Coda: toward urban provisioning

AbdouMaliq Simone

What to do with the city. With its conceptual and empirical traps. With its reified, truncated distillation of urbanization. With its accelerated implosions into intensely surveilled spaces promising to exist at the level of the ‘world’, and thus must be protected from the morass of parochialisms, messy encounters, and increasingly desperate improvisations that characterize its surrounds. Weighted down with the infrastructures of exclusivity and exclusion, somnambulant in the torpor of accumulated theft and exhausted from the obligation to produce incessant spectacle, what passes for the penultimate city is forced to retreat more and more into hyper-abstraction in order to render any image of efficacy. Not merely an apparatus for reconsolidating the salience of whiteness, it seems indifferent to anyone or any body specifically. Or perhaps more precisely, it aims to make use of anything that exists in any form, wounded, flourishing, capacitated or traumatized. It doesn't matter. Any condition becomes a hedge, a matter of arbitrage, a maneuver of variables whose value is only in terms of the derivatives or combinations to which they can be subjected. In plenitude or vacancy, the penultimate city, stopping just short of its ultimate disappearance and collapsing under its own leverages and sunk costs, confirms the irrelevance of inhabitation. The city is not a place of settlement, by anybody.

The work of this book is important in that it documents the extent to which the traditional categories of neighborhood, conviviality, multiculturalism, community organization and participation are insufficient either in accounting for the claimed capacities of European cities to ensure a modicum of spatial justice or as elements for an imaginary of the dissipation of coloniality and the rectification of anti-blackness. The entrenchment of white supremacy and the materialization of imperial extraction as the fundamental substrate of urban economies has not only institutionalized precarity as the predominant mode of inhabitation for peoples of color but undermined the potentialities of urbanization itself to produce multiple dispositions of well-being. Through the depletion of urban capacity, whiteness itself is inevitably destined to implode.

As cities hold the vulnerabilities of those structurally marginalized they have been twisted and turned through the multiple strategies of everyday survival. In many European cities where ‘migrants’ were often unable to attain formal work, education and health services, entire parallel worlds were forced into existence, often brutal and precarious, but nevertheless acted both as an affront to and revelator of the prevailing presumptions of urban modernity. By forcing people of color to the margins, the hegemonic imaginaries and operating procedures themselves become increasingly marginal to the ‘real city’. For even if the pretensions of liberty and modernity were always held together by the avarice and power-hungry deal-making of political elites and all those who tried to become elites, the work needed to maintain racial assemblages demonstrated the extent to which multiple forms of violence – police, bureaucratic, institutional neglect – were at the heart of urban governmentality.

Europe clearly is not what it thinks it is. There are countervailing narratives always already in front of us. There are spaces between exclusive inclusion and inclusive exclusion that cities will always deem problematic, but from which they cannot dissociate. They cannot dissociate because such spaces simultaneously perpetuate problems that are used to legitimate particular forms of rule, provide spaces where problems can be worked out always temporarily without ruling regimes having to acknowledge responsibility, and posit specific propositions of urbanities that those same regimes do not have any idea about what to do with.

Despite its most recent postmodern instantiation, Stazione di Napoli Centrale and its surrounds are exemplars of both a more anachronistic and vital notion of the city. What more could you ask for? The profusion of thousands of games of chance and tactical proficiency. The intricate choreographies of tacitly coordinated bodies operating as mobile collectives in transactions of all kinds, and whose performances are adorned with constantly invented vernaculars. Here blackness is a gravitational field that pulls in all kinds of curiosities, vulnerability, interdiction and joy. Markets come and go instantaneously or are entrenched through detailed and mutating arrangements of ‘local authorities’ who all have difficulties recognizing themselves let alone each other. Gritty, parasitical, generous, transgressive and systematic, blackness here is fundamentally multivalent, and while constantly pissed off about the arbitrariness of municipal rule as applied to it, is also not all that interested in the tropes that pass for spatial justice.

