A political autopsy of Liberal Los Angeles

Abstract

In this tribute to Mike Davis, I engage with his concept of the “slum” to analyze the present conjuncture of the First World slum, notably mass homelessness in Los Angeles. While Davis honed his attention on global neoliberalism, I draw upon his incisive LA essays to uncover the violence of liberal governance, specifically what he calls “community capitalism.” Drawing on my work with insurgent research collectives, I argue that the LA intifada is alive and well in the marginalized spaces of the city where community defenders repeatedly assert collective power in the face of social death.

Many years ago, when I was in my first year as an Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, I was tasked with establishing a new undergraduate major in Urban Studies. I made up my mind immediately that the curriculum for the major would be unapologetically theoretical and that it would challenge the stubborn Eurocentrism of urban studies. In other words, I set out to craft what I was to later call “new geographies of theory” (Roy, 2009), those that deepen a relational understanding of space and place and take account of the world histories of colonialism and imperialism.

In order to make the case for this intellectual endeavor, I lined up a year-long lecture series called The City, which was also the title of the core course I was to develop and teach for many years at Berkeley. I remember the poster well. It was a stunning black and silver poster that we put up all over Wurster Hall, the building housing the College of Environmental Design. The lecture series was anchored by the stalwarts of urban theory such as Neil Smith as well as by prominent theorists who did not always explicitly theorize the urban, such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Each had a specific charge regarding the remaking of the canon of urban studies. In my request to Mike Davis to give a lecture, I rather brazenly asked that he does not think from Los Angeles and that he instead consider other worlds of urban life and theory. Specifically, I asked him to think from the South. Mike responded with generosity, delivering a riveting and brilliant lecture that eventually became the seminal New Left Review article, “Planet of Slums,” (Davis, 2004), and then the book by the same name.

In this work, Mike Davis (2004: 23) focuses on a vast mass of surplus labor, a “surplus humanity,” set into motion by neoliberal globalization, specifically structural adjustment, and manifested in informal urbanism. Here is that unforgettable sentence from “Planet of Slums”: “Thus only the slum remains as a fully franchised solution to the problem of warehousing the twenty-first century's surplus humanity” (Davis, 2004: 28). The impact and influence of this argument has been significant, directly linking the restructuring of labor with the restructuring of space and honing our attention on the specific conjuncture that is neoliberalism.

In this tribute to Mike Davis, I will take the liberty of contradicting the brazen request I had made of Mike Davis in 2002 and think from Los Angeles. The title of my essay, “A Political Autopsy for Liberal Los Angeles,” refers to a 2-part essay penned by Davis (1993a, b) in New Left Review in the aftermath of the 1992 uprising: “Who Killed LA? A Political Autopsy.” In it, Davis shows how other than a Marshall-style plan for urban recovery put forward by the Crips and Bloods, plans for rebuilding were nothing more than privatized urban reform, ideologies of entrepreneurialism, and what he calls “community capitalism,” a stunningly prescient turn of phrase (Davis, 1993b: 54). The essays end with this sentence, “In this city of weary angels, where the fires still burn just under the surface, it takes a very fine razor indeed to split the difference between a ‘liberal’ and a ‘reactionary’” (Davis, 1993b: 54).

Nothing could be more apt for the historical conjuncture at hand, a moment that I like to think of as liberal urbanism. What is at hand is not the neoliberalism of which Davis writes in “Planet of Slums,” but rather a recombinant liberal urbanism. Davis (2004: 26) notes in “Planet of Slums”: “But at the end of the day, a majority of urban slum-dwellers are truly and radically homeless in the contemporary international economy.” I am arguing that the surplus humanity that Davis found prevalent in the Third World is here, in the postcolony that is the United States, in liberal cities such as Los Angeles. It is here that the poor are truly, radically, and literally homeless. I am further arguing that while Davis diagnosed the surplus humanity warehoused in Third World slums as an effect of structural adjustment, it is now upon us to understand the making of surplus humanity at a time of surplus, including surplus budgets, plentiful federal resources, emergency funds, and more.

