Nick Gottschall, University of Washington, Jackson School of International Studies
I
You can see the gentrification of Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood in the landscape of towering cranes. You can see the gentrification of Capitol Hill in half-demolished buildings, hastily-assembled chainlink fences, incessant drill rumblings, the endless immaculate conceptions of ostentatious plasticky condominiums.
You can see the gentrification of Capitol Hill in the shuttering of your favorite coffee shop, record store, sports bar (they’ve relocated to Ballard for now, but don’t worry, the sign assures you, they’ll be back in 2016 to reclaim the shiny condo complex’s ground floor retail spaces).
You can see the gentrification of Capitol Hill in the convergence of homeless bodies on the sidewalks, under awnings, staked out in doorways. The proliferation of construction sites lures a segment of Seattle’s transient population. Graffiti, drugs, sleeping bags—all the trappings of the conspicuous poor have appeared in the nooks and crannies, those unearthed shady spaces of condos-in-the-making.
Question: where do the poor people come from? Were they here all along? Have they literally come out of the woodwork, in an exposure facilitated by the destruction and reassembling of urban space? What can explain this intra-urban migration?
This is the irony of shelter, unfolded across space and time: today’s drug addict shooting up in tomorrow’s yuppie apartment; today’s battered wife taking refuge in tomorrow’s hipster coffee joint.
This is the relationality of poverty and privilege, writ large on the streetscape.
II
To levy criticism against the academic study of poverty is not difficult. The image of elitist professors and graduate students discussing the plight of “the poor” from the privileged and comfortable positions of university classrooms and tenured salaries is readily available to the public imagination. (And if it isn’t, maybe it should be.
Criticism runs both ways, and we “enlightened” academics despair of the uncritical claims of the “ignorant”:
Why are people poor?
They’re lazy.
They choose to be that way.
They make bad lifestyle choices.
The rage provoked by hearing such declarations rivals only the intensity of the academic’s desire to prove them wrong, to concoct a clever response, to convert the ignorant from their misguided beliefs. The pull of elitism is a powerful one, and graduate students face a daily struggle: how do we harness “critical thinking” without invoking bombastic proclamations of dominant, insidious world-systems?
Why are people poor?
Neoliberal market fundamentalism.
White supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
Institutionalized prison-industrial complexes.
Here we see a tension between “seeing too little” and “knowing too much.” The scholars writing as J.K. Gibson-Graham propose a tool to help bridge this gap: weak theory. Weak theory refuses to “know too much” about the world and guards against the burden of ceaselessly recalling conspiracy theory-esque dominant systems. My interpretation of weak theory entails a re-examination of the world around us by restoring the significance of our more “primitive senses” (of sight and sound, etc.) in place of the urge to plunge into grand theory and ambitious world-changing aspirations. In fact, according to Gibson-Graham, the humble acts of thought and speech enabled by weak theory resurrect a sort of hopefulness that can enact change in the world.
Importantly, weak theory can reveal the relationality of privilege and poverty—the idea that the former’s success produces and depends on the latter’s plight—in mundane urban life.
Below I sketch two thought exercises that demonstrate the application of weak theory to poverty and privilege in our daily lives.
III
In my last blog post I wrote about the University of Washington’s safety notification emails. Campus security sends these notifications to inform the university community of recent U-District criminal activity, most often muggings, petty theft and burglary. The regularity and predictability of these emails work to concretize boundaries between (insular) academics and the neighborhood’s (violent, conspicuous) poor. This is the routinization of threat.
The U-District is known for its population of innumerable homeless panhandlers, street youth, drug dealers and the like. Undeniably, many of these people own cell phones or have easy access to a computer and the internet. Without denigrating the abilities of campus security, it’s probably safe to say many crimes committed in the neighborhood go unreported—both to the police and to the campus community.
So what if we extend the safety notification apparatus to the neighborhood’s street community?
Imagine:
Sexual assault in a frat house? Homeless teens get a safety notification text. Drug deal in the dormitory? Panhandlers get an email. Rape? Rampant abuse of alcohol and Adderall? The list goes on.
You get the picture. The point of this exercise is merely to provoke a few questions. Whose safety matters? Whose interests are protected? Whose victimhood is validated?
This is the irony of security. The relationality of poverty and privilege is written into our laws, structured in our imaginations, and encountered in our everyday experience on the street and sidewalk.
Now to return to Capitol Hill. The transformation of the neighborhood by gentrification exposes—in a literal, visceral, visual sense—a segment of Seattle’s conspicuous, proximate poor. Surely the eight-story condominiums-in-the-making represent bastions of prosperity, emblems of the city’s resilience in the face of economic recession. Yet today, at this moment, these condos remain merely figments of the future. In their place—in the very same space—abide homeless bodies, poor bodies.
Weak theory demands that we see these juxtapositions. We need not invoke the refrains of uneven development, the criminalization of mental illness, the stigmatization of drug use or invalidation of non-normative family structures. (Although, in fact, we must absolutely keep talking about these.)
In these day-to-day experiences, weak theory asks only that we ascertain the ironies of shelter and security in our physical surroundings. Ascertain, that is, and keep asking questions.
IV
The ironies of urban living sketched here may arise from what Sheppard et al. characterize as the problems of mainstream global urbanism, or the notion that global development is on a trajectory toward city ideals of the advanced capitalist global North. The normative city dweller in mainstream global urbanism is the embodiment of the “personal responsibility” of welfare reform discourse. He (and he is emphatically a “he”) is the natural heir to the American protestant work ethic and “pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps” evangelism. The normative city dweller is an active participant in the market and seamlessly integrated in the financialized economy. He is above all a consumer.
Global mainstream urbanism epitomizes the ironies of shelter and security. According to Ananya Roy, the formalization of the housing market has meant that the “right to safe and sanitary shelter” enshrined in American citizenship actually prevents people from attaining any shelter at all. Laws intended to provide for the safety of homeless Americans actually work to displace them by criminalizing the informal occupation of space.
Here we return to “strong” theory: neoliberal market fundamentalism, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, hypocrisies of propertied citizenship in global mainstream urbanism. It is absolutely our duty to identify these forces, to name them, to call them out, to propose alternatives. But in so doing we should not underestimate our own primitive senses, our surroundings, our day-to-day confrontation with the relationality of poverty and privilege. Acknowledging irony, contradiction, juxtaposition—this is a key step toward accomplishing change.
Leave a Reply