What is planning without property? Relational practices of being and belonging

What is planning without property? This question was recently posed to me following a conference presentation. In this paper, I argue that taking this question seriously reveals unchallenged assumptions about the relationship between planning and property. Focusing on Canada as a settler colonial liberal democracy, I respond to this question by looking at the Indian Act which has supported colonial dispossession and assimilation in Canada for almost 200 years and rely on Brenna Bhandar’s conceptualization of “racial regimes of property” as a means of examining how racial subjects and private property are co-produced. I then look to the practices reflected in the creation of Nadia Myre's artwork Indian Act to show how Indigenous epistemologies can aid in the conceptualization of planning without property. I argue that planning without property would be an approach to planning that would be focused on identifying, making, and strengthening the human and more-than-human relationships the flourishing of life requires. Thus, planning without property would support practices of being and belonging rather than practices of exclusion and domination.

Homeless shelters and the blues

In this article, I analyze the emergence of New York City’s infrastructure of homeless shelters dialectically, relationally, and historically. The members of Boogie Down Productions met in an incipient New York City homeless shelter in the mid-1980s. Their relationship and music is a window into a critical political consciousness of men living in homeless shelters because the artists gave expression to an emergent structure of feeling of resistance taking hold during intense changes to New York’s political economy and its institutions. The paper first analyzes homeless policy and infrastructural change through a reading of archival sources and government reports and documents. The second section understands oral histories conducted with men living in a New York City homeless shelter as blues geographies—insurgent, critical explanations of these institutional spaces. Shelter residents actively challenge the material conditions, relations, and values that produce homeless shelters as essential instruments of the carceral state. I argue that they activate this resistance to the naturalization of shelters, and themselves as homeless, by narrating carceral spaces as abolitionist spaces.

Urban Social Hauntings: Disappearing Gravestone Murals in Gentrifying Brooklyn

This article concerns the disappearance of gravestone (or “rest in peace”) murals in gentrifying Brooklyn, New York. Social hauntings reveal the unresolved violence of Black disposability and dispossession, as it manifests in the urban landscape in periods of urban decline and gentrification; gravestone murals are forms of “wake work” that attend to social haunting, accounting for Black life and death in urban place. This article first considers the wake work of gravestone murals, that they are memorials, archives of collective memory, spaces of worldmaking, and resistance to anti-Black violence. Because gravestone murals illustrate how Black people produce meaning in the urban landscape, they are also forms of Black spatial production. The article then explores the emergence of newer, stylized murals as aesthetic commodities that bring social and economic value to urban space, while commodifying Black life and death. The disappearance of gravestone murals, a visual record of the urban crisis, indicates the transformation of Black urban space in the 21st century.

World class from within: Aspiration, connection and brokering in the Colombo real estate market

This paper explores how the aspirational urban form of the ‘world-class city’ is produced from within the city itself. Rather than focusing on global competition between cities, the analysis considers how local actors in key industries discursively and materially produce the world-class city through their labor. The analytic of connection is introduced as central to understanding how world-class city-making projects are achieved. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Colombo’s high-end real estate sector, the article examines how a successful broker creates and manages connections across different scales and registers. It focuses on three key areas: (1) the rhetorical connections drawn between luxury real estate and national development; (2) the connections created between wealthy foreign clients and local property owners and (3) the work of connecting disparate narratives about supply and demand for luxury housing. I highlight that against the backdrop of considerable economic and political uncertainty, connections are valuable even if they do not result in immediate profit. Offering a glimpse into the world of white-collar professionals in the luxury real estate industry, this paper underscores that world-class city-making projects are embedded in local realities even as they reflect generalized patterns of urban development.

A minor theory of direct action politics and performance in New Orleans’ economic justice movement

In this paper, I develop a minor theory that blurs boundaries between prefigurative direct action and symbolic performance to reconsider strategies for resistance and world-building. Drawing on participant observation and interviews of economic justice organizers and activists in New Orleans in 2015, I examine two events through this minor theory: an immigration reform protest and a collaboratively written skit about income inequality. By emphasizing the performance of protest and the potential for protest through performance, I consider how these events empowered activists to make claims on spaces of the city, develop long-term embodied solidarities, disrupt dominant narratives, and en act more just alternatives. These events took place against the backdrop of intensifying racial and economic inequalities in post-Katrina New Orleans, following a long history of both repression and resistance in the city. Through performance-based direct actions, New Orleans’s economic justice movement moves beyond a reactive politics rooted in outrage and anguish toward a direct action politics constructive of a more just world.

