interdisciplinary essays that all address the contemporary process of urbanization. They do so by challenging abstract models of sustainability, as was the Brundtland Report,3 and focusing instead on specific practices, policies or interventions that promote the building and well-being of local communities. I hope that the readers of EJAS will recognize the passionate

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 167 commitment of its contributors whose engaging experience and academic expertise inform their formidable thinking. The volume would not have reached its completion without the exemplary guidance and support of Ana Manzanas. Special thanks go to the general editor of EJAS, Jenel Virden, for her patience and enthusiasm for the project.

NOTES

1. Antonis Balasopoulos’s “Celestial Cities and Rationalist Utopias,” in The City in Literature, ed. Kevin R. McNamara (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015): 17. 2. Robert P. Inman “Introduction: City Prospects, City Policies,” in Making Cities Work: Prospects and Policies for Urban America, ed. Robert P. Inman (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2009):1. 3. The Brundtland Report included the “classic” definition of sustainable development: “development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” The term, sustainable development, was popularized in the Brundtland report, also known as Our Common Future report, published by the World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987.

AUTHOR

THEODORA TSIMPOUKI University of Athens. Theodora Tsimpouki is Professor at the Faculty of English Studies, University of Athens. She studied at the University of Athens, the Sorbonne and at New York University from where she received her Ph.D. Her research has centered on American literature and culture, gender studies and theories of space. She is editor of the EJAS Book Review section since 2000.

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PART TWO Sustainability and the City: America and the Urban World

Real Cities

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Infrastructures of the Global: Adding a Third Dimension to Urban Sustainability Discourses

Boris Vormann

1. A More Sustainable City

Hopes1 for cities to solve the social, environmental, and economic problems of the early 21st century loom large over discourses on sustainability in the United States. On a rapidly urbanizing planet, it is often argued, the global challenge of creating a more sustainable kind of living can best be tackled in cities and by urban actors. Besides the widespread notion of an emerging urban era, this focus on cities can be explained by the common assumption that these are the points of origin of environmental destruction and climate change as well as the best-suited locales for their potential contestation. Unsustainable processes of industrialization, congestion, and sprawling spatial living arrangements are associated with processes of urbanization —as are the seemingly more sustainable counterstrategies: downtown revitalization, green urbanism, and smart city projects.

In2 this dynamic debate about sustainable cities, two broader paradigms are dominant. One camp emphasizes the need for technological improvements to design better and more efficient cities. Adherents of this school of thought assume that urban competition and commercial exchange foster scientific innovation and technological

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 170 progress which, in turn, will help reduce greenhouse emissions and increase efficiency. Others, by contrast, highlight that cities need to build better spaces for human interaction. Planning greener, more dense, and more livable cities will contribute to a better social life—one that happens to also be more sustainable. As I argue in this article, both these views—which I call the triumphant city and the beautiful city lines of argumentation—are short- sighted. As I will show, both debates have historical precedents that do not bode well for an actually more sustainable urban future. De3 finitions of sustainability commonly consist of an environmental, a social, and an economic component. Sustainable development is seen as that overlapping political space, where these three elements are in equilibrium. This implies more generally that the objective of environmental friendliness needs to be complemented by concerns for social justice and economic growth. Even measured against its own principles, this mainstream normative horizon is not accounted for in current discussions about urban sustainability.

This4 article formulates an immanent critique of existing discourses on urban sustainability, and provides a third analytical perspective that seeks to shed light on problematic blind spots in these debates. As I detail throughout this paper, whereas urban planners and designers in the United States put their hopes for a sustainable city in technological innovation and a renewal of the public realm, these approaches are based on a two- dimensional account of sustainability that either ignores social relations altogether or shrinks them down to immediate face-to-face interactions in the city. Instead, I propose to address questions of urban sustainability through the lens of infrastructure, thereby shifting the focus to social relations that transcend, but at the same time, are necessary to sustain urban agglomerations.

I5 will make this argument in three steps. In the two subsequent sections, I will present and critique the logic of existing urban sustainability discourses identified above. In so doing I also point out historical parallels to the early-20th century city-beautiful and city-efficient movements, which worked along similar argumentative lines and which came with similar pitfalls and shortcomings. Most notably, the focus on efficiency and aesthetics largely ignores social questions, which is equally true for today’s sustainable city

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 171 debates. In a third step, I will add a third dimension to sustainability discourses. In taking an infrastructural perspective that transcends aesthetic and technological concerns, we can shed light on the benefits and costs of sustainable urban development and repoliticize debates about urban sustainability.

2. The Triumphant City: Making the City More Efficient

One6 school of commentators in today’s debates on urban sustainability expects cities to be the loci for progressive change because of their potential for innovation and efficiency increases. As is argued in this debate—which I call the triumphant city debate in reference to what is perhaps the most well-known publication in this context, Edward Glaeser’s book Triumph of the City (2011)—one of the key features of cities are agglomeration effects. Cities are sites where politicians, entrepreneurs, and researchers meet and closely interact. For that reason, cities are seen as the sites where innovations are made; innovations that are supposed to help us lead more efficient and productive lives and render our societies more sustainable, or so the argument goes.

This7 line of argumentation is not at all as new as it might seem at first glance. Its locus classicus is Adam Smith’s oft-cited book The Wealth of Nations. For Smith, too, spatial proximity and close interaction were the keys to social progress. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith argues that the division of labor, the “extent of the market,” determined the degree of labor specialization and thereby the advancement of society. In cities, where transportation and communication is safe and cheap, markets can extend, labor can specialize, and productivity is increased (21-22). Commercial exchange, in turn, also produces “improvements of art and industry” and “cultivation” (23). In short, in facilitating interaction between merchants—the predecessors of today’s entrepreneur, that Smith saw as the real agents of wealth and economic growth (Blyth 107)— cities are the nodal points of social progress.

This8 18th century view of urban progress was, of course, embedded in the thought and rhetoric of the enlightenment era, and part of a larger political argument for markets and for “capitalism before its triumph” (Hirschman). It was expounded and repeated by liberal commentators in the course of the 19th century in order to

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 172 legitimate the expansion of markets into all spheres of life and, more precisely, to give sense to the social upheavals produced by the industrial revolution. Indeed, US cities at the time provided a perfect illustration of what Karl Polanyi later described as the dangers of “disembedded” markets: Commodifying the environment, labor, and capital—thereby turning them into “fictitious commodities”—undermined social cohesion and endangered social reproduction.

The9 reactions that the multiple urban crises ensued anticipate some of today’s arguments a hundred years before the concept of the “sustainable city” became fashionable. It is important to note, in this context, that cities in the United States were somewhat distinct from their European counterparts because of the significance of market-centered growth regimes in the 19th century. The central goal of state and civil society actors was to increase the competitiveness of their city—with little consideration for its social effects. This pronounced orientation toward the market and a lack of regulatory institutions on the local scale boosted urban growth with drastic social and environmental effects. In addition to rampant inequalities, freewheeling market rule led to severe environmental degradation. Moreover, the unprecedented expansion of urban populations across existing jurisdictional boundaries led to a mismatch between political capacities and responsibilities (Brenner “Decoding”). At the beginning of the 20th century it became obvious that the institutional apparatus to guide growth was severely lacking. Cities and municipal institutions needed to be reorganized and reformed.

Between10 1900 and 1930, economic elites of Chicago’s and New York City’s metropolitan region—most affected by labor’s crisis of reproduction—attempted to develop growth plans for the entire metropolitan region. The Plan of Chicago (1909) and the “Regional Plan of New York and its Environs” (1929) bear witness to these attempts of creating more efficient cities by modernizing infrastructures and taking new approaches to urban growth on a regional scale (Fishman). While Smith’s argument had been one for the extension of markets to foster progress and improvement, the city-efficient movement was an attempt to hold on to this rationale in the light of a radically successful market— one so radically successful that it undermined its own conditions of possibility.

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The11 city-efficient movement of the early 20th century, a precursor of the triumphant city argument, then, can be regarded as part of a “double movement”—to stick with Polanyi’s terminology—to try and cope with the negative outgrowths of unfettered industrialization processes. Urban economic and political elites in the two leading US cities of the time, New York City and Chicago, argued for more efficient uses of resources. Based on Taylorist forms of scientific management, the adherents of the city-efficient movement called upon specialized technocrats and experts to guide economic growth and to do away with inefficient and wasteful practices.1 In developing the right types of technology and design, they argued, and in creating leaner public governance structures, urbanization processes could be optimized in a way to foster business and render cities even more competitive and productive.

Today’s12 debates about sustainability mobilize similar tropes of the efficient city. Again, these propositions are made against the backdrop of multiple crises. Over the course of the past thirty years, given a drastic expansion of markets in all arenas of social life, inequalities have steadily increased, the environmental crisis has turned global, and jurisdictional problems are no longer limited to the boundaries of the city but extend to the regional, and, as we will see, even to the planetary scale. And again economic and political elites see cities not just as the sites where these crises unfold, but also where they can be tackled.

The13 contemporary rendition of the triumphant city discourse is powerful; it is a strong discourse that is reflected in strategy papers and reports of institutions such as UN Habitat or the World Bank, in newspaper articles and more conversational pieces by urban economists and publicists. Its general arguments as to why cities will make us healthier, greener, and more productive are hence not limited to specialized academic discourse but reach a mass audience and have a strong impact on political decision- making.

Echoing14 Adam Smith’s thesis that cities were the hubs of civilizing progress, contemporary proponents of the triumphant city believe that exchange between elite actors and decision-makers will benefit from their physical proximity and urban dynamism—from the possibility of matching research with capital and business-friendly policies—to come up with and implement smart technology and share best practice models through inter-city networks

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 174 and thereby find solutions to render cities more sustainable. In this vein, Bruce J. Katz and Jennifer Bradley believe that a “metropolitan revolution” will lead to the technological innovations necessary to meet the environmental challenges of the 21st century. Like them, Edward Glaeser believes that cities are—and have been since at least their renaissance—sites of “innovation explosions” (8). Letting the free market and innovative entrepreneurs take over urban development, this is the subtext of this argument, will create a more efficient and thereby more sustainable city. This15 hope is coupled with a firm belief in technological progress. Notably, big data analyses are supposed to improve resource allocation and diminish congestion in cities. Smart technology and a more accurate calculation of flows of humans and cargo are seen as a way to facilitate better land utilization and a more efficient use of scarce resources. Corporations such as Siemens or IBM, for instance, have pioneered the developments of telematics technologies to optimize urban processes.2 Others emphasize the role of architecture and the built environment in creating a more efficient city. Architectural innovations are seen as bearing enormous potential for future urban living since they allow for a more efficient use of space. Technological innovations in interior design promise feasible solutions for adaptable, multipurpose homes and shared use accommodations which will render cities denser and will enable urban residents to use their private spaces in multiple ways (e.g., Larson). Agglomeration16 effects, the market mechanism, and technological improvement are the three hopes of the triumphantcity debate—but the salutary role of technology is central to all of them. Evgeny Morozov has coined the term “technological solutionism” to describe the credulous outlook with which many discourses on social progress approach the potential of technological innovation. What he emphasizes is that “technological solutionism” offers solutions for problems that had not existed before their cure. But there is a more dangerous aspect to the technophile approach as well and we see it most prominently in the triumphant city debate: “technological solutionism” obscures social relations and depoliticizes debates about social development. Similar to the city- efficient movement in the early 20th century, this type of discourse relegates technical questions to specialized

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 175 experts and technocrats, thereby impoverishing public debate. Its moot point is its obsession with more efficient technologies that leaves more deep-seated causes of unsustainable development such as economic and political inequalities or tendencies of urban splintering and the more indirect effects of globalization on urban development unaddressed.

3. The Beautiful City: Hopes for a New Public Sphere

If17 the city-efficient movement was one reaction to the crisis of reproduction in US cities of the early 20th century, it was not the only one. Its sole focus on efficiency and its lack of a reform perspective was indeed criticized by a second movement that gathered momentum at around the same time: the city-beautiful movement. Proponents of this movement equally sought to attenuate the miserable conditions of the urban labor force and to address the environmental crisis in the cities. They were inspired by the reform movement of the late 19th century and the garden city movement and sought both smaller scale urban arrangements under a regional institutional umbrella and the beautification of cities through the construction of parks, esplanades, and monumental buildings (Wilson).

Advocates18 of the city-beautiful movement held that this type of reform also had a political dimension. The beautification of cities would restore social peace and result in a more harmonious social order that would increase the quality of life for urban residents. Arguably, one reason why this movement was able to leave an imprint on political decision-making—also on the above-mentioned plans for Chicago and New York City—was that it resonated with the interests of urban business elites. They, too, sought for strategies to reproduce the labor force and to pacify social relations. But it was precisely this convergence that made the potential political thrust of the city-beautiful movement vulnerable for cooptation. This is why both the city-efficient movement and the city-beautiful movement have come under attack for ignoring questions of actual social reform (Schönig).

A19 similar argument can be made for today’s version of the city-beautiful movement. The paradigmatic site to make such an argument about depoliticized aesthetic development strategies in US cities is the post-industrial waterfront. In the US context, owing to historical patterns

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 176 of colonial expansion along the rivers and coasts, waterfront revitalization has been more extensive than elsewhere (Tunbridge 88). By the 1990s, waterfront redevelopments had become a “seemingly ubiquitous process in urban North America” (Sieber 120), granting it the status of a new planning paradigm. Like the city- beautiful movement, architects and urban planners who pushed for waterfront redevelopments over the course of the past three decades have sold it as a countermovement to the negative outgrowths of industrialization. Indeed, this type of real-estate development is until today even understood by many as the complete reversal of industrialization: where once manufacturing industries and shipyards soiled the ground and polluted air and water, today livable waterfront parks and esplanades seam the shorelines of New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles (Vormann Global Port Cities).3

Waterfront20 developments have become a global tool to secure capital investments in inner-city neighborhoods and to attract a new clientele of residents and visitors to these formerly “abandoned” and “unsavoury, run-down and neglected areas” (Hoyle 14). As in the early 20th century, the hope is that revitalized parkland will lead to civic virtues—and even to a new public sphere. “These sites, being adjacent to water, now offer us unique opportunities,” argues Richard Marshall, former professor of Urban Design at the Harvard Design School in an essay about urban space-making on the water’s edge (7). Concurring with Marshall’s assessment, and with the assessments of many other city planners and landscape architects, President of the Friends of Hudson River Park, Albert K. Butzel concludes that “[a]fter one hundred fifty years, the waterfront has become the public’s domain again—and an extraordinary one” (5-6). In addition to being more visible and more representative of the city, Raymond Gastil even maintains that the post-industrial waterfront, as the “paradigmatic site for the future of public life,” forestalls developments to come; they are an integral part of the “history of the future” (19, 192).

But21 these discourses, like their early 20th century antecedents, are incomplete and flawed. To be certain, one can validly argue that industrial waterfronts were highly polluted, that hiring practices on the docks of the 1950s and 1960s were corrupt, and that corruption on these sites had a tendency to breed crime (Vormann Global Port

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Cities).4 Yet, if we think that contemporary American global cities are more sustainable, less corrupt and less dangerous —or, put differently, that the pathologies of the industrial city have been overcome—we fall victim to a fallacy. Put provocatively, even if the post-industrial waterfront were not only commercially successful, but also sustainable, equitable, and open, a perspective limited to the post- industrial waterfront as a litmus test for the social development of the entire city (as which it is often presented in the urban sustainability debate), is still inadequate. We have to move beyond and beneath existing sustainability discourses in order to grasp wider material processes that facilitate urban development. Debates22 on the so-called open city are a first step in the direction of a more socially just city, but they display some of the same weaknesses of the beautiful city ideology. The notion of the open city, which stands in the tradition of Jane Jacobs, is one of a “system in unstable evolution” (Sennett 2006). This emphasis on the becoming and on the processual nature of cities constitutes an attempt to overcome urban planning traditions dominated by over- determined forms and closed systems. As Richard Sennett, this position’s most articulate proponent, argues, “the closed system has paralyzed urbanism, while the open system might free it” (2008). Closed systems that serve only one specific function, in this logic, need to be opened up into multifunctional systems so as to unleash the potential for interaction, spontaneity, and the democratic use of public spaces.5 Open cities, in this sense, might be sustainable in a different way, as Sennett goes on to argue: Buildings left incomplete, partially unprogrammed are structures which can truly be sustainable in time; the flexible building would help end the current wasteful cycle which marries construction and demolition. Asserting the value of incomplete built forms is a political act because it confronts the desire for fixity; it asserts, in steel, glass, and fiber-optic cable that the public realm is a process. (n.p.)

This23 valid critique of dominant sustainability discourses highlights the process-character of cities.6 In contrast to triumphant city discourses, it shifts the focus from technology to questions of social justice and the public realm. Conceding more importance to social relations, proponents of the open city seek to uncover the conditions of possibility for spatial change to yield more emancipatory social outcomes. Nonetheless, however, the open city debate has elective affinities with the beautiful city

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 178 paradigm. Ultimately, like the beautiful city paradigm, it focuses on individual spaces and changes in the built environment as a reform strategy—and thereby tends to neglect social relations that transcend the immediately local all the while buttressing it.

Whereas24 the notion of the open city constitutes a much-needed corrective for mainstream “technological solutionism” in that it critiques the inner contradictions of sustainability discourses, then, the focus on individual sites and projects similarly tends to limit the view from broader social relations that are much less sustainable. Moreover, I see a fundamental problem in the convergent notions of the open, evolutionary system, and the market as a tool for resource allocation. The open city can easily be co-opted into market-led approaches, because it is mostly directed against central planning. Its critique of rigidity resonates with a plea for marketization. Consequently, the openness that such a regime would grant is not one of individuals on equal footing, meeting in a non-hegemonic space, but essentially skewed long before these individuals enter the public realm. Finally, and perhaps most problematically in the context of urban sustainability debates, the notion of an open system defers all political decision-making: to value the incomplete nature of urban processes opens up spaces for participation, but if taken at face value it also bears the risk of relegating all questions political to the future or to other orders.

4. Beneath and Beyond: The Infrastructural City

Cities25 are not algorithms. Urban sustainability debates are steeped in social relations and cannot be fully captured or improved by mathematical models. Neither will societies become more sustainable in the full sense of the term, if individual sites are beautified. So far, I have argued that both the triumphant city and the beautiful city debate miss the point. These lines of argumentation are mobilized in today’s dominant urban sustainability debates as though they were innovations. But, as I have tried to show, they have historical antecedents and, like them, they neglect an important dimension of sustainable development. By focusing on technological efficiency, urban design, and market-led private entrepreneurialism, these approaches lack a social dimension. The open city debate provides us with a helpful critique of dominant sustainability discourses

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 179 but has its limitations. Nonetheless, the open city debate has been productive in another way. It resonates with ongoing attempts to open up the debate of what a city really is and what, in turn, urban sustainability can mean. This can be the starting point for a new discussion that we already see forming in different contexts. As I would like to argue before concluding, this new debate needs to go beyond and beneath existing urban sustainability discourses.

I26 am certainly not the first one to argue that cities are more than a dense agglomeration of people in one place. Saskia Sassen, for instance, builds on the process-based understanding of the open city to criticize “an ‘urban focus’ limited to individuals and households” and tendencies to “leave out global economic and ecological systems that are deeply involved, yet cannot be addressed at the level of households or many individual firms” (251). Her ensuing call for multi-scalar governance frameworks to address the ecological crisis through a “global regime centered in cities” (239) is warranted, because it mobilizes urban capabilities beyond parochial local concerns. Sassen’s perspective echoes recently emerging research paradigms in urban political economy that generalize this concern. Hillary Angelo and David Wachsmuth (2014), for example, have very convincingly criticized the perspectival shortcomings of methodological city-ism; that is, of limiting our urban (sustainability) analyses to the city-level only. In an era where urbanization processes are no longer oriented toward the horizon of the city, but to the regional (Soja 679) and the planetary7 we need new analytical tools. The same applies to our understanding of urban sustainability. The fact that cities are nodes of different types of flows—on which the city depends and which are facilitated in it— implies that we have to extend our notion of what a city is in order to conceptualize it as more than just a bounded entity. Debates on urban sustainability need to take these flows and metabolisms that go beyond the jurisdictional boundaries of the city into account.

What27 I am proposing here is in line with this recent debate on planetary urbanization. Urban sustainability debates need a dimension that transcends local immediacy —a dimension which both triumphantcity and beautiful city debates lack. In this respect, I am very sympathetic to the idea of “blasting open” the container of the city as an analytical framework (Brenner 2011). But I see a

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 180 methodological problem in doing so if this theoretical move is not qualified. The danger of reframing “urbanization” as all processes related to the maintenance of cities, is that this concept becomes indistinguishable from the old- fashioned notion of “civilization.” To be fair, the moment of explosion—to use Henri Lefebvre’s term—is related to a moment of implosion: cities and flows are not arbitrary but function according to specific spatial and social logics which stand in a dialectical relationship. But to harness the potential of this insight and to capture the precise social logics which determine the dynamics of these moments, we need to be more specific. A debate on urban sustainability worthy of that name needs to go not just beyond but also beneath the city. What I am suggesting then, is that a perspective that turns our attention to the structures that enable social relations can help us link the two “moments”—of agglomeration and flow, of implosion and explosion—while at the same time raising questions of social justice. It28 might seem curious and perhaps overly specific to point our attention to infrastructures as an analytical solution to the methodological city-ism of dominant sustainability debates. But these structures are literally “the underlying foundation” and “basic framework” of social systems.8 Infrastructures are physical, durable structures that create social patterns and that enable and constrain social processes. Infrastructures are crystallized social relations, already incurred, sunk costs, that create certain path dependencies for how cities and societies develop (Angelo and Calhoun). As such, they are not just neutral technological assemblages, but both their emergence and their effects are political. In them are inscribed certain social power relations—and, in turn, they reproduce these relations. Two brief examples that address the beautiful city and the triumphant city’s main tenets from an infrastructural perspective should help clarify the type of research program that I have in mind.

To29 be sure, post-industrial waterfronts in the United States might seem to validate the assumptions of the beautiful city proponents. If we restrict our field of vision to these spaces—as the beautiful city paradigm does—it is true that they are more environmentally sustainable today than they had been only three or four decades ago. But this perspective ignores wider social processes that have made the post-industrial waterfront possible in the first place and

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 181 that we can only grasp by shifting our view from the superficial spaces to their underlying infrastructures. The post-industrial waterfront has arisen as a utopian site from rearrangements in global production networks: containerization and related technological and political innovations led to a spatial rearrangement of US cities in which derelict old harbor sites could be redeveloped as utopian sites of a post-industrial era. At the same time that the post-industrial waterfront made its ascent as “paradigmatic site for the future of public life” (Gastil 19), then, the social and environmental costs of the new, post- Fordist goods-moving economy—shipping pollution from container vessels, diesel fumes from outdated port trucks, flexible working conditions for supply chain workers and other industries, to name but a few—have been imposed on the public. On the post-industrial waterfront “the postmodern façade of cultural redevelopment” has become a veritable “carnival mask which covers the decline of everything else” (Featherstone 107). The new infrastructural fix that enables production and consumption on a global scale is neither sustainable nor socially just (as I argue in more detail elsewhere9) but it is the socio- technological pillar on which the beautiful city rests.

