Negotiating the (legal) right to the city: Public housing demolition and the federal courts in two postindustrial U.S. cities (original) (raw)
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Constructing Public Responsibility in Legal Encounters Over Public Housing Demolition
Scholarship on welfare privatization illustrates how the process often curtails and undermines public responsibility for the poor. In this article, I examine how recipients, policy makers, and judges participate in the legal process as a means of challenging and defending privatization. I look at cases of litigation initiated by public housing tenants between 1985 and 2012 to fight the demolition of their homes to explore the changing meaning of public responsibility within a shrinking public sector. My findings show that as legislative and administrative reforms steered courts toward a more flexible understanding of public responsibility, courts gave increasing attention to the economic hardships experienced by the state itself, while downplaying the plight of low-income tenants.
Since the advent of public housing in the U.S., tenants have played an integral role in both fostering environments where they can flourish, and, when needed, organizing to hold public housing authorities and government officials accountable for providing the material resources necessary to maintain and enhance residents' quality of life. In the current era of public housing demolition and redevelopment as mixed-income communities, these organizing efforts have not only centered on minimizing forced displacement, but also for the right to participate as meaningful stakeholders in governing the transformation of the places they call home. While these material and political dimensions of tenant organizing have been the focus of many studies, relatively little research has focused on the epistemological work that organizing performs in challenging and disrupting abstract representations commonly deployed in spatial policy discourse that marginalizes public housing residents as being both victims and causal agents of concentrated and intergenerational poverty. We examine these themes through an analysis of tenant organizing in Nashville, Tennessee's largest public housing development that is slated for demolition and redevelopment. Our study finds that the material and political achievements of tenant organizing were predicated on the epistemological work that residents engaged.
Regeneration, Citizenship, and Justice in the American City since the 1970s
Peter Lang, 2016
This book investigates post-industrial American cities as sites of struggle where political identities are mobilized and new modes of citizenship are articulated. This interdisciplinary analysis gleans insights from anthropology, literary criticism, cultural studies, geography, political philosophy, and urban studies. Drawing on scholarly, journalistic, essayistic, and fictional texts, the author examines the linkages between urban regeneration policies, citizenship, and social justice in the neoliberal city. She foregrounds grassroots and official strategies of community building, civic revival and democratic governance, as well as the right to the city, localism, and sustainability as key discourses and practices of re-configuring and re-inhabiting the urban.
Victories from Insurgency: Re‐Negotiating Housing, Community Control, and Citizenship at the Margins
Antipode, 2019
This article considers how insurgent campaigns for housing the poor in New York City and Chicago succeeded in engaging the local state, non‐profits and financial institutions in the creation of community land trusts. These campaigns had long arcs in which victories and losses built from each other, neither as permanent as they initially seemed. The campaigns moved iteratively between spaces of “invited citizenship” (courtrooms, planning committees) and “invented” spaces of collective action (property takeovers). They found their greatest success when, exploiting state incapacity to defend abandoned property, they elicited a degree of complicity from local governments in their takeovers of housing and land. The article thus contests dichotomised accounts of social movements that oppose losses to victories, cooptation to resistance, and movements to institutions. Instead, we call for situated and dynamic accounts of insurgent practice, capable of theorising the long, messy, co‐constit...
Law in Politics: Struggles over Property and Public Space on New York City's Lower East Side
Law and Social Inquiry-journal of The American Bar Foundation, 1996
This article examines politics on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York City, for evidence of law at the constitutive level. We see legal relations shaping grassroots struggles over public space and housing as forums, claims, and political positions. This view challenges instrumental conceptions of law still prominent in some social-scientific approaches.
Publics are not what they were once imagined to be. A growing body of interdisciplinary work is shifting attention to processes in which publics are summoned, constituted and mobilized within political struggles. Nowhere is the formation of publics, as multiple, contingent and contested, more evident than in the varied responses to the transformation of urban spaces. Publics are emerging around issues of belonging, heritage, rights and participation within increasingly divided and unequal cities. Through a close reading of discourses of revitalization and gentrification in the case study of the controversial redevelopment of the Woodward's building in Vancouver, Canada, I examine how the formation of issues imagines and mobilizes publics and further how these discourses work to define possibilities of democratic participation. I show that discourses of revitalization, relying on economic and cultural logics of urban redevelopment, imagine an exclusive, individualized and passive public. In contrast, anti-gentrification discourses, advancing social and political logics of redevelopment, mobilize a collective, active and more inclusive public. In exploring publics within the relationship between issue formation and political participation, I suggest that urban struggles, such as that at Woodward's, are sites in which to understand how meanings of democracy are being contested and rewritten in the contemporary moment.
The Journal of Architecture, 2018
It is on the grounds of 'eminent domain' and in the context of the great urban transformations that the city of New York underwent through the twentieth century that so much criticism is launched at urban actors such as Robert Moses. Blight often constituted the ground of legitimacy for the use of eminent domain. Blight is often condemned for its definitional ambiguity by both legal and urban historians. Yet if it is considered at the intersection of urban spatial reasoning's experimentation with the size of the neighbourhood in relation to the housing project, and at the point where it collides with legal argument and jurisprudential challenge around the notion of public benefit, it is possible to see an incredible productivity at work in the notion of blight. This paper argues that it is in fact the instrumentality of this definitional ambiguity that galvanises a broad and diverse dispute around housing. Rather than simply reflecting legal change, here the typological and diagrammatic spatial experimentation at work in the coming-into-form of the housing project can be seen iteratively to nudge transformation in legal and constitutional definition. This suggests a quite different kind of directed and specific material politics than that typically attributed to architecture's disciplinary skill set.
Contentious buildings: The struggle against eviction in NYC’s Lower East Side
Current Sociology, 2021
The article focuses on the mobilization carried out by tenants living in a rent-stabilized building in NYC’s Lower East Side. Their action was a central part of a large and successful struggle against the landlord, blocking his continuous attempts at eviction. The main research question is: what are the reasons of the success of this action? In other words: what has tipped the balance in favor of the tenants in a conflict in which the landlord clearly had stronger economic, political and power resources? The article argues that this success was highly based on the intersection of three main elements: the specific resources of the tenants, the organizational resources of the territory and the institutional and legal configurations. Moreover, the study considers these three levels closely interconnected and mutually influencing each other. Based on the direct observation of the mobilization, on semi-structured interviews and on biographical sources, the article aims to contribute to the understanding of the multifaceted dimensions of the fight against evictions. The article also aims to contribute, theoretically and methodologically, to a relational and interactionist approach both for the study of social movements and of gentrification and to strength the dialogue between the two fields