From Style Wars to Turf Wars?

"I aint no perfect man i'm tryna do the best I can with what it is I have..." Mos Def 'Umi Says'

If Naked City captured New York at the moment preceding urban renewal then Style Wars surely depicts the city at the moment before gentrification enveloped many neighbourhoods in the 1980s and the city became almost a succession of bland districts with a uniform aesthetic formed from that noxious coalescence of Starbucks, French bistros and twee florists.

There is something about the spirit of the kids in this documentary that is infectious. It is also revealing of the role that urban cultures play in the making or production of the city. There is also a degree of nostalgia when viewing the decaying, yet colourful streets and subways of NYC in the 1970s. We simply don't get to see the city in this way nowadays.

The origins of hip-hop as portrayed in the film also demonstrate the cultural potentials inscribed within urban living. The incredible energy and creativity of the youth of the ‘seven mile world’ of the South Bronx perhaps serves as a defence of the urban against its detractors. Could any other dwelling arrangement produce equally pulsating expressive cultural forms?

Of course, NYC in the mid-70s was no urban utopia. The city was bankrupt, public services were being withdrawn or downsized and many of the failings of urban renewal- especially the public housing projects and racial segregation- were becoming apparent. In some ways the graffiti movement represents the 'return of the repressed'- the original slum dwellers, African Americans and Puerto Ricans; all those groups confined to the city margins by Robert Moses' urban renewal programmes. As E.P. Thompson reminds us culture is always a response or to a shared set of constraints- an articulation of identity based upon common experiences. The subway graffiti writers- through the processes of ‘getting up’, 'bombing' and going 'all city'- were staking their claim on the city, making names for themselves and very literally making a mark on a city hell bent on ignoring them (see the story about the Freedom Train). Crucially the writers were anything but passive victims of oppressive forces; they were engaged daily (and nightly!) in producing their city. Graffiti is evidence of the active presence of marginalized groups in the city. The city isn't just something that is produced around them.

It is difficult to imagine a new sub-culture with as much vitality as hip-hop emerging from NYC today. Yes, there is pastiche, nostalgia, hyped musical trends and so on and of course there is still hip-hop. Yet this is vastly different to the sounds that first emanated from the South Bronx. Contemporary hip-hop- from the mid-1990s onwards is more likely to depict the brutal, aggressive and sexually violent streets of the deteriorating and ever more alienated projects, a shift in emphasis that perhaps reflects Wacquant’s suggestion that the communal ghettos of the past have become hyper-ghettos characterized by fear, violence and mutual hatred. Compare for example (and rather selectively) Grandmaster Flash’s ‘The Message’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdtcwtIxO4s&feature=PlayList&p=4D3CC987B375F879&index=3) with Mobb Deep’s bleak ‘Survival of the fittest’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf_dsmUHnTw&feature=related). Both speak of life on the harsh streets of NYC yet the latter portrays a world completely devoid of positivity or urbanity. Of course, both are examples of expressive culture produced under constraints, yet it appears that constraints have hardened, the divides between neighbourhoods- or territories- are more fiercely defended and that hope has all but disappeared.

The point is also that while life in the projects and ghettos becomes even more constricting, many ordinary working class neighbourhoods- possible escape routes- have gentrified, their original residents replaced by the middle classes. Gentrifiers like graffiti though- the gentrifier’s habitus is predisposed towards endorsing authentic ‘street art’- since it reflects well upon their self-consciously liberal ethic. The aesthetic of gentrification celebrates local colour and diversity, yet when these elements threaten to overwhelm or compromise the ‘order’ and ‘security’ that gentrifiers also value any polluting elements are purged. Graffiti is only welcomed in its place- hanging in galleries or homes and on specially commissioned pieces. Here, graffiti becomes art (traditionally conceived)- it is stripped of its original subcultural significance and removed from the endeavour, risk and energy that characterises true subway graffiti.

More in the next couple of days…

Black Belt- Red Belt

Loic Wacquant (a French sociologist working in the US) has made a direct comparison between the North American ghetto (the black belt) and the banlieues on the periphery of Paris (the red belt- so called because of their historica association with the Communist party). This comparison is based on his research in Chicago and the Quatre Mille (les 4000) a public housing estate in the Parisian suburb of La Courneuve (also where I have carried out research). As we have already learned, the Parisian banlieues have suffered from deindustrialisation and the collapse of manufacturing jobs. As a consequence they have achieved increasing notoriety as zones of social disorder, with focus especially centred on ‘lawless’ minority ethnic youth (often of North African origin) who periodically clash with the police (the last major riots were in 2005- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_civil_unrest_in_France).

Wacquant argues that the banlieue and the ghetto share certain common features, not least a powerful ‘territorial stigma’ that is attached to living in a devalued space. Residents have to live with the indignity of living in the ghetto or banlieue, a stigma that results from the poverty that curses each area. For Wacquant, such spaces are the 'dumping grounds' of the city- site to contain an economically superfluous population. Both spaces also share similarities in terms of the bleak and oppressive atmosphere that suffuses them. Both spaces are also wrongly perceived as socially disorganised (see Wacquant's 'three pernicious premises' from monday's lecture).

Yet, despite these similarities- which often have more to do with perception rather than reality- the black belt and red belt are actually very different socio-spatial formations, produced by different institutional logics of segregation which results in ‘significantly higher levels of blight, poverty and hardship in the ghetto’.