I put forward these arguments as a member of insurgent research collectives that bring together university and movement-based researchers with unhoused comrades. Our After Echo Park Lake Research Collective was formed in the aftermath of the militarized state-led displacement of an unhoused encampment in Echo Park Lake, a public park in a gentrifying neighborhood of Los Angeles close to downtown. We have shown how such displacement was mobilized and legitimized through the promise of housing, a liberal ruse that has perpetuated the scattering and disappearing of people as well as their containment under conditions of carceral isolation and surveillance. It is as a member of such collectives that I highlight that five unhoused persons die on the streets of Los Angeles each day. And those still living, living on the streets and in encampments or in the carceral shelter, are subject to social death, a term we borrow from Orlando Patterson's (1982) conceptualization of slavery in order to convey the stripping of sociality, the deprivation of all claims to the community. Such exile is spatial. It entails the eviction of people from their homes, a ban on their presence in public spaces, and the expenditure of vast public resources to police poor people. We call this forced disappearance racial banishment. If I had the opportunity to continue with Mike the conversation that started in 2002, I would put forward to him that it is the First World homeless encampment rather than the Third World slum that now requires our analytical attention as the “late capitalist triage of humanity” (Davis, 2004: 27).

Mass homelessness must of course be understood in the long history of racial-colonial capitalism. But I am also keen to understand it within the specific conjuncture that is recombinant liberal urbanism. Davis was masterful in his analysis of the violence of liberal politics. For our research collectives, a hallmark of this moment is the repackaging of racial banishment as an improvement—an improvement of the city, an improvement of the lives of the poor. As I have already noted, this is especially apparent in the liberal ruse of housing. It is thus that the former mayor of Los Angeles touted the militarized eviction of the Echo Park Lake encampment as one of the most successful housing transitions in the history of the city. Yet, as our research shows, the vast majority of the nearly 200 people displaced from the encampment were scattered and disappeared. Only 4 were housed while many more died under conditions of banishment (After Echo Park Lake Research Collective, 2022a). It is thus that the current mayor of Los Angeles, known for her background in community development, touts a program called Inside Safe which targets visible encampments and cycles people through motels and hotels in a system that can only be understood as permanent displaceability. Indeed, for her mayoral inauguration, a ceremony attended by VP Kamala Harris and other prominent liberal politicians, unhoused people were swept into the city's largest containment site, the Project Roomkey Grand Hotel, while others who have been there, displaced from other locations, waiting for housing, were expelled and returned to the streets. My research comrade, Will Sens Jr., displaced from Echo Park Lake, who waited in carceral isolation at the Grand for two years for a housing placement, took this photograph that epitomizes this moment of liberal urbanism. This is an Urban Alchemy worker, waiting in line to undergo the security check that is needed to enter and stay at the Grand Hotel. Will has added a note, “Alas the circle is complete” (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

An Urban Alchemy worker at the Project Roomkey Grand Hotel, Los Angeles, 2022. Courtesy of Will Sens, Jr.

Urban Alchemy presents itself as a social enterprise that works in neighborhoods that have “earned a reputation as a place to avoid.” The hiring system-impacted Black men and women, it touts itself as an exemplar of Black uplift. Urban Alchemy was hired by LA's liberal politicians to broker the Echo Park Lake displacement. In an expanding empire of what Mike Davis would call “community capitalism,” Urban Alchemy now holds multimillion-dollar contracts, from Los Angeles to San Francisco, Austin to Portland. Will's photograph and notation remind us that Urban Alchemy workers are themselves radically homeless, dependent on the very forms of carceral services that they themselves broker. In an essay titled “The Continuum of Carcerality” that we, the After Echo Park Lake Research Collective (2022b : 86), wrote for the Radical Housing Journal, we explained Urban Alchemy in the following way: “… as a counter-insurgent formation, one in which the use of formerly incarcerated people to present offers of shelter and housing to the unhoused legitimizes displacement. Such counter-insurgency is an integral part of liberal urbanism, one in which people experiencing homelessness and incarceration are used to exploit and police one another.”