An30 infrastructural perspective helps us understand how urban beautification is not only a question of making some places greener and more sustainable than others: these places are part of a larger infrastructural fix in which costs are externalized and spatially relocated. A second example addresses a question which remains perhaps more implicit in the context of global logistics infrastructures. If we aim for more efficient flows to allocate resources within the city, we need to question the finality of that optimization: Efficiency, for what and for whom? An infrastructural perspective, again, helps us to address related questions with a view to social relations.

Urban31 infrastructures are object to political struggle, although their technocratic appearance might suggest otherwise. What we tend to ignore, if we only address questions of efficiency, is that technological innovations and infrastructural changes through the market mechanism “enroll some people and some places to premium status” and, more than that, these restructurings “often simultaneously work systematically to marginalize and exclude others from access to even basic services” (Graham and Marvin 288). For instance, high-speed rail

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 182 connections between exurban airports and revitalized downtowns provide certain segments of the global middle- classes with seamless transportation, but exclude poorer populations in neighborhoods along the tracks from access. Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin’s work on splintering urbanism illustrates how the privatization of urban transportation infrastructure creates such “premium network spaces” that allow better off populations seamless mobility at the detriment of other marginalized and segregated segments of society. “Such ‘disfigured urban spaces’ thus tend to remain excluded and largely invisible within the contemporary metropolis, beyond the secured, well designed and carefully networked premium ... spaces” (287). This means that we cannot simply argue, as the triumphant city discourse does, that entrepreneurial innovations in the market place will help us make cities more efficient and thereby more sustainable, without specifying who benefits and who loses. Efficiency alone does not address questions of social justice.

Whereas32 the triumphant city debate focuses only on technological efficiency gains and agglomeration economies, and the beautiful city planners call for greener urban design, both these lines of thinking narrow our perspective on urban sustainability to individual sites. To take an infrastructural perspective means to shed light on how social processes are linked over different scales and spatial distances. By examining the infrastructures that are necessary for the production of (isolated) post-industrial and seemingly more sustainable places in US cities, we can see how social and environmental costs are shifted to other places and externalized through mechanisms that cannot be captured by a mono-scalar and uni-spatial urban analysis. Ultimately, what this means is that what we tend to call a sustainable city today rests on systemic costs that are much less sustainable than refurbished industrial parks, remediated brown fields, and green waterfronts esplanades might suggest.

5. Re-politicizing Urban Sustainability Debates

I33 have argued that two dominant lines of argumentation in debates about urban sustainability—the triumphant city and the beautiful city discourses—have problematic blind spots and are analytically skewed. These discourses, reproduced by powerful political actors and

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 183 institutions, seem to offer new solutions to our global challenges of the 21st century. But they are not as new as they suggest. Like their historical antecedents, the city- beautiful and the city-efficient movement, these discourses are limited. If sustainability has an environmental, a social, and an economic component, current urban sustainability discourses fail to address these dimensions. They put too much hope in technological solutions for social problems, they focus on aesthetic questions without questioning underlying social relations, and they limit their analytical scope to the immediately local.

Advocates34 of the open city and planetary urbanization, per contra, offer us ways to get beyond methodological city- ism and use an analytical framework that is more appropriate to capture urbanization processes in the current conjuncture. This article has argued that an infrastructural perspective extends our analytical grip, and offers us a new perspective that goes beyond and beneath existing debates on urban sustainability. This infrastructural perspective reveals the systemic conditions that defer costs from one set of places to other, less visible ones. The relocation of social and environmental costs is very much a political project, emanating from political decisions on various scales—and not, as current planning and design discourses tend to emphasize, the consequence of inexorable economic processes. In this sense, a more holistic approach to sustainable urban development is equally a political endeavor that cannot fully fall back on technological and architectural improvement. Not35 only were the city-efficient and city-beautiful movements of the early 20th century not particularly successful: They also depoliticized debates about urban development, leaving urban change to technocrats and experts, while at the same time distancing political decision-making from urban constituencies. Moreover, the exclusive focus on the built form and the immediately local to create a better society—either through more efficiency or more beautiful spaces—did not and does not address larger social contexts. An infrastructural perspective re-politicizes debates about urban sustainability. Using infrastructure as an analytical lens helps us to overcome the fetish of the immediate and to pose the central question: who benefits and who loses from sustainable urban restructuring?

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Angelo, Hillary and Craig Calhoun. “Infrastructures of the Social: An Invitation to Infrastructural Sociology.” April 2013. TS. NYLON Group, Berlin.

Angelo, Hillary and David Wachsmuth. “Urbanizing Urban Political Ecology: A Critique of Methodological Cityism,” Implosions / Explosions. Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization. Ed. Neil Brenner. Berlin: Jovis, 2014. 372-385.

Blyth, Mark. Austerity. The History of a Dangerous Idea. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Brenner, Neil. “Theses on Urbanization.” Public Culture 25 (2013): 85-114.

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_____ . “Decoding the Newest ‘Metropolitan Regionalism’ in the USA: A Critical Overview.” Cities 19 (2002): 3-21.

Butzel, Albert K. “Foreword.” Lost Waterfront: The Decline and Rebirth of Manhattan’s Western Shore. Ed. Shelley Seccombe. Bronx, NY and New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. 5-6.

Featherstone, Mike. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. London and Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1991.

Fishman, Robert. “The Metropolitan Tradition in American Planning.” The American Planning Tradition. Ed. Robert Fishman. Washington, D.C.: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1999. 65-85.

Gastil, Raymond W. Beyond the Edge. New York’s New Waterfront. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002.

Glaeser, Edward Ludwig. Triumph of the City. How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier. New York: Penguin Press, 2011.

Graham, Stephen and Simon Marvin. Splintering Urbanism. Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.

Harvey, David. “Megacities Lecture 4: Possible Urban Worlds.” Twynstra Gudde Management Consultants, Amersfoort, The Netherlands, 2000. Web. 8 June 2015. .

Hirschman, Albert O. The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph. 1997. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.

Hoyle, Brian S. “Development Dynamics at the Port-City Interface.” Revitalising the Waterfront. International Dimensions of Dockland Redevelopment. Ed. Brian S. Hoyle, David Pinder, and Sohail Husain. London and New York: Belhaven Press, 1988.

IBM. “Smarter Cities.” IBM, 2014. Web. 8 June 2015. .

Katz, Bruce and Jennifer Bradley. The Metropolitan Revolution. How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2013.

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Larson, Kent. “Brilliant designs to fit more people in every city,” TEDxBoston 2012. Web. 6 May 2015. .

Lefebvre, Henri. The Urban Revolution. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2003.

Marshall, Richard. “Contemporary Urban Space-Making at the Water’s Edge.” Waterfronts in Post- industrial Cities. Ed. Richard Marshall. London: Spon, 2007: 3-14.

Morozov, Evgeny. To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. New York: Public Affairs, 2013.

Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. 1944.. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 2001.

Sassen, Saskia. “A Focus on Cities Takes Us Beyond Existing Governance Frameworks.” The Quest for Security: Protection Without Protectionism and the Challenge of Global Governance. Ed. Joseph E. Stiglitz and Mary Kaldor. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.

Schönig, Barbara. Pragmatische Visionäre: Stadtregionale Planung und zivilgesellschaftliches Engagement in den USA. Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, 2011.

Sennett, Richard. “The Open City.” London: Urban Age, Cities Programme, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2006.

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Soja, Edward. “Regional Urbanization and the End of the Metropolis Era.” The New Blackwell Companion to the City. Ed. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson. Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley- Blackwell, 2011. 679-689.

Taylor, Frederick Winslow. The Principles of Scientific Management. New York: Harper, 1911.

Tunbridge, John. “Policy Convergence on the Waterfront? A Comparative Assessment of North American Revitalisation Strategies.” Revitalising the Waterfront. International Dimensions of Dockland Redevelopment. Ed. Brian S. Hoyle, David Pinder, and Sohail Husain. London and New York: Belhaven Press, 1988. 67–69.

Vormann, Boris. Global Port Cities in North America: Urbanization and Global Production Networks. London and New York: Routledge, 2015.

_____ . “Toward an Infrastructural Critique of Urban Change. Obsolescence and Changing Perceptions of New York City’s Waterfront,” CITY 19, 2-3 (2015): 365-64.

Vormann, Boris. “Infrastrukturen der globalen Stadt. Widersprüche des urbanen Nachhaltigkeitsdiskurses am Beispiel Vancouvers. ” Zeitschrift für Kanadastudien 34 (2014): 62-86.

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NOTES

1. I would like to thank Margit Mayer and Stefan Höhne for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay and the reviewers and editors for their support and feedback during the publication process. Frederick Winslow Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management starts out with a reference to President Roosevelt, arguing for increased efficiency to improve environmental conservation. I thank James Dorson for calling my attention to this point. 2. IBM’s globally visible “Let’s build a smarter planet”-campaign aims at “collecting and analyzing the extensive data generated every second of every day.” In so doing, IBM’s tools are supposed to “coordinate and share data in a single view creating the big picture for the decision makers and responders who support the smarter city” (2014). 3. See in particular Chapter 5. 4. Ibid. Chapters 3 and 4. 5. It is helpful to quote this passage at some length in order to drive home the central contradiction: “We might imagine a sustainable environment to be harmoniously balanced and for all its parts to fit together efficiently; we would thus define sustainability in terms of equilibrium and integration. In the use of natural resources like petrol and water these seem only sensible standards. But in social systems they are not. […] Equilibrium in a social order can sacrifice dissent for the sake of harmony. […] both the values of harmony and integration can become instruments of repression. Seen in this light, balance and integration are the correlates of over-determined form; rigid rules and structures promise to deliver them” (Sennett 2008). 6. On the important distinction between spatial and process-based (urban) utopias and their limitations see David Harvey’s lecture on “possible urban worlds” (2000). 7. Neil Brenner (2013) argues that “the geographies of urbanization, which have long been understood with reference to the densely concentrated populations and built environments of cities, are assuming new, increasingly large-scale morphologies that perforate, crosscut, and ultimately explode the erstwhile urban/rural divide” (87). Therefore his interest lies not on ‘regional’ but on “planetary urbanization.” 8. Merriam-Webster definition of “Infrastructure,” . 9. For the cases of Vancouver and New York City see Vormann 2014 and 2015 (“Toward an Infrastructural Critique”) respectively.

INDEX

Keywords: City-beautiful Movement, City-efficient Movement, Infrastructure, Open city, Planetary Urbanization, Sustainability

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AUTHOR

BORIS VORMANN Freie Universität BerlinBoris Vormann is a lecturer in political science and urban political economy at Freie Universität Berlin’s John-F.-Kennedy-Institute for North American Studies. Vormann is also the coordinator of the Einstein research group NYLON Berlin and associated researcher at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Published with Routledge (2015), Global Port Cities in North America: Urbanization Processes and Global Production Networks is his second monograph. His most recent book publication is a co-edited handbook on politics and policies in the United States (Handbuch Politik USA, Springer 2015).

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Dealing with the Past Spatially: Storytelling and Sustainability in De-Industrializing Communities

Julia Sattler

1. Introduction

1 At the latest since the so-called “spatial turn” in the humanities and the respective “narrative turn” in urban planning, cultural and literary studies and urban planning have been interested in each other as disciplines. Such interdisciplinary dialogue is helpful to recognize, for example, how cultural factors contribute to the failures or successes of a plan, or why the readership of a plan matters and is useful to take into account. It may potentially lead to more successful plans, but also to a practice based on the recognition that planning is constitutive; that it is not only a response to certain community needs, but rather, that it is an important factor shaping and literally building communities and cultures. For the literary and cultural studies, this particular interdisciplinary link opens up new ways of reading urban spaces and shapes a better understanding of the practices of representation and the role of narratives and scripts in the urban experience.

2 In his study Planning as Persuasive Storytelling. The Rhetorical Construction of Chicago’s Electric Future, James A. Throgmorton attests to the important role of language, discourse and rhetoric in planning practice, making evident that planning is not neutral, but that it impacts and shapes the past, present and future of the city. Defining planning as “persuasive and constitutive storytelling within a web of relationships” (xix), he makes clear that attention to stories and narratives is crucial in the creation of sustainable and livable environments in our cities. As an Americanist interested in transatlantic

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relations and in such practices of persuasive storytelling, I am particularly fascinated by the similarities and differences that are provoked in perceiving, but also in planning the city by way of narrative. Having lived in de-industrializing regions all my life and having been confronted with oftentimes diverging ideas as to what is to become of formerly industrial sites as a citizen, studying the storytelling aspect of de-industrialization promises to be an interesting research project in order to understand better how cultural factors and stories impact the process of dealing with the past spatially.

2. Sustainability and the Post-Industrial City

“Sustainability”3 has long become a buzzword in planning discourses around the world. Oftentimes, this discussion about creating a sustainable way of life is centered on questions of the environment: it relates to the ecological footprint of our cities, to providing access to alternative, renewable energies, and to ensuring quality of life for future generations inhabiting our communities. In more than one way, thinking about sustainability for the future thus also relates to dealing with the legacies of the past. With regard to how this discussion is being led across the Northern hemisphere, this is especially true for de- industrializing cities, where past land uses have led to the creation of brownfields and other excess spaces—oftentimes industrially shaped and not easily reusable for non-industrial purposes due to their degraded soil. In post-industrial cities, the word “sustainability” comes up in negotiations about the re-use of former industrial facilities that have lost their purpose, in the attempt to re-develop whole housing projects originally built for industrial workers, and in the question of whether parts of cities might be returning to their rural origins as more and more homes and factories are left to demise.

In4 addition to the physical difficulties of dealing with the industrial legacies, de-industrializing communities are confronted with several additional layers of history that pose a challenge now and for the future. Even thoughin public discourse, the processes affecting these communities—the North American “Rust Belt,” the German Ruhr Valley, the French Pas-de-Calais-Region, just to name a few examples— are oftentimes subsumed under unspecific headers such as “globalization,” “transformation of the workplace” or simply “de- industrialization,” the situation on the ground is much more complex than such descriptions express. The ongoing transformations in former Rust Belts pose a narrative challenge to planners and citizens alike. At the turn to the post-industrial age, an identity shift or re-definition is of need, responding to existing stories, but simultaneously building new ones.

The5 places mainly referred to in this article, the German cities of the Ruhr Valley and the U.S.-American Detroit, serve as representative for a whole set of cities across the Northern hemisphere which grew

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significantly through their industries, identified strongly through industrial production—hence their nicknames, the “Coal Pit” for the Ruhr and the “Motor City” for Detroit—and are now confronted with the challenge of re-invention. At the same time, these places are very specific: Different from each other and different from all others due to their specific micro-histories. The Ruhr and Detroit are especially important industrial cities and linked to each other in important ways despite the very different industries they became known for. Certainly, the Ruhr—in its physical design, in its industrial production processes— was heavily shaped by the Fordist principles established in Detroit. But the connections go further than that: Not only is Detroit part of the region that sometimes used to be nicknamed “American Ruhr,” but both the Ruhr and Detroit were, and maybe still are, the bellwether of their respective countries’ economies, the canaries in the coalmine, so to say. Industrial work was important both to keep the cities growing and going, and to provide a stable income and identity for the inhabitants: For many generations, the future was clear—now, these are cities literally “on the verge” and the path to the future is not fixed yet.

What6 is oftentimes referred to simply as the “crisis” both are confronted with nowadays has been a long time in the making: Looking back, it was already clear in the 1950s that the eternal growth these places were built for was not going to last forever. Almost ironically, one of the Ruhr’s strategies of cushioning the emerging crisis of its industries—coal, iron, steel—was establishing a new focus on car- production: the assumption was that people would always need cars, especially in a region that is as sprawled as the Ruhr. The company that finally settled in Bochum in the Ruhr Valley roughly 50 years ago was General Motors from Detroit. The company is known in Germany under the name of Opel—and it has closed its Bochum production site in late 2014. This plant closing is expected to lead to the loss of up to 45.000 workplaces in the Ruhr Region and beyond, such as in other industries associated with auto production. In the Ruhr, despite the rather strong German economy, unemployment is notoriously high, and with the loss of the Opel/General Motors plant it is not the first time “globalization” takes its toll. The coal mines, the coal cokeries, the steel plants have by and large disappeared as sites of industrial production; the more recent losses of Nokia1 and Opel make evident that in a time of crisis and change, sustainability cannot come by way of work alone. Finding a new path ideally needs public dialogue. This dialogue is likely not going to begin on its own though: Art has proven to be a powerful initiator of such dialogue in the Ruhr.

3. How love could be: Staging Motown in the Ruhr

Artistic7 practice, much like narrative practice, is more than just a tool in urban development. It can highlight previously invisible layers and dimensions of a site, and create new links. It can also help to

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extend the scope of a site—both in order to be able to recognize site- specific factors and characteristics, and to see economic and other developments across a larger scale. In the context of urban development, it can open up a dialogue between the past and the present, and point out, even enable, several potential futures. Ideally, by helping create a new narrative about a site which picks up on the existent ones, new conversations about a place are facilitated.

8 In April 2014, an LED installation by the British artist Tim Etchells was lit on top of a former shaft tower that today is part of the DeutschesBergbaumuseum in Bochum, a museum devoted to the history of mining and the mining of resources around the world. This installation, in red capital letters, and visible from many different points in the city of Bochum, reads four words: “How love could be,” a statement that can also be understood as a question. The installation is quoting the third line of a 1961 Motown song by The Miracles, “Bad Girl.” Its lighting was celebrated with a “Motown BBQ,” a get-together of city and state officials and citizens of Bochum and the surrounding cities for food and Motown music. The installation creates a visible (and in that sense, audible) link between Detroit and the (post-) industrial landmarks of the Ruhr, between one “Motown” and another, so to say.

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Figure 1

Tim Etchells, “How love could be”

Etchells’s9 installation of “How love could be” is part of a larger artistic project happening in 2013-14 that became known as the “Detroit-Project” and that established a slogan in Bochum and in the Ruhr that I find ambivalent for its apparent lack of solidarity with the citizens of Detroit: “This is not Detroit.” While the slogan can be read as ironic—it is obvious that Bochum is not Detroit, but that it is indeed Bochum—it highlights that GM cannot do to the citizens of Bochum what it has done to the citizens of Detroit. At the same time, it builds a barrier between the two cities: Detroit is not what Bochum wants to be.

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The “Detroit-Project,” creating yet another—albeit highly problematic— link between the Ruhr and Detroit, is carried out by the Bochum theater and the organization “Urban Arts Ruhr,” a publicly funded association aiming at creating a sustainable and culturally rich urban landscape in the Ruhr. It is also financially supported by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and the Arts Foundation of North-Rhine Westphalia.

The10 project has the goal to establish a transnational dialogue about urban sustainability and the future of the city of Bochum—and other “Motowns,” cities on the international scale associated with the auto industry—through art. As quickly becomes evident from the program, the “Detroit-Project” itself is not so much about anything that is happening in the city of Detroit, but it rather uses “Detroit” as a buzzword to highlight the potential failure of urban transformation. This is much in tune with a lot of other contemporary media using “Detroit” as a template for urban crisis, and represents yet another instance where the city’s condition is brought up “as basis for opportunistic self- aggrandizing” (Herron, “Detroit” 668): Negative stories about Detroit “sell,” and make one’s own misery appear a little less, it seems.

11 Love, of course, could be different, and hopefully would be different. Love would be more respectful, would recognize the specificities that lead to difference and appreciate what could be learnt from them. Love could carefully analyze how Detroit—if its name is already evoked in the project title—is dealing with the changes and how “learning from Detroit” could be a strategy of coping with the transition at hand in Bochum: A bit of Detroit might do good things in Bochum.

4. Sustaining on Stories

In12 de-industrializing communities, storytelling is important to keep the integrity and the solidarity of the citizens despite the ongoing challenges. It also contributes to the sustainability aspect in these communities, specifically also via establishing boundaries between one place and another (Eckstein 13), something that also becomes evident in the “Detroit-Project:” Cities in crisis do not necessarily like to be compared to each other. Certainly, the people of Detroit would rather see their city as a “new Berlin” than as a “new Oberhausen” or “new Gelsenkirchen,” two of the Ruhr cities known for their notorious unemployment, high poverty index, communal debt, and all the troubles arising out of such a situation.

Barbara13 Eckstein and James A. Throgmorton have published a volume on Story and Sustainability. Planning, Practice, and Possibility for American Cities, arguing that the telling and understanding of stories is important “in the recognition, agreements, and responsibilities necessary to create and maintain sustainable cities” (4). In his own contribution to the volume, Throgmorton goes on to show how unseen layers of the city impact the creation of sustainable communities: Drawing heavily on the literary critic Lawrence Buell, he

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argues that “places are continually shaped and reshaped by forces from both inside and outside; they have histories and are constantly changing” and that “any one place contains its residents’ accumulated or composite memories of all the places that have been significant over time” (“Imagining” 45). The claim here is that the history of a place is important with regard to its future: in order to become sustainable for the future, and sustainable not only in terms of environment, but also in terms of social justice and opportunity, cities need to work with their pasts in one way or another.

5. Dealing With the Past Spatially: From the 1980s Onwards

Creating14 a sustainable city for the future means building it onto a steady foundation. Both in the Ruhr and in Detroit this means dealing with the industrial legacy and the ongoing absence of industrial work. An analysis of how these communities are dealing with their industrial past spatially will help understand not only in how far the industrial past is still part of the contemporary conception of these cities, but also in how far the future(s) will be determined by this layer of history. Certainly, this analysis will also make evident the cultural differences in handling the transition to the post-industrial age as well as the dimension of public policy in the creation of sustainable urban environments. This is not a new challenge, of course: By the 1980s, both the Ruhr and Detroit felt increasing pressures to determine how their industrial heritage could be dealt with in the “post-industrial” age.

15 The Ruhr reacted to this challenge by suggesting an alternative use of the former sites of industrial production. The International Architecture Exhibition “Emscher Park/ Workshop for Industrial Regions” tried to bridge the gap between industrial production and the post-industrial economy. It took place in several Ruhr cities between 1989 and 1999, and focused on change without growth. Its implementation made “conservation of the industrial heritage ... a cornerstone of the area’s economic, social and spatial restructuring” (Raines 184). With this typically social-democratic agenda, it tried to make the unavoidable departure from the industry and the loss of jobs more bearable to the population in the region, and open the Ruhr for tourism. In more concrete terms, this meant that industrial sites, but also worker’s housing and the urban structures from the industrial age, in many cases were preserved in order “to retain the spatial identity, to give points of orientation, and to explain the history of the region, as well as to give the next generation the opportunity to interpret their heritage for themselves” (Ganser,2 qut. in Raines 195).

