From a long-term immersion on an (extra)ordinary block on the Westside of NYC, Christian M. Anderson demonstrates how the blunt powers of urban restructuring are intricately nestled in the jostling of everyday compositions of things through which collectives are made—collectives stitched and woven by the everyday efforts to keep social violence at bay, which can both support and undermine new forms of living, and which then demand a new politics of those spaces in-between.
Congratulations to Christian M. Anderson, an Associate Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at UW Bothell, whose book, Urbanism without Guarantees: The Everyday Life of a Gentrifying West Side Neighborhood, was recently published by The University of Minnesota Press. Anderson received support for his research while he was a 2015-16 Society of Scholars fellow.
According to the publisher's website, Urbanism without Guarantees "offers a new perspective on urban dynamics and urban structural inequality based on an intimate ethnography of on-the-ground gentrification on a single street in Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen in New York City. The book proposes new ways to think and act critically and organize for transformation of a place—in actions that local residents can start to do wherever they are."
AbdouMaliq Simone, a professor of sociology and urbanism at University of Sheffield’s The Urban Institute, writes of Anderson’s book:
From a long-term immersion on an (extra)ordinary block on the Westside of NYC, Christian M. Anderson demonstrates how the blunt powers of urban restructuring are intricately nestled in the jostling of everyday compositions of things through which collectives are made—collectives stitched and woven by the everyday efforts to keep social violence at bay, which can both support and undermine new forms of living, and which then demand a new politics of those spaces in-between.