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‘We live like prisoners in a camp’: Surveillance, Governance and Agency in a US Housing Project

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Book cover Class, Ethnicity and State in the Polarized Metropolis

Abstract

This chapter uses a study of the everyday practices of residents of a housing project in the USA to challenge the understanding of these projects as either communal or hyper-ghettos. Situating such housing projects within wider socio-spatial forms of containment, oppression and urban marginality in the USA, the chapter uses residents’ ‘hidden transcripts’ to reveal gendered, racialized and class-based forms of social orientations. These are shaped by wider disciplining and stigmatizing urban processes but also create contexts and spaces for different behavioural responses.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    ‘41 shots / Lena gets her son ready for school / She says now on these streets Charles

    You got to understand the rules / Promise me if an officer stops you’ll always be polite /

    Never ever run away and promise mama you’ll keep your hands in sight / Cause is it a gun?

    Is it a knife? Is it a wallet? This is your life / (…) / It ain’t no secret No secret my friend / You can get killed just for living in your American skin’. Springsteen wrote this after the police killing of Amadou Diallo in 1999 by 41 shots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQMqWAiWPMs, accessed 30.1.2018. Few Whites would think of teaching their sons such regulations of ruling.

  2. 2.

    http://www.nhregister.com/news/article/Report-30-million-plan-proposes-to-redevlop-11506888.php (accessed 31.1.2018).

  3. 3.

    http://www.nhregister.com/news/article/Ex-residents-of-rndown-Farnam-Courts-find-new-12034991.php (accessed 31.1.2018).

  4. 4.

    http://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/farnam_re-do_plan/ (accessed 4.2.18).

  5. 5.

    Adults named on the apartments’ lease. I draw this conclusion from a confidential tenants’ list of the Housing Authority.

  6. 6.

    Most US states limit the number of months of welfare eligibility. Once these are used, one only receives food stamps for children.

  7. 7.

    http://www.portal.ct.gov/DCF/Policy-Homepage/Chapter-34/34-2-7 (accessed 4.2.2018).

  8. 8.

    On another occasion, a woman offered another her urine in an application process at Walmart job. For a Dutch person, it is incomprehensible why it is required to take drug tests for Walmart jobs. This completely different doxa shows the deeply connected stigmatization of race/class and criminalizing drug consumption as part of the war on drugs for decades in the USA, and adds to systematic ethno-racial closure.

  9. 9.

    Jaffe (2012: 676) following Taylor (2002: 106) defines social imaginary as ‘the way ordinary people “imagine” their social surroundings … carried in images, stories, legends … shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society’.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social Sciences, Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Talja Blokland

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  1. Talja Blokland
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Correspondence to Talja Blokland .

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  1. Department of Urban Studies and Planning, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

    John Flint

  2. Department of Urban Studies and Planning, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

    Ryan Powell

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Blokland, T. (2019). ‘We live like prisoners in a camp’: Surveillance, Governance and Agency in a US Housing Project. In: Flint, J., Powell, R. (eds) Class, Ethnicity and State in the Polarized Metropolis. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16222-1_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16222-1_3

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