16 According to this principle, industrial sites were re-invented as sites of cultural activity, as parks, museums and event centers: the International Architecture Exhibition, so to say, “saw a million opportunities in the ruins of industry—in fact, it wished to dance on its

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grave” (Raines 200). Many projects in the context worked with a paradigm that is best described as metamorphosis without destruction (Barndt 272), and points to the layered histories of the region. As the Ruhr came to terms with the fact that land was no longer needed for industry or new investment, nature can take back what the factories and smokestacks once took, leading to, for example a coking plant turning into what Raines has described as “garden of abandonment” (198) that is open to visitors free of charge year round, the Landscape Park Duisburg-North. The creation of “playgrounds” in formerly inaccessible facilities has established a new relationship between the people and the (post-industrial) landscape, and offers a platform for identification and for thinking about the past, present and future of these places.

Figure 2

Landscape Park Duisburg-North

Certainly,17 the Architecture Exhibition’s attempts to redevelop the region had its flaws: It did not create the new jobs it promised, for example. Also, even though one goal of the project was to achieve an increased democratization of the planning process itself, this does not mean that all voices were heard on equal terms—when exploring the preserved sites (including their museum sections) today, one will have to search far and wide until one encounters the voice of a migrant—in a region shaped by different waves of migration throughout 150 years. The same is true for women: the narratives surrounding these sites mainly focus on male white industrial workers’ voices. On the bright side, the grand achievement of the IBA was that it gave the region

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something to identify by and with: it contributed to a regional identity which built on local/ regional specificity (albeit with a dominant focus on some groups and not others) and the Ruhr’s unique urbanity (sometimes referred to as Ruhr-banity in more recent projects). In the Ruhr of the 1980s and 1990s, several factors combined that led to this achievement: The emerging cooperation between the 53 cities in the region, the fact that state support was available, and the ability to connect to grassroots movements going on in the population at this time: In the case of Duisburg’s Landscape Park, for example, citizens from the area stopped the demolition of the industrial plant and strongly supported the installation of a new type of park. Nevertheless, while the process of preservation developed very well in many sites, preserving this high a density of (post-)industrial markers—literally, hundreds of sites—may have led the Ruhr to a romanticization of its industrial past, and smokestack nostalgia; an idealization of the past that makes it hard to move on to a different future.

18 While the Ruhr hosted the International Architecture Exhibition, Detroit chose a different route. This does not mean that people do not reflect about Detroit’s past: They spend “a good deal of time remembering and writing about its past in local newspapers and magazines; this is a great place for nostalgia,” but the city is not a place “that the majority of metropolitan residents feel good about visiting” (Herron, “Postmodernism” 66). While the automotive production landscape had a strong presence in Detroit’s neighborhoods, the preservationist imperative was not as strong as in the Ruhr. As Brent D. Ryan and Daniel Campo have shown, “since the 1980s, Detroit’s historic building stock of automotive manufacturing facilities has mostly disappeared” (95). Thus, the sites of industrial production were mostly either demolished and/or possibly replaced with “vacant lots, surface parking, office parks and fortress-like industrial complexes” (127), or just left to themselves. The remains of structures like the Packard Plant, the world’s largest abandoned factory, for example, have gained world fame. Every few weeks, an idea for its re-development will pop up on the internet, but its ultimate chances of re-use are unclear.

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Figure 3

Packard Plant, Detroit

Certainly,19 there is a variety of reasons for not taking action and preserving the industrial heritage as it was done in the Ruhr. One is that is that in Europe, quite simply put, public money was made available at the time in order to ease the effects of the transformation to the post-industrial age. Another is that Europe has a tradition of

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“industrial culture” and preservation that does not have as many ardent supporters in the United States. A third is the ownership structure: A comprehensive public redevelopment of multiple former plants, comparative to the Ruhr’s “route of industrial culture” would mean that these would have to be publicly owned to begin with. This is usually not the case with such facilities in Detroit. The fact that preservation did not occur in a concerted effort is certainly also related to the idea that new investors would rather like to buy up large portions of free land than a set of partly redeveloped parcels: For the longest time, Detroit’s future was to remain industrial—today, industrial ruins oftentimes attract tourists and others to the city. These outsiders who admire and celebrate the “ruins,” also in the form of photographs, often do not take into account that the daily experience of Detroit is radically different: The abandoned structures are oftentimes understood to be painful reminders of the past—and of a future that never came.

20 In Detroit, additionally, a number of site-specific factors come into play: the fall of industrial production coincided with race rebellions and the following “white flight” to the suburbs. This makes regional approaches rather difficult, as the suburbs define themselves versus the city of Detroit. Even within the city of Detroit, the past is decidedly more openly contested; it is the root of distrust between different groups who have a history with the city: “If whites remember a city of sturdy working-class neighborhoods, ethnic festivals, and steady work in the auto plants, black Detroiters remember a very different place. For the 85 percent of the current population that is black, old Detroit was a city of bitter housing segregation, white neighborhood protection associations, and racist mayors” (Eisinger 89). As an almost singular example within the city of Detroit, the Heidelberg Project captures this ambivalence and—albeit in a disturbing manner—establishes some sort of continuity between past and present story (Sheridan). The Heidelberg Project, with its layers, and layers and yet more layers of history, “visually captures the story of a residential community coming undone” (Walters 64), creating something that is inclusive of multiple stories and that tries to capture the ongoing transformation of Detroit, all the while posing critical questions about the future of the city, the meaning of poverty in a throw-away society, and the role of art in abandoned spaces.

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Figure 4

Heidelberg Project, Detroit

21 In the United States, where the incentive is to look toward the future instead of dwelling on the past, and specifically in Detroit, where this future has been and was going to be fabricated, the recognition that the expected version of the future did not arrive is specifically hard to

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handle. In his article “Detroit: Disaster Deferred, Disaster in Progress,” Jerry Herron describes how the industrial city of Detroit has been based on the creation of sameness: During the industrial age, Ford’s initiation tactics focused on the assimilation of recent immigrants to the city, and on the claim that the only history that matters is the history of today. The city itself, with its importance for the creation of standardized mass culture “becomes an assembly line of forgetting machines” (676). Herron goes on to explain that in the process of de-industrialization and abandonment, “(t)he city becomes a junkyard of no-longer-relevant forgetting machines—the department store and the old hotels, the great downtown office buildings and the train stain, the old neighborhoods and public parks. The ‘problem’, then is getting over the memory of things that once were necessary, which stand now for the way we were, not for the way we aspire to be” (676). To re-connect with this heritage would mean having to deal with a painful past.

22 As becomes evident, different strategies of dealing with the industrial past are a result not only of different investment strategies, but also of different narrative processes and stories about the meaning of the past for the present. In fact, the investment strategies may be the result of stories: Had people in the Ruhr not opted for the preservation of the Duisburg steel plant, which they considered vital for their city’s identity, efforts at preservation may have been much more difficult. This is in no way to say that one strategy is “better” than another, but rather, it helps explain why situations that may seem rather similar to the outsider can lead to very different outcomes. Projects that have proven sustainable appear to be those that can easily “attach” themselves to ongoing narratives, thus, those that are locally specific and inclusive of existing stories. This also makes a lot of sense, since such projects remain read- able in their original context.

6. Facing the Global Frontier

It23 seems all the more surprising, then, that more recent approaches to dealing with the industrial heritage of the Ruhr region and Detroit in the 2000s are more similar to each other than they used to be. In his article “Reimagining Detroit” (2003), Peter Eisinger has pointed out that when political or financial leaders speak of the “rebirth” of Detroit in the 2000s, they not only reject the complex racial legacies that are part and parcel of the city, but that indeed “they are reimagining a new city, guided by three different templates: Detroit as a world class city, Detroit as a tourist destination, and Detroit as the vital center of a prosperous metropolitan area” (85). In recent years, similar templates have become more and more prominent in the public discussion about what is to happen in the Ruhr.

24 This is certainly also a result of narratives about excess spaces and abandoned sites that have emerged in de-industrializing regions: Due to the rather prominent discourse of the “creative city” since the late

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1990s, an immediate connection is made between “creativity” and urban development. In post-industrial cities, where new job perspectives are desperately needed, such discourse is especially prominent. In theory, the post-industrial city becomes a new type of frontier where the new settlers find ideal conditions for artistic and other creative practice: Space is available and, most importantly, affordable. Thus, a narrative connection is produced between abandoned industrial and other facilities, and artistic production as the new engine for development. These concepts go hand in hand with the proposition that post-industrial cities are similar to an “empty canvas” (or a wilderness) that can be cleared of its legacy and inscription, and on which newcomers can leave their mark, as there is supposedly no obligation to deal with either the past, or with the native population.

25 This narrative is not only an oversimplification. It can also potentially become a threat to the local population that is no longer visible in this narrative. Of course, one can ask if a debate about whether gentrification is happening in shrinking cities in desperate need of inhabitants and tax-payers even makes any sense, but at the same time the sense of displacement that becomes evident in the story of the “creative class” needs to be taken seriously (Elliott). Instead of actively establishing a continuity between past and present, these newer projects are carefully curated and accumulate “placeless, meaningless, and cultureless” (Raines 201) landscapes producing a linearity that is not part and parcel of the original narrative or of post-industrial urbanity at large, an urbanity marked by multi-layeredness and intense contradictions.

These26 new developments, that cannot only be seen in the Ruhr or Detroit, but everywhere around the globe, are usually steered by outside actors and work with powerful slogans of “reinvention” and “creative cities” being built for a newly emerging “creative class.” This “creative class” can be defined as a group of knowledge workers (usually white) coming to these post-industrial cities in order to begin, finally, a process of economic uplift that the current, local population cannot achieve. With regard to the Ruhr, this development has very recently been described as a shift from “industrial culture to cultural industry.” These newcomers are supposed to bring capital—economic and cultural—to post-industrial regions and to provide new hope. Since the idea to rebuild the “old Detroit” has been rejected by the citizens themselves (Eisinger 90), it is somewhat understandable that such a narrative could gain momentum in Detroit; it is quite astonishing to see the same kind of development in the Ruhr.

27 This development, that threatens the resilience and sustainability of grown communities, points to the pressure to put oneself on the “map” in the global competition for the best minds and highest funding, but also to larger trends in contemporary city building in which a highly idealized present and future of post-industrial spaces is projected in the context of booster campaigns which political leaders tend to want for

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outsiders— possible investors or future residents—to see (Eisinger 93). This means that at a time when affordable housing solutions are needed (e.g. due to the lack of jobs), luxury condominiums are constructed to stimulate positive development. Recently, for example, the replacement of a steel plant with a lake including luxury housing along the shore has provoked a lot of discussion in Dortmund, another Ruhr city being faced with difficulties to retain its tax-base: Who was going to be living there, in a city with 13% unemployment? According to Thomas Pedroni, “neoliberal urbanism involves a process of creative destruction that remakes the city physically and discursively. In the process, a different kind of city emerges—a city imagined by someone else, and not for the people who remain there” (206). The new construction, as McGraw evaluates for Detroit, changes the outlook of the city, but in the long run, such success stories do not overcome, but rather mask the overall decline happening in these places (291). The developments threaten to create a “tale of two cities” with a prosperous and a poor and neglected part—in the case of the lake in a city that prides itself in its strong social-democratic tradition. The environment that is newly created in these areas is sterile and not locally specific—rather, it looks like anywhere else. The new facilities form an enclave within the overall context of the post-industrial city: Stories about new opportunities emerging out of the rubble in these places stand right next to stories of despair, never ending loss and decay, creating new spatial unevenness and new borders between people living in the same city.

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Figure 5

New developments

Certainly,28 there are counter-initiatives in the Ruhr and in Detroit. Neighborhood involvement groups that are locally organized and financed, and informal artistic activity around such places as the Packard Plant and the iconic Michigan Central Station should be mentioned as well as research-based projects that try to build on and

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extend the long-term legacy of what the International Architecture Exhibition has done in the Ruhr: With an increasing focus on cultural pluralism and looking toward comparative urbanism to contest the powerful discourse of the “creative” imperative. At the same time, these projects are oftentimes not where the funding goes because they go beyond the established schemes, and they are not as “glamorous” as luxury housing. But they focus on people who have made these cities their homes. This is important, and this counters the threat behind the story of the “new frontier:” That the supposed frontier-space is treated as an empty arena instead of a landscape full of stories that are already there.

7. Conclusion

While29 much more could be said about how the places discussed here –Germany’s Ruhr and Detroit, Michigan– deal with their industrial legacies spatially, my article has hopefully shown that the role of storytelling in creating sustainable communities for the future cannot and should not be underestimated. While certainly, in a “global” age, global developments play into local affairs, urban sustainability is first and foremost to be thought on the local level, thus, taking into account the different historical legacies and layers a place might offer. Urban planning and American Studies can work together in uncovering some of the hidden layers these sites have to offer and contribute to a more inclusive vision of a sustainable post-industrial city.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Barndt, Kerstin. “‘Memory Traces of an Abandoned Set of Futures’: Industrial Ruins in the Postindustrial Landscapes of Germany.” Ruins of Modernity. Ed. Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010. 270–93.

Eckstein, Barbara. “Making Space: Stories in the Practice of Planning.” Story and Sustainability: Planning, Practice, and Possibility for American cities. Ed. Barbara J. Eckstein and James A. Throgmorton. Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press, 2003. 12–36.

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Eckstein, Barbara, and James A. Throgmorton. “Introduction: Blueprint Blues.” Story and Sustainability: Planning, Practice, and Possibility for American cities. Ed. Barbara J. Eckstein and James A. Throgmorton. Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press, 2003. 1–8.

Eckstein, Barbara J., and James A. Throgmorton, eds. Story and Sustainability: Planning, Practice, and Possibility for American Cities. Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press, 2003.

Eisinger, Peter. “Reimagining Detroit.” City and Community 2.2 (2003): 85–99.

Elliott, Meagan. “We need to ask: Is gentrification happening in Detroit?” December 13, 2011. Web. 1 Sep. 2014. .

Ganser, Karl. “Eine Bauausstellung in hübsch-hässlicher Umgebung.” Forum Industriedenkmalpflege und Geschichtskultur 1 (2009): 15-19.

Hell, Julia, and Andreas Schönle, eds. Ruins of Modernity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010.

Herron, Jerry. “Postmodernism Ground Zero, or Going to the Movies at the Grand Circus Park.” Social Text 18 (1987): 61–77.

_____ . “Detroit: Disaster Deferred, Disaster in Progress.” South Atlantic Quarterly 106.4 (2007): 663–82.

McGraw, Bill. “Life in the Ruins of Detroit.” History Workshop 63.1 (2007): 288–302.

Pedroni, Thomas C. “Urban Shrinkage as a Performance of Whiteness: Neoliberal Urban Restructuring, Education, and Racial Containment in the Post-industrial, Global-niche city.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 32.2 (2011): 203–15.

Raines, Anne B. “Wandeldurch (Industrie) Kultur [Change through (industrial) culture]: conservation and renewal in the Ruhrgebiet.” Planning Perspectives 26.2 (2011): 183–207.

Ryan, Brent D., and Daniel Campo. “Autopia’s End: The Decline and Fall of Detroit’s Automotive Manufacturing Landscape.” Journal of Planning History 12.2 (2012): 95–132.

Sheridan, David M. Making Sense of Detroit. University of Michigan Library, 1999. Web. 1 Sep. 2014. .

Throgmorton, James A. Planning as Persuasive Storytelling: The Rhetorical Construction of Chicago's Electric Future. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

_____ . “Imagining Sustainable Places.” Story and Sustainability: Planning, Practice, and Possibility for American Cities. Ed. Barbara J. Eckstein and James A. Throgmorton. Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press, 2003. 39–61.

Walters, Wendy S. “Turning the Neighborhood Inside Out: Imagining a New Detroit in Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project.” TDR: The Drama Review 45.4 (2001): 64–93.

NOTES

1. From 1988 to 2008, the city of Bochum was home to a Nokia production plant. In 2008, Nokia closed the plant and moved its production to Romania. This led to the loss of about 2000 jobs and caused significant public attention. 2. Karl Ganser is a German geographer and urban planner. He was the executive director of the International Architecture Exhibition “Emscher Park/ Workshop for Industrial Regions” (1989-1999).

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INDEX

Keywords: de-industrialization, Detroit, Ruhr Region, Storytelling, urban transformation

AUTHOR

JULIA SATTLER TU Dortmund University Julia Sattler teaches American Studies at TU Dortmund University in Germany’s Ruhr Region. Her research focuses on Urban Cultural Studies, Storytelling in American Culture and the cultural history of Rust Belt. Combing American Studies and Urban Planning, her post-doctoral project is reading the Ruhr Region and Detroit in dialogue. From 2012 to 2015, she directed an international PhD program on “Urban Transformations in the USA” at the UA Ruhr funded by the Mercator foundation. In addition to research and teaching, Julia Sattler has worked on multiple urban redevelopment projects in the Ruhr. She was a visiting scholar to the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning in 2013 and to the University of Iowa’s School of Urban and Regional Planning in 2015.

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The Implementation of the URBAN Community Initiative: A Transformative Driver towards Collaborative Urban Regeneration? Answers from Spain

Sonia De Gregorio Hurtado

1. Introduction1

At1 the end of the 80s and during the 90s, different theoretical and practical contributions (e.g. Davidoff, Friedmann, Forester, Healey, Innes) developed an approach to urban matters that was characterized by participative/communicative practices. During that period this approach pushed for the adoption of certain policy instruments in the United States and the United Kingdom. In the context of the European Community, the experience developed in the United Kingdom exerted a relevant influence on the construction of the communitarian approach to the urban domain. In fact, the British experience would make an important contribution to the policy instruments for urban regeneration to be launched by the European Community in 1994: The URBAN Community Initiative.

The2 development of the theoretical and practical contributions mentioned above took place in a complex context in which questions of the legitimacy of traditional planning processes became central. The situations of injustice and conflict, in which local communities could not have their say on urban transformation processes that affected directly their neighborhoods, were increasing as a result of the presence of a number of different social groups sharing the same urban spaces, and in respect to their growing capacity to organize themselves to express their disagreement. Urban planning processes, which had hitherto avoided the issue of participation and diversity, started to take local communities into account. In this context, the above-mentioned

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contributions served as a source of intellectual input. Although each of those is characterized by the ideology and the professional activity of the authors, all of them developed alternatives to the “traditional” planning processes (those in use in the period following the Second War World in Europe and the United States) which proposed the representation of all the relevant stakeholders in the decision-making processes through the development of a communicative and inclusive approach.

In3 1997, Patsy Healey published Collaborative Planning: Shaping Places in Fragmented Societies. The book argues that the involvement of all relevant actors in a planning process can lead to the transformation of governance (the ways or processes through which matters of common interest are managed by political communities), resulting in the construction of institutional capacity of those places. The author assigns to the planning process a role in the transformation of places towards collaborative governance models. For her, planning becomes part of a process that has the capacity to build up relations and discourses through which links between networks are constructed in order to address matters of shared concern at different scales (neighborhoods, towns and urban regions). Through this alternative approach in urban planning it is possible to overcome conflicts that characterize urban decision-making in which divergent interests and expectations come together. These processes are developed through the construction of forums for dialogue, where active discussion takes place. One of the strengths of this approach is the potential to develop a transformative work able to establish new ways of organizing and new relational networks (61).

In4 the framework of this work, the concept of Collaborative Planning is applied in the context of instruments for urban regeneration. Through the implementation of participatory regeneration processes, that involve devolution of power to the local community and their responsibility in urban decision making and implementation (empowerment), it is possible to develop institutional capacity. It also entails the evolution towards collaborative models of governance that, apart from making possible the dialogue between different stakeholders, leads to the transformation of local and multi-level governance. The inclusion of the collaborative dimension in planning involves the consideration of the knowledge of the local community (not expert knowledge) as well as expert knowledge, and therefore the use of both in order to better identify the causes of urban deprivation and define more effective regeneration strategies. Finally, the collaborative approach involves encompassing a strategic planning vision in the inclusive understanding of the problem and the design and implementation of action measures.

The5 proposal developed by Healey has been set as conceptual framework for the analysis undertook in this work because in Collaborative Planning the participation of the different stakeholders takes place within the institutional structures that constitute the planning framework. From this perspective, the regeneration programs implemented under the two rounds of the URBAN Community initiative are considered to be the instruments that could not only transform local governance through dialogue but alter urban policy governance systems. This study reviews the collaborative approach assumed by the programs of urban regeneration implemented under the URBAN and URBAN II in Spain in order to understand how the theoretical assumptions and the practical objectives that were adopted by this Community Initiative were transposed to the Spanish urban scenario. The objectives are to identify if the

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programs could transform local governance in the urban areas where they were implemented, encouraging local capacity. The outcomes are proposed as a contribution to the urban agenda that is being discussed in the framework of the EU at the moment.

2. Method

The6 methodology that has been used to achieve the above-mentioned objectives is based on the next steps and tasks:

7 a) Review of the urban policy of the EU (its background and theoretical contributions) from the beginning of the 80s to the present, and characterization of the URBAN and URBAN II Community Initiatives as collaborative tools for urban regeneration.

8 b) Study of the development of the collaborative dimension of the URBAN Community Initiative in Spain. This part undertakes an analysis of the 29 programs implemented in the country.

9 c) Study of the development of the collaborative dimension of the URBAN II Community Initiative in Spain. This part undertakes an analysis of the 10 URBAN II programs of urban regeneration implemented in the country. In order to achieve an in-depth knowledge on how the collaborative dimension was developed,the study examines the URBAN II program according to which the collaborative approach was implemented in a more sustained and coherent way (Pamplona), applying the guidelines provided by the European Commission regarding collaborative regeneration processes.

10 d) Analysis of results of b) and c) under the light of the tradition of urban regeneration in Spain. This part presents the aspects that have fostered or hindered the transformation of local governance in the Spanish cities where the URBAN II programs of urban regeneration developed.

11 e) Identification of conclusions and recommendations to be considered in the actions to be taken for the continuation of the URBAN II Community Initiative in the country under the urban policy of the EU. The recommendations are relevant as well for a consideration of the urban agenda that is taking place at a EU level.

3. The construction and launching of a collaborative tool for urban regeneration (URBAN) in the context of the European Union

In12 the early 90s the European Commission accepted the request presented by certain cities, some institutions, and agencies for direct intervention of the Structural Funds in deprived urban areas of the European Community through the development of a new and specific instrument of urban regeneration. This demand was based on the awareness regarding the structural crisis faced by many cities in Europe and the specificity of urban problems. Based on the experience gained through the development of the Regional Policy during the 80s, the European Commission, The

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European Parliament and the governments of the Member States began to embrace gradually a framework for urban development in the European Community. This work, together with the previous experience of the Urban Pilot Projects (PPU) launched in 1989 by the European Commission, led in 1994 to the presentation of the URBAN Community Initiative.