It is nearly impossible to imagine what European cities would be without blackness. Without its sound ecologies, fashion statements, visceral maneuvers and collective intelligence. While of course forged under intensive racial oppression and within the ligatures of infrastructures designed to operationalize the extraction of bodily and mental capacities and resources of all kinds, blackness, or rather its sacrifice, has positioned itself as the only salvation. Even if such a position approximates a rejuvenated enslavement, or the obdurate entanglements of boundary-making and conviviality, it is a critical element of the incomputable that extends urbanization beyond its city-centric capture. For only in such an extension is there a production of spaciousness contingent, not on the rolling out of a specific logic of growth, but on the intersection of multifaceted territories of operation, logics of appearance, and seemingly incompatible forms of life. Granted, this formulation skirts the constitution of abstract blackness as an endlessly malleable form operating, as Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (2020) points out, simultaneously across all register. Nevertheless, the white instrumentalization of malleability, according to its needs and fantasies, and in circumvention of the constitution of a milieu of mutual enactment and shaping of form, cannot define the scope of its use.

As such, justice cannot be ‘served’ on the platter of the city-form; it is not a matter of accommodation, of availing real and resourced opportunities on the part of the oppressed to define what they want the city to be, but rather its very abolition. For at its very core, the city was the locus for inhabitation based on the continuous evolvement of reflexivity about that very inhabitation – an economy of time and labor that required the proximity of those to whom that position and capacity were denied. The abolition of the city is not then the dismemberment of its densities and agglomerations but its constitutive narrative of articulation, the ability to subsume that which is made dense to a linear trajectory of interminable development, while occluding all the mechanisms of violence that are entailed in securing this geometry. It restores to urbanization an ambiguation, even indeterminacy of temporality that upends the capture of diverse experiences and bodies in the formatting of what counts, what is valuable.

Genericity

Rather than mobilizing the apparent heterogeneity of the city either in calculations of equilibration that ensures a judicious balance among inhabitants or in proliferating niche spaces and built environments capable of representing the self-valorized ways of life of the heretofore excluded, the abolition of the city is an upending of proportionality. It is the upending of all of those attempts to curate niche styles and built environments, which seek to blend judicious proportions and mixtures of functions, populations and capacities in favor of genericity. By genericity I mean an extensiveness, an extension of urbanization, and a production of spaciousness through a compression of differences that occludes the determinacy of a hierarchy of valuation. Analogous to a black hole, the generic here, instead of a homogenization of difference or an empty abstraction, enables the operations of anything – where, for example, it is impossible to tell what is formal or informal, legal or illegal, and so forth.

Perhaps more important than Europe's monuments, neighborhoods of enduring antagonisms and gentrifying spaces are the vast swathes of seeming featureless spatial products – fractal housing blocks, storage spaces, warehouses, under-utilized industrial estates and transport nodes; all of those facets of the built environment, usually across the sprawling peripheries of metropolitan areas that elicit little attention. All of these seemingly generic spaces whose actual functions and uses remain or can remain largely unknown. In the fourth season of Italy's most popular television series, Gomorrah, these urban domains become a main character, as they are repurposed into a fabric of accumulation for Gennaro, having been stripped of everything, upon his return to Naples to start anew. Industrial bakeries on the verge of collapse, abandoned ports, tracts of suburban housing seemingly in the middle of nowhere, the terroir vague of underpasses, abandoned service roads, food processing centers shuttered for violations, and commercial storage spaces become essential infrastructure collapsing just enough of the minimal sustenance of their intended purposes with a circulation of varying provisional uses.

For generic spaces, it is nearly impossible to determine where they are headed and how, and so keep open the question as to who cities are for, and begin to undo the historical answer, which was for ‘whites’. It restores the uncertainty as the role of ‘dirty industries’ and ‘dirty populations’ that, on the one hand provide a critical economic substrate but are rendered ‘subaltern’, a polluting of modernity. Here the conundrum has always been the capture of urbanization by and through technical apparatuses capable of rendering inhabitation beyond corporeal excess, of harnessing physical metabolisms to output, to the volumetric expansions of space and potentiality. Such expansion is opposed to the production of spaciousness through the intersections of wayward practices of settlement and unsettlement, which always entailed dirty business – processes that could never be stabilized within the terms of the furtherance of well-being, health and individual potential and, as such, meant both the predictable and unpredictable ramifications of exposure to slow death or enduring uncertainties.

