Manufactured housing and the dialectics of enclosure and commoning

Abstract

This commentary draws on comparative insights from fieldwork on migrant labor camps in the US and informal settlements in India to argue that manufactured housing communities (MHCs) are central to understanding urban marginality in North America. It does so by using three conceptual frameworks: infrastructural violence, territorialized stigma, and enclosure. Infrastructural violence manifests through MHCs’ segregation into hazard-prone geographies and substandard infrastructural networks, and through regulatory abandonment that produces preventable suffering among residents. Territorialized stigma links place-based degradation to negative stereotypes about “trailer trash,” creating administrative neglect and blocking governmental responsiveness to resident needs. Finally, the dialectic of commoning and enclosure reveals how MHCs enable collective land uses and informal economies essential to social reproduction yet face growing threats from corporate consolidation. Private equity investors benefit from regulatory constraints on new construction and immobile tenants to densify, gentrify, and standardize communities under the guise of improvement, squeezing common land uses into privatized and aestheticized landscapes. Taken together, these frameworks show MHCs to be contested sites of peripheral urbanization that demand more explicit theorization in urban studies.