Cities and Race

America's New Black Ghetto

David Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415358057
• eBook ISBN: 9781134246298
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This fascinating book examines the 1990s rise of a new black ghetto in rust belt America, 'the global ghetto'. It uses the emergent perspective of 'racial economy' to delineate a fundamental proposition; historically neglected and marginalized black ghettos, in a 1990s era of societal boom and bust, have become more impoverished, more stigmatized, and functionally ambiguous as areas.

As these ghettos grow in size and become more stigmatized entities in contemporary society, our understanding of them in relation to evolving cities and society has not kept pace. This book looks to the heart of this misunderstanding, to find out how race and political economy in cities dynamically connect in new ways ('racial economy') to deepen deprivation in these areas. This book is an essential read for students of geography, urban studies and sociology.

I.
Glocal black ghetto emergence

1 Introduction

THE FRAME

Today, in the shadows of gleaming downtown skyscrapers and showy gentrified neighborhoods, many impoverished black ghettos in America’s Rust Belt have substantially worsened (Wacquant 2002, 2002a).¹ These ghettos, frequently found within five to ten minutes drive of investment-energized downtowns, might as well be in another universe.² Leaders and residents struggle to acquire the resources to upgrade their communities, but face a formidable obstacle: the accelerated push to make and protect downtown revitalized landscapes of consumption, pleasure, and affluent residency. New redevelopment zones (e.g. the Loop-Gentrification Complex (Chicago), the Circle Centre Mall Axis (Indianapolis), Soulard-Gentry Boulevard (St. Louis), and the Public Square-Historic Gateway Cluster (Cleveland)), have emerged as hyped revitalization icons for what their cities ostensibly can and need to become. In this context, black ghettos, from the gaze of many planners and growth-advocates, simply do not rate.

The thesis of this book clarifies this new black ghetto reality: that these areas more deeply bleed with a bolstered functional logic ascribed to them, to warehouse “contaminants” in the “global-compelled” city restructuring. While these ghettos in Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, Chicago, and the like have always warehoused the racial poor and been seared by negative representations, these aspects have accelerated since 1990. As this book documents, deepened neoliberal physical and social restructuring in these cities has created a startlingly new black ghetto entity.³ Now, a more pronounced material and symbolic deprivation marks these areas under a post-war “third-wave” of black ghetto marginalization. These residents, in expedient processes, are both materially battered and symbolized – understood around a new debilitating theme of hopelessly pathological and destructively “consumptive.” Black ghettos, once again but in a new way, are built into the ground, embedded in social relations, and plugged into circuitries of economy and politics.

But what is the third wave of ghetto marginalization that is central to this exploration? This wave, a post-1990 phenomenon, socially and spatially isolates these spaces (via discourses and practices) to make profitable “global-competitive” economic spaces for real-estate capital (a post-war privileged coalition of prominent builders, developers, and Realtors in city policy that has always been entangled with local elite dreams for profit, prestige, and civic improvement). The previous wave, the second, was an early and mid 1980s activating of Reagan’s “welfare-ghetto” rhetoric by local growth machines (striking out to assist real-estate capital) to fortify and expand the newest accumulation apparatus: frontier gentrification (Wilson 2005). Yet both have roots in a 1950s and 1960s first wave of black ghetto marginalization whose central analytical object, “the negro slum,” purportedly needed isolating or eradicating to economically galvanize cities (Tabb 1974). Whereas the second wave pivoted around nurturing incipient revitalization spaces, the first wave centered upon the use of the urban renewal bulldozer to boldly re-make downtowns. In each case, these black ghettos have felt the wrath of something powerful: punitive, perpetually faltering city economies.

It follows that these ghettos today, despite other assertions, are anything but absent from capital’s thoughts and mainstream discourse. In a widespread myth, the ascendant neoliberal 1980s (fueled by Reagan’s “Welfare Queen” oratory) powerfully marginalized these spaces and populations, and now erases them from the public mind. In common discourse and daily thought, it is said, they are now forgotten and left to rot.