URBAN13 was influenced by the urban regeneration policies that had been developed previously by different Member States of the European Union and particularly by the United Kingdom, in whose national context had begun to operate the City Challenge program in 1991. The URBAN Community Initiative adopted many of the methodological issues of this tool. City Challenge was a result of the process of consideration that took place in the British framework in the end of the 80s on the limited outcomes of the initiatives that had been put in place during the previous years in the field of urban revitalization (i.e. Urban Development Corporations, Inner City Enterprises, City Grant). The new program aimed to overcome the main difficulties faced by those tools through the adoption of an integrated approach in which local authorities and other local stakeholders had to play a significant role in the regeneration processes. The integrated approach to tackling social inclusion at the local level constituted a turning point in the British scenario and corresponded to what, in the early 90s, M. Stewart called “new localism,” that amounted to a review of the British urban policy towards the devolution of power to the local level, thus seeking to achieve desired policy objectives. The communicative and collaborative contribution influenced the search for alternatives at that moment. In fact, Mark Tewdwr-Jones and Philip Allmendinger point out that the concept of Collaborative Planning seems to have evolved as a reaction to the planning experience developed during the 80s, and particularly from the debates that took place at the end of the 20th century as a response to the neoliberal puzzle of anti-planning regulations in the 1980s.

During14 the same period (early 90s) the European Commission (through its Directorate General for Regional Policy) requested Michael Parkinson (from the European Institute for Urban Affairs of Liverpool) to design a draft for a Community Initiative aimed to regenerate urban areas. Parkinson counted on a deep knowledge of the tradition of urban programs that had been launched during the 80s in his country and on the ongoing discussion on urban revitalization. On this basis, he prepared and presented to the Directorate General for Regional Policy a proposal for a Community Initiative to face urban decline that was highly influenced by City Challenge (De Gregorio, 2012). After a quite complex process,2 the Community Initiative was officially launched by the European Commission in 1994 under the name of URBAN.

4. The collaborative method for urban regeneration in URBAN

URBAN15 integrated in its methodology many of the elements of City Challenge, but assuming a more social approach, as a result of the integration of the British experience and other urban traditions present in the European Context (mainly the urban social tradition of France and the participatory experiences that had been developed in Northern countries). By launching URBAN, the European Commission aimed to introduce innovation in the field of rehabilitation of degraded neighborhoods and to promote the transformation of the governance structures of the planning

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systems of EU’s Member States (Reiter). These goals would be achieved through the implementation of the URBAN regeneration programs based on a collaborative approach. URBAN was one of the 13 Community Initiatives of the EU during the period 1994-1999. The Community Initiative was used by the European Commission as an instrument to act in policy areas where it was considered that direct action at Community level was more effective than action through the Community Support Frameworks agreed by the Commission and the Member States (highly influenced and limited by national priorities). The European Commission understood URBAN as a bridge between innovative small-scale urban projects and wider actions funded under the Structural Funds. It should create synergies between them in order to initiate a multiplier effect in the long term that could result in the mainstreaming of the URBAN approach.

The16 main elements of the URBAN methodology to regenerate urban areas were the following: • Area-based approach that focused on concentrating financial and technical resources in a limited deprived urban area during a period of 6-8 years. • Strategic approach based on a vision of urban development integrated with the local and regional strategies of urban and territorial development. • Integrated approach through the inclusion of measures of economic, social, environmental and management nature, able to give a holistic answer to the problems of degradation. • Involvement of all actors with interests in the area of the regeneration process with the aim of building local capacity. This collaborative approach included the involvement of the different levels of government (local, regional, national and communitarian) and interdepartmental collaboration at a horizontal level. • Competitive selection process based on the quality of the proposal, co-financing capacity, innovative vision adopted, etc. (De Gregorio, “Iniciativa Comunitar”).

The17 URBAN Community Initiative was launched by the European Commission officially through the Communication to the Member States laying down guidelines for operational programmes under the Community initiative concerning urban areas (URBAN) (European Commission, 1994a). This communication set out the scope, objectives, eligible areas, measures to be implemented, and conditions for funding of the programs. Each of the programs had to be structured along a number of axes that were instrumental to the implementation of the strategy of urban regeneration. The axes contained different measures and, in turn, the measures contained a set of individual actions that had to be developed during the period 1994-1999. As established in the Communication of the European Commission and in the official documents, the urban regeneration programs implemented under URBAN aimed at involving the local community in the development of a strategy of urban regeneration, giving place to an integrated approach through the collaboration of all the relevant departments of the Municipalities through a holistic vision (acting in the environmental, economic and social dimensions of urban decline).

The18 collaborative vision of the instrument was not familiar to many of the Member States of the EU. At that moment, only few had developed urban policies at a national level and many had no previous experience in the implementation of a collaborative approach in the context of urban policies. This explains why the Communication by the Commission advised the integration of the collaborative approach but, neither it, nor any of the other documents that established the

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normative guidelines, pointed it out as compulsory. As a result, the Initiative was transformed in each national context, influenced by the urban regeneration practice traditionally implemented. Consequently, the potential of transformation of the collaborative methodological elements of URBAN in the Member States was limited by the inertia of their urban planning systems.

5. URBAN in the Spanish scenario: introducing innovation and dealing with inertia

Initiatives19 on urban regeneration in Spain have been developed mainly during the last two decades. In fact, when in 1994 the European Commission launched URBAN, some Member States of the EU had a consolidated experience on urban rehabilitation of deprived neighborhoods, implemented through specific legislative and policy frameworks, while in Spain the experience was shorter and there was no comparable initiative on a national scale. The main reasons that explain this situation are historical: The isolation and conservative ideology that characterized the dictatorial period left the country outside the debates on urban renewal that had taken place at a European level. The profound State reform that was implemented since the Constitution of 1978 influenced the way in which urban policies would evolve in the next decades: the responsibility on planning issues, that so far had been in the hands of the Central Government, were transferred to the regions (Autonomous Communities) and the cities. From then on, institutional action on urban issues evolved towards a fragmented institutional scenario, where collaboration between different levels of government became difficult. At the same time, the social and institutional transformation that took place during the next decades resulted in the consolidation of an urban planning tradition in which local communities were almost excluded from the decision-making processes. Institutions adopted a paternalistic vision while, after a participatory momentum under the Urban Social Movements during the late 70s and the early 80s, the request for participation by citizens and associations was greatly reduced. As a result, in general, urban transformation was implemented in the country on the basis of instrumental rationality, limiting the participation of local communities. It is worth pointing out as well that, by the arrival of URBAN in 1994, urban regeneration in the country was characterized by a sectoral approach in which the transformation of public space prevailed over the transformation of the social and economic dimensions of decline.

The20 afore-mentioned situation, together with the lack of experience in the implementation of collaborative instruments in the field of urban policies, resulted in that major goals were not attained and URBAN programs in Spain3 did not succeed in transforming governance in the context of the urban regeneration strategies (De Gregorio, 2012). In fact, during the first round of the URBAN Community Initiative (1994-1999) the programs reproduced the traditional approach to urban transformation, showing a lack of integration of non-institutional actors in the definition and implementation of the strategies with the continuation of the sectoral approach (where the focus on environmental transformation still prevailed). Within this general scenario, just a few programs managed to implement the integrated and participatory methodological dimensions of the URBAN Initiative. In these cases, program limitations led to strategies that slightly improved urban environments but

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were not successful in achieving major transformative results. None of the programs was able to implement a wide and consistent participative process. Only the program of Huelva partially reached its goal toward an inclusive process of urban transformation, while most of the programs developed processes of “participation” that consisted only in spreading information in the local community. However, one should not underestimate what was achieved in the first round of URBAN in Spain which translated mainly in the knowledge and experience gained by both practitioners and institutions. An understanding of the novelty of the methodology proposed by URBAN was eventually introduced in the academic circles (even if it exerted less influence than in other countries of the EU). All this resulted in a penetration of the URBAN methodology at a theoretical level, which, in turn, contributed to essential practical outcomes in the next round of the Initiative (URBAN II 2000-2006) (De Gregorio, 2012).

6. URBAN II in Spain: achieving concrete results and trying to overcome persisting inertia

The21 second round of URBAN was launched by the Communication from the European Commission to the Member States laying down guidelines for a Community Initiative concerning economic and social regeneration of cities and of neighborhoods in crisis in order to promote sustainable urban development (URBAN II) in 2000 (European Commission, 2000). It maintained the approach and objectives of the first round, focusing on the promotion of innovation and the dissemination of best practices.

22 In Spain 10 programs were integrated in the URBAN II Community Initiative.4 The way in which the collaborative dimension was embraced and implemented in some of these programs shows a relevant evolution if compared with those developed during 1994-1999, but at the same time it demonstrates how local tradition and inertia continued hindering the implementation of “real” collaborative strategies. It is worth pointing out that, even if the outcomes of the programs run under URBAN (1994-1999) highlighted the problems the municipalities had faced in order to implement the collaborative approach, there was no initiative process at the national level. As a result, the programs continued to face problems in implementing this methodological dimension in the Spanish context. Only those municipalities with more resources, experience and political will were able to overcome limitations.

The23 lack of experience of Spanish municipalities in implementing collaborative visions in urban policies explains why, in most cases, the URBAN II programs equated the participatory processes with dissemination of information to citizens and consultation processes (in the context of strategies already defined by local institutions). Nevertheless, the analysis identifies two cases (Pamplona and Gijón) where the URBAN II programs were able to launch processes in which an interaction between stakeholders took place (De Gregorio, 2012). The URBAN II program of Pamplona constitutes the example in which the collaborative vision was implemented in a more consistent way. The strategy of urban regeneration designed by the Municipality included a structured process of participation organized with the support of facilitators (experts from the University of Navarra) in which all the stakeholders were invited to participate in the design of the strategy, the implementation of some of its actions and the monitoring of the process. The next part of this essay focuses on the

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case of Pamplona, in order to examine the conditions on which the city developed the participatory process and the limitations that had to be faced as the process evolved.

a. The case of URBAN II in Pamplona

The24 URBAN program developed in Pamplona acted on the historic center of the city and the neighborhood of Rochapea, a mixed-use area with small industrial activities and residential blocks (Fig. 01). The total surface area was 1.7 km2 and the resident population approximately 30,000 (16% of the total population in 2000). Since the 70s, both neighborhoods had suffered depopulation, poor housing conditions, lack of public facilities and public space, and problems of social integration. In addition, they were characterized by the decline of economic activity and urban environmental deterioration. A reversal of the depopulation trend started by the late 90s. In order to counteract the degradation, the Municipality started in the case of Rochapea the construction of public housing projects in 1988. At the time of the implementation of URBAN, the area was being reconverted from a mixed-use to a residential one.

Figure 1

Area of the URBAN II program in Pamplona (Rochapea area: North to River Arga; Historic center: South to River Arga) (source: developed by the author on a base of Google Maps)

25 The Municipality of Pamplona chose the historic center and Rochapea to implement URBAN II after an analysis of the situation of the different districts of the city. The main reasons that entailed the decision were: • The poor socio-economic indicators. • The problems of urban functionality posed by the physical barriers between the historic center and the Rochapea area (wall and river).

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• The need to promote commercial activity. • The need of more public facilities and public spaces. • The urgency from the part of institutions to address the sustained efforts of citizens, social actors and local agencies to revitalize the area.

26 The URBAN program of Pamplona adopted from the beginning a collaborative and integrated vision. In fact, from the beginning the Municipality considered the existence of a social participative substrate as an important basis on which “[to] build new and deeper ways of participation”able to increase the solidness and strength of the program and improve its dissemination at a local level (Ministerio de Hacienda, 2001). This vision enabled the Municipality to understand the collaborative approach of URBAN as an opportunity for the city, making it an essential part of the strategy. As a significant component of the program and taking advantage of its transformative potential, the collaborative approach was introduced to reinforce urban regeneration strategies: “To create enduring structures of participation and management based on consensus-building and able to undertake and make possible the change and the regeneration that the URBAN area needs” (ibid.). The analysis of how the collaborative vision was encoded in the program’s documents of 2001 shows that it aimed to construct effective institutional capacity through participation-learning, resulting in citizen input into agency decision-making and management. In order to facilitate the participation of all the relevant and interested actors in the regeneration program, the Municipality published an invitation in the newspapers. Afterwards, a protocol was signed with the stakeholders in order to start a process of social participation able to monitor the project and integrate proposals by social actors and individuals. The protocol set the procedures for participation as well as its deadlines, and anticipated the creation of the Management Committee, a body which would coordinate the different arenas of participation (URBAN Forums) and would guarantee the smooth evolution of the process.

The27 Management Committee was composed of various local and institutional actors (City Council, technicians of the URBAN program, representatives of organizations of the historic centre and Rochapea, etc.). It represented the core of the participative process, as it engaged all stakeholders as equal contributors in dialogue and negotiation. The participative process counted on the technical assistance and expertise of INSONA (Institute of Social Studies of the University of Navarra).

Discussions28 of the measures to be implemented took place in the context of the URBAN Forums. During 2001, eight Forums were created, in which different measures were discussed. At first, the Forums played an informative role on the rules of URBAN, giving participants the opportunity to become familiar with this method of urban regeneration. INSONA acted as a facilitator when conflicts arose in the course of discussions, in order to make different positions converge into an acceptable proposal for all. The participation process lasted three years. Once defined and agreed, the measures moved to a body called Mesa URBAN which was chaired by the Mayor and was comprised of stakeholders, technicians from the City Hall (particularly the technicians involved in the development of the URBAN program) and representatives of all the political parties with representation in the Municipality Plenary Sessions. The Mesa URBAN studied the proposals of the Forums. It had the authority of accepting or rejecting them. Nevertheless, it exercised its decision-making authority respecting what had been decided in the Forums, proposing changes in the case of the

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measures that were considered very complex from a technical point of view. Some of the measures selected were: Improvement of sports facilities; connection of the Paseo de Ronda to surrounding streets and improvement of adjacent streets; refurbishment of Palacio del Condestable; construction of centre for local associations and NGOs; access to the Internet available to all; improvement of accessibility; low emissions public transport; installation of solar panels; services for entrepreneurs; tools and services for the creation of SMEs; creation of Environmental Education Center; promotion of crafts and arts incubator; integration of immigrants; support for older people. The participative nature of the URBAN program of Pamplona diminished as the implementation progressed, when the Municipality started developing measures differently from what had been agreed in the participative process.5 This circumstance led to frustration and dissatisfaction of citizens who were engaged in the policy making process. Despite the discomfort born around the final realization of some activities and the recognition that the process of participation lost strength over time, the stakeholders contacted6 considered that the process was very positive, not only because it allowed the introduction of particular measures in the final strategy that otherwise would not be carried out by the Municipality, but because the path initiated by URBAN led to the transformation of local governance through the inclusion of the local community in the regeneration of the city.

b. Results of the participative process

29 The development of the described process resulted in measures that improved significantly the strategy of the program. All stakeholders who were interested in getting involved were integrated in the participatory Forums. In particular, citizens and associations of the area (historic center and Rochapea) were well represented. The participatory process led to a high degree of consensus regarding the strategy to be implemented to revitalize holistically the historic center and the Rochapea area. The actual participation in the Forums allowed a large number of citizens and other actors to familiarize themselves with the URBAN method and acknowledge the EU interest toward urban regeneration. It provided them experience on more democratic decision making processes in the field of urban matters at a local level. Despite the difficulties, it should be noted that the participative approach was considered positive by local associations, the Municipality and other stakeholders. It was also assessed positively by the European Commission in 2003.7 This shows that the inertia and traditional limitations that characterized the Spanish context of urban regeneration at that moment could be overcome with political and technical commitment. In the case of Pamplona, the commitment of the technicians of the Municipality responsible for the implementation of the URBAN program with the participative process was a key factor in order to overcome the problems that arose before and during the implementation. Nevertheless, with the decrease of political commitment the participative process declined and the results achieved so far were only partially preserved.

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7. Lessons from the experience of URBAN and URBAN II in Spain

The30 observation of the collaborative dimension in the URBAN and URBAN II programs shows that it was only partially introduced in the Spanish case, which reduced the transformative capacity of the processes of urban regeneration put in practice. This is explained by the tendency to reproduce traditional practices and the hesitancy to introduce new methodological elements in the domain of urban regeneration. The experience reviewed in this work, and particularly the case of Pamplona, shows that these limitations can be overcome when technical and political commitment supports the collaborative and integrated approach, and when the collaborative dimension is understood as an opportunity to improve the local management of urban issues and the development of local capacity. Political will and commitment emerge as crucial factors to sustain a process of participation aimed to develop local capacity. In addition, the Spanish experience shows the fragility of participative processes when they are still at an early stage and not fully implemented.

The31 difficulties involved in implementing the collaborative potential of the URBAN method in Spain highlights once again the necessity of fostering this methodological aspect in the programs for urban regeneration launched in the context of EU’s urban policy.8 The analysis shows that municipalities need more support and knowledge to understand the potential of participation in order to construct effective and sustained collaborative frameworks for urban regeneration. Member States are defining at the moment the instruments through which they will implement the Cohesion Policy of the EU during the current budget period (2014-2020). In this context, it is particularly important to reinforce the participative approach for urban regeneration, so that it can effectively contribute to the transformation of local governance, the empowerment of local communities and the consideration of the real needs and demands of local citizens.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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European Commission. Communication to the Member States laying down guidelines for operational programmes under the Community Initiative Concerning Urban Areas (URBAN). COM (94) 61 final. Brussels: EC, 1994a.

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NOTES

1. Post Doctoral Research Fellow in Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. The article is related to the research work developed by the author in the context of her PhD Thesis (De Gregorio, 2012) and in the line of research on integrated urban regeneration in the European Union that she is currently developing. 2. See (De Gregorio, 2014; Tortola, 2013; Parkinson, 2005). 3. 29 programs were developed in Spain under URBAN: Albacete, Avilés-Corvera, Badajoz, Badalona, Barakaldo, Cádiz, Cartagena, Castellón, Córdoba, Huelva, La Coruña, Langreo, León, Madrid, Málaga, Murcia, Palma de Mallorca, Pontevedra, Sabadell, Salamanca, Santa Coloma de Gramanet, Santander, Sevilla, Toledo, Telde, Valencia, Valladolid, Vigo and Zaragoza. 4. Cáceres, Gijón, Granada, Jaén, Orense, Pamplona, San Adriá de Besós, San Sebastián-Pasaia, San Cristóbal de la Laguna and Teruel. 5. In particular, the Municipality changed the use of the refurbished Palacio del Condestable and the location of the centre for local associations and NGOs, devoting both buildings to activities that were not considered of social interest by the local community. 6. In the context of the research were contacted: the Municipality of Pamplona; the Asociación Gaztelán; the Asociación Alter Nativas; and INSONA. 7. It was included in the document “Cooperation with Cities: The URBAN Community Initiative” (European Commission, 2003: 17) as an example of urban participatory processes together with those of the URBAN II programs of Rotterdam, Clyde Waterfront and Graz. 8. URBAN has not been launched from 2007 as a Community Initiative, but its lessons and its method are to be mainstreamed in the context of the EU policy, particularly in the initiatives and programs funded under the Structural Funds.

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INDEX

Keywords: collaborative approach, innovation, Pamplona, participative process, planning, Spanish experience, URBAN and URBAN II, urban regeneration

AUTHOR

SONIA DE GREGORIO HURTADO Universidad Politécnica de Madrid Sonia De Gregorio Hurtado is a Post Doctoral Research Fellow Sonia is postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Urban and Spatial Planning of the Faculty of Architecture of the Polytechnic University of Madrid –UPM-. She has developed her professional activity as practitioner in architecture and urban planning in Europe, North Africa, Asia and Center America, in Chapman Taylor Architects and L35. She has a sustained research activity as research fellow in CEDEX (Ministry of Public Works) and UPM. She has been a visiting researcher in the European Institute for Urban Affairs (Liverpool) and in Boku University (Vienna), and a lecturer in UPM. She participates frequently in high-level conferences and publishes research in Spanish and English journals. Her work focuses on the analysis of the urban dimension of the EU policy, integrated urban regeneration, local climate change and mobility, and the gender dimension of urban policies.

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PART TWO Sustainability and the City: America and the Urban World

Imaginary Cities

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Urban Figures, Common Ground: JR and the Cultural Practices of Perception

Petra Eckhard

The most political decision you make is where you direct people’s eyes. In other words, what you show people, day in and day out, is political. Wim Wenders

The1 stern gaze of monstrous eyes and the sudden provocative presence of grimacing faces have added a new and astonishing form of décor to the bleak and characterless walls of Downtown Los Angeles. In an uncompromising gesture, the gigantic photographic portraits which spread over entire walls of multiple stories buildings, garage doors, rooftops, fire walls or industrial corridors consume both the city’s public wall space and the immediate and absolute attention of the (mostly motorized) passers-by. Beautiful and threatening at the same time, their smart symbiosis with the city’s architecture signals a previously unseen form of urban monumentality which, in terms of reception aesthetics theory, would fall into the category of the sublime.1 “What exactly are they advertising?” one might ask, but the larger-than- life black and white portrait posters lack a commercial purpose. The posters’ contents disturb the observer’s eye since what is prominently at display is not the stars and starlets of Hollywood’s dream factory but the wrinkled faces of Carl, Michael, Tuangpet, Robert and John—elderly Angelenos who would usually fall into the category of the un-famous. So would the architectonic structures upon which the portraits had been pasted: Bleak industrial halls and undecorated sheds reveal their age and un-glamorousness through the sun-bleached and fading colors of their once brightly painted frontages. The portraits seem to have

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entered a silent and intimate dialogue with the city, which, upon deeper reflection, brings to mind Robert E. Park’s famous assertion that the city is “a product of human nature,” a space first and foremost defined by “the people who compose it” (1).

Figure 1

JR, “Michael Downtown” from “The Wrinkles of the City,” Los Angeles, 2012 (c) JR

Faces2 on facades are currently experiencing a revival as tools of social critique and commentary. Since 2005 Parisian street artist and urban activist JR,2 who positions his work at the intersection between graffiti and photography (thus referring to himself as a “photograffeur”),3 has made visible urban conflicts around the globe through the display of the people who are most directly involved: The rioting immigrant youngsters of the Parisian suburbs (Portrait of a Generation, 2004-2006), Israelis and Palestinians on both sides of the West Bank Barrier (Face to Face, 2007), female victims of war, rape or other side-effects of political extremism in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the slums of Cambodia, and the shantytowns of Kenya and India (Women are Heroes, 2008-2010), the ageing population of the poor areas of Shanghai, La Havana, Cartagena, Berlin and Los Angeles (The Wrinkles of the City, 2008-2013), with each individual coming to personify a part of the city’s history. JR positions the portraits wisely so that their location in urban space becomes part of the social commentary itself.