Despite European societies experiencing similar neo-liberal economic restructuring to the US, they have not produced equivalent pathologies to those associated with the American city. As Wacquant states, when it comes to size, assimilating US ghettoes and the French banlieue is like matching heavyweights and flyweights. For example, the ghettoes of New York alone house a million blacks, while the largest banlieue estates only house around 35,000. Whilst joblessness is a problem in both the ghetto and banlieue, unemployment stands at around 50% in the banlieue while in Chicago’s projects barely 16% of residents held a job. Yet it is not just the extent and depth of wealth and income inequalities in the US that distinguish the ghetto from the banlieue. It is also the extent of racial segregation. Comparative studies of ethnic segregation suggest that levels of segregation for African-Americans are far higher than those found among minority ethnic groups in Europe and the UK. The US ghetto is racially homogenous, it is a legacy of slavery and a mechanism of racial confinement- ‘an apparatus aimed at enclosing a stigmatised category in a reserved physical and social space that will prevent it mixing with others and thus risk tainting them’.

Although ethnic enclaves can be found in France and the UK, they do not take the ghetto form found in North American cities. In French estates the social composition is drawn from a variety of ethnic groups. They typically bring together persons of West African, European and Maghrebine descent- ‘black, blanc, beur’ as they are sometimes stereotypically referred (La Haine's characterisation is an example of this). Even within the categories of black, blanc, beur, the nations of origin among banlieue residents are incredibly diverse.

The intensity of racial segregation and disadvantage in American cities combined with the intensity of poverty and paucity of welfare provision are therefore qualitatively different from the circumstances that can be found in European cities. There are also disparities in terms of criminality. While the French media create panics around banlieue disorder such as aggressive behaviour, vandalism and petty theft, in the American ghetto physical violence is ‘a palpable reality that overturns the parameters of ordinary existence'. According to Wacquant, such is the frequency of robberies, assaults and homicides that it has caused the virtual disappearance of public space. The homicide rate in the US is 75 times that of France.

The final divergence between the banlieue and the ghetto concerns the condition of public housing. Wacquant states that the historic African American neighbourhoods of New York, Chicago and Philadelphia have the look of war zones- abandoned or crumbling buildings, carcasses of burnt out stores, rotting factories, boarded up homes and vacant lots filled with garbage and rubble. In contrast, degraded working class banlieue have undergone considerable state assisted renovation. Buildings have been repainted, refitted or demolished. This may paper over the cracks, or mask deep-seated social problems but the environment is not as degraded as that found in the ghetto.

Urban Outcasts

I hope those of you who came on the walk yesterday enjoyed it- despite the cold- and learned a lot about Victorian London. One of the most interesting aspects, I think, is that the 'past city' we toured is still very much 'present', many buildings remain (even if they have been turned into luxury apartments) and the ghosts of the Victorain city remain just around every corner. On the topic of ghosts and the dead, if any of you are interested in the crossbones cemetary, the paupers grave that we visited in Red Cross Street, please see the link below:
http://www.crossbones.org.uk/

Sorry I had to dash off halfway through the walk. I had to make it to University of Surrey at Guildford where I was giving a seminar on my research in the Parisian banlieues (housing estates), with my colleague Dr David Garbin. My research on this topic links very clearly with our next topic on urban outcasts. As such, I provide some history of La Courneuve and the 'Cite des 4000' where we carried out our research. This is taken from the seminar that we gave yesterday. It will give you a flavour of what is to come on monday. And of course, it's also relevant because we will be watching a French film- La Haine. See link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Haine


From our seminar:

"La Courneuve is a banlieue (suburb) situated on the northeastern periphery of Paris in the Seine-Saint-Denis département (‘le 93’). It is part of what is known as the ‘red belt’ of Parisian suburbs because of their historical association with the communist party, due in no small part to the concentration of industry in this region. In fact, despite high rates of unemployment in La Courneuve, the town still has a communist mayor to this day.

Why was it built? During the post-war period nearby Paris struggled to meet the housing demands of its rapidly rising workforce. The housing shortage was exacerbated by the arrival of around a million ‘pieds noirs’ (returning French settlers from Algeria) in 1962. Consequently, La Courneuve like other suburbs of the city that at the time resembled a slum or shantytown was designated a ‘Zone à Urbaniser en Priorité’ (ZUP), an ‘area to be urbanised quickly’.

Industrial techniques that maximised size, speed and density for minimum cost were used to build large, dense housing estates on the peripheries of Paris. Designs were utilitarian and inspired by Le Corbusier’s pronouncement that houses were mere ‘machines for living in’ (machines à vivre). This rather prescriptive view fitted with the tradition of the paternalistic and also hygienist French state. This belief in the urban solution encouraged the mechanised construction of repetitive and monotonous estates that almost made architectural input redundant.

The largest of these housing projects, including les 4000 became known as the grands ensembles. The quatre mille in La Courneuve, so-called because it contains 4000 housing units, is one of the grands ensembles. Finally, by 1975 France had built enough dwellings to be in balance with the number of households-some achievement. Yet these quantifiable housing ‘successes’ would cause huge social strains in the 1980s and beyond."

Later this week, I'll post something about the banlieues riots of 2005. The picture above is of the CRS (riot police) outside one of the buildings in the estate that we based our research.