This book paints a different portrait: that these populations and spaces are still painstakingly managed, particularly by growth machines (amalgams of builders, developers, Realtors, the local state, and the media that push a unified vision of city growth) and the police apparatus. While national rhetoric has lessened this demonizing, widely substituting “commonsense” neoliberal oratory for raw portrayals of atavistic people and spaces, local rhetoric seamlessly deepens this. The sources of this demonizing today, thus begin less with oratory from familiar voices – presidents, think-tank hotheads, and incendiary national columnists – than with local politicians, planning reports, mayoral utterances, and real-estate moguls.

In elaborating this thesis, the book chronicles a crucial catalyst to this third-wave of ghetto ravaging: the recent fear of and obsession with a supposed new era – globalization. This elaborate rhetoric, served up heavily now in local settings, has been a key trigger to mobilize and put into play crucial ghetto-destroying forces (targeting of government resources to cultivate a robust entrepreneurial city, retrenching the local welfare apparatus, rhetorically attacking these populations and spaces). This rhetoric, which I call “the global trope,” is framed by and extends neoliberal principles and designs (especially the notions of the private-market as determinant of social and land-use outcomes and the retrenchment of social welfare) to systematically re-make these cities. The global trope, in this frame, is served up as a frank and blunt package of truths about city realities and needs that can no longer be suppressed. In assertion, its pleas correspond to core truths; deft interpreters read and respond to clear truths as a policy prescriptive, progressive human intervention onto a turbulent and fragile city.

The rhetoric of the global trope has thus been a perceptual apparatus with profound material effects. It has served up a digestible reality that, following Robin Wagner-Pacifici (1994), guides construction of programs and policies by making certain actions thinkable and rational and others not. Imposed webs of meanings, like symbolic cages, build bars around senses of reality that place gazes within discrete and confining visions. One reality is ultimately advanced while alternatives are purged. Here is Mikhael Bakhtin’s (1981) implicit dialogue with other points of view, the simultaneity of asserting one vision and annihilating others. This strategic affirmation and rebuke, forwarding what exists and what does not, continues to make this rhetorical formation a fundamental instrument of power. As this apparatus has resisted and beaten back competitive visions of city and societal realities, even as it is contested and struggled against, it grows stronger in numerous rust belt cities.

At this rhetoric’s core, a supposed new hyper-competitive reality makes rust belt cities easily discardable as places of investment, production, and business. These once enclosed and confident containers of the economic, in the rhetoric, have recently become porous and leaky landscapes rife with a potential for dramatic economic hemorrhaging. Against this supposed reality, cities are portrayed as beset by a kind of accumulation disorder and uncertainty that now haunts them. The city, as a place of becoming, is a threatened but historically resilient locale that once again must act ingenuously to survive. The offered signs of this ominous potentiality – municipal fiscal depletion, an aging physical infrastructure, the “reality” of decayed residential, commercial, and production spaces dotting the city – are deployed as disciplining signifiers of what the future can bring. Through this rhetoric, a proposed shock treatment of re-regulation and privatization is grounded and rationalized.

In a second part of the rhetoric, city survival supposedly depends upon following two imperatives: strengthening the city as a taut entrepreneurial space and meticulously containing black ghettos and their populations. In the first imperative, the assertion is forceful: Now cities must push to build attractive consumptive complexes, upper-income aesthetic residential spaces, efficient labor pools, and healthy business climates. This post-1990 rhetoric has been at the heart of what Kevin Cox (1993) earlier identified as the supplanting of a “politics of redistribution” by a “politics of resource attraction.” Entertainment, culture, sports, and leisure now become civic business. To fail to commodify these, borrowing from Milwaukee Mayor J. Norquist (1998), is to miss the reality of the new stepped-up inter-city competition. An intensified fragmenting and balkanizing of city space by class and race is not merely normalized, it becomes celebrated as utilitarian and in the service of city survivability.

