Saving the neighbourhood: understanding tenant activism in middle-class Manhattan

Abstract

Recent debates question whether assemblage urbanism provides an appropriate framework for addressing the housing question under late capitalism. On one side, proponents note the capacity of assemblage to reveal the complex emergence of events, places and processes, whereas critics argue assemblage accounts provide deep empirical detail but avoid engaging with political economy. This paper addresses such criticism through an assemblage account of local activism in the context of ownership changes that threatened the rent-regulated Stuyvesant Town neighbourhood in Manhattan. We adopt an assemblage methodology to examine this case of privileged tenant activism and find that it provides an additive lens for understanding the networks of relations that influenced the community during the mid-2000s. Noting that assemblage and the financial ecologies approach are similar in their attendance to relational thinking, we describe how these approaches can be used in conjunction to better understand the linkages between housing and financialization.

Keywords:

• Assemblage theory;
• relational thinking;
• financial ecologies;
• tenant activism

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the editors and three reviewers for their productive and supportive work in reviewing earlier versions of this paper. We also wish to thank the Stuyvesant Town residents who agreed to be interviewed for this study. An earlier version of this paper was presented in 2015 at the American Association of Geographers annual meeting in Chicago, IL.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.