Diversity, inclusion, equity, safety, care, well-being have all been enrolled and weaponized in the counter-insurgent formation that is liberal urbanism. Mike Davis knew that well. Repeatedly in his writings, he presents LA's various revivals, rebuildings, recoveries, and the moments of an urban renaissance as “counter-revolutionary” restructuring (Davis, 1985: 110). It is thus that in the wake of the 2020 uprisings for racial justice and police abolition, the City of Los Angeles, with great fanfare, unveiled a new department, that of Civil + Human Rights and Equity. In a text message, Benito Flores of Reclaiming Our Homes, a movement of unhoused persons to occupy the vacant public property, commented to some of us: “The same city that has criminalized our poverty and that wrote our carceral contracts of temporary housing, in violation of human rights, US constitution, and California laws, is now creating an office where we can complain about just that.” The very Councilmembers claiming and lauding this department, including its expansion in 2021 to a fancy downtown office space, from Mark Ridley-Thomas to Gil Cedillo to Kevin de León, were to be eventually caught in acts of corruption (Ridley-Thomas) and anti-Black hate (Cedillo and de León). Yet others like Mitch O’Farrell engineered revanchist displacements such as that at Echo Park Lake alongside the advocacy for this office. One of the main campaigns of the Department of Civil + Human Rights and Equity has been The LA for All campaign. With the slogan, “LA is for Everyone,” the campaign is meant to stand against hate, “neighbor to neighbor, community to community—in solidarity with all vulnerable communities and for the diverse city we know and love.” Coinciding with the campaign has been one of the most brutal expansions of anti-homeless laws by the Los Angeles City Council. Epitomizing what Mitchell (1997) has termed “the annihilation of space by law” and what unhoused activist and scholar, Theo Henderson calls “the war on the poor,” the municipal ordinances of liberal Los Angeles enact banishment. In sharp contrast to the LA is for everyone slogan, here is how artist Jennifer Blake, a former resident of the Aetna Street encampment, sees the city (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Artwork by Jennifer Blake, 2023. Courtesy of Jennifer Blake.

But I also think that Mike's work gives us cause to be hopeful about the moment at hand. Because it is precisely in the face of such liberal lies that there is persistent insurgency, or what in the wake of the 1992 uprisings he had called “LA intifada” (Katz et al., 1992). One of my disagreements with “Planet of Slums” has to do with the question of protest and insurgency. Mike Davis (2004: 28) argues that slum-dwellers, as uprooted rural migrants and informal workers, “have little access to the culture of collective labor or large-scale class struggle.” The “Left,” he wrote, is “largely missing from the slum” (Davis, 2004: 34). This conclusion sits at odds with his own conceptualization of LA intifada, which sees collectivity and struggle in formations that have otherwise been dismissed or criminalized. Heed this passage: “Gangs are the major compensatory social structure that's been generated in the face of structural unemployment, deindustrialization, etc. I mean the real genius of this city is that it has produced gangs as surrogate families…The tragedy of this city is that this can only be produced in gangs” (Katz et al., 1992: 27–28).

Our insurgent research seeks to accompany those who are radically homeless and otherwise precarious as they forge the revolutionary conditions of our time. This is neither the culture of collective labor nor large-scale class struggle. Davis is correct about that. But it is what Asef Bayat (2015: S34) in writing about the backstage of the Arab Spring pinpoints as the role of the urban poor in the “quiet encroachment of the ordinary,” “the silent, protracted, but pervasive advancement of the ordinary people on the propertied and powerful in order to survive and advance their lives by unlawfully acquiring land, building homes, and getting urban services or jobs.” Such encroachments are not visible in “Planet of Slums.” It is thus that Davis laments the state of slum politics, missing the ways in which everyday encroachments set the stage for confrontations with state power. As Bayat (2015: S41) argues, such quiet encroachments have not only resulted in “major gains in collective provisions” but have also turned into “remarkable social protests” and even spectacular uprisings such as the Arab Spring.

At a time of recombinant liberal urbanism, what are the formations of quiet encroachment evident in the slums of First World cities? Put another way, what forms of protest and uprising emerge from the homeless encampment, by those who stand outside of the spatial order of property and possession? Here it is important to return to Davis's conceptualization of community capitalism. The First World slum is enrolled into liberal urbanism through community capitalism, with promises of handouts to the deserving and obedient poor, brokered by community development experts turned into powerholders. Safe Sleep. Tiny Homes. Inside Safe. Care Courts. Care Plus. Carcerality and banishment masquerading as care and safety.

The counterpoint to community capitalism is intifada. And at a time of the unceasing catastrophe that is social death, amidst the necropolitics of the post-pandemic era, this intifada often takes the form of community de-fence. This phraseology is inspired by the many acts of insurgency enacted in Mike Davis's beloved Los Angeles, specifically by this one (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Echo Park Lake, Los Angeles, August 7, 2022. Courtesy of anonymous community organizers.

The state-led displacement of the unhoused community at Echo Park Lake was accompanied by the fencing of the park and the installation of surveillance cameras. But about 17 months later, on a warm August night, community organizers deftly and quietly took down the fence. They called it community de-fence. Pinned to the fence was an open letter reminding us all that the fence had to be taken down because it represented the transfer of collective power from the people to the city and its developers. I read it as the political autopsy of liberal Los Angeles. I think it would make Mike Davis smile. I think Mike would see in it an intifada against community capitalism.