Towards a Praxis of Manifesting Spatial Imaginaries

Abstract

In this essay, we suggest an alternative lens to uneven development as an embodied process to frame extant work within critical gentrification studies. In doing so, we resist a theoretical and methodological distinction divorced from the politics of remaking the material and immaterial conditions of the body before, within, and beyond space. In the pursuit of theoretical distinctions and temporal and spatial renderings from the varieties of everyday racial capitalism, we urge scholars to embed an imaginary towards our collective urban future within their theoretical conceptualizations. To do this means to not only suggest what is but what could be. While brief, we hope that this encourages others to engage in scholarly endeavors not only to understand the causes and effects of gentrification and displacement, but to advocate for a politics of spatial imaginaries.

Introduction

Given the often reductionist view of gentrification studies over the last half of century, critical scholars have called for a more expansive view of its effects. Displacement, while not the only effect, but one of gentrification's most pernicious forms of extraction has been argued to be “a core component of gentrification and a key structuring feature of Western capitalist landscapes” (Bloch and Meyer, 2023: 2). Thus, as Bloch and Meyer (2023) argue “it is a process that functions through people's embodied placemaking capacities, only some of which manifest in physical mobility (2).”

Indeed, within disciplinary traditions across urban studies, the salient focus of researchers has been on residential mobility (e.g., Brown-Saracino, 2017; bunten et al., 2023; Freeman, 2005; Hwang, 2015; Lee and Perkins, 2023). Central to these ideas typically involves a form of dislocation—a separation of the body from physical space. However, before Ruth Glass’ coining of the term in 1964, the emptying of bodies through spatial practices of disposability have been central to urbanization. That is, to remove the body from a place while stripping away its surrounding infrastructure of value requires a decomposing of the body for the digestion of another. Devaluation and displacement of the body itself satisfies the nourishment for the growth of others. If we are to take scholars of Black Geographies seriously, we have to understand not only the spatial practices of the body in space, but also the spatial practices internally within the body based on external practices of consumption and valuation.

In this essay, we take a brief look at the literature on embodiment to situate uneven development as an embodied process. In suggesting this lens, we argue that scholars should reorient their theoretical interventions towards a politics of spatial manifestations. That is, we challenge scholars to consider what are the material manifestations of such theoretical interventions towards our collective efforts to remake society? How do these theoretical interventions conceptualize a spatial practice of urban imaginaries across individual disciplines and institutional settings? More simply put, what are we doing to manifest different realities of those who continue to nourish our roles in the academy, our scholarly norms, and this collective exercise of memory-making? To this end, we suggest a more “radical” approach for scholars to embrace their subjective dispositions even in the search for true objectivity and theoretical and methodological distinctions, a practice we indeed argue is central to our roles. Yet, we call for an ideological reorientation to ground these efforts in a quest for collective organizing around a movement from studies to imaginaries (See Lindner and Meissner, 2018) —a shift from deconstructing what is to imagining what could be.

Critical gentrification studies scholars have invoked a plethora of theoretical approaches to understand gentrification as, for example, a result of economic and political restructuring (e.g., Hackworth and Smith, 2001; Morel et al., 2022), a social and cultural process (e.g., Davis et al., 2023; Hyra, 2015; Summers, 2021), a feature of our environmental footprint (e.g., Anguelovski et al., 2022; Rigolon and Collins, 2023), a process constituted by racial capitalism (Dantzler, 2021; Rucks-Ahidiana, 2022), and a form of aversive racism (Bloch and Meyer, 2023). Yet, to what end does that help change the material conditions and collective memory-making of the times? To what degree does this aid us in creating an ever-evolving spatial imaginary? Instead of conflicting accounts of the everyday varieties of racial capitalism, we hope to tease out a more nuanced understanding of gentrification beyond temporality and a teleological understanding of urbanization. Instead of only distinguishing the material nature of gentrification, we must articulate what this means for us to engage in a politics of spatial manifestations—a collective memory-making exercise. In what follows, we expand upon this concept of embodied uneven development as a pathway to articulate a praxis of spatial manifestations.

Embodiment as a spatial practice

Body politics scholars have for some time argued that the body, far from a neutral zone, “is politically inscribed and shaped by practices of containment and control” (Brown and Gershon, 2017: 1). In Beyond the Periphery of the Skin (Federici, 2020), Silvia Federici uses the body as a departing unit of analysis. She argues that every socioeconomic, political, or cultural transformation has been articulated through the body, ultimately leaving a mark whether physical or psychological upon individual bodies. Capitalism, and its adjacent neoliberal webs of wealth accumulation, she further contends, have operationalized the domestication of the body through regulatory practices including strict working hours, surveillance, limited access to free and unconditional healthcare and more (Federici, 2020). Approaching the city as a body politic, authors (see: Federici, 2004; Mbembe, 2019; McKittrick, 2011; Schinkel, 2009) have highlighted how classist, racist, and sexist capital accumulation-driven spatial processes have impacted our bodies.