Deepening counter institutions: Property, lands, relations, and the economic future of the Tŝilhqot’in

The recognition of Aboriginal title by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2014 affirmed the existence and relevance of a Tŝilhqot’in legal order governing the relationship that Tŝilhqot’in people have with their lands, with each other, and with outsiders. The challenge now for the Tŝilhqot’in is to articulate and enact these laws in ways that respond to their modern socio-economic and cultural-ecological needs and goals without betraying their fundamental principles. Complicating this is a dominant narrative which rationalizes First Nations compliance with liberal institutions of British common law, property, and market-based economic growth as requirements for socio-economic improvements and well-being within First Nations communities. This article interrogates some of the logics and fundamental assumptions that underpin the arguments of liberal property rights enthusiasts, questioning their applicability to the values and aspirations of the Tŝilhqot’in people and First Nations broadly. The Tŝilhqot’in, empowered through title, at once resist liberal private property while at the same recognize the need for institutional developments in relation to lands, housing, and ‘ownership’. This indicates a need for new legal conceptualizations of property that are more comprehensively rooted in, and reflective of, Indigenous laws and land relations.

‘An Epic Tale of England’: Atmospheric authentication of nationalist narratives

Kynren is an outdoor spectacular pageantry performance which tells a tale of England, drawing on myth and history, to make several claims about Englishness and Britishness. It does so in the political wake, first, of constitutional crises in the UK centred around Brexit; and second, of debates around heritage, empire, race and nation which have been driven by responses to the Black Lives Matter movement. These themselves are manifestations of broader, global trends in which populist movements have attempted to reassert state-legitimacy through nationalism, heritage and culture. This paper explores, how Kynren affectively presents and discursively performs a narrative which puts place and landscape, and specifically the place and landscape of the peripheral region of County Durham in which it is located, at the heart of nation. We argue that the ways in which this narrative is authenticated performatively through the spectacular affective atmosphere of Kynren show how and which nationalist narratives resonate most readily in popular culture.

Blue lines and blues infrastructures: Notes on water, race, and space

In Detroit, Michigan, the urban poor fear they are being displaced and replaced by water. As part of the city’s recent redevelopment efforts, planners have proposed creating green and blue infrastructure zones to manage urban flooding and mitigate the volume of overflow storm and sewer waters that pollute the Great Lakes each year. The areas slated for these water retention zones are the same marginal neighborhoods where Black residents face frequent foreclosures due to water debts and mass shutoffs from water and sewer services. This paper explores how water materializes and mediates uneven landscapes of livability, as well as new modes of living in common among those excluded from the urban commons. I introduce the concepts of “bluelining” and “blues infrastructures” in order to think through the contested assemblages of water, race, and space at the margins of urban life.

Gendered infrastructure and liminal space in Delhi’s unauthorized colonies

This paper takes an embodied approach to the lived experiences and everyday politics of liminal neighborhoods and infrastructures in Delhi’s unauthorized colonies, which lack official entitlements to networked infrastructures such as water and sewerage. Bringing a feminist political ecology lens to critical infrastructure studies, I show how gendered social relations, subjectivities, and the unequal experience of urban liminality are tied to accessing water and its fragmented infrastructures beyond the network. In particular, liminal infrastructural space is produced in unauthorized colonies through not only these neighborhoods’ quasi-legal status and unequal access to urban water, but also through gendered discourses and the socially differentiated ways water infrastructures are co-produced, managed, and made livable by residents. As water is primarily accessed beyond the network via tubewells and tankers, I demonstrate how these fractured modalities ultimately constitute gendered infrastructural assemblages that enable water’s circulation across neighborhoods but also serve to deepen forms of gendered marginality and differentiation. Here, gendered infrastructural practices and labor to negotiate and supplement fragmented components of water infrastructure shape subjectivities and possibilities for social relations and urban claims-making. These infrastructural assemblages expose both the situated experience of urban liminality, as well as its transcendent possibilities.