Especially3 JR’s early projects were realized without permission, a strategy which allowed him to occupy the most relevant architectural spaces in terms of social and aesthetic impact. For his first project— Portraitof a Generation (2004-2006)—the portraits of grimacing teenagers living in the poor suburbs of Paris were placed strategically

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not only in the very center of Clichy-sous-Bois4––to make sure they don’t escape the journalist’s eyes–– but also across Central Paris’ posh arrondissements to remind the wealthy public about the class conflict’s biased media-coverage. For his Women are Heroes project in Kenya’s Kiberia slum, JR used the photographs of local women to cover 2000 square meters of rooftops, thus providing a water-resistant layer to the fragile shacks. At the same time, to anyone passing the village by plane or helicopter, the large eyes and faces transform the slum into a spatial statement prominently declaring the local women’s existence and survival in a world of gender-based violence and discrimination. In addition, the installation also includes the paste-ups of women’s eyes on six train cars, which when in movement complete three other oversized portraits pasted on the slope below the railway tracks. In Morro de Providencia, one of the most dangerous favelas in the hills of Rio de Janeiro, the paste ups show large pairs of eyes belonging to the favela’s female residents. The visual axis is provokingly directed to Rio de Janeiro’s fancy center and glamorous water-front drives: An ironic re- interpretation of Orwell’s 1984, with the female gaze constantly reminding of the ongoing drug war and the city’s destructive class hierarchies.

Having4 been awarded the TED prize5 in 2011 at the age of 27, JR has now become famous on a global scale also exhibiting his works in galleries such as the MOCA Museum Los Angeles, the Centre Pompidou Paris, the Tate Modern London or the Magda Danysz Gallery in Shanghai. His most recent project, financed with the $100.000 award money provided by TED, is even more participatory in nature: Inside Out invites people to upload their own portraits which are then transformed by JR into large-scale posters and sent back to their clients enabling them to paste them at locations relevant to their individual projects. In North Dakota, 60 portraits were placed in the Standing Rock Reservation by the representatives of the 7th generation of the Lakota tribe to make visible that they still exist. In Parroquia Guangaje, Ecuador, the Kichwa Indians pasted 23 portraits in order to react to their political invisibility and exclusion in the country. 51 portraits were placed in front of Russian Embassies across Europe to stand up against homophobia. In Caracas, Venezuela the walls of shacks are decorated by the faces of 220 women who all have lost their children because of violence.

These5 examples help to understand why JR’s works are classified as “relational art,” i.e., art that establishes a firm connection between the artist, the work, its socio-cultural context, and the spectator. According to Nicolas Bourriaud, who coined the term in 1998, works of F0 F0 relational art “tak 5B e5D as [their] theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space” (14). JR’s projects do both:they emerge from and motivate human relationships. According to the artist, every project starts with a conversation prior to the photo- session, so that the individual life stories always influence the portrait’s

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message: “Some preferred simply to be, silently, in front of the camera, allowing one to read the past in their eyes. Others accepted, playing supermodels one day and turned, in a matter of seconds, from quiet sadness to uncontrollable laughter” (JR 9). As soon as the portraits are up on the wall, JR usually disappears from the scene to make sure that journalists get in touch with the local population and listen to their stories. “Part of the work is the conversation that follows,” JR confirms in an interview with The New York Times (Wood n.p.). Critics have started to call JR “the Robin Hood of the art world” (Ferdman 13).

JR6 refuses to call his work political, even though his projects are, as he himself points out, intended to raise questions about different manifestations of social misery around the globe. “I would call it art,” he insists (Michaud 3). His exhibitions at the world’s most distinguished art galleries as well as the availability of his works in the form of lithographs, posters, and photo collections via JR’s homepage,6 confirm his official status as an “artist” and hence his affirmed place within the global art market. At the same time, however, JR’s projects clearly fall into the category of street art, a discipline concerned not only with F0 F0 what is written or displayed on a wall, “but also fundamentally 5B with5D reading what is already there” (McCormick 24). In the 1970s graffiti emerged as the unofficial language of Black and Hispanic youngsters in New York’s poor neighborhoods and as a response to the unequal distribution of resources and property. In similar terms, JR’s portraits, in their strategic figure-ground relationship with the city, localize social, political, and economic inequalities through visual language. Even though distancing himself from a political motivation of his works, JR’s balancing on the very edge of photographic art and illegal street activism alone puts his work in the very center of, what David Levi Strauss has called “the documentary debate” (3), a debate which concerns the distinction between aesthetics and propaganda and at the center of which stands the question: Should social misery be aestheticized by photographic art, and if so, who should have the right to do so?

JR’s7 relational aesthetic invites a short detour into the history of social documentary photography which, in the early U.S.-American tradition, was considerably shaped by the works of Jacob Riis, Lewis W. Hine and Dorothea Lange. Jacob Riis is considered the pioneer of social documentary (as well as the inventor of magnesium flash photography), F0 F0 who in 1887 first shed light onto “how the other half 5B of the world 5D lives,”7 a phrase synonymous for the disastrous living conditions in the squalid slums of New York’s East Side. Similar to JR’s work, his black and white photographs of poor immigrant families packed into tenement houses were aimed at effecting social change by making visible the problematic constellation of poverty, migration, and the urban environment. However, Riis was not interested in capturing the immigrant’s stories behind the image and preferred to leave as soon as hehadshot his flash cartridges (Bogre 46). Still his documentary work convinced Fiorello LaGuardia to pass a constitutional amendment in

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1938 which regulated New York’s housing policies in favor of the poor and homeless. Similarly, Lewis W. Hine’s investigative images of child labor, putting into focus the harsh conditions in America’s factories, mills and mines to which children were exposed at the beginning of the 20th century, led to the passing of the Keating-Owens-Act, a law which regulated standards about age and working hours (53). During the 1930s, Dorothea Lange, in documenting the despair of the rural population during the Great Depression for the FSA (Farm Security Administration),8 used photography to expose the hardships of the rural population throughout America. Especially the visual rhetoric and dramatic composition applied by Riis and Lange proved to be successful: Showing the anonymous poor in dirty rags, crouching positions, downcast facial expressions, frowns or emotionless blank stares, the pictures clearly communicated a rigorous hierarchal relationship not only between the photographer and the photography’s subject(s), but also between the photograph’s subject(s) and the greater American public looking at them. As Abigail Solomon-Godeau has observed, in Riis’ case, the visual as well as textual dramaturgy depicting the poor individuals in a subaltern position also served the function to soothe the public fear of the immigrant other so that photography became a tool for their surveillance and control. In Lange’s case, the rural poor were displayed strategically as dignified subjects (most famously “Migrant Mother”) suggesting that the suffering was a result of individual misfortune rather than of a larger political and economic crisis originating from the nation state. At the same time, Lange’s photographs published in newspapers subliminally promoted the New Deal policies as the most effective solution to the problem. In the U.S., early ethnographic photography thus produced, what Solomon-Godeau has called, “a double act of subjugation: first, in the social world that has produced its victims; and second, in the regime of the image produced within and for the same system that engenders the conditions it then re-presents” (176). Documentary photography, in its early days, was rather a tool for moralism than for revolutionary politics. In the 1960s, Leonard Freed’s documentary work on the Civil Rights Movement surveyed protest events such as the 1963 March on Washington in that he captured the many different facets of the life of a cultural community which had been shaped by racism and had suffered the impact of trauma on their lives. Freed’s evocative snapshots of different moments in the urban cultural milieu of African- Americans subtly counteracted the destructive one-dimensionality of the black/white or oppressor/victim binary paradigm of race which dominated documentary reports up to the 1960s.

In8 similar, but more radical and abstract terms, Martha Rosler’s 1974/75 photo-text installation “The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems” represented a critical reaction to the many forms of social portraiture in which the human subject had been reduced to the personification of poverty serving a larger national political battle of charity propaganda. To undermine the usual “victim photography”

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approach, Rosler’s representation of the Bowery’s fallen people was communicated through their very absence. Instead of putting in front of her lens the poor drunkards or mentally confused, their status as a “subculture” was communicated through the Bowery’s architecture alone, i.e., the dreary facades, shabby doorways and empty bottles in front of them. “The photos here are radical metonymy,” Rosler explains her project, “with a setting implying the condition itself” (325).

This9 brief historical review of social activist photography in the U.S. shows that the discipline, from its very beginning onwards, involved a complex system of visual codes that was built upon different subject and object positions in space. Since these early days of ethnographic photography, a lot has been written about spectatorship and the organization of the visual, for example, about the power of photographic mise-en-scenes, camera positions, perspectives, frames or viewpoints but also about the politics of the gaze, the look, voyeurism, fetishism or surveillance. By now, it is almost a commonplace that the way a photograph is staged, placed, and distributed, also influences the way it is consumed and interpreted. Furthermore, new aesthetic decisions made by photographers often indicate important transformations of social and cultural codes which organize urban life. While Riis’ realist mode, for example, lends expression to the fact that the city at the turn of the century was considerably transformed by new immigrant populations, Rosler, by deconstructing the conventional modes of victim photography, also made a statement about New York’s socio-economic situation during the 1970s, which saw a heavy decrease of low-rent housing and the deinstitutionalization of mentally disabled people from state hospitals.

Considering10 this historical context, JR’s work marks another transition in the history of social documentary photography. What distinguishes him from other photojournalists is that his visual aesthetics subvert the established rules of spectatorial desire in that they aesthetically evoke the empowerment of the dispossessed subject. This empowerment, as I will show in the following, is due to a taxonomy of visual strategies which effect a substitution of the subjects’ connotations from “pathetic” and “powerless” into “self-possessed” and “superior.” The fact that the (photographic) image, in our age of visual (or rather virtual) culture, has become suspicious and unreliable, invites an analytical reading of JR’s work through the lens of perception theory, hence shedding light onto the complex taxonomy involving urban space, social criticism/activism and the empowerment of the subject.

Surfaces

With11 JR’s visual language, the space of the city becomes the picture plane of the portrait. This is nothing unusual if we think of the flood of print and digital advertisements which have become a natural feature of cityscapes around the world. Similar to the image use in print

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media, JR’s posters, upon first sight, can hardly be distinguished from advertising campaigns placed in the urban fabric. As Bertie Ferdman rightly argues, JR’s works “walk a fine line between images (for art’s sake) and advertising, alluding in a way to the very Warholian notion of art as marketing, the very ‘marketing’ of his project seems implicitly part of the work” (21). JR’s aestheticsare based onmarketing9 strategies, communicated by the poster’s monumental size and their strategic placement in the urban environment. This act of integrating the portraits into the city thwarts conventional representations of the urban poor which rather than effecting charitable action reinforce the “us” versus “them” divide. As David Levi Strauss explains: “The politics of images, the way they are organized, has changed, and this has acted to erode their effectiveness, and their power to elicit action…. Images of suffering and misery elsewhere in the world are used as reminders of what we are free from. They operate in the greater image environment of consumption to offset images of contentment, to provide the necessary contrast” (81). The visual documentary of poverty or social and political injustice (i.e., all those realities which are largely invisible to the Western world), however, involves the radical exposure of the private sphere of the poor (desolate housing, war zones, etc.) to the public, while at the same time neglecting “the social function of subjectivity” (97). JR, however, subverts this visual strategy of victimization in that he makes the dispossessed subject invade public space. Rather than staging (or aestheticizing) the urban poor within their “typical” environments of poverty or war, JR’s portraits are reduced to facial close-ups, which are only added a physical backdrop when pasted onto the city’s architecture.

With12 the city acting as a frame (with a boundary only on the inward side), the portraits are placed within a specific context which dictates how the image/subject should be read. Rather than photographs which downscale the human face in a picture frame or in a gallery space, JR’s faces and eyes stand in direct relation with its urban surroundings. Hence, the spatial dynamics which result from this interaction between portrait and buildings also have an impact on the visual communication between the pedestrian who performs the look and the person on the portrait who is looked at. The visual rhetoric upon which this communication is based entails an aesthetic effect, which philosophers and perception theorists (most famously Longinus, Burke, Kant, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Adorno, Lyotard) have called the sublime—and which is most generally defined as a sensation of both awe and terror. While early theorists limited the aesthetics of the sublime to objects of phenomena of greatness in nature (i.e., the vastness of the ocean or the monumentality of the Alps), philosophers of the 20th century defined it in more abstract and culture-specific terms. For Lyotard, for example, the sublime is the expression of all that which is unrepresentable. In his famous essay “What is Visual Culture,” Nicholas Mirzoeff has used Lyotard’s definition of the sublime not only to describe the effects generated by the postmodern omnipresence of

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the visual but also to link sublime effects triggered by the visual to ethics: Quoting Lyotard, Mirzoeff writes: “Because the sublime is generated by an attempt to present ideas that have no correlative in the natural world—for example peace, equality, or freedom—‘the experience of the sublime feeling demands a sensitivity to Ideas that is not natural but acquired through culture’”(9).

It13 is within this theoretical frame of the sublime that JR’s work has to be approached. The sublime, as an aesthetic effect which refers to the unrepresentable dimension of cultural practices or phenomena, is at work whenever his vast black and white posters suddenly pop up within a city’s environment. JR’s positioning of posters in so called “heaven spots” ––urban spaces which are, due to their height or inaccessibility usually hard to reach (rooftops, freeway signs, etc.)–– not only ensure the poster’s visibility from many different perspectives in the city, they also contribute to the effect of the sublime in the poster’s reception aesthetic process. JR’s portraits confuse the conventional organization of photographic images in public urban space in that they come in even bigger dimensions than usual advertisements, forcing the urban public to partake in a visual dialogue with the subjects displayed. The sublime effect resulting from the scale of the posters is also based on the confusion between figure and ground. Usually, in a visual composition, the ground is larger than the figure, which makes it easy to distinguish between the two categories. However, in JR’s posters, the figures take on almost the same size as the ground so that the subject and the city, the face and the surface, operate in the same dimensions. It is through this blurring of figure and ground that both the human body (as figure) as well as the city (as ground) can no longer work as a conventional frame of reference and as such provoke a perceptual disequilibrium of the visual urban order. It is this initial disturbance of the visual order wherein the evocative power of JR’s portraits lies and through which his challenging of power structures operates. A closer examination of his projects reveals JR’s reciprocal ideological perspective: the urban poor should be made visible as individuals. At the same time, these individuals want to see their urban reality in different terms. This act of monumentalization puts the dispossessed individual in an elevated position, so that it can look at the (urban world) from a “heavenly” perspective, a point of view usually reserved for those in power. With the dispossessed subject looking down onto the urban public, JR counteracts the “suppression of the social function of subjectivity” (Berger 100) which, as David Levi Strauss points out, results from the way photographic images are used today (97) . What constantly resonates in JR’s work is the need for urban redevelopment.

Also14 JR’s choice to use the photographic genre of the portrait contributes to the empowerment of the individual. As Richard Brilliant remarks, the practice of portraiture—representing the shift from the private to the public persona—is always an expression of individual presence and social identity:

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The very fact of the portrait’s allusion to an individual human being, actually existing outside the work, defines the function of the art work in the world and constitutes the cause of its coming into being. This vital relationship between the portrait and its object of representation directly reflects the social dimension of human life as a field of action among persons, with its own repertoire of signals and messages. (8)

15 Being a medium formally reserved only for the privileged (aristocracy, artists, politicians, important thinkers or scientists, etc.), the portrait has always been the carrier of a person’s individuality and character. However, unlike the painterly portraits of earlier centuries, which were collected in galleries,10 museums, or aristocratic residences, JR’s visual biographies do not remove the photographed subjects from their social origin, but place them literally onto the social and cultural space from which they originate. What is established is a firm relation between the face and the facade, a liaison also inherent in the term’s etymological history. Deriving from Roman “facies,” the term facade directly relates to the words figure and face, hence connecting the parts of a human body (the face) to a building’s skin. (Hohmann 15)11 Similar to a building’s facade, our skin represents the borderline between the internal and the external body. This etymological connection is also at the root of JR’s work, in which the social space of origin (=the city) therefore becomes the frame through which the subject must be looked at in the first place. To understand the subject, one also has to understand the space in which it is situated. In this way, the photographs contribute to a readability of the city which is determined by the reciprocal relationship in which the subject is shaped by and simultaneously shapes the urban milieu.

Many16 of the individuals captured on JR’s camera have been asked to perform funny faces, a compositional strategy which enables those people usually unseen and unheard in political discourse to perform a gesture of empowerment. JR’s portraits are characterized by the subject’s direct look into the camera, and in so doing, communicate an active (rather than a passive) subject, a subject full of life. Just like a moment of comic relief in drama, the images of grimacing faces suddenly pop up amidst the harsh realities of war zones and in urban areas of extreme poverty. JR’s most well-known funny-face portraits are those wallpapered on both sides of the Israeli West Bank Barrier in 2007 displaying three men of Palestinian and Israeli origin face to face. A party of three having a blast.From Bakhtin we know that laughter or comic spectacle can present “an element of victory not only over supernatural awe, over the sacred, over death; it also means the defeat of power, of earthly kings, of the earthly upper classes, of all that oppresses and restricts” (92). Even though Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque applies to the context of Medieval and Renaissance social systems, it also helps to understand the significance of the grimace as a tool of political resistance in JR’s works. Medieval ideology12 considered the comic as a category belonging to the “non-official,

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extraecclesiastical and extrapolitical aspect of the world, of man and of human relations” (6). Since the Middle Ages, the carnivalesque, often expressed via grotesque body imagery (e.g. in the form of masks) was considered a liberation from the restrictive and hierarchal medieval social order. Bakhtin writes:

The serious aspects of class culture are official and authoritarian; they are combined with violence, prohibitions, limitations, and always contain an element of fear and of intimidation…. Laughter, on the contrary, overcomes fear, for it knows no inhibitions, no limitations. (90)

17 It is only during carnival, that the established social order can be turned upside down and the social codes of hierarchal distancing can be declared invalid. Fool and king can freely change their roles. It is due to the wearing of masks (or grimaces) that spectators can no longer be distinguished from the actors. Victims can no longer be distinguished from their offenders. In this sense, JR’s portraits also provide a grotesque alternative to the everyday imagery of war, violence, and death, as they use laughter on both sides (the actor and the spectator) to confront the everyday fears and horrors experienced in war zones. F0 F0 “Even though 5B the Women are Heroes project 5D did not change the world,” JR explains, “sometimes a single laughter in an unexpected place makes you dream that it could” (1). As a reanimation of desolate urban spaces, the portraits temporarily eliminate hierarchal barriers between people and, at the same time, motivate a questioning of the flood of distorted and one-sided images (of either victims or criminals) produced by the media.

18 JR also alludes to the homonymy of the word “eye”/”I” in that he sometimes also reduces the abstracted body to the display of a subject’s pair of eyes. Especially in places notorious for their high crime rate, JR seems to prefer the display of eyes thus hinting at the necessity, as famously articulated by Jane Jacobs, to have “eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street” (35). With JR’s work, however, Jacob’s demand for the presence of onlookers to provide safety on the sidewalks has deeper implications because the authoritative gaze of the dispossessed also symbolizes the authorities’ look away from the corruptive forces operating in urban crime zones.

Conclusion

JR’s19 portraits have transformed cityscapes around the globe into contemporary portrait galleries whose reception works against traditional readings of the city. JR’s works are, in many ways, a gesture of an anti-neoliberalist urbanism in the sense that they represent a visual counter-narrative to the global city whose visual rhetoric is dominated by messages of consumer-capitalism. By granting those urban subjects living in poverty prominent spatial positions within the public urban sphere, JR also subverts the strategies of mainstream

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media usually criminalizing the urban poor. JR’s unmasking of the social miseries through the empowered and autonomous subject, is a radical antithesis against the dominant mode of “victim photography” which places the dispossessed subjects in a subaltern position. The sublime effect, the strange coexistence of the feelings of awe and terror, resonating from the eyes and portraits also communicates a kind of monumentality that works against the amnesia of a mainstream culture. Each of JR’s portraits, therefore, also represents an urban monument and thus also the repressed aspects of an individual urban reality.

20 JR’s participatory principle, most effectively performed by the project Inside Out, becomes a vital tool through which different manifestations of social misery can be made visible not only in the urban but also in the virtual sphere. As Bertie Ferdman remarks: “By taking the literal (and physical) space of the street into the virtual commons, a space where we can all upload our images and then see the myriad interventions that have taken place, Inside Out produces new frameworks by which others can create and reclaim their cities. The art belongs to no one and everyone” (21). While for Inside Out, the artist’s role is reduced to the printing subject, it is urban individuals who can decide where to place their posters, thus claiming their right to the city. While not every work of (street) art might change the world to the better, JR’s posters definitely challenge our perceptual patterns in and of urban space. Even though JR rejects his role as a political urban activist, his works clearly negate the distinction between art and propaganda. In fact, the aesthetic and participatory impact of his larger-than-life posters makes this very distinction seem irrelevantly small.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du Reel, 1998.

Brilliant, Richard. Portraiture. London: Reaction Books, 1991.

Ferdman, Bertie. “Urban Dramaturgy: The Global Art Project of JR.” PAJ 102 (2012): 12-25.

Freed, Leonard. Black in White America. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1969.

Hohmann, Hasso. Fassaden mit Gesichtern. Graz: Verlag der Technischen Universität Graz, 2014.

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Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, 1961.

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NOTES

1. Etymologically speaking, the Latin term sublime means “set or raised aloft, high up,” thus establishing a connection between a sensation of both awe and terror and an object of physical greatness. For the definition of the sublime along the lines of greatness see, for example, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement. 2. The acronym JR refers to the artist’s initials. 3. See Gaby Wood, “Supercolossal Street Art” The New York Times, Feb. 24, 2011. In the 1980s Sidney Janis has introduced the term “post-graffiti” to denote the emergence of new techniques of visual art in the public urban sphere, for example, by means of stickers, stencils or paste-ups. 4. Clichy-sous-Bois is one of the most isolated suburbs of Paris which due to its high unemployment rate and criminal activity has been labeled one of the “urban problem areas” by the French authorities. In 2005 it became the center of the riots following the death of two young boys of Malian and Tunisian descent who were escaping the police and whose deaths sparked the dissemination of the conflict to other French towns. Clichy-sous-Bois has therefore become synonymous with the fight against social and economic exclusion and racial discrimination in France. 5. TED (an acronym standing for Technology, Entertainment, Design) is a New York based non- profit organization which annually awards $100.000 to an individual “with a creative and bold

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vision to spark global change” (See http://www.ted.com/participate/ted-prize). According to TED, “JR embodies the many characteristics TED looks for in a winner: creativity, vision, leadership, and persuasion. His work is not just stunning. It is innovative, using collaborative storytelling techniques, which move the art of photography in a new and exciting direction. His work is about unlocking the power of possibility, revealing our true selves to those who live around us and then sharing those stories far and wide”(ibid). 6. See http://www.jr-art.net/ 7. Jacob Riis’ photographs were initially taken to illustrate his book How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York, a reformist treatise in which the grim realities of immigrant life in New York’s slums were documented. 8. The FSA was established in 1935 as one of the programs of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, intended to support poor farmers throughout America. The FSAemployed photographers to visually document the effects of the Great Depression. 9. For an elaborate discussion of street art and its effect on commercial advertising see Stefania Borghini et al. “Symbiotic Postures of Commercial Advertising and Street Art: Rhetoric for Creativity.” 10. It is in the public daguerreotype galleries of the 19 th century where American celebrity culture began, as Miles Orvell recounts, quoting a contemporary observer: “‘Suspended on the walls, we find Daguerreotypes of Presidents, Generals, Kings, Queens, Noblemen—and more nobler men—men and women of all nations and professions’” (28). 11. Hasso Hohmann’s recent publication Fassaden mit Gesichtern (2014) offers a thoroughly researched and well documented history of the use of faces on the facades of residential buildings throughout the world. 12. “The very contents of medieval ideology—asceticsm, somber providentialism, sin, atonement, suffering, as well as the character of the feudal regime, with its oppression and intimidation—all these elements determined this tone of icy petrified seriousness. It was supposedly the only tonefit to express the true, the good, and all that was essential and meaningful” (Bakhtin 73).

