Precarious Participation: Targeting Affect through Neoliberal Participation in a Public Housing Context

• In Event: 189 - Section on Community and Urban Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 10. Urban Planning and Governance

Abstract

The effects of the privatization of public housing on lower-income residents in Minneapolis are dramatic and real, exacerbating residents’ tangible sense of socioeconomic precarity in one of the US’s least renter-friendly cities. Alongside austerity in public services, the last two decades has seen a dramatic increase in the use of public engagement or “participation” to allow those locally effected by policy decisions to have their voices heard and considered by the fiscally-strapped local public housing agencies. However, the formal spaces and discourses of “participation” are often tightly controlled by sponsoring agencies, leaving any oppositional organizing work to be done outside formal participatory spaces, creating additional burden for the already marginalized and precarious public housing residents. The same precarity of residents that looms over these privatization efforts becomes the condition for and target-object of the exercise of various forms of power through “participation” and the production/management of participatory spaces, having direct effects on the residents and the kinds of strategies deployed by all diffuse governing groups/actors involved in the planning processes, constituting residents into identifiable and manageable “populations” within neoliberal urban governmentality. Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores the various ways power operates through participatory activities and spaces, with implications for how power operates more broadly in contemporary spaces of ‘urban renewal.’

Author

• Ryan T Steel, University of Minnesota