Urbanism Without Guarantees

Christian M. Anderson is associate professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington at Bothell.

• ContentsIntroduction: Situating a StruggleI. Renovating and Making the Urban Question Critical: Toward a Parallax Urbanism1. Fateful Leaps: Flipping the Script on Rent Gaps and Revanchism 2. Unsettling the Urban Question3. The Contingencies of Civic Action, Revisited4. The Hitch, or, Performative InfrastructureII. Place-Embedded Stories and Other Incitements to Parallax Urbanism5. A Brief (Infrastructural?) History of West Forty-Sixth Street6. Specters, Traditions, and the Dominance of Common Sense7. Battles, Contradictions, and Good SenseConclusion: This Hegemony Is a DragAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

"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."-AbdouMaliq Simone, The Urban Institute, University of Sheffield"Conceptually rich, artfully crafted, and with a striking immediacy, Urbanism without Guarantees offers a compelling analysis of the meanings of urban change from the perspective of ordinary residents."-Christine Hentschel, Hamburg University"A fascinating new book."-Viewing NYC"Christian Anderson’s Urbanism without Guarantees takes its name from Stuart Hall’s ‘Marxism without Guarantees’ (1983) and lives up to its name by delivering a critical Marxist analysis of everyday life."-Myung In Ji, ANTIPODE