“Everything Belongs to Everyone”: Eviction, Risk, and Anticipatory Geography in Chicago

ABSTRACT

This paper sets out to complicate the principle claims of the environmental risk and “anticipatory geography” literature. Typically, this literature employs a Foucauldian and non-representational arsenal in order to illustrate the ways in which the specter of future risk is folded into the present and mobilized by those in power to justify regressive politics. In contrast, a profile on the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign (CAEC) and its strategies of legal postponement and commoning is deployed to illustrate how future risk can be used to jumpstart a collective and emancipatory political project. Going further, this paper claims that the CAEC’s radical politics is propelled into motion not only by folding the future into the present but by dialectically conceptualizing both time and space. In closing, it will suggest that this dialectical praxis points toward an ontological politics that poses a challenge to liberal notions of subjectivity and equality.

KEYWORDS:

• Eviction
• risk
• preemption
• abolition ecology
• commoning

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 One peer reviewer thoughtfully—and productively—noted that the use of “racialized” here, and throughout this article, might give the impression that some form of capitalism exists without “racialized” modes of differentiation. This presumption, of course, would stand in opposition to the claims of many working on the topic of racial capitalism, which is (decidedly) not my intention. Rather, throughout this article, I refer to the “racialized and gendered” character of capitalism much as Jason W. Moore does. That is, to underscore how the historic expulsion of women and “peoples of color from Society” has yielded and continues to produce “important surpluses to capital” (Moore 2017, 612).

2 In the US context redlining primarily refers to the racist denial of mortgages to prospective non-white buyers. Beginning in 1934, under Federal Housing Administration (FHA) policy, Black neighborhoods were rendered ineligible for mortgage insurance (see Coates 2014). The specific phrase “redlining” refers to the fact that these neighborhoods were marked in red in FHA maps.

3 Hope VI was a US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) competitive grant program that financed “the demolition of public housing projects and their replacement” with “redesigned ‘mixed-income’ neighborhoods” (Hanlon 2010, 80).

4 Skype interview with a co-founder of the CAEC given on condition of anonymity.

5 This article's understanding of the CAEC's spatial and temporal praxis emerged largely through a close reading of the material that they re-posted on their blog over the course of several years, their original organizational writing, secondary commentary on the organization, and through an interview conducted with a co-founding member.