Solely positing the body as a locus for the unraveling of power and oppression, however, would result in an un-nuanced depiction of corporeal flows—to take up Deleuze and Guattari’s (1983) terminology—in the neoliberal city. The body rather, is an intricate “interzone” (Puumala and Pehkonen, 2010) or a field of “possibilities” (Coker, 2004; Fontanari and Ambrosini, 2018; Joronen, 2017) that can be constrained neither to power nor dispossession. In that sense, capitalism's subjection of the body to Brutalism—interpreted by Achille Mbembe as a “forcing of bodies which are treated as concrete” (Confavreux, 2022: 133)—is continuously met with bodily resistance, whether successful or not. The bodily realm, then, is a political realm and a space from which capitalism's imprint on the body can be internally resisted. Here, we turn to the notion of embodiment to further explore the various ways in which the body and its relation to space under capitalism can effectively help us reimagine and rebuild our relation to ourselves and community.

Due to its ambiguous nature, scholars from cultural anthropology, human geography, and sociology have tended to refrain from using the body as a unit and object of spatial analysis (Low, 2014). As noted above, the body is a nuanced liminal space where various dichotomies—the material and the symbolic, the subjective and the objective, the oppressed and the liberated—converge and diverge not only beyond, but within the flesh (Häkli and Kallio, 2021). These conflicting tendencies create particular interactions between the body, space, the self, and others, that are challenging to grasp in theory or analysis. We acknowledge this complexity, and as part of our argument, chose to stray away from previous accounts of gentrification-generated displacement which tended to reify the violence directed at Black and Brown bodies, to turn our attention to embodiment as an epistemology and object of enquiry. Embodiment we argue, is theoretically, methodologically, and politically productive for it enables us to move beyond contrasting and top-down accounts of the body in space. This allows us to study how, departing from the body, the individuals and communities affected by urban change internalize, respond to, and act against spatial dynamics in the neoliberal city. Most importantly, embodiment as an epistemological point of departure embraces the body as a necessary lens through which to approach the social world.

The concept of embodiment brings back the theoretically fragmented body together in allowing its plurality to emerge. Rather than arguing about what the body is, what it does or what is done to it, embodiment positions being in the body as “the existential ground of culture and self” (Csordas, 1994: 6). The idea of “embodied space,” or the intimate encounter between body, culture, and space as coined by Low (2014: 19), is particularly illuminating here. The body as embodied space is biological, material, metaphorical. It is most importantly a point of departure from which to experience and exert agency over the social world (Low, 2014). Again, embodied space, as the tangible and spatial manifestation of subject-driven bodily experience and existence under capitalism is both an epistemology and an object of enquiry. Embodiment as spatial analysis, we argue, centers individual and community resistance—understood here up to its most mundane manifestations—to neoliberal urban phenomena. When it comes to displacement-as-gentrification, this signifies striving to put forward individual and communities’ placemaking patterns from within—how do people experience, respond to, navigate, and circumvent urban change? Embodiment as epistemology and object of enquiry is ultimately a political project: to seek liberation in life through research.

Urban imaginaries as a quest for liberation

Our commitment to urban research as a liberatory practice greatly stems from the expansive literature of Black Geographies, and the Black Radical Tradition more broadly (See Robinson, 2020 or Kelley, 2002). Studies in the social sciences have tended to attach images associated to marginality, displacement, dispossession, and often death onto racialized individuals and the spaces they inhabit (Hunter et al., 2016; McKittrick, 2020). Research thus plays a part in the perpetuation of the very occurrences we seek to unearth. According to Katherine McKittrick, “Black methodology and method making” (2020, 41) enable us to counter such self-perpetuating narratives in thinking through and recounting Black experiences with regard to “liberation and joy” (McKittrick, 2020: 12). For example, in their demand for a decolonial approach to urban housing policy and reparations, Dantzler and Reynolds (2020) provide a set of policy recommendations to disrupt “the urban process under racial capitalism” (Dantzler, 2021). They are explicit in that these approaches are insights to what is possible “within the racial capitalistic order” (Dantzler and Reynolds, 2020: 160). Similarly, in Freedom Dreams, Kelley (2002) states, “My purpose in writing this book is simply to reopen a very old conversation about what kind of world we want to struggle for. I’m not the only one interested in the work of dreaming…” (7). Central to the ideas raised by these scholars is a strong lack of imagination in extant scholarship while offering imaginaries of what is possible.

Following this trajectory, we encourage scholars of gentrification studies, and urban research at large, to work towards disrupting ties to mainstream knowledge production hierarchies by centering resistance to neoliberal spatial phenomena. In putting forward this notion of gentrification as an embodied process, we hope to actively deconstruct top-down accounts of the body in space, to put forward a politics of spatial manifestations which departs from simply understanding the embodied ways of existing and resisting in space. In essence, we are calling for others to dream—to manifest urban imaginaries for which we can collectively strive to bring to fruition.