In the second imperative, the assertion is sometimes explicit but often implicit: that poor black neighborhoods and populations need to be systematically isolated and managed as tainted and civic-damaging outcasts. These are cast as not merely culturally problematic but things to be feared, reviled, and cordoned off. At work is William Wimsatt’s (1998) notion of the mobilized fear economy, a general trepidation that now expands to more deeply include black ghettos. As Wimsatt notes, since 1980 we have increasingly had government by fear, foreign policy by fear, and landscapes of fear, all of which are expediently peddled by all scales of media. Now, we also have a heightened fear of the sinister black-ghetto in these cities that is manifested in a discursive fright about crime, black men, black youth, streets, and ghettos. A spiral of fear, peddled through rich images, now sells black bodies and spaces as potential violators of the collectivity’s socio-moral and economic integrity. As is revealed in the analysis of contemporary ghetto changes (chapter 4), the unhidden hand of the global trope that sells this can be found in city policy, planning discourse, and normative politics.

The global trope is in this sense two-pronged. It offers the complementary “truths” of what circumstances these cities now face and also what they must do to survive. These two supportive formations seamlessly connect to form a coherent and resilient rhetoric. This whole, borrowing from Wendy Hollway (1984), offers purportedly progressive positions for subjects to adopt that legitimate potentially contentious actions (e.g. requiring poor people to work at sub-minimum wages, cutting food stamps to the needy, using public funds to subsidize gentrification). Yet use of such discourse by growth elites is anything but surprising. These formations, following Norman Fairclaugh (1992), are the modern alternative to flagrant violence and oppression. The now established rule in complex societies, to Fairclaugh, is to make and manage rather than to nakedly repress. To Fairclaugh, seizing and extending the terrain of logical and progressive through discourse, is potent politics.

The end result, I chronicle, has been the formation of a new kind of ghetto, what I term the “glocal black ghetto,” which has become more impoverished and more impugned as the now crystallized zone of human discard in “the global era.” These ghettos, simply put, have become one-dimensional apparatuses for the naked isolating and warehousing of those deemed cancerous to real-estate submarkets and downtown transformation. In the process, dominant changes in these ghettos (deepened deprivation, more health fatalities, new forms of stigma and marginalization) reflect this ghetto and inner city isolating imperative put into play. The facilitating rhetoric, the global trope, proves functional by communicating the need to re-entrepreneurialize city form and life and deepen ghetto isolation. Ultimately, it normalizes both an intensified splintering of city space and the sense of tainted and civic-damaging black outcast bodies that need assiduous regulating and management.

But use of this ghetto-devastating global trope in the third-wave is rooted in a deeper force that has so far been merely hinted at: the production of a strategic uneven development. This differentiation of city form has fluctuated over time in response to a central process: local and societal regimes of accumulation. This cultivating of uneven development, Neil Smith’s (1984) lifeblood for making the city an instrument for accumulation, produces an economically-taut landscape that can efficiently service the interests of local growth machines and the broader society. Thus, during the golden age of the Fordist societal growth dynamic, rust belt cities like Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Detroit took on and progressively embellished their trademark feature: large factory districts dominating downtowns ringed by tiers of worker districts (Judd 1979; Teaford 1990). Black ghettos immediately arose to aid a small real-estate capital but most fundamentally to assist the Fordist industrial economy’s need for cheap and plentiful low-wage workers.

But local and societal circumstances were changing in the 1970s with the collapse of Fordist economics and the Keynesian-welfarist complex. As flexible production systems, labor-market deregulation, and a retrenched welfare state became the societal adjustment, rust belt cities especially were battered. These cities, desperate to revitalize moribund economies, rallied around an “opportunity structure” provided by the structural economy, potentially lucrative real-estate (see Smith 2002), to drive the second-wave of black ghetto marginalization. Fluctuations in land and property value, as before, persisted, but cultivating an ascendant gentrification could generate substantial revenues for real-estate capital and local government (see Weber 2002; Smith 2002). In this context, the institutional stimulants to revalorize land in key districts – tourism, historic preservation, cultural upscaling – arose as city redevelopment mechanisms. Desires of growth machines to cultivate this new city-wide differentiation, steeped in isolating “contaminating” black bodies and building expansive (but fortressed) posh spaces, spurred the creation of the new glocal black ghetto.

