Diverging Spaces for Deviants: The Politics of Atlanta’s Public Housing

It is a great honor to introduce a book review forum celebrating Akira Drake Rodriguez’s Diverging Spaces for Deviants: The Politics of Atlanta’s Public Housing. In the book, she offers a rich, detailed account of tenant activism in and around Atlanta’s public housing through tenant associations. The origins and development of public housing in the city are found in more than a century of political strategies and tenant resistance, all of which are taken up in her discussion throughout the book. Importantly, her presentation on the history and spatial politics of tenant associations in Atlanta’s public housing resists the characterization of residents as deviants, instead elucidating their collective action, creativity, power, and agency.

Central to the story of Atlanta’s public housing is the role of Black women and Black feminist spatial politics. As Rodriguez asserts, “Centering Black feminist politics in the production of space is a divergence of the existing white supremacist spatial logics that guide modern citymaking. In taking up the causes of Black women produced by public housing policies and politics, public housing tenant associations were building cities hospitable to the modern deviant” (p. 12). In this way, she follows what Wilson (2002) urged two decades ago: “We must expose the skeletons of places and plant the flesh of black experiences on those bones as well” (37). She scaffolds the work conceptually through Ella Baker’s Black participatory democracy, critical spatial literacy, and par­ticipatory planning strategies. These conceptual framings are supported by an extensive array of data sources.

This book review forum began as an Author Meets Readers/Critics session at the American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting in February 2022, sponsored by the Black Geographies Specialty Group. The virtual format of the conference did not lend itself to the most ideal scenario for praising one’s first book, but it remained an opportunity to commemorate Rodriguez’s powerful and transformative contribution to geography, urban planning, urban studies, Black feminist studies, Black geographies, Black studies, housing studies, gender studies, and Southern studies.

The commentaries in this forum are written by scholars who were among a long list of researchers and writers that Rodriguez provided to me, those whose intellectual and activist work she deeply admires and respects. Each of the five commenters in the forum went to great effort to engage with Rodriguez’s work in a way that demonstrates care, rigor, and jubilation. I express gratitude to Deshonay Dozier, Ashanté Reese, Celeste Winston, AbdouMaliq Simone, and D. Asher Ghertner for agreeing to present in the AAG session and for continuing to engage the book through their commentaries in this book review forum. After they share their engagements, Rodriguez provides her author response.

We continue to celebrate Akira Drake Rodriguez’s achievement in the publication of Diverging Spaces for Deviants.

Commentary by Deshonay Dozier, Department of Geography, California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA, USA.

To detail the planning, construction, and demolition of the first U.S. housing development in the city of Atlanta is a tremendous feat. Akira Drake Rodriguez makes her mark by chronicling more than a discussion of despair, detailing exactly how and why Atlanta’s public housing became a political opportunity structure where Black women waged a fight for tenancy and liberation. Rodriguez centers that the construction of public housing is the construction of deviancy within U.S. racial and urban politics. Deviancy is an analytical tool that Rodriguez operationalizes to reveal how Blackness and Black spaces are made criminal, marginalized, and devalued under the conscripted notion of (1) political disengaged or disruptive civilian, and (2) White patriarchal middle-class notions of family and home. Throughout Diverging Spaces for Deviants, Rodriguez details how public policy and planning constitute the site in which the spatial production of deviancy is fixated into the brick-and-mortar development, maintenance (or lack thereof), and demolition of Atlanta’s public housing. Thus, Rodriguez focuses on how notions of deviancy influence Atlanta’s public housing construction and maintenance to show the ways in which criminality, impoverishment, and tenancy are a top-down planning enforcement of White supremacist spatial logics. To call deviancy out as a project of White supremacy is a critical approach for all scholars of urban geography and housing studies. There is a difference in Rodriguez’s epistemological approach: She is not an “academic coroner,” in the words of Woods (2002), who registers premature death or a litany of harm by the state’s production of deviancy. Instead, Rodriguez shows what interventions emerge throughout Atlanta’s public housing history as a way into understanding how Black women refused the White supremacist subject positioning of deviancy. Thus, Rodriguez centers how Black people who are conscripted into a political landscape of deviancy at various moments in Atlanta’s public housing development and demolition ignite spatial interventions as divergent geographies of refusal.

