West Side stories: Everyday life and the social space of West Forty-Sixth Street
Item
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Title
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West Side stories: Everyday life and the social space of West Forty-Sixth Street
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:c52eba0cf286:11491
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identifier
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11996
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Creator
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Anderson, Christian M.,
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Contributor
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Cindi Katz
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Date
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2012
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Geography | Cultural anthropology | ethnography | everyday life | hegemony | practice | space
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Abstract
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This is an ethnographic study of macro-structural change from the vantage point of everyday life on a few blocks of a single street in the Hell's Kitchen/Clinton neighborhood of New York City. The study tells stories from daily life on several blocks of West Forty-Sixth Street between Eighth Avenue and the Hudson River as documented over three years of close observation. These stories show how the actions of some residents serve to lubricate outcomes like privatization, rising housing costs, discriminatory policing, displacement, and eviction. These outcomes then negatively affect others who have less power---particularly undocumented migrants, the elderly, the poor, and people of color. This finding is complicated by the fact that people here are not acting malevolently, but more often than not out of well-intentioned common sense ideas about community, quality of life, and progress. What this means, I contend, is that processes like gentrification, neoliberalization, and inequitable urban development are not simply imposed from outside by macro forces such as real estate capital or top-down urban policy. I argue that these processes are also deeply contingent on everyday life---on the daily actions, ideas, and subjectivities of ordinary people in places such as West Forty-Sixth---which act as a kind of social infrastructure. This situation presents a mash-up of spatial, political, and structural questions about hegemony and power that span the intimate and the global in scope while complicating existing understandings of urban space and everyday life.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Earth & Environmental Sciences