AN UNEASY GLOBAL TROPE

Yet it is important to distinguish between the appearance and reality of these growth machines and their usage of the global trope. At a superficial level, they appear as blunt neoliberal operatives, flagrantly offering a kind of new shock treatment (e.g. necessity of concentrating public and private resources in select spaces, demanding the racial poor to be productive and civically contributory or pay the price). But things are more complex at a deeper level. These machines elaborately stage their power and acuity to appear as inevitable and irreversible forces (Pulido 2000). This “theater of self-aggrandizement” bolsters the machine’s political standing and conceals the difficulties of its reality: it must continuously struggle to negotiate shifting political ground, engage new possibilities and constraints, and grapple with new forms of contestation (Ward 2000). If successful on these fronts, the myth of naturalness and inevitability is hardened and dogmatic and strident neoliberal rhetoric can proceed full force.

In this setting, the global trope is always multi-textured and elaborately staged to be effective and solvent. It “speaks” directly to specific issues (the reality of globalization and city need to appropriately respond) but fabricates elaborate worlds of people, places, and processes that foundationalize and organize these themes (see Wagner-Pacifici 1994; Castells 2004). This provision of “support worlds,” a crucial analytic ingredient in the rhetoric, functions to stage these “themes of truth” as they connect to the lifeline of “truths” in other rhetorical formations. These support worlds, in other words, are necessary inclusions in the rhetoric that authenticate dominant, addressed issues. Mapping reality ultimately involves staging the mapping replete with providing a supportive cast of characters and processes. Thus, as we discover, the global trope’s ability to persuade (i.e. create perceptions that make certain actions practical and others not) lies in a discursive framing of its dominant themes, which cultivates and manages the sense of one objective reality.

It follows that the global trope which drives this new uneven development is complex and tension-ridden. Contradictions and discontinuities characterize the formation – its themes, images, and general coherence – that need continuous management and refinement. This formation’s complexity is tied to a straightforward reality: it is a strategy of power that is never complete or fully determinative. The global trope is thus always in a process of becoming, as something partial, contingent, and developing, to render it malleable, fluid, and hybridized. At the heart of this, the trope is always subjected to a “double-gaze,” a two-sided observation and interpretation, which continuously opens it up for scrutiny and interrogation (see B. Wilson 2000). Young and old, the poor and non-poor, and everyone else take their turn at reading this formation. To dull or taint this gaze, the search for a consensus and the production of a democratic veneer is constant. Contestation and resistance, as we learn in chapters six and seven, is forever there or on the horizon, making the creation and reproduction of this global trope an ongoing human accomplishment.

What are the specifics of these difficulties? Most generally, a surprisingly elusive abstraction – new global times – is always being simplistically grounded and empiricized. The global trope is an elusive abstraction in a fundamental way. A sense of new global times is an absent reality, an empirical ambiguity (see Dear 2000; Cameron and Palen 2003). It is not visible to people in space, and is said to lie way beyond the domain of states and regions. It is also absent temporally, with globalization widely invoking the sense of an inexorable, futuristic unfolding as “the telos of capitalism.” In this context, growth machines continuously toil to “proof” globalization as something observable, legible, and on the move. In this process, a sense of easy-to-understand local ills is widely served up as irrefutable evidence. Manifestations of globalization are projected to be all around the city: in people (e.g. the black poor), places (e.g. industrial districts), and processes (e.g. city crime, declining public revenues). The public is to see the city and quickly grasp this proof: the city is to be read in only one way.