INDEX

Keywords: JR, photojournalism, relational art, social documentary photography, street art, visual aesthetics

AUTHOR

PETRA ECKHARD Graz University of TechnologyPetra Eckhard is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Architectural Theory, Art History and Cultural Studies at Graz University of Technology. Previously, she taught at the Department of American Studies at Karl-Franzens University in Graz and was a visiting lecturer at the Universities of Roehampton, Pécs, and Joensuu. She studied English and American Studies as well as Media Studies in Graz, Bern and New York and received her doctorate in 2010. Her current research explores “Architectures of the Ex-Centric,”

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their cultural implications as well as practices of architectural writing. She is the author of Chronotopes of the Uncanny: Time and Space in Contemporary New York Novels (2011) and, since 2012, has been the co-editor of Graz Architecture Magazine (GAM).

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Space Over Time: The Urban Space in William Gibson’s Techno-thriller Novels

Anna Krawczyk-Łaskarzewska

In Gibson’s fiction, to see our souls, look at our cities. Lisa Zeidner

1. Introduction

This1 article will examine ways in which big cities are envisioned in William Gibson’s three techno-thriller/ speculative noir novels: Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007)and Zero History (2010),1 frequently referred to as Blue Ant trilogy, after the name of the fictional advertising agency whose founder, Hubertus Bigend, plays a pivotal role in the books. More specifically, the functions of the urban settings in the respective stories will be briefly commented upon, taking into account the symbolic quality of the described locations and spaces as well as their thematization vis-à-vis the incrementally chaotic narratives and the limited agency of the increasingly disempowered principal characters.

2 In his attempt to capture the spirit of the early 21st century, a period of growing connectivity, Gibson essentially focuses on the urban realities of the networked societies he “fantasized” about in his earlier, science fiction novels. The big, “global” cities featured in the Blue Ant trilogy, such as

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New York, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, Moscow, or Vancouver, have their apparent, real life counterparts, yet the thoroughly mediatized nature of the cityscapes fashioned by Gibson makes it difficult to establish a clear- cut boundary between the real and the imagined, the strange and the familiar, the authentic and the manufactured. While3 the semiotic excess in the fictionalized cities is usually structured and interpreted mainly using capitalism as a point of reference, Gibson’s literary representation of all things urban tends to rely on juxtaposing the quasi- psychogeographic experiences and reflections of his fictitious protagonists with spatial navigation tools, such as GPS, Google Earth, Google Maps, Wikipedia, social networking media, etc. However, even those instantly trackable and seemingly explicit settings retain their enigmatic instability, very much in accordance with the events taking place in them.

In4 what follows, I will attempt to clarify two points. Firstly, in Gibson’s more recent literary oeuvre cities appear to be unknowable and socially unsustainable, especially as regards the inhabitants’ chances of gaining power to influence and transform their urban habitats. Secondly, his protagonists’ inability to fully make sense of cities results from the fact that they are constantly dealing with their atemporal representations. 2 In other words, although I do not intend to question the assumption that spatial thinking is “a general human tendency” and “spatial elements play an important role in fabulas” (Bal 215), nevertheless, I contend that Gibson tends to privilege space over time for more sinister reasons: The urban environment he describes and filters through his protagonists’ minds is apparently not the end-result of an historical process, but one which seems ready-made, defined and homogenised through the corporate logo, with any sense of contextualising this process denied through the fossilisation of history that is a result of ‘heritage’. In this environment we do not encounter man the maker, but man the consumer. This is not a world that is brought into being by Gibson’s narrative, but which is already there, already ‘made’ and described in terms of the brand names which have made it. (Skeates 8-9)3

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2. Sustainable Cities and Binaries

Although5 the problems with distinguishing the modern- day city and “the urban non-spaces of postmodernity” (Skeates 6) is beyond the scope of the present analysis, it seems necessary at this point to hint at some consequences of thinking about cities in terms of their sustainability or lack thereof. Of specific interest to me is the discordance between various definitions of sustainability in terms of how they employ the frame of space and time. To illustrate this discordance, Matthias Berger invokes the most frequently cited approach to sustainability, according to which “[s]ustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (365).4 This popular definition privileges growth in time, rather than in space, whereas in the case of cities a more static definition would probably make more sense. For instance, one such “space-friendly” definition characterizes sustainability as “the ability to be sustained, supported, upheld, or confirmed,”5 while others might prevent us from conflating sustainability and self-sufficiency by treating the city as “a metabolism, as exchange of stocks flows, not as aggregation of individuals’ behavior; yet embedded within something larger, alternatively either seen as hinterland, habitat, nation or planet Earth” (Berger 367-8).

There6 are several other issues worth mentioning in the context of sustainability. To begin with, as Berger rightly observes, sustainability is “essentially a binary concept— meaning that either something is sustainable or it is not sustainable” (370); such a binary opposition might be troubling and unsatisfactory especially in fiction, which favors more nuanced distinctions. Furthermore, Berger argues that “by definition, cities are the counterparts to the hinterland, and thus they axiomatically should be and are unsustainable” (365, 366). Additionally, he reminds us that “[u]nsustainable cities have been studied for many decades, even from different perspectives, but almost entirely as an expression with negative connotation” (366), a conclusion shared by Leif Jerram: While occasionally we see ‘urban’ being used to denote ‘cool’ and ‘sophisticated’, ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’, ‘free’ and adventurous’, too often our cities , over the last hundred years, have been used as a shorthand for our defects, our failures, and our disappointments.

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When it comes to our cities, we have the self-esteem of a battered wife. (Jerram 386)

There7 is, naturally, a larger context for issues connected with sustainability. For the sake of brevity, I will mention only cursorily the problem of definitions which suit particular agendas. For example, environmentalists claim that the Brundtland Report definition is flawed as it eschews ecological responsibility while extolling the social dimension of sustainability: Instead, they “define sustainability as the ability to continue a defined behavior indefinitely…because if environmental sustainability…is not achieved, then none of the zillions of other types of sustainability matter.”6 Of greatest relevance to me, however, is the fact that Gibson never found it entirely feasible to examine cities in processual terms, as entities developing across specific time frames.

3. Troubling Timelessness

The8 rationale for Gibson’s consistent atemporality is expounded on, among other characters, by Hubertus Bigend, an enigmatic, highly influential mogul who orchestrates the events in each of the three novels, and who offers a general observation on the possibility of registering a more or less linear growth in the era of rapidly shrinking future: “Of course,” he says, “we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which ‘now’ was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile.” He smiles, a version of Tom Cruise with too many teeth, and longer, but still very white. “We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.” (PR 57)

Bigend9 is a character whose arc develops consistently and with an inexorable logic, if to the probable detriment of the humanity: he wants more information and more influence, and in the course of the trilogy he not only becomes more and more controlling, but is also able to control his employees more efficiently. However, the mogul’s greed does not make him oblivious to the

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 240 consequences of living in accelerated times. For instance, Bigend’s remark that “[e]verything, today, is to some extent the reflection of something else” (PR 68) spells out a significant problem with describing the 21st century world, namely the absence of any genuine novelty and the ubiquity of corporate-friendly, generic, smug blandness. Because of the effective insidiousness of coolhunting, even the growth of subcultures is no longer spontaneous, unaffected by viral marketing and other commercial strategies.

Coupled10 with the fact that “the spatialisation of the world takes precedence over chronological orderings of time” (Grierson 6) is the sense of reaching a threshold beyond which our civilization cannot progress anymore. A few years ago Bruce Sterling defined the situation as one of “growing disorder”: “Historical narrative . . . is simply no longer mapped onto the objective facts of the decade” and “[t]he maps in our hands don’t match the territory,” and thus we are doomed to mere “attempts at sustainability.” He went as far as to compare living in an “atemporal network culture” to “moving into a new town,” where the creative artists have learned to “take elements of past, present, and future and just collide ‘em together” in an act of some “Frankenstein mashup.” Sterling’s insistence on refusing “the awe of the future” and “reverence to the past” sounds like an opportunistic, but rational contingency plan: the only way to go in an atemporal world, where future has already arrived, is to reduce the past and the future even further and to focus on living-in-the-moment. The alternative is not exactly encouraging: History “flatten[ed] into serviceable narratives, from records of financial data— a credit check database returns the information that a character has “zero history”—to brand-formation and marketing strategy” (Purdon).

4. Tough Cities

In11 the mid-seventies of the 20th century Jonathan Raban published Soft City, a quasi-documentary collection of essays which focused on the nature of experiencing the modern-day city. The blurb on the cover of the book introduced an interesting and valid distinction between the subjective perception of urban settings and their objective, quantifiable functioning. Raban’s soft city “as we imagine it is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city that we can locate in maps and statistics. The soft city is a private place;

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everyone lives in his or her own soft city.” In the first chapter of the book a reciprocal connection is established between cities and the people inhabiting and/or visiting them. The city goes soft; it awaits the imprint of an identity. It invites you to remake it, to consolidate it into a shape you can live in. You, too. Decide who you are, and the city will again assume a fixed form round you. Decide what it is, and your own identity will be revealed. (9) 12 Compared to “the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare” (Raban 2), Gibson’s cities seem to be located somewhere in-between, in a liminal space where hardness and softness are intertwined. In spite of clearly defined space and time coordinates, those urban mazes often become almost unrecognizable and are experienced in intensely personal ways. Moreover, the highly subjective geographies so alluringly described by Raban are expanded by Gibson in a rather ambiguous fashion. Depending on his cosmopolitan protagonists’ backgrounds and obsessions, the cities portrayed in the Blue Ant trilogy often function as simulacra of simulacra and as zones of both privilege and destitution; as repositories of meaningful symbols and empty signifiers; as sites where “obsolescent artefacts” become “semiotic phantoms” (Aguirre 126), at the same time as citizens are affected by very real constraints. Ultimately, toughness is what both the soft and the hard city have in common, but Gibson’s pessimism brings to mind early 20th century treatises whose authors— philosophers, scholars, sociologists—shared the conviction that “the city fundamentally corrodes every form of real community and fulfilling human relationship altogether” and that it is “ultimately an agent of disintegration of human relationships and atomization of the human psyche” (Jerram 392).

The13 common motifs and themes in the trilogy are easily discernible. Each of the novels is set around a nodal event happening in the real world and exerting a significant influence on the protagonists, but whether it is the 9/11 tragedy, the 2003 invasion of Iraq or the financial crisis of 2008,7 the main characters’ quests are accompanied by the drive to decipher urban reality. Each object of each of the quests turns out to be somewhat ridiculous, a Macguffin whose sole purpose has been to drive the plot. It is the guessing game on the part of the protagonists and their peculiar ways of responding to the incomprehensible, “ill- defined, semi-public, vulnerable…illegible and threatening”

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 242 urban environments that matter the most (Meades 174). The perverted flânerie Gibson is toying with is hardly surprising in cities perceived as overflows of products and images.

As14 regards narrative patterns, the story in Pattern Recognition is seen largely through Cayce Pollard’s mind, Spook Country braids into three main plotlines, whereas in the case of Zero History we are following two characters whose task is to find a mysterious creator of a new brilliantly designed product. However, whereas coolhunter Cayce was able to retain anonymity and independence after completing her mission, neither the artistically inclined and unconventionally thinking Hollis nor the recovering ex- addict and translator Milgrim can enjoy a sense of agency. They turn out to be pawns on the chessboard, in a game configured and controlled by Bigend. Needless to say, the winner (Bigend) takes it all; he is able to outmaneuver every single competitor, from government agents to arms dealers and mobsters.

5. Pattern Recognition

In15 Pattern Recognition, members of a web chat group obsess over mysterious film clips which are available online and referred to as “footage.” One of those members is Cayce Pollard, a freelancer who has a very special ability, namely, she quickly detects first symptoms of something that might become a trend or a new fashion. Paradoxically, in spite of her unusual skills she suffers from anxiety attacks caused by the surplus of logos, and suspects almost everyone of conspiring against her. Hired by her rich boss, the already mentioned Hubertus Bigend, to track down the creator of a series of anonymous, artistic film clips via the internet, Cayce travels to various big cities and while roaming about London, Moscow, New York and Tokyo, she experiences confusion and sadness (her father, a retired C.I.A. man, was in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, and is presumed dead). Only after meeting the person who created the clips, she is reminded of the redeeming power of art and is able to shake off her emotional detachment, create new personal patterns, and achieve a degree of closure.

Naturally,16 Cayce’s presence in the above mentioned cities is very much a result of belonging to a privileged elite and her urban experience is limited, dictated by the socially

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and economically confined nature of the locations (e.g., the only way she will finally see Tokyo is through the windows of her hotel, and in the hotel fitness center). Additionally, Cayce’s sense of dislocation might stem from filtering the reality through her Americanness. For example, London is nearly always featured as a place refracted by the prism of American urban spaces: relational, never quite autonomous —simply a mirror-world, and perhaps aptly so, considering the logic of the world in which simulacra prevail.

Even17 more exotic cities do not encourage Cayce to drop the habit of gazing and interpreting them like a Westerner. That is why, having found herself on Moscow’s Arbat, she immediately compares it to Oxford Street (PR 310), although the location does not look like Oxford Street at all. Moscow is one of the global cities and yet Cayce usually perceives it as having no individual, idiosyncratic presence, even though it cannot be reduced to the position of a mirror-world in her imagination. It is possible to know, describe and maybe even understand Moscow mostly through US-specific, movie clichés. The irony of the situation is quite striking: A symbol of an empire is depicted by means of symbols forever associated with another empire. The following “pale simulacra” quotation only confirms the overall impression that we learn nothing about Moscow. After 9/11 (but also after the Cold War) nothing is the same, even the ways of simulating past and foreign cultures: The lounge has the October theme in spades, haystack- sized arrangements of dried flowers flanking leaf-strewn sideboards piled with pale simulacra of gourds, worryingly skull-like. Much brownish mirror, darkly veined with gold. The girl with green boots is here, though not wearing them; Cayce recognizes the snakeskin flames, deployed to maximum advantage atop a barstool. At least a dozen of this one’s colleagues seem to have negotiated security as well, this evening, and attend to a clientele consisting entirely of large, clean-shaven, short-haired, remarkably square-headed men in dark suits. Like some lost America, down to blue strata of cigarette smoke and the completely unironic deployment of the Frank Sinatra, through both of which the gestures of these men are carving out the shapes of triumph and empire, defeat and frustration. (PR 312-13)

18 Cayce’s father, Win Pollard, used to work in Moscow, but the city “never seemed like a real place” to her, “more a fairy tale” (PR 265). When she arrives in Moscow for

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professional reasons, she notices its ugly, bombastic architecture and general dilapidation, and drivers changing lanes “in a way that gives her little confidence” (PR 269). Her Moscow is merely an instance of the imaginary, unruly Eastern European other.

Gibson’s19 fiction has been said to occupy a “borderland territory between unlikely truths and likely falsehoods”; his is “a disorientating world of nouns, mirroring our own world, where nouns—things, that is—are dizzyingly paramount” and that world of nouns or things “eats itself like an ouroboros” (Thomas). However, the concluding scenes of Pattern Recognition demonstrate Cayce’s readiness to question comforting binary oppositions: Cayce looks from Sergei to Marchwinska-Wyrwal to Bigend, then to Parkaboy, feeling much of the recent weirdness of her life shift beneath her, rearranging itself according to a new paradigm of history. Not a comfortable sensation, like Soho crawling on its own accord up Primrose Hill, because it has discovered that it belongs there, and has no other choice. But, as Win had taught her, the actual conspiracy is not so often about us; we are most often the merest of cogs in larger plans. . . . . It occurs to her then that the meal has been entirely free of toasts, and that she's always heard that a multitude of them are to be expected at a Russian meal. But perhaps, she thinks, this isn't a Russian meal. Perhaps it's a meal in that country without borders that Bigend strives to hail from, a meal in a world where there are no mirrors to find yourself on the other side of, all experience having been reduced, by the spectral hand of marketing, to price-point variations on the same thing. (PR 341)

20 Cayce’s inability to read Russian has interesting consequences: It alleviates her logophobia, makes her immune to the excessive commercialization of the city districts and, paradoxically, able to see more. At the beginning of the Moscow episode, her experience seems to be delimited by the Lonely Planet view of the city. On completing her mission she is at least able to re-invent Moscow, frame it in a larger context, although this more global outlook means paying less attention to what might make the city unique, different.

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6. Spook Country

Out21 of the three intersecting plotlines that dominate Spook Country, the most important one concerns Hollis Henry, once a popular rock vocalist and now a music journalist. The task she is given by Bigend consists in finding and interviewing a fashionable artist Bobby Chombo, who specializes in locative art and, additionally, is an expert in military navigation systems. While trying to keep track of a shipping container whose destination and cargo are revealed in the final chapters of the story, Hollis will have to travel to several cities.

The22 urban world in the second instalment of Gibson’s trilogy seems to have become even more unfamiliar and incomprehensible. Art, marketing and all things military converge here with frustrating efficiency, and the knowledge gained by the characters will be used to facilitate crime, rather than redemption. The main characters are constantly spied upon, yet in a sense they have already come to terms with the surveillance. They are under no illusion that they can change things for the better, either. The deliberately ambiguous title of the novel refers to covertness as a dominant modus operandi as well as to the spectral presences populating the urban environment. The good old-fashioned flânerie, even in its perverted version, is practically absent here; it is replaced by Systema alertness: the readiness to fight and be in absolute control of emotions at the same time.

Los23 Angeles, where locative art makes it possible to recreate things which no longer exist (yet another decontextualizing, atemporal gesture), albeit for very limited, privileged audiences, is also a place where anything can become a reality. It functions as a setting completely emptied of meanings. The possibilities of things happening there are limitless precisely because LA is unreal by default: The air was full of the dry and stinging detritus of the palms. You are, she told herself, crazy. But that seemed for the moment abundantly okay, even though she knew that this was not a salubrious stretch for any woman, particularly alone. Nor for any pedestrian, this time of the morning. Yet this weather, this moment of anomalous L.A. climate, seemed to have swept any usual sense of threat aside. The street was as empty as that moment in the film just prior to Godzilla’s first footfall. Palms straining, the very air shuddering, and

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Hollis, now hooded blackly, striding determinedly on. Sheets of newspaper and handouts from clubs tumbled past her ankles. A police car whizzed past, headed in the direction of Tower. Its driver, slumped resolutely behind the wheel, paid her no attention. To serve, she remembered, and protect. The wind reversed giddily, whipping her hood back and performing an instant redo on her hair. Which was in need of one anyway, she reminded herself. (SC 13) Spook24 Country offers a modified concept of space, too: It is neatly tagged, URL-dependent, GPS-described, bracketed by Augmented Reality technology, with the potential to be divided into an endless number of channels, to suit the needs of its fragmented communities and growingly paranoid citizens. The real life counterparts of such separate spaces include ghettos for the masses and enclaves for the obscenely rich, where CCTV cameras, gates, nets, and barbed wire make access difficult and epitomize the Deleuzian paradigm of “societies of control.” Taking into account these disparate points of reference, it is easy to understand why even the main character in the novel is unable to form a coherent picture of urban realities, not to mention reality as such: Hollis Henry is, in essence, a modernist character in a postmodern novel, a person seeking definitive answers in a world surfeit with information. Even though in the end she finds the information she seeks—that is, the location of the shipping container filled with U.S. currency—she cannot know its significance, beyond the fact that it is part of a shell game of sorts in which meaning is endlessly deferred. (Henthorne 27)

7. Zero History

The25 very first paragraph suggests that the motifs of quest, atemporality and flattening of history will be explored in great detail: Inchmale hailed a cab for her, the kind that had always been black, when she’d first known this city. Pearlescent silver, this one. Glyphed in Prussian blue, advertising something German, banking services or business software; a smoother simulacrum of its black ancestors, its faux-leather upholstery a shade of orthopedic fawn. (1) 26 Cabinet, a hotel/club in Portman Square, London, is the first location described in detail: a site of privilege, but mostly a

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part of the mirror world. A sense of disorientation prevails, which ties in consistently with the gradual loss of agency for the protagonists of the novel. The city is a text/pattern which is growingly difficult to decode. On his route from Heathrow, having entered Euston Road, Milgrim ponders over the enigmatic nature of the cityscape: Like entering a game, a layout, something flat and mazed, arbitrarily but fractally constructed from beautifully detailed but somehow unreal buildings, its order perhaps shuffled since the last time he’d been here. The pixels that comprised it were familiar, but it remained only provisionally mapped, a protean territory, a box of tricks, some possibly even benign. (ZH 37)

27 Hubertus Bigend hires, separately, Milgrim and Hollis, the protagonists of Spook Country. The former is supposed to gain access to and photograph a piece of rare military clothing, while the latter’s task involves tracking the identity of the person who designed the Gabriel Hounds, yet another mysterious brand which fascinates the head of Blue Ant.8 Having experienced the consequences of the financial crisis, Hollis is forced to accept the job: “the world has become a place in which choice—ethical and otherwise—is a luxury to which few have access” (Henthorne 61), but then, the world she is living in is “a world where nearly everyone is losing control of their lives” (62). If Spook Country read like a drug-induced memoir of a very paranoid person, Zero History is striking for the disjointed nature of memories and a permanent sense of dislocation. As usual, the nomadic lifestyle of the protagonists is not conducive to making sense of the cities.

