Middle-Class Poverty Politics: Making Place, Making People

Abstract

In a context of rising inequality and economic vulnerability in the United States, we explore links between class identities, urban place-making, and poverty politics. We ask how class difference and poverty politics are made and remade in neighborhood-level place-making and with what implications for boundaries and alliances between middle-class and poorer residents. Place-making refers to activities through which residents work to produce the neighborhood they want, such as participating in community organization or initiatives, interacting with their neighbors, and supporting or opposing particular changes in the neighborhood. We use a relational poverty framework to show that middle-class place-making reproduces normatively white middle-class place imaginaries but always also produces poverty and class politics. We extend prior research on middle-class poverty politics, which focuses primarily on class boundary making, to investigate whether progressive, alliance-building moments ever emerge. Drawing on case study research with two Seattle neighborhoods, we trace the ways in which place-making practices situate middle-class and poorer actors in relation to one another. We show that these interactions might continue to govern poverty and poorer people but might also challenge normative understandings of poverty and sow the seeds for cross-class alliances. Through comparative analysis of the neighborhoods as dense sites of class formation, we show how particular histories, place imaginaries, and built or institutional infrastructures allow (or foreclose) questioning and reworking of normative class and race formations and poverty politics to pave the way for cross-class alliance.

我们在美国成长中的贫富不均及经济脆弱性的脉络中，探讨阶级身份认同、城市地方打造与贫穷政治之间的连结。我们质问，阶级差异与贫穷政治，如何在邻里层级的地方打造中生产并重构，及其对中产阶级与较为贫穷的住民之间的界线与结盟而言寓意为何。地方打造，意味着透过住民工作来生产其所期望的邻里之活动，例如参与社区组织或自发运动、与邻居互动，以及支持或反对邻里中的特定改变。我们运用相对贫穷的框架，展现中产阶级的地方打造，再生产了白人中产阶级的规范性地方想像，但却总是同时生产了贫穷与阶级政治。我们延伸早先主要聚焦阶级边界划定的中产阶级贫穷政治之研究，探讨进步的结盟时刻是否曾经浮现。我们运用西雅图两座邻里的案例研究，追溯地方打造之实践，如何将中产阶级与较为贫困的行动者置于相互关係之中。我们显示，这些互动或许会继续治理贫穷和较为贫困的人民，但亦可能同时挑战对于贫穷的规范性理解，并为跨阶级联盟的形成种下种子。透过邻里作为阶级形成的密集场域之比较分析，我们展现特定的历史、地方想像与建成或制度基础，如何促使（或封闭）对规范性的阶级与种族形构及贫穷政治的质问和重构， 并为跨阶级的结盟铺路。

Dentro del contexto de creciente desigualdad y vulnerabilidad económica en los Estados Unidos, exploramos los lazos entre identidades de clase, construcción de lugar urbana y políticas de pobreza. Nos preguntamos cómo, y con qué implicaciones para los límites y alianzas entre los residentes de clase media y los más pobres, se construyen y reconstruyen las políticas de diferencia de clase y pobreza durante el proceso de construir lugar a nivel de vecindario. La construcción de lugar se refiere a las actividades por medio de las cuales los residentes trabajan para generar el vecindario que ellos desean, tales como participar en organización o iniciativas comunitarias, interactuar con los vecinos y secundando o controvirtiendo ciertos cambios en el vecindario. Utilizamos un esquema relacional de la pobreza para mostrar que la construcción de lugar en la clase media reproduce normativamente los imaginarios de lugar que tienen sus miembros, aunque también siempre produzca pobreza y políticas de clase. Ampliamos la investigación precedente sobre políticas de pobreza para la clase media, concentrada principalmente en la construcción del límite de clase, para investigar si alguna vez emergen momentos progresistas de construcción de alianzas. A partir de la investigación de estudio de casos en dos barrios de Seattle, trazamos las maneras como las prácticas de construcción de lugar sitúan los actores de clase media y los más pobres en sus mutuas relaciones. Mostramos que estas interacciones podrían seguir gobernando la pobreza y la gente más pobre, aunque también podrían cuestionar los entendimientos normativos de la pobreza y plantar las semillas para alianzas entre clases diferentes. A través de análisis comparativos de los vecindarios como sitios densos de formación de clase, mostramos cómo historias particulares, imaginarios de lugar e infraestructuras institucionales o construidas permiten (u obstaculizan) el cuestionamiento y la reelaboración normativa de las formaciones de clase y raza, y las políticas de pobreza que allanan el camino para alianzas de clases.

Key Words:

• cross-class alliance
• middle class
• poverty politics
• relational poverty
• whiteness

关键词：:

• 跨阶级结盟
• 中产阶级
• 贫穷政治
• 相对贫穷
• 白人性

Palabras clave:

• alianza de clase
• clase media
• políticas de pobreza
• pobreza relacional
• blancura

Acknowledgments

We thank Helen Olsen, Elyse Gordon, and Mónica Farías for research assistance. We are grateful for helpful commentary on the article from Bob Lake, four anonymous reviewers, and the editor, Richard Wright. All errors are ours.

Funding

We thank the University of Washington College of Arts & Sciences for funding support.

Notes

1 In addition, our approach understands middle-class position as produced through intersectional processes of race, religion, and gender.

2 We use pseudonyms for the neighborhoods and all interviewees quoted here.

3 This is a partial subset of possible activities and interactions that could be considered place making. Massey (2005) and others suggest that all practices constitute place, not just the everyday actions that residents perform and argue for a part of the neighborhood they desire. We focus on these more specific forms of place making because they are central to the negotiation of class identities and relations, the central concern of our project.

4 Relational poverty research focuses on political–economic relations and a range of social positions, identities, and processes (e.g., racialization, criminalization, adverse incorporation into the labor market, neoliberalization of the public sphere, etc.) as they either produce material poverty or contribute to the production of poverty discourses of difference (Hickey 2009; Mosse 2010; Lawson 2012).

5 As O’Connor (2002), Schram (2000), and others have noted, these constructions of worthy and unworthy poor are centuries old, found in Elizabethan poor law, colonial U.S. poor relief, and other times and places.

6 The agency and resistance of those named or signified as poor against these framings is a deeply important part of relational poverty analysis, but it is not our direct concern in this article.

7 See also Lemanski (2006), Ballard and Jones (2011), and Scheurmans (2013) on South Africa, and Lawson, Jarosz, and Bonds (2008) on the United States.

8 The interviews were open ended, forty-five to ninety minutes, audio recorded, and transcribed. Interviews were structured around foundational questions prompting interviewees to talk about the neighborhood, their history or relationship to it, current activities, perceptions of the neighborhood's positive and negative elements, patterns of change, and so on. Follow-up questions probed to elicit further discussion, especially around themes of class, race, gender, and place imaginaries present in interviewees’ initial responses to open-ended questions.

9 Three interviewees rent their homes. Notably, all three are pursuing undergraduate or graduate degrees and articulated clear middle-class aspirations in their interview remarks.

10 This facility opened in December 2013.

11 The community center programming is modeled on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century settlement house movement in the United States and United Kingdom and is formally linked to the nongovernmental organization that operates a network of similar “neighborhood houses” across the region.

12 These expressions mirror findings from other research on a liberal middle-class desire for “diverse” neighborhoods (Lees 2008).

13 Because nearly all impoverished residents of Spruce Ridge live in subsidized housing, “renter” is often used as a synonym for “poor.”