‘Bodies is what makes it work’: Statecraft and urban informality in the Philadelphia recovery house movement

Abstract

There are some 30,000 abandoned row houses in the city of Philadelphia. In the neighborhood of Kensington, recovery house operators have reconfigured hundreds of row homes to produce the Philadelphia recovery house movement: an extra-legal poverty survival strategy for addicts and alcoholics located in the city’s poorest and most heavily blighted zones. The purpose of this article is to explore, ethnographically, the ways in which street-level survival mechanisms articulate with the restructuring of the contemporary welfare state and the broader political economy of Philadelphia. I use ethnographic data to reveal how the recovery house, as an unplanned predatory ‘subsistence niche’ (Davis, 2006), operates in concert with the workfare state, the informal/deregulated low wage service sector, and the criminal justice system. The contradictions of the movement explain how informal street level poverty politics in areas of spatially concentrated poverty work along the periphery of post-welfare regulatory institutions.