The struggle is also to reinforce something else: the local state as leader of the new restructuring. To push this, growth machines extol the state’s supposed reason for existence, to form and execute collective goals, even as prevailing neoliberal sensibilities also necessitate anti-statist rhetoric (see Ward 2000; Weber 2002). Direct pronouncements (government as facilitator of civic livability and civic progress) and subtle insinuation (government as preserver of status quo class and race relations) help these growth machines: they prop up this offering. In short, the push of a proactive government belies neoliberal orthodoxy. The drive to front a smart and adroit local state is a nonstop rhetorical project. Ultimately, these local states, in the growth realm, do not abandon (in action and discourse) sense of themselves as mechanical bearers of public desires that transform cities for public gain, even as they struggle with the new reality of having also to demonize themselves.

Moreover, these growth machines struggle with something else: they communicate the contradictory notions of democratic ideals and the need to isolate the black poor. While the principles of freedom and self-determination are extolled, policies blatantly isolate “a people.” Rationalizing this confining, an ongoing project, involves a two-pronged process: bringing supportive, paralleling narratives into the global trope (e.g. the black crime question, the erosion of public schools issue) by referencing and illuminating; and allowing these narratives to function and influence on their own (see Pulido 2000). In theme, both offer a doctrine of liberty that is tied to a notion of deservedness to be measured by two supposed time-tested ideas: levels of civic conformity and civic contribution. In this context, poor African Americans are cast as a least deserving lot: they are widely demonized as threats to public safety, security, and civility (Hooks 1993; Collins 1996). Diverse discourses in the spheres of crime, public education, city growth, community development, and housing policy are critical. I discuss this more fully later.

At the same time, the agenda to isolate the black poor must be complete and total. This key part to creating the entrepreneurial-competitive city involves triple goals: the raw act of cordoning off “a people,” rendering them accepting of this and non-incendiary; and removing totally their presence from the civic gaze onto privileged micro-spaces. Creating this new city becomes a delicate, ongoing human endeavor that involves deft discursive and material management. The final goal of these three (managing the civic gaze onto select micro-spaces) is perhaps most vexing; it necessitates a non-stop management of the black poor’s activity spaces and routine paths. The growth machine’s realization is stark: the images that these “cathedrals of consumption and production” emit need to be elaborately choreographed and controlled. It follows that such commodifying of space, goes hand-in-hand with a key maneuver, entrepreneurializing the visual and banishing “visual trash.”

But who offers this global rhetoric in rust belt cities? The leaders are diverse “talking heads” within growth machines: planners, mayors, City Council people, newspaper writers, developers, Realtors, editorial pundits, and corporate CEOs. This is the nexus of enablers, funders, planners, writers, and direct builders of urban space who aspire to create a new, profit-propulsive capitalist city. They unify around a central goal: to produce maximum urban rent and to cash in on the produced revalorization of land. This means, of course, encouraging multiple city changes: attracting more business and industry; building more conspicuous consumption neighborhoods; crafting vibrant, lavish downtowns; re-entrepreneurializing local business climates, and isolating the racialized poor. These actors frequently differ in the desired timing and pattern of restructuring, but this fails to blunt the drive to restructure. All desire in general principle a coherent nexus of spaces that yields the prize: investment-attractive micro-terrains (e.g. gentrified neighborhoods, historic districts, high-tech production zones).

This combination speaks its truths through multiple sources: speeches, public oratory, newspaper editorials and stories, planning documents, and informal everyday conversations with colleagues and others. All help constitute a circuit of knowledge that permeates the urban everyday to populate the local with anointed facts and realisms designated as irrefutable (hence this book’s empirical focus on all of these sources). One key point is the “regime of truth”, which is dependent upon a crucial but often overlooked source – the mundane everyday conversations of growth machine actors, as bold declarative statements in public forums....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Tables
• Preface
• I. Glocal black ghetto emergence
• II. Current ghetto dynamics
• III. The active black ghetto
• Notes
• References