Sweeping the city: infrastructure, informality, and the politics of maintenance

ABSTRACT

Uneven development in many North American cities has given rise to an increasing number of homeless encampments as residents seek shelter, sanitation, and other basic needs outside of formally recognized networks. In gentrifying cities, these informal infrastructures are also subject to the recurring violence of sweeps, wherein states remove, seize, or destroy life-sustaining necessities to decrease their visibility and designate space for other uses. The sweep is both a strategy of governance and a viscerally felt phenomenon in which infrastructural networks become terrains of contestation. In this article, we examine the cultural politics of sweeps through the analytic of maintenance. Drawing on examples from Toronto, Ontario, Canada and San Francisco, California, United States, we argue that sweeps are mechanisms of policing that often operate through the apparently benign work of routine maintenance, which in turn iteratively organizes belonging and exclusion in cities. These dynamics have thereby become important sites for infrastructural struggle. With our analysis, we join scholars in the study of infrastructure taking a critical stance toward processes of maintenance and repair, asking questions about what is being maintained, for whom, and toward what end.

KEYWORDS:

• Infrastructure
• housing
• maintenance
• gentrification
• encampment
• homeless sweeps

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Blake Hallinan, James Gilmore, and reviewers for their feedback, Tony Sparks for sharing insights, and both the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (www.ocap.ca) and the Coalition on Homelessness (www.cohsf.org) for their public research and advocacy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Bentway is funded by a $25 million CAD philanthropic partnership, is being imagined by a collection of architects, designers, planners, art professionals, technicians, and advisory boards, and is executed and maintained by various City of Toronto agencies, including Waterfront Toronto (Waterfront Toronto, n.d.a).

2 On the contingency and limits of ‘gentrification’ see for example: McElroy and Werth (2019); Ghertner (2015b).

3 In the same time period, surrounding counties (e.g., Alameda and Santa Clara) saw double and triple this increase respectively, indicating the intimacy of inequity regionally.

4 See Roy (2003), ‘Paradigms of propertied citizenship.’

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Constance Gordon

Constance Gordon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at San Francisco State University. Her research engages the cultural politics of dispossession especially in relation to questions of food, housing, and environmental justice.

Kyle Byron

Kyle Byron is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department for the Study of Religion at University of Toronto in the area of Religion, Culture, Politics. His research focuses on conservative Christian politics in contemporary North America.