The work of Black geographies is to be precise about how premature death is dealt with to create an epistemological opening that intervenes in the reproduction of Black death. Rodriguez provides an opening in her coined term “Black Participatory Geographies,” where “both the traditional and nontraditional spatial practices of Black everyday life to account for more deviant interests and continue the Black radical tradition of countering dominant spatial logics” (p. 14). That means that to show how public housing is structured, Rodriguez imparts for scholars of Black life and insurgent politics that refusing the category of deviant reshapes the everyday scale of community, local, state, and federal through tenant associations. Through the tenant associations formed, Atlanta’s Black public housing residents teeter an anticolonial and anticapitalist place-making practice toward Black collective liberation. Often in studies of resistance, we leave out the conflicts within aggrieved communities toward the goal of revealing the united ability for these practices to circumnavigate planned abandonment. Rodriguez makes a critical intervention in Black study and studies of housing movements by showing divergent approaches among tenants to challenge deviancy. In particular, in Chapter 1, “A New Deal to Plan the New South: The Politics of Atlanta’s Public Housing,” Rodriguez uncovers how elite Black men and women use accommodationist politics of racial uplift to codify Black residential life and tenant association participation in the early formation of Atlanta’s public housing. In Chapter 3, “From Production of Place to Production of Space: Spatial Justice in Perry Homes,” we learn how Black women-headed households fought toward economic and social transformation instead of inclusion mirroring great Black freedom struggles that denounced categories of deviancy by expanding the net of residents that could participate in challenging neglect. This change across the history of political opportunity within Atlanta’s public housing allows us to understand how the scope of deviancy transforms the political conditions for fighting for tenancy.

At many times throughout the book, I am left with the question of why “deviants”? Rodriguez often uses the word deviants to portray how public housing residents are conscripted into notions of deviancy. Deviancy then undercuts the scales of state harm that is projected through notions of criminality and material neglect. The reader, however, might come to question why at times in the discussion of deviants the author reproduces the word as a sort of naming of particular residents’ practices in political refusal or opportunity formation. For example, in Chapter 5, “‘What Are We Doing to Help Ourselves?’: Atlanta’s Black Urban Regime and the Limits to Tenant Activism,” Rodriguez discusses the war on drugs and the resultant increased criminality and use of drugs in public housing across the nation. Such criminality resulted in increased policing and eviction of tenants, resulting in a new set of political conditions of claims and rights toward tenancy and tenant organizing. As Rodriguez goes on:

Thus, even when the problematic elements—substance abusers—who lived in public housing are removed during the modernization process, the problems or issues of those deviants remain in the larger community. Evicting these individual deviant residents will not remove the problem from the wider community. Yet the shrinking concept of community and dispersed public housing geographies would only exacerbate the divide between deviants and model tenants and limit their inclusion in tenant association politics. (p. 170)

Although Rodriguez is referring to the problem of “those deviants” as related to the deleterious economic and social conditions that lead to substance use and the categorization of deviancy, I am left many times wondering how Rodriguez might consider removing the use of the word deviants when speaking to how Black tenants or community members refuse the category. Rodriguez might have considered naming their positionality or behavior as valid human refusal or just a human act to problematize the particular category of deviancy, such as drug user.

Nonetheless, Rodriguez puts to task that the painstaking issue that planning is policing. I define planning is policing as the ways in which the production of space toward containment or dispossession reproduces difference. In Rodriguez’s work, planning is policing as much as how we see at the everyday scale the production of criminality codifies the production of urban space. Rodriguez uncovers this by showing how at its core Atlanta’s political opportunity structure of public housing worked to police Black people into particular sites of political struggle. For example: (1) White patriarchal norms of how to live and be; (2) top-down approaches of racial uplift; (3) dependence on violent state actors such as the police or the lack of access to nonpunitive safety; and (4) male dominance of Black women that created spaces of resistance, to name a few. Rodriguez shows how planning is policing in the ways that practices of shifting the fundamental social and economic underpinnings of Atlanta’s public housing are thwarted and recodified through a White patriarchal lens of how to be.