Characteristically28 enough, the cities Gibson describes in Zero History cannot even be perceived in isolation, as self-contained, unique entities: Everything in them resembles something or mirrors something; each location brings associations with an alternative universe, rather than with its own past and present. Gibson’s protagonists often have the impression that the urban setting they are dealing with is only superficially autonomous. For example, at some point Holly realizes that her memories of touring with her band have little to do with the reality of the cities she visited. The chaotic way in which she frames her experience further reflects the impossibility of grasping the essence of an Australian city: Her Melbourne was a collage, a mash-up, like a Canadianized Los Angeles, Anglo-Colonial Victorian amid a terraformed sprawl of suburbs. All of the larger

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trees in Los Angeles, Inchmale had told her, were Australian. She supposed the ones in Melbourne were as well. The city in which she was imagining Clammy now wasn’t real. A stand-in, something patched together from what little she had available. She felt a sudden, intense urge to go there. Not to whatever the real Melbourne might be, but to this sunny and approximate sham. (ZH 77-8)

However,29 what makes Zero History really worth attention is how the old paradigm of flânerie gets repurposed, transformed into an all-encompassing metaphor. For example, Meredith, a perfunctory character, recalls her “[i]ntensely nomadic” (ZH 117) experience as a young model working in various cities and having to walk everywhere because of her meagre income. After she quit modelling, she decided to become a designer herself and the first thing she designed was a pair of sneakers that were both good-looking and didn’t fall apart, but that would be “somehow…untainted by fashion” (ZH 119). What my friends and I were going through as models was just a reflection of something bigger, broader. Everyone was waiting for their check. The whole industry wobbles along, really, like a shopping cart with a missing wheel. You can only keep it moving if you lean on it a certain way and keep pushing, but if you stop, it tips over. Season to season, show to show, you keep it moving. (ZH 118)

In30 order to understand things better (in this case the history of shoes and their cultural significance) Meredith enrolled in a fashion college in London. She moved to the UK capital, or rather in her own words, “simply stopped moving. In London” (119). It would be difficult not to see the irony of juxtaposing a reluctant nomad and the modern- day city, which is “in constant movement” (Rykwert 265): A successful shoe designer seems no longer interested in making good use of her product because, after all, “[t]o walk is to lack a place” (de Certeau 103).

Interestingly,31 it turns out one of Meredith’s American friends used to wear a jacket which was to become the Hounds brand, and which was designed by someone from Chicago. It is strongly implied in the novel that Cayce Pollard may have been that person. The story of the mysterious designer-hobbyist makes Meredith realize that she is on the right track, that the sneakers she designed are the real thing precisely because they are not tied to a particular time frame: “Things that weren’t tied to the

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present moment. Not to any moment, really, so not retro either” (ZH 120). Similarly, not walking, or rather, notwalking at all is crucial in the case of Milgrim: Milgrim had never liked the City. It had always seemed too monolithic, though to some older scale of monolith. Too few hiding places. A lack of spaces in between. It had been turning its back on people like himself for centuries, and made him feel like a rat running along a baseboard devoid of holes. (ZH 255) The heels of Milgrim’s Tanky & Tojo brogues, as he sat astride the high, raked pillion of Benny’s Yamaha, didn’t quite touch the cobbles of this tiny square. Something about the angle of his feet recalled some childhood line-drawing from Don Quixote, though whether those feet had been the knight’s or Sancho Panza’s, he didn’t know. (ZH 361)

32 For Milgrim, who makes a living as a translator and interpreter, the only truly reliable way to know the city, to understand it, is via media: He looked down at the screen, the glowing map. Saw it as a window into the city’s underlying fabric, as though he held something from which a rectangular chip of London’s surface had been pried, revealing a substrate of bright code. But really, wasn’t the opposite true, the city the code that underlay the map? There was an expression about that, but he’d never understood it, and now couldn’t remember how it went. The territory wasn’t the map? ZH (370)

33 Like Hollis, Milgrim is an outsider, but not a cosmopolitan as she is. “What he discovers as he becomes a more fully- rounded person is that the world itself has flattened, the differences between London and Paris, for example, becoming almost negligible, being occupied by the same sorts of people doing the same sorts of things” (Henthorne 83). When in the final chapter of the novel Milgrim becomes aware of the fact that for some time he has been given placebo treatment, there is a sense that he has also been cured of illusions.

8. Conclusion: The Creatives’ Complicity

In34 Pattern Recognition we are provided with numerous opportunities to assess the female protagonist’s state of mind, but only once in the course of the story Cayce seems to be experiencing remorse for the privileged lifestyle she has embraced: Leaving Neal’s Yard and the Pilates studio, she tries to become just another lost tourist, though she knows she'll never be one. Like Magda going out to spread

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whatever shabby micromeme her Blue Ant subsidiary requires her to, Cayce knows that she is, and has long been, complicit. Though in what, exactly, is harder to say. Complicit in whatever it is that gradually makes London and New York feel more like each other, that dissolves the membranes between mirror-worlds. (PR 194) Even35 if, in retrospect, the first novel of the Blue Ant trilogy seems reasonably optimistic (after all, Cayce manages to find the maker of the mysterious footage and is transformed spiritually thanks to Nora’s art), nevertheless it sows the seeds of inevitable failure. It is the so-called creatives, installation/digital media artists, designers, coolhunters, rock musicians, filmmakers, painters who save the day. But these talented creatures are also vulnerable to cooptation, and their complicity has the potential of turning the world into a nightmare.

Bigend’s36 motivation in Zero History is truly ambitious and perplexing at the same time: To find “the order flow,” to know the future or at least “a very tiny slice of the future” (ZH 401). Ironically, he gets what he wants thanks to the brilliance of an artist (the order flow is revealed to him inadvertently by Chombo), rather than his limitless financial resources. The end of the Blue Ant trilogy leaves no illusion as to the way things are turning out; the creatives are, in varying degrees, selling out to parasitic corporate America, not bothering too much about those less privileged.

In37 a way, Gibson’s novels constitute, perhaps inadvertently, a depressing, if not wholly unexpected, postscript to the work of American urban studies theorist Richard Florida, who in 2002 predicted “the rise of creativity as a fundamental economic driver, and the rise of a new social class, the Creative Class” (vii), and expressed the conviction that “the dawning of the Creative Age has ushered in a newfound respect for livability and sustainability” (x). Florida defended himself against criticisms that his vision of sustainability privileges the Creatives over other classes, by stating that the most important task ahead is “to unleash the creative energies, talent, and potential of everyone—to build a society that acknowledges and nurtures the creativity of each and every human being” (xi): a shared and sustainable prosperity that improves human well-being and happiness and restores meaning and purpose to life. We must shift from a way of life that valorizes consumption, in which we take our identities

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from the branded characteristics of the goods we purchase, to one that enables us to develop our talents and our individuality, to realize our truest selves through our work and other activities. Our fledgling Creative Economy needs to give way to a fully Creative Society, one that is more just, more equitable, more sustainable, and more prosperous: our economic future depends on it. (Florida xiv)

38 Volker Kirchberg and Sacha Kagan argue that “Florida’s emphasis on the creative class (and the ‘super-creative core’) is tainted by implicit demands for an unsustainable urban development” (137), leading to further polarization and homogenization of the urban environment (138). Great global cities might seem “unprecedentedly desirable,” but they are also “socially bifurcated” (Abbott 125) and resemble “elite citadels,” “turning into vast gated communities where the one per cent reproduces itself” (Kuper).

Obviously39 modifying Lefebvre’s idea of “the right to the city,” wherein urban renewal “cannot but depend on the presence and action of the working class, the only one to put an end to a segregation directed essentially against it” (Lefebvre 154), and repurposing Robert Merton and Elinor Barber’s 1958 study The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity (which highlighted the importance of accidental discoveries in science), Kirchberg and Kagan propose “the right to serendipity” (141), where the possibility of chance events is taken into account, which, coupled with “sustainable creativity” and resilience might prevent the neo-liberal model of economy from being the sole factor influencing urban development. The40 Blue Ant trilogy presents a vision of the globalized world in which little is left to chance and highly advanced technology does not necessarily improve the cause of decent living conditions for all. On a more spiritual and emotional plane, “[a] doom-laden idea that everything may be connected persists even while individuals are striving, and often failing, for personal connections amid a technological wonderland” (Taylor). The fictionalized cosmopolitan wanderers traversing big cities in the 21st century, and losing sight of the bigger picture, are a sign of the times. Perhaps they mark a necessary transition stage between the old “analog system” and the more anarchic and more participatory network culture (Sterling). Perhaps Sterling is right in claiming that atemporality “has a built in

European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 252 expiration date. It’s not going to last forever. It’s not a perfect explanation, it’s a contingent explanation for contingent times.” Meanwhile, we are left with pockets of resistance which, like small parallel universes, might become a remedy to the atemporal power takeover. Space over time, indeed.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abbott Carl. “Cyberpunk Cities: Science Fiction Meets Urban Theory.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 27 (2007): 122-131. Aguirre, Peio. “Semiotic Ghosts: Science Fiction and Historicism.” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry 28 (Autumn/Winter 2011): 124-134. Bal, Mieke. Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Berger, Matthias. “The Unsustainable City.” Sustainability 6 (2014): 365-374. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984. Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on Control Societies.” Negotiations. Trans. Martin Joughin, 177–182. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1990. Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited. 10th Anniversary Edition. New York: Basic Books, 2012. Gibson, William. Pattern Recognition. New York: Berkley, 2005. _____. Spook Country. New York: Berkley, 2009. _____. Zero History. New York: Putnam, 2010. Grierson, Elizabeth M. “From Cemeteries to Cyberspace: Identity and a Globally Technologised Age.” Working Papers in Communication (December 2001): 1-12. Henthorne, Tom. William Gibson: A Literary Companion. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland, 2011.

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Jerram, Leif. Streetlife. The Untold History of Europe’s Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2011. Kilian, Eveline. “Review of Imagining London, 1770–1900.” Journal for the Studies of British Cultures 12.1 (2005): 88-90. Kirchberg, Volker and Sacha Kagan. “The Roles of Artists in the Emergence of Creative Sustainable Cities: Theoretical Clues and Empirical Illustrations.” City, Culture and Society 4 (2013): 137–152. Kuper, Simon. “International Cities Are Turning Into ‘Elite Citadels.’” The Financial Times 1 June 2013. Lefebvre, Henri. “The Right to the City.” Henri Lefebvre – Writing on Cities. Translated and edited by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Oxford, Malden: Wiley- Blackwell, 1996. 147-159. Meades, Jonathan. “Postmodernism to Ghost-Modernism.” Museum Without Walls. London: Unbound, 2013. 170-184. Purdon, James. “Zero History by William Gibson.” Guardian 12 Sept. 2010. Raban, Jonathan. Soft City. London: Flamingo, 1984. Rykwert, Joseph. The Seduction of Place. The History and Future of the City. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Skeates, Richard. “The Infinite City.” City 2.8 (1997): 6-20. Sterling, Bruce. “Atemporality for the Creative Artist transcript.”Wired.com 25 Feb. 2010. “Sustainability.” Thwink.org 2014. Taylor, Art. “Book World: William Gibson’s Zero History.” The Washington Post 11 Sept. 2010. Thomas, Scarlett. “Networking.” New York Times 8 Sept. 2010. Zeidner, Lisa. “Pattern Recognition: The Coolhunter.” The New York Times 19 Jan. 2003.

NOTES

1. Henceforth, all references to novels under discussion will be abbreviated by using the initial capital letters of the respective titles: PR, SC, and ZH, 2. See also Kilian 88.

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3. Skeates made this comment in reference to Gibson’s first science fiction trilogy and short stories, but the generalization holds true for the writer’s non-science fiction novels as well, perhaps to an even larger extent. 4. To be exact, the above definition of sustainable development comes fromOur Common Future report (known also as the Brundtland Report), by the World Commission on Environment and Development, issued in 1987. 5. See the definition at http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ sustainability. 6. http://www.thwink.org/sustain/glossary/Sustainability.htm. 7. As per Gibson’s statements on his blog and in numerous promotional interviews. See also Henthorne 126. 8. Ironically, in real life Lucinda Trask designed a clothing line based on the works of WG. She called it Hounds. See http://like-clothing.biz/ and http://like-clothing.biz/pdf/like-hounds-lookbook.pdf. Every page of the brochure has an insert with a photo of a cityscape.

INDEX

Keywords: atemporality, city, flânerie, locative art, mediatization, mirror-world, simulacra, space, sustainability.

AUTHOR

ANNA KRAWCZYK-ŁASKARZEWSKA University of Warmia and MazuryAnna Krawczyk-Łaskarzewska is teaching at the University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn. She published articles and edited volumes devoted to film and TV adaptations, book illustrations and other pop/visual culture phenomena, as well as William Gibson’s prose and cultural representations of the city. Her current research focuses on the theoretical and practical aspects of reimagining and repurposing iconic literary characters.

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Stanley Park, Literary Ecology, and the Making of Sustainability

Georg Drennig

1. Introduction

The1 study of urban systems and the role of cities in debates about sustainability is a fashionable topic in numerous fields in academia, with the need for interdisciplinary research being a much-voiced aspect of such academic interest. Yet the contributions of the humanities and the study of culture to these debates stay within the respective disciplines of studying literature and popular culture. In the following reading of Timothy Taylor’s 2001 novel Stanley Park, I intend to explore an avenue that offers some way of making literary studies relevant to the discussion of sustainable cities and the future of urbanity. Following a brief discussion of the possible contributions of literary studies to a better understanding of urban sustainability, the specific ways in which literature can do cultural work within the social setting of the city shall be investigated. Hubert Zapf’s triadic model of the novel’s function in a cultural ecology—fully developed in his 2002 book Literatur als kulturelle Ökologie—will be discussed and brought to bear on Taylor’s 2001 Vancouver novel Stanley Park. This reading will investigate Taylor’s engagement with questions of urban sustainability, and then briefly explore the question of how such a book can play a role in fostering urban sustainability.

2. Literary Studies and Questions of Urbanity

The2 current academic debate about cities, the ways to study them and to make the insights gained thusly useful for practitioners seems mostly to take place among the hard sciences, fields related to engineering and urban planning, and sociologically inclined disciplines. Cultural phenomena such as street art, especially, are acknowledged, yet dealt with as symptomatic of other phenomena such as gentrification, and thus in turn not approached from an angle that cultural and literary

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studies would explicitly be called to contribute to. A similar dynamic applies in the case of studying urban complexity, which has become increasingly prominent in recent years; the fact that otherwise hard-to-obtain insights could indeed be added to the field by calling upon the humanities to contribute has so far been barely recognized, though literary scholars are beginning to explore urban complexity from their perspective.1 Indeed, the challenge of fostering a transdisciplinary dialogue that goes further than simply acknowledging or adapting the insights of different fields—the reframing of concepts from life-sciences in literary ecocriticism comes to mind—has been recognized, and steps have been taken in the humanities to address the lack of approaches that put the needs of the object of study before disciplinary constraints.2

Still,3 the humanities have not yet produced a coherent set of methods that are explicitly geared towards making a contribution to the debate about urban sustainability in the 21st century and beyond, nor are other disciplines yet sufficiently aware of what additional—and needed—understanding literary and cultural studies could add. As Hubert Zapf argues, “literary culture … probably has a special potential for the reintegration of different areas of cultural knowledge that are kept separate in other forms of discourse” (“Literary Ecology” 850). In her dissertation, Maia Joseph writes in a statement more specifically concerned with understanding urbanity, that: Literary texts are…the carriers of a certain kind of knowledge—subjective, experimental, affective, interactive, often reflexive; this is knowledge that many planning scholars and practitioners value, but that can be difficult to articulate and integrate into planning and development discourse. (6)

Indeed,4 the humanities and especially ecocriticism have the tools to excavate said knowledge; though the ways and means to make this knowledge useful to others seem to be missing, there are clear contributions that have been made and have a theoretical and methodical foundation.

The5 best recognized and most-often stated contribution that literature and its study make to understanding urbanity is through the role of the writer as a cultural diagnostic. As Jens Gurr and others have argued,3 quantitative approaches to questions about the city cannot account for their affective, sensual dimension. Literature of and about the city can transcend the technological language of planning discourse as well as draw attention to issues and questions that, as they are not quantifiable, evade the grasp of statistical analysis. Zapf’s statement that “the narrative mode is necessary to provide a medium for the concrete exemplification of ethical issues that cannot adequately be explored on a merely systematic-theoretical level” (“Literary Ecology” 853) can thus be adapted to urban studies. Urban systems theory and the disciplines that draw upon it are inherently unable to explicate or make insights available to the much more amorphous mode of literary representation and its study. Neil Evernden’s proposition that “[t]he artist makes the world personal—known, loved, feared, or whatever, but not neutral… . Perhaps it is a cultural simulation of a sense of place” (100), therefore points to the specific and unique role that culture can take in the urban debate. It can serve as an arena of exploration, diagnosis, and speculation, and in the process, make knowledge accessible that would otherwise be missing from the study of urbanity.

This6 becomes somewhat ironically evident in the study of complex urban systems, which is, at first sight, clearly a matter for hard sciences and mathematical modeling. Several salient features of urban complexity that also make it subject of

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mathematical interest and quantitative study—such as emergence, nonlinearity, heterogeneity and hybridity4—are not only also of interest to the study of culture: complexity in its non-linearity can be made understandable through “nonlinear forms of knowledge” (Zapf “State” 53, cf. Zapf Literatur 50). Those are precisely what literature excels at producing and representing, and what literary studies—as Zapf argues, especially in their ecocritical inflection—are well-equipped to investigate.

Though7 the relationship of the study of culture to investigations into urban complexity and methodologies are still in the making, more general theories about cultural imaginaries are easily adaptable to the question of what literature actually effects within urban culture. Drawing upon Wolfgang Iser and Winfried Fluck’s work on cultural imaginaries, Zapf, in his theoretical work on literary ecology, conceives of culture as an ecological system, in which literature then acts as a life force that brings renewal and regeneration to a system that would otherwise be moribund. He allows a special role for fiction, or imaginative literature, and considers it “an ecological principle or an ecological energy within the larger system of cultural discourses” (“State” 55). In their turn, Jens Gurr and Martin Butler apply this general idea of culture as an ecological system to cities, and read cultural work—including imaginative literature but not limited to it—as force fields that shape the way readers and audiences perceive, and thus participate in the shaping of their own urban environment (cf. 85-85). Culture, from this point of view, can become a factor in shaping the ideas of urban agents about what places their cities are, and more importantly, what they could be. While this essay views the concept of culture as a “life force” skeptically and to be approached with caution lest urban practitioners can too easily dismiss literary studies approaches as overly esoteric, the following considerations do take seriously the notion of literature’s power to motivate, inspire, and inform the actions of city dwellers and decision makers.

The8 following considerations will neither provide clear instructions on how to apply literary insights to urban planning, nor will they exhaustively explore possible methodological approaches to better doing so. Reading the novel Stanley Park through the lens of Zapf’s triadic model of the function of literature in cultural ecological systems, however, sheds light on the ways fiction can negotiate cultural diagnosis with the imaginative potential closed to non-fictive ways of writing. This model of literature as a cultural intervention that offers critical cultural diagnosis, stages the repressed, and suggests ways of bringing seemingly opposite discourses together, makes sense in both a rather close reading of the novel and when putting the work into the larger context of urban change in Vancouver. Hopefully, this may provide an example of how a novel makes sense of urban issues on its own terms, and indeed can be a factor in shaping the understanding that city dwellers have of their own environment. Stanley Park indeed offers ideas of sustainability that continue to resonate in Vancouver’s spatial practice. While it did not necessarily cause such things into being—after all, this article argues that writers engage in diagnostics—it did bring ideas to a larger public awareness, also due to the fact that the novel did gain some local prominence after its publication.

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3. A Triadic Reading of Stanley Park

In9 the triadic model of Hubert Zapf, there are three functions imaginative literature can fulfill in the larger cultural ecosystem5: novels can do the work of providing a critical metadiscourse, offer an imaginative counterdiscourse, and, through a re-integrative interdiscourse, effect a reconciliation of seeming opposites, and transcend the binary of meta- and counterdiscourse. In the critical metadiscourse, literature makes the aforementioned cultural diagnosis and larger social critique by representing systemic deficits, injustices, and the way hegemony destroys cultural vitality. By staging the culture’s repressed elements, literature then offers a different model of social relations and practices in the mode of an imaginative counterdiscourse or a plural of those, which—and in his considerations, Zapf somewhat overburdens the idea of a cultural life force—derives special power from aesthetic effects unique to literature. In a re-integrative interdiscourse, novels can then attempt to reconcile their critique of cultural reality with their own imagination and, through images of revitalization, bring culturally separate phenomena and discourses together.

10In Stanley Park, this discursive triad works in two different ways. In the story of the protagonist Jeremy Papier’s failure as an independent restaurateur bought up by an international business mogul, his subsequent experiences cooking for, and learning from, the homeless of Vancouver’s Stanley Park, and his grand gesture of secretly bringing foraged foodstuffs to an elite audience in the restaurant he is forced to work for, all of Zapf’s modes are represented. A first reading of the novel will therefore be primarily interested in the themes of rootlessness and alienation, artfulness and craft as opposing forces, and chef Jeremy’s final prank as a re-integrative interdiscourse. On a somewhat different level, however, the plot’s movement in and out of different social, economic, and culinary spaces of Vancouver negotiates a triad that directly addresses its urban setting. The urban change, collective memory, and guerrilla placemaking that the second reading of the novel’s triadic structure will investigate can be understood to resonate with the themes addressed previously. It is then on this contextualized plane on which the novel can be read as a piece of engaged and interventionist writing that may yield insights about, and suggest ways of improving urban sustainability, and provide something of an antidote against an alienated and placeless mode of urbanity.

11 It is this issue of placelessness and alienation that Stanley Park’s critical metadiscourse attacks through the voice of its protagonist and his approach to cooking. Chef Jeremy Papier, distinguishes between two culinary modes, the names of which are borrowed from gang culture: Blood, which is a traditional cuisine of place, and the globalized postnational Crip approach, which from Jeremy’s perspective, is placeless, ignorant, and incoherent. This notion is extended to the provenance of ingredients— and here the issue of sustainability already becomes relevant—as in the case of Jeremy’s aversion against farmed salmon: The fish in such a pen lived independent of geography, food chain, or ecosystem. These salmon were perfectly commodified as a result, immune to the restrictions of place. There was no where that these fish were from. (171)

12Yet his creditor, Dante Beale, is the owner of the deeply placeless Inferno Coffee chain, and as Jeremy’s restaurant The Monkey’s Paw fails, his only option for fiscal survival is to become chef of the deeply Crip restaurant Gerriamo’s, in which Beale’s successful approach is one of a cuisine ignorant and uncaring of its location or any

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tradition. Jeremy’s moral indictment of this—economically more successful—way of dealing with food shines through in a sarcastic statement he gives to a food journalist about Gerriamo’s culinary vision: “This is not fusion. We are the restaurant of no place. We belong to no soil … to no culinary morality. We only belong to those who can reach us and understand us and afford us” (364).