Here, Fred Moten's (2017) notions of lateral agency are important: an agency that is not characterized by the furtherance of human development or the prolongation of life, but life in its priority, as that beyond linear steerage; something that veers off in all kinds of dimensions; that steals away from either being an object of theft or an asset whose value is to be maximized. In the ordinary duress of racialized cities, of the bodies of ‘strangers’ – no matter how long they have been around – being immobilized and exposed to constant interdiction, there remains the indistinction between surviving immanent threat and the costs of that surviving; that a focus on endurance may simply constitute a theft of an engagement with life, right here, right now.

This is not to obviate the importance of genealogies about how we got to where we are, about the structuring operations that as Dionne Brand (2010) says introduced terror into the world. And it is not that such genealogies lack the capacity to specify methods of transformation or offer imaginations of what freedom might look like. But no matter what genealogies are developed, they cannot account for all of the leakages, inexplicable circumventions, all of the life lived on the ‘side’ or ‘besides’ that has no unequivocal meaning, that measures no degrees of freedom or viability. These are the affective and practical extensions of urban inhabitation; they extend off the grid, off the normative trajectories of sustainable development, and are mute in face of grand pronouncements or major events.

While the specters of racialized trauma will always come back to haunt, and are materialized in the very infrastructures of European cities, there is something else besides these living memories that come to inhabit, which add ‘new impossibilities’ to the world – both in terms of capture and liberation as they are conventionally understood. Parading around as the most facile and digestible of forms, the generic also embodies the impossibilities of the coexistence of the irreconcilable outside the protocols of domination. Compressed into a proximity with forms of life, use and inhabitation otherwise deemed antithetical, the residues of the colonial are frozen in an uncertainty of their authority. As it was the surfeit of confidence beyond reason acting as reason that underpinned this authority, abolition eventually could care less about what of coloniality's materialization remains or not.

Beyond extraction

Decoloniality also puts in play the technical dimensions of the relationalities of urbanization that come from all over the place, and work in different degrees, proportions and manifestations that come to be associated with it but also do not intrinsically belong to it. This is because there is no essential overarching characterization attributable to urbanization outside of its profusion of technical relationalities – its capacity to continuously repeat everything we might know about it, and upend itself at the same time. This is not simply a matter of machines, calculative instruments, architectural plans or social media, but points to the ways in which processes of ‘affecting and being affected’ far exceed the deliberative mechanisms of planning, policy or sectoral protocols.

They entail constantly oscillating circuitries of reciprocal impact, reshaping and rearrangement emerging from the intersections of metabolisms, sensory systems, discourses and physical performance. They entail all of the ways in which gathering takes place, all of the ways in which infrastructures work on each other and all of the ways in which images and sounds ‘address’ each other, thus generating possibilities of spaciousness which no apparatus of control or mediation knows quite what to do with, even as it misrecognizes or obscures them. The technical concerns the range of organizing mechanisms that articulate materials, spaces and expressions with varying intensities generating constellations of livability that make up the virtual repertories of the urban. What and how decisions are made to attend to specific constellations are a matter of politics, but politics do not bring into being this virtuality, to which the labor, expressive lives and practices of care and endurance of the oppressed have substantially contributed. In other words, the technical elaboration of the urban already embodies the incipience of multiple forms potentially constitutive of ‘freedom’.

It is critical then to proliferate aesthetic forms and experiences that amplify the presence of such techno-poetics and facilitate investment in maximizing the resourcefulness, instead of vilification, of social arrangements that may have emanated from the positions of enduring catastrophe but which exemplify more just forms of urban existence. Just as the book has practiced a gathering of literatures over time, it is important to continue assembling an archive of all of those gatherings that rework the operative notions of household, home, collective and livelihood. This is in addition to the continuous reframing of the financialized city as systematic theft, and shifting the locus of economy away from expansive reproduction, with its logistical systems centered on maximizing the extraction of something from everything, to extended social reproduction, where childcare, marking, schooling, health, provisioning, calculating and working become the conjoint and coordinated responsibilities of multiple and intertwined institutions.