Thus, Rodriguez offers recent political sentiments of the last decade: “We must rid the cop out of our heads.” The ways in which deviancy is made and remade tell us that even the most well-meaning or positioned subjects become the sites in which we must rethink how to refuse our inner cop that sanctions how to live and be. This practice of ordering Black life is not only within the practices of non-Black people, as Rodriguez demonstrates the internal community processes of constructing deviancy toward gaining resources for a better living. Rodriguez commands the reader to see how we, too, could implement forms of ordering in our everyday practices of organizing for better worlds, as much as she reveals this in the liberation visions of tenants. Thus, throughout the book, Rodriguez goes to great lengths to demonstrate how the Black participatory geographies that emerge contest such planning of deviancy, by making visible the historical and contemporary political life of spatializing Black humanity. The lesson we take with us is profound. Rodriguez should be commended for seeing beyond the epistemological conditions of the unsettling intellectual fields of welfare, housing, and urban policing for her ability to center what the on-the-ground stakes look like historically and contemporarily for those in movement toward Black freedom dreams.

Commentary by Ashanté Reese, African & African Diaspora Studies Department, University of Texas–Austin, Austin, TX, USA.

I enter Diverging Space for Deviants from a memory. It is early 2009. I am a middle school teacher at Coretta Scott King Young Women’s Leadership Academy, Atlanta Public Schools’ first experiment with single-gender education. It is my second year of teaching, and I still do not fully grasp the urgency of what is happening with public housing in the city. One day, one of my students comes to me in tears and says she cannot attend school any more. I ask her why. She tells me that it is because her family has to move from Bowen Homes—the only home she has known—and when they move, they will no longer be on a bus route that would bring her to school. She is distraught, and inside, so am I. So I invite her to come live with me so she can at least finish out the semester. She does come to stay with me. When she leaves, I never see her again.

This memory is a painful one, but it is not exceptional or singular. Over the course of my two years of teaching at Coretta Scott King Academy, I watched our student body dwindle. As families were given vouchers and forced to vacate Bowen Homes and Hollywood Courts, we lost students—and here I mean lost literally. Like my student who I never saw again, there were many who I would not know where they ended up until years later when they would find me on Facebook. There are still others who I will never find and who will not find me.

These students I taught, whose mothers and grandmothers I got to know, whose living rooms I sometimes sat in, are the human face of the politics of Atlanta’s public housing. These students I taught, whose mothers and grandmothers I got to know, whose living rooms I sometimes sat in, bore the brunt of the seventy-plus years of the push and pull of political, economic, and social power that shaped public housing.

In a detailed and often intimate portrait of the building and diminishment of political power, Diverging Space for Deviants gave me an opportunity to rethink Atlanta and my time as a teacher during the final phases of public housing in the city. I filter my comments through this lens, highlighting key takeaways from the text and how they have shifted my thinking.

First, Rodriguez’s exploration of Black women’s leadership in the various phases of public housing in Atlanta highlights the limits of representation and recognition. At the same time Black (middle-class) women rise into leadership and positions of traditional political power, poor and low-income Black women throw the city’s image as well as the very meaning of Blackness itself into crisis. As Rodriguez so brilliantly illustrates, in the latter phases of public housing in Atlanta, it is Black women who hold positions of power—Mayor Shirley Franklin overseeing the demolition of the public housing, for example—and it is this leadership that in part makes it painstakingly clear that being Black alone does not afford one entry or acceptance into the “Black Mecca.” With funding diffused and later gutted and increasing investment in conservative ideas about progress and uplift, Diverging Space for Deviants shows that in some ways, the pursuit of representation and recognition undermines political organizing toward a radical reorganization of spatial and economic priorities. As it related to my students, this meant that having a Black woman mayor, a Black woman superintendent, and a majority of Black women teachers did little to lessen the political and social stymying or the stigma of living in public housing. In fact, it might have made the development of Black participatory geographies more challenging. Rodriguez goes beyond the adage “all skinfolk ain’t kinfolk” to conceptually grapple with the material impact of conservative and neoliberal policies showing up in Black face. In a city with predominantly Black leadership who purport to care about Black people but make the same discursive moves to mark poor and working-class Black people as deviant or undeserving, the road to political power is less straightforward.

Second, her work highlights how a progressive vision of self-determination—particularly when institutionalized—can be coopted to reify self-help bootstraps ideologies that, at their core, malign and mark poor Black women and mothers in particular as deviant. As Rodriguez points out, tenants can and did use their organizing to contest and resist the failures of public housing even in the midst of economic decline. At the same time, though, the sustainability of this resistance is always called into question. In particular, it is called into question because of the discursive moves to create even more mythical characters—like the welfare queen—to undermine poor Black people’s political power. When one’s power is undermined, what should they do? How should they respond? How does one get their needs met while still holding on to a radical vision of citizenship that is not based on how much money one has? These are questions I think about often in various organizing spaces, and they are also questions that Rodriguez attends to in the latter half of the book. It is painful to read about the shifts from organizing for a collective good, to forms of organizing that reinforced structures like policing and individualizing crime and violence. Rodriguez is careful to not make this about the failures of tenant organizing, however. By connecting the shifts in organizing over time to economic structures, the rise of public–private partnerships, and the transfer of management (and responsibility) for the Atlanta Housing Authority to tenants themselves, she demonstrates—or warns us really—that any “failure” on behalf of the tenants was by design. Rodriguez writes in a lineage of Kelley (2002), who reminded us that “too often our standards for evaluating social movements pivot around whether or not they succeeded in realizing their visions rather than on the merits or power of the visions themselves” (ix). This book teaches us to see the visions—not only the concessions—and imagine what other political futures might grow from them.

Finally, Diverging Space for Deviants makes us rethink or reconsider what counts as a “win” in fights over public resources and space. When Coretta Scott King Academy was founded, it was not unusual for the principal to remind us and students that whatever they did back home in the projects was not acceptable in a school bearing the name of a civil rights hero. Students were routinely shamed and disciplined for things that I would now say were directly related to the public housing crisis that was unfolding before our eyes every day: coming to school without their uniforms, for example, or arriving late. Although the public housing crisis was not a legitimate excuse for one’s behavior in the principal’s eyes, it was one that justified students being put out or reassigned to other schools. Whereas there was no transparent process for how students from elite families were allowed to enroll in our school even though they were out of district, it was publicly shared and often celebrated that once an administrator knew that a student who was considered “bad” or disruptive had relocated from Hollywood Courts or Bowen Homes, she would be reported and reassigned to a school in her district. This kind of surveillance mimics that which Rodriguez writes about in her book. What some considered a good thing that would help public housing—police officers moving in, regular inspections that, if failed, might lead to tenants being evicted—trickled down to children’s experiences in school. In this way, the mark of deviance—absent of political power—traveled.

In closing, I want to just say thank you, Akira, for researching and writing this book. Between the meticulous archival research and the analysis that maintained the complexity of Black women leaders within the public housing struggle and the city more broadly, this book helps us to see that all infrastructure fails. Through your focus on the Black participatory geographies that emerge in this space, we can see that infrastructure failure is not the only phenomenon that we must keep in the forefront. Rather, we also need to be students of what emerges in their wake. Rather than treat Black participatory geographies as singular or static or even having one set of political demands, you help us sit with the messiness that ensues over struggles for space. You help us look at these past struggles to perhaps start parsing through answers to the question you end the book with: What does the future of deviant politics and Black participatory geographies look like in a post-public-housing city? I do not have an answer to your question, but reading your book made me consider how—even in their absence—the freedom fighters who organized within public housing and the everyday people whose names we will never know shaped Atlanta in tangible ways. Bowen Homes, Hollywood Courts, and Bankhead Homes might no longer “exist” as infrastructure, but this book begs us to look for palimpsest, traces of these lives, and build political power from what they left behind.

Commentary by Celeste Winston, Department of Geography and Urban Studies, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA.

As much as Diverging Space for Deviants: The Politics of Atlanta’s Public Housing is a book about public housing, it is equally a story about policing. During the Author Meets Critics session at the 2022 AAG Annual Meeting for Akira Drake Rodriguez’s book, fellow panelists Deshonay Dozier and AbdouMaliq Simone expressed the centrality of policing to the story of public housing in Atlanta, stating, “planning is policing” (Dozier), and the “police always already make everything about them” (Simone). While Diverging Space for Deviants is situated in urban planning and development scholarship, I trace the book’s through-line on policing to highlight Rodriguez’s contributions to the study of carceral geographies.

Diverging Space for Deviants explores how in a context of heightened policing across U.S. cities in the twentieth century, the management of Atlanta’s public housing was undergirded by the surveillance and control of Black deviance. The book traces the construction and policing of Black deviance across multiple eras of public housing in Atlanta: from the 1930s openings of the city’s first racially segregated public housing developments, to 2011 when Atlanta became the first city to demolish virtually all of its public housing. Working through archival materials, Rodriguez shows how news reporting, local and national politicians, white and Black elites, and public housing managers all participated in the creation and renovation of dominant ideas about Black deviance in Atlanta’s public housing.

Rodriguez also demonstrates how groups of tenants and leaders pushed back against the policing of Black deviance across the life of public housing in the city. Whereas conservative tenant leaders often embraced dominant constructions of Black public housing residents as deviant and the policing of this “deviance,” more radical leaders and tenants worked to create vibrant “deviant” communities that challenged racist characterizations of working-class Black neighborhoods as hotbeds of crime and delinquency. In this way, Rodriguez invites us to consider how anti-Black discourse may be turned on its head to understand geographies of “Black participatory democracy” (p. 13).

In public housing’s early years in Atlanta, those labeled as deviant were Black residents who failed to assimilate their behavior and political struggles around “white, middle-class, patriarchal, heteronormative capitalist norms” (p. 214). The policing of this Black deviance initially took form primarily through the built environment of public housing. While Atlanta’s early racially segregated public housing was considered a helping hand for white residents in “becoming better housing consumers and developing a greater sense of civic pride and duty,” it was presented as a spatial fix for the Black “deviant, broken family structure produced by disorganized slum life” (p. 40). The clearance and replacement of slums with public housing was intended to reduce criminal activity and uplift the Black race. While “[p]olice presence in Black communities was a contentious subject in Atlanta and throughout the South” (p. 74), Black middle-class public housing managers sought increased police activity in the developments as part of their efforts to secure public investments that Black neighborhoods had historically been denied. They fought for increased police enforcement of traffic violations and offered to work in concert with the police, agreeing to not interfere in the arrests of public housing residents.

During the postwar era, Black deviance took the form of a more explicitly gendered construction: the needs and interests of single Black mothers in public housing. Rodriguez locates the emerging power of Black feminist tenant organizing as a critical counterpoint to this construction of deviance. While Atlanta’s Black political spaces continued to be dominated by Black elites, whose visions of safety centered the hiring of Black policemen (and men in particular), new working-class Black women-led tenant coalitions emerged to challenge “uplift ideology” and “respectability politics” (p. 105). In 1969, the Black-woman-led group Tenants United for Fairness, for example, pressed the Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA) to adopt the Tenant’s Bill of Rights, which “included accommodations for nontraditional family structures and limited state surveillance during the application process” (p. 111). In addition, a group of members on the Citywide Advisory Council on Public Housing, formed in 1969, mobilized around a Black feminist spatial politics to push back against programming and policing practices based on the characterization of young Black residents and mothers as deviant. This momentum of radical tenant organizing, however, was stifled in the last quarter of the twentieth century as austerity measures shrunk budgets for antipoverty programs and more conservative tenant politics were uplifted.

In the 1980s, the domestic war on crime and Ronald Reagan’s “racialized and gendered construction of welfare recipients” (p. 148) as irresponsible welfare queens compounded with the crisis of the Atlanta Child Murders of 1979–1981 to produce a context in which truant youth and young mothers living in Atlanta’s public housing became local symbols of Black deviance. In response to the Atlanta Child Murders, a group of mothers in public housing formed the Committee to Stop Children’s Murders (STOP). While this group traded in some constructions of Black deviance, it challenged others. For example, they chastised public housing tenants who they believed tolerated crime and fought for increased involvement from the police department in solving the murders. On the other hand, they criticized Atlanta’s Mayor Maynard Jackson for characterizing the murdered and missing children as “street urchins who come from broken homes and families on welfare” (p. 153). Rodriguez celebrates STOP for its intersectional approach to supporting nontraditional, low-income families in public housing.

A separate group called the Bat Patrol organized across multiple public housing developments with the goal of defending themselves in a context of police inaction to the Atlanta Child Murders. Unlike the women-led STOP, the Bat Patrol was led by men—who carried unloaded handguns and rifles—whereas the patrol’s boys and women members wielded bats. Rodriguez critiques the Bat Patrol for infantilizing women tenant leaders in this way, reasserting patriarchal norms, and falling short of STOP’s approach to addressing intersectional disparities faced by public housing residents (p. 154). While Rodriguez’s juxtaposition of STOP and the Bat Patrol offers an important intervention for analyzing the gender politics of tenant organizing in Atlanta’s public housing, I wonder what a more nuanced analysis of the Bat Patrol might reveal about the role of women in shaping the group’s organizing strategies and commitments. Despite the organized efforts of STOP and the Bat Patrol to enhance safety in Atlanta’s public housing, the city responded to the murders with heightened police surveillance and aggressive anticrime tactics that reflected the federal government’s increased financial support for policing and decreased funding for public housing.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, “the reach and authority of the Atlanta Police Department” (APD) deepened in the city’s public housing spaces (p. 159). In 1989, the Georgia state legislature passed statutes that criminalized the reporting of fraudulent income or eligibility requirements for a public housing program, and that allowed municipalities and housing authorities to demolish buildings connected to drug crimes. Conservative public housing managers also solidified ties between the AHA and the APD. In the 1990s, public housing managers participated in grant-funded drug elimination programs that required them to systematically report suspected drug activity to the APD and evict tenants involved in drug use and sales. In addition, in 1991, the managers of Techwood and Clark Howell Homes, for example, provided the APD with a master key to the units to facilitate drug searches and no-knock warrants. While the antidrug activities and issuance of the master key to the APD were protested by residents, they marked a new level of cooperation between the AHA and APD that would help facilitate the eventual demolition of public housing.

Rodriguez closes the story on public housing in Atlanta with a critical argument about the cyclical politics of policing Black deviance. As Atlanta prepared to host the 1996 Summer Olympics, public housing as a whole was condemned as deviant to pave the way for its demolition. The AHA and APD collaborated to increase police surveillance and control in public housing, and tenants were evicted for failing to adhere to strict new policies. New, mixed-income, low-density buildings with improved sightlines for security were proposed to replace existing public housing, and many working-class Black people were “dispersed into new concentrated geographies of housing choice vouchers” (p. 217). While Atlanta’s early public housing was proposed to “fix” Black deviance geographically, the demolition of these same sites was now the dominant solution to Black deviance in Atlanta.

In telling the history of Atlanta’s public housing, Diverging Space for Deviants contributes to a central intervention of carceral geographies scholarship in demonstrating that the social relations of policing extend beyond the police themselves. Public housing and the newly dispersed geographies of subsidized housing in Atlanta comprise geographic concentrations of endless control and surveillance before, during, and after police intervention. Despite this ongoing carceral landscape, the practices of refusal animating tenant organizing point toward a critical opportunity for disentangling the intersections of affordable housing and policing in Atlanta and beyond.

Commentary by AbdouMaliq Simone, Faculty of Social Sciences, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK.

In this exceedingly well-researched narrative about the social history of political opportunity structures associated with public housing provisioning in Atlanta, there is both a generative and problematic relationship between fungibility and opportunity. Fungibility embodies an ambivalent orientation; both the capacity of bodies to be enfleshed in various formats and functions outside of their will and a capacity for aspirations and values to assume multiple arrangements, to convey a coherent force without alignment to essentialist modes of appearance. Ghertner (2020) wrote recently of how particular kinds of collectives are able to retain valued ways of living through the fungibility of tenures and spatial arrangements. If, as Cephas (2014) has claimed for Detroit, the continuously experimental orientations to urban inhabitation not predicated on the adherence to White normative social categorization were primarily the object of so-called slum clearance and the then subsequent disciplining of Black collective life through public housing, what are the considerations necessary to assess the viability of public housing?

In other words, if Black collective urban life potentiated very different modes for inhabiting cities, ones based on the intersections of heterogeneous practices of care, domesticity, livelihood production, and decision-making—which in turn, posed a threat to the dominant logics of urban rule and value formation—how were these capacities and potentials to be translated into new built environments, ones that might have represented concrete material improvements and political visibility, but were from the get-go precarious in their own often disadvantageous geopolitical locations and labor-intensive demands in reconciling what was important to pay attention, to attend to, or not?

Although the conditionalities of residence would seem to enforce a more individuated orientation to everyday management—the intensified salience of the household unit as a fiscal and managerial entity—public housing provided opportunities for more transversal and lateral relations, less inclined to defend the integrity of a household than for multiple lives to be imbricated with each other, with individuals taking advantage of the various positionalities and networks implicitly availed within such social densities—of people coming and going, trying their best to figure out some form of livelihood across various types of employment and itineraries of navigation. Although the inevitable volatilities of such orientations, affiliated so closely to various types of risk-taking and work-arounds, might have compelled strong defensive maneuvers—injunctions to stay clear of certain spaces and people—the long-honed inclinations to extend and diversify, to rely on more than one way of doing things and taking and providing care, meant that public housing was indeed public in ways that could not be easily framed, proportioned, or accounted for within an institutional landscape that often demanded strict accounting.

As Rodriguez points out, “without the restrictions of uplift ideology, religious morality, and structuring political opportunities, more deviant Black interests had the ability to assert power through public housing developments. New political norms, tactics, and strategies emerged to complement this more radical assemblage of interests for Black social welfare” (p. 105). At the same time, the conundrum always would seem to be how to effect an image of viability and sustainability within a plane of resourcefulness that depended on navigating the unanticipated effects of solidarities always provisionally forged and taken apart through shifting networks of affiliation and often intensely speculative collective action not easily figured through the political mobilizations necessary to negotiate externalities characterized by unwavering anti-Blackness. What makes public housing in such circumstances work internally is often discordant with what makes it work in its larger relations with regulatory and political institutions responsible for budgets, maintenance, and decision-making mechanisms.

As Rodriguez again states, “As resources for political opportunities bypassed urban governments and were directed to neighborhood groups and organizations (encapsulated by the Community Action Program with maximum feasible participation for disenfranchised populations), the urban poor were finally able to create political spaces with inclusive processes toward equitable outcomes for their own interests” (p. 123). My first jobs were with the Community Action Program (CAP), and although often messy and contentious, this was indeed a time where in many instances the operational practices for translating the collective attainments and logics of inhabitation of the past opened up a new political space of Black power rooted in the synergistic relations among diverse positions, actors, and ways of doing things.

What made sense, as a collective mode of inhabitation, where Black residents were surrounded on all sides by constraints, arbitrary rules, and dismissals and thus needed ways of “surrounding” White atmospheres and apparatuses with subversions, refusals, spirits, and technologies of dissipation, would always be subject to criminalization and attributions of deviance. To deviate from confinement meant to choreograph maneuvers that could not be easily framed, picked at, apportioned, or rendered property. As resourcefulness and incapacity often hover along a tremulous line of distinction, and as public houses faced undermining from within and without because keeping things together in a different kind of way requires a lot of work especially for those constantly worn down by long bus rides and incessant abuse, making use of each other and preying on each other requires a boundary that too often occasions the police, who always already make everything about them.

Rodriguez notes:

[T]he 1980s was indeed a pivotal decade in public housing policy and the public housing development as a political opportunity structure. The political opportunities were increasingly hoarded by conservative and accommodationist interests within and surrounding the public housing development. Political opportunity for deviants was limited and outright eliminated during this period, and the spatial justice and divergence for these interests began to wane by the early 1990s. At its best, this decade produced collective governance and solidarity around spatially just mobilizations that sprang from its developments. Just as it happened to Indigenous peoples, slum dwellers, and residents in blighted communities over the last two centuries, public housing residents in the 1990s were legislatively othered, politically excluded, and forcibly displaced. Those who supported and conformed to white supremacist spatial logics profited. (p. 173)

As Hunter et al. (2016) reflected on public housing in Chicago, the public was something that always had to exceed any specific categorization of Blackness or form of representativity, for it always had to entail seemingly diverging ways of life finding