Set13 against this critique of culinary business culture, and by extension, society, which is ignorant of place and roots, are Jeremy’s restaurant The Monkey’s Paw and his notion of Blood cuisine, as well as the anthropological work of his father in Stanley Park. For chef Jeremy, “Blood Cooks were respectful of tradition … interested in the veracity of things culinary, … linked to a particular manner and place of being” (33). The Monkey’s Paw is thus conceived as a “restaurant other chefs would go to. Local but not dogmatic. It wasn’t a question of being opposed to imported ingredients, but of preference, of allegiance, of knowing what goodness came from the earth around you” (51). Jeremy’s father, in the novel referred to as the Professor, echoes his son’s concerns. An anthropologist working on, and in what he calls a participatory approach, living with the homeless people sheltering in the park, the Professor articulates concerns similar to his son. He constantly draws attention to how his son’s culinary allegiance and application of rooted skill and his own work of studying the craft of sheltering in the park are both “about how people relate to the land on which they stand” (136).

These14 two positions then meet in the novel’s imaginative counterdiscourse when Jeremy becomes jobless after his business fails and he begins to cook for the homeless of the park in impromptu potluck dinners. There, the skill of the homeless urban hunter and forager represented by the character Caruzo, meets the chef’s French training, leading to the communion of eaters and the transformation of ingredients considered abject by most of urban society: As had become their practice, they snared squirrels for dinner, two reds and a grey, and Jeremy roasted them, spread-eagling the gutted carcasses on Caruzo’s grill [improvised from an upturned shopping cart]. He sent Caruzo off to gather huckleberries and dandelion greens and combined these with roasted potatoes … . Nobody observed that the squirrels, with their sinewy flesh spread unevenly over bony carcasses, had been perfectly roasted. That the beer marinade he’d applied during cooking had caramelized into a mahogany brown. (249)

What15 results from Jeremy’s proverbial time in the wilderness is an even stronger appreciation of the essential function of food and the way it can provide a sense of community. Yet the skill of all three, the chef, the professor, and the homeless, and the potluck dinners that are repeatedly described in the novel, are still relegated to the economic and spatial margins of urban society. It is then in the mode of a re-integrative interdiscourse that Taylor constructs the novel’s climax, in which Jeremy takes the lessons learned in the park and brings them to an elite audience of gourmets and successful entrepreneurs.

As16 part of the deal that saves Jeremy from financial ruin but also spells the end of The Monkey’s Paw, Dante Beale employs Jeremy as the chef of his own restaurant venture Gerriamo’s. It is in Jeremy’s performance on opening night that the novel then provides an unexpected image of vitality that works against the placelessness of Dante Beale’s market-researched mode of doing business. Though the menu of Gerriamo’s opening night is deeply Crip—exotic but unrelated international ingredients brought together in an affected display of creativity—Jeremy secretly sources many of the

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foodstuffs from Stanley Park. Thus, the foraging and hunting skills of the homeless provide the basis for a deeply rooted and local mode of cooking. There was a bucket of dandelion greens and fiddleheads, as well as a garbage bag full of salal, salmon and huckleberries. A dozen plump Canada geese, a dozen grey rock doves, six canvasbacks, four large rabbits, sixteen squirrels (greys, fatter and more plentiful than reds) four huge raccoons and a swan. (355-356)

It17 is through this dinner—though the guests are unaware of the nature of the ingredients, as they are camouflaged by the fake names of items on the menu—that Jeremy makes his grand statement, providing in his view “messages about knowing the earth’s bounty … where one stood, understanding the loyalty and sanctity of certain soil” (389). In spite of this performance being half-hidden, Jeremy is convinced that he has provided the kind of vital impulse or “life force” that Zapf’s triad conceives of as coming from the re-integrative interdiscourse (cf. Joseph 226): [T]he celebrants, he found himself thinking … had been fed. Fed well. Fed goodness like they never had been fed. And they had eaten it, been delighted, were now satisfied and strengthened and full of unknowable joy. Sanctified by his efforts. It was possible … to briefly feel messianic. Like he had done a truly great and lasting thing. (402)

In18 this sense, Stanley Park’s climactic dinner literally infuses a “life force” into a subculture—Vancouver’s gourmet and business elite—that has become moribund and alienated.

Taylor,19 however, inserts into his novel a critical awareness of the fleeting nature of such an action, and repeatedly questions both Jeremy’s Blood allegiance and Dante Beale’s construction as unfeeling and even infernal capitalist. Not only does Jeremy fail as an entrepreneur and commits fraud in the process—which Taylor is probably more critical of than most of his readership6—but the problematic nature of his ideology of Blood cooking is several times hinted at. His co-chef Jules Capelli’s comment that he is something of “the Pacific Northwest’s pre-eminent Food Nazi” (181) can be read as humorous, yet it does draw attention to the way it echoes, (especially German) discourses of blood and soil, which eventually became a pillar of European fascist ideology. On a more explicit and less academic level, the novel’s scenes at a festival dedicated to local food point to the privileged aspect of Blood cuisine that is primarily consumed by affluent gourmets (262), Stanley Park’s imaginative counterdiscourse of practices in urban parklands notwithstanding. The book's critical metadiscourse is also, to a degree, subjected to questioning. Though Dante Beale is repeatedly and explicitly imbued with infernal attributes—Jules’ and Dante’s dislike of each other is compared to that of “Gabriel and Belzebub” (65)—even Jeremy’s godson jokes about the overly simplistic view implied by this playing with names and symbols (cf. Mason ft 87).

In20 contrast to the way Stanley Park often ironically deconstructs its own ideological dichotomies or draws attention to their shortcomings, its spatial discourses leave less room for ambiguity. In the context of the novel’s Vancouver, the triad of cultural criticism, stage for the repressed, and reconciliation and rejuvenation provide literary space for a more trenchant critique. Dante’s Inferno Coffee becomes a homogenizing agent that reshapes the cityscape, while Stanley Park and The Monkey’s Paw offer only precarious spatial alternatives, though the park becomes the site of the book’s intervention in the urban memory. The space of re-integration, Jeremy's final project Food Caboose, then, though firmly in the mode of guerrilla placemaking, offers

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only a degree of escape from the Post-Fordist urban restructuring that has so prominently shaped Vancouver over the last few decades.

In21 the novel’s critical metadiscourse, Inferno Coffee—an obvious sibling to the Starbucks Coffee chain—becomes a force of homogenization and de-localization, actively erasing spaces that are different. The novel uses, for example, Jules’ views to make this homogenizing effect explicit. In her opinion, “Inferno was polluting the city with sameness. Inferno was a cost model, an exercise in scale. Inferno was a celebration of everything they [The Monkey’s Paw] were not” (66). While The Monkey’s Paw is host to a display of urban diversity, a “multicultural client base that nobody could consciously target” (52), Dante’s business model relies on clearly structured neighborhoods that offer a base of: consumer types to whom Dante felt confident he could sell, always sell, reliably sell every morning and lunch, to the extent that there was a business case for the investment in blond wood, canned music, and barista training. (63)

Yet22 urban change works against the diversity of The Monkey’s Paw and replaces it with Gerriamo’s, just as the restaurant’s neighborhood changes in a brutal mirroring of the reality of the Vancouver neighborhood that the novel uses as a setting. Thus, Inferno Coffee gains a foothold “around the corner in the space that had been Fabrek’s falafel stand” (294). Such displacements are not limited to the diverse neighborhood of Crosstown, but noted by Jeremy even in the affluent West End on the border to Stanley Park, where he remembers an “aging co-op resident” who had kept “a nail-hold on the land that held so much of her” (110) against a major developer restructuring the urban space.

If23 this instance of remembering urban change and displacement is a familiar story, the space of Stanley Park’s imaginative counterdiscourse stages a much more strongly repressed element. During one of his nightly visits to the park, Jeremy observes a First Nations family that dwell there. As his father explains in full professorial mode: These people are taking a last stand. Homing in on a place that cannot be taken from them. You see, their language belongs to this land…the land itself cannot be taken…. It can’t be expropriated, built up, paved over, strata-titled. These speakers of an ancient tongue, their actions are the sociolinguistic equivalent of taking sanctuary in a church. (135)

The24 problematic equation of naturalness with aboriginal peoples that Taylor constructs in these few scenes notwithstanding, the novel here does important cultural work. It reminds readers of a historical First Nations presence which had been erased both physically and from the memory of Vancouverites (cf. Barman). Though the book’s potential romanticization of homelessness can also be seen as problematic, it does link skill to the urban fabric, and raises the issue of knowledge and individual usage of space. Jeremy himself undergoes a process from helplessly stumbling through the park at night to where a visit “felt like coming home …. Jeremy walked the trails with certainty, knowing exactly where he was relative to his destination” (346). As the Professor claims, this way of skillfully navigating the urban territory is at least marginally a means of claiming ownership of urban space otherwise subject to a regime of real estate interest, or at least fighting alienation and a sense of placelessness: “A farmer touches the earth in his fields. He thinks, this land is mine. A person in the city, too, they walk their favorite streets, they visit their favorite parks” (117).8

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From25 the point of view of a spatialized reading, Stanley Park’s re-integrative interdiscourse does not reconcile these concerns of memory and resistance to capital- driven urban change with the dominant order. Jeremy’s final restaurant project that follows his work at Gerriamo’s, the Food Caboose, however, does use a space forgotten or ignored by the real estate industry, and at least allows his work as an independent restaurateur to continue. Located on the southern fringes of Chinatown, the Food Caboose is an unregistered establishment that needs an otherwise marginal space to remain undetected by authorities. Taylor lays out this setting as follows: In more recent years the colorful community of vegetable stalls and butchers, spice vendors and the sellers of ancient cures had contracted into a few square blocks around Main Street to the northeast. The beachhead of condo development to the southwest had stalled in its advance this direction. Buildings had been torn down and not replaced. The area stopped being part of any neighborhood at all. (419)

The26 guerrilla restaurant that allows Jeremy to pursue his culinary vision outside of the system depends on an unstable spatial setup that is under constant threat by possible changes in the real estate market. How precarious this position is, also becomes clear by Taylor’s use of words from a military register such as “advance” and “beachhead” of development. If the Food Caboose can be read as a space of re- integrative interdiscourse, then it is a highly unstable one. Also, in a twist that reveals the compromise at work when imaginative counter discourse meets “reality,” it is subject to mechanics of social and spatial exclusion. As Maia Joseph states in her reading of Stanley Park: Jeremy seems to have trouble bringing his new understanding of urban community out of what we might describe as the dream-space of Taylor’s Stanley Park and applying it to his work as restaurateur. (250)

Gaining27 entrance to the Food Caboose is radically different from the relative openness and diversity that marked The Monkey’s Paw. Instead, guests have to be referred by already established list members, and then undergo a highly complicated reservation process in order to eat there. Chef Jeremy may have, through this appeal to secrecy and exclusiveness, and through escaping the vagaries of the real estate market, established a financially viable enterprise that allows him and Jules Capelli to keep going with their project of serving local bounty; it does, however, come at the cost of social exclusion and the acknowledgment of a capitalist logic, and therefore shows the limitations of bringing the experience of communion through place-aware food to “celebrants” on a regular basis.

Nevertheless,28 Stanley Park provides both critical cultural diagnosis and makes a clear argument for ways to live differently in the city. Its critical metadiscourse links urban change fueled by a logic of capital investment to both literal and metaphorical displacement, and to a culture that becomes homogenized and amnesiac at the same time. Jeremy’s place-aware restaurant project becomes removed—or displaced—by the logic of capital that cannot be concerned with the intricacies of art and skill of being in place, exactly those things that Blood cuisine and the Professor’s studies represent. In the space of imaginative counterdiscourse, Taylor’s novel then stages numerous tactics that apply knowledge and rootedness to the urban fabric. Obtaining something as essential as one’s sustenance from urban surroundings,9 celebrating community through food, learning to make one’s way and actively map one’s surroundings, or even simply remembering the indigenous presence in the park are all acts that allow Jeremy and the other characters to engage with their urban setting differently. These acts may

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be fleeting, and by their nature be marginal, but the novel articulates them as worthy endeavors nevertheless, that may help contribute to a larger cultural awareness which in turn may change the larger material urban fabric after all.

4. Ways Towards a Conclusion

Though29 a basic argument about how a novel such as Stanley Park can play a role in making cities more sustainable can be easily made—and the novel itself does so—, this article intends to build on Zapf’s argument about the special resources available to imaginative literature. This leaves the more problematic question of how the study of literature itself can play a role in such a process. The following considerations will first look at the specific reception of Stanley Park, then turn once more to the question of a “life force” in culture, and then briefly remark on the role of aesthetics and specific modes of representation only available to fictive writing. None of this yields a blueprint for how to engage urban practitioners and scholars from outside the humanities, though some final remarks will hopefully indicate starting points for this necessary process.

The30 city that provides the setting for the novel, and arguably features as a character itself, reacted positively to the book. In 2003, it was featured by the Vancouver Public Library’s citywide reading initiative, it was nominated for the Giller Prize, and in the experience and analysis of local scholar and expert Maia Joseph centrally “contributed to the ‘shaping’ of the conversation about local culture and community” (221). It thus clearly made its critique and ideas enter a larger urban conversation, a notion mirrored in the novel itself: Jules Capelli claims that one of the functions of The Monkey’s Paw in the Vancouver culinary scene is to fuel people’s imaginations, so that “in the great, culinary meme-pool, their ideas were now loose” (210). The placemaking tactics suggested in the novel’s imaginative counterdiscourse absolutely resonate with what can be called the “meme-pool” of alternative and arguably sustainable methods of gathering food in cities—from urban foraging and harvesting over guerrilla gardening to freeganning and the practice of locavore-ism— that were even featured as part of the Vancouver Art Gallery’s We: Vancouver exhibition on the occasion of the city’s 125th anniversary (cf. Drennig).

The31 “meme-pool” of Jules Capelli is in the context of this paper a different way of referring to the cultural imaginary or what Zapf calls the cultural ecology. The notion that the cultural articulation of ideas can make certain ways of doing things thinkable and thus possible as they become part of a widely shared imaginary (cf. Zapf Literatur 59, Fluck 20-21, Charles Taylor 24-28) is central to literature’s potential in fostering sustainability. What Zapf frames as the vital force in a cultural ecology is then, colloquially framed, the injection of new ideas into the larger pool of things considered possible and feasible within a culture. As has been shown above, Stanley Park clearly provided such an injection or bolstering of ideas into Vancouver’s public conversation about itself and the practices possible in the city. Even though this article has announced a degree of skepticism about the “life-force” metaphor for literature’s role in the public conversation that is culture, it does argue that literature may play a special role in such processes.

What32 literature has to offer in comparison to other modes of cultural articulation—which, in their turn, have distinct advantages of their own, as street art

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clearly demonstrates (cf. Gurr and Butler)—is the way it can handle allusion and different perspectives and voices. Zapf indeed argues that an understanding of fictive literature as a “life force” needs to account for literary aesthetics and their impact (Literatur 5, 46). In Stanley Park, Taylor makes use of different voices that allow for varied articulations of similar themes, potentially broadening their appeal to readers. The imaginative counterdiscourse therefore becomes something to be thought of in the plural, as the Professor, Jeremy, and numerous other characters have different takes on what exactly constitutes their alternative practices and the meanings and motivations behind them, whether that is Jeremy’s allegiance to Blood cuisine, Jules’ strong dislike of corporate homogenization, or the Professor’s search for a deeper understanding of rootedness in the late-capitalist metropolis. In contrast to other forms of cultural critique and articulation of alternatives, the multiple narrative voices available to literature allow a larger variety of affective responses and create a playing field for ideas within one work. Though leaving more space for ambiguity in the criticisms voiced by a number of voices instead of one narrator, and though in this case making the characters’ ways of engaging with their urban setting mutually exclusive, this multi-faceted approach is more open to its audience’s uses and adaptations; staying in the metaphor of the cultural ecology, this would then mean that the “life-force” unique to literature can foster a unique and broad biodiversity of ideas and practices of sustainability.

Yet,33 as this article has argued at its outset, it is not enough for the literary studies scholar to point at the value of books in creating a culture of urban sustainability. One step is to direct our attention to works, such as Stanley Park, which themselves are explicitly or implicitly dealing with practices of sustainability and can provide an urban ecocritical pedagogy that is not too overtly didactic or bound up in generic constraints (cf. Gersdorf 38). Especially if, as is the case in Taylor’s novel, these novels do not fall into any current research paradigm.10 Our analyses then need to be accessible beyond the bounds of our disciplines. Whether Zapf’s11 concept of cultural ecology may have appeal outside of the humanities because of its accessibility, or reinforce an image of unscientific and evasive thinking, it is worth considering how our models and interpretive lenses may allow us to enter our voices into the debate. Finally, and admittedly on an unrelated note, it is important that we, scholars of the humanities, acquire a better understanding of how other fields investigate the city, create their understandings of it, and arrive at the questions they ask. Urban sustainability is a concern that will stay with the academia for a while. The humanities have a contribution to make; for this to be sufficiently heard, however, there is still work ahead.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

11. Barman, Jean. “Erasing Indigenous Indigeneity in Vancouver.” BC Studies 155 (Autumn 2007): 3-30.

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Brandt, Stefan L., Winfried Fluck, and Frank Mehring, eds. Transcultural Spaces: Challenges of Urbanity, Ecology, and the Environment. REAL – Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 26 (2010).

Davis, Mike. Dead Cities. New York: The New Press, 2002.

De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Transl. Steven Rendall. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1984.

Drennig, Georg. “Cities of Desire: Ecotopia and the Mainstreet Cascadia Imaginary.” Brandt et al. 145-58.

Evernden, Neil. “Beyond Ecology: Self, Place, and the Pathetic Fallacy.” The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Eds. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Athens, GA: The U of Georgia P, 1996. 92-104

Fluck, Winfried. Das kulturelle Imaginäre: Eine Funktionsgeschichte des amerikanischen Romans 1790-1900. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1997.

Gersdorf, Catrin. “Nature in the Grid: American Literature, Urbanism, and Ecocriticism.” Transcultural Spaces: Challenges of Urbanity, Ecology, and the Environment. Ed. Brandt et al. REAL – Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 26 (2010). 21-40.

Gurr, Jens Martin. “‘Urban Complexity’ from a Literary and Cultural Studies Perspective: Key Cultural Dimensions and the Challenges of ‘Modeling.’” Understanding Complex Urban Systems: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Modeling. Ed. Christian Walloth, J.M. Gurr, J.A. Schmidt. Heidelberg, New York: Springer International, 2014. 133-150.

Gurr, Jens Martin, and Martin Butler. “On the ‘Cultural Dimension of Sustainability’ in Urban Systems: Urban Cultures as Ecological ‘Force-Fields’ in Processes of Sustainable Development.” Generative Process, Patterns, and the Urban Challenge: Fall 2011 International PUARL Conference. Ed. Hajo Neis, G. Brown, J.M. Gurr, J.A. Schmidt. Portland, OR: PUARL P, 2012. 77-86.

Joseph, Maia. “Urban Change and the Literary Imaginary in Vancouver.” Diss. University of British Columbia, 2011.

Mason, Travis. “Placing Ekphrasis: Paintings and Place in Stanley Park.” Canadian Literature 194 (Autumn 2007): 12-32.

Rhys-Taylor, Alex. “The Essences of Multiculture: A Sensory Exploration of an Inner-City Street Market.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 20.4 (2013): 393-406.

Steel, Carolyn. Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives. London: Vintage, 2008.

Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004.

Taylor, Timothy. Stanley Park. Vintage Canada Edition. Toronto: Random House, 2001.

Vancouver Art Gallery. We: Vancouver. Exhibition. Vancouver: 2011.

Zapf, Hubert. Literatur als kulturelle Ökologie: Zur kulturellen Funktion imaginativer Texte and Beispielen des amerikanischen Romans. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002.

_____ . “The State of Ecocriticism and the Function of Literature as Cultural Ecology.” Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism. Eds. Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. 47-69.

_____ . “Literary Ecology and the Ethics of Texts.” New Literary History 39.4 (Autumn 2008): 847-868.

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NOTES

1. For a thorough discussion of this problem, see especially Gurr 134-137. 2. See the collection Transcultural Spaces: Challenges of Urbanity, Ecology, and the Environment, for an attempt to provide steps toward this direction. 3. See Gurr’s work for a literary studies perspective, or sociologist Rhys-Taylor’s essay “The Essences of Multiculture: A Sensory Exploration of an Inner-City Street Market.” 4. For a full list of phenomena that characterize complexity and are of interest to scholars from the humanities, see Gurr’s contribution in Walloth et al. 5. This is a synthesis of considerations laid out by Hubert Zapf in his book Literatur als kulturelle Ökologie, and the articles on “The State of Ecocriticism” and “Literary Ecology and the Ethics of Texts” respectively, with a focus chosen by me for the purposes of the following argument. 6. As Taylor stated in a personal conversation in Vancouver on May 4th, 2011. 7. I am indebted to Glenn Deer at the University of British Columbia, whose class on global foodways in literature (Spring 2011) informed this discussion. In the session concerned with Stanley Park, the novel was compared to a medieval morality play. Indeed, the references to Dante Beale’s demonic character are numerous and are made on a variety of levels, as are angelic traits of other characters. Still, I would argue in agreement with Travis Mason that the novel deliberately complicates such a reading and indeed makes fun of it. 8. This suggests a reading of navigational skills as a placemaking tactic in the sense of Michel De Certeau, an avenue this paper cannot explore for reasons of focus and space. 9. Though it is a marginal space, Stanley Park in the novel is not constructed as oppositional to urbanity; the animals that inhabit it and that provide the basis for the potluck dinners in the park and during the grand opening at Gerriamo’s are distinctly urban species. See Mike Davis thoughts on the natural history of urban wastelands for a deconstruction of the dichotomy of urbanity and wilderness that can be applied beyond brownfield sites (Davis 361-399). See also Carolyn Steel’s Hungry City for how radical—and utopian—the idea of a city feeding itself actually is. 10. Stanley Park does not fall into any “post”-classification of writing; a presentation of this novel at a conference on material culture was coolly received in part because of the book’s lack of appeal as either sufficiently artistic or having pop-cultural standing.

INDEX

Keywords: culinary culture, Hupert Zapf’s triadic model, literary ecology, Timothy Taylor, Vancouver

AUTHOR

GEORG DRENNIG University of Duisburg-EssenGeorg Drennig studied North American Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria, and Georgetown University, U.S., and is now a PhD candidate in the Advanced Research in Urban Systems program at the University of Duisburg-Essen. There, he works on

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Environmental Imaginaries of Vancouver and the cultural production of space. His main interests are spatially-turned Cultural Studies, “stone-kicking-realist” Ecocriticism, and discourses of urbanity in popular culture, including comics. He has published essays on topics ranging from Poison Ivy and urbanity in Batman comics and films, Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, and Eminem’s rejection of Ruin Porn, to Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and the WTO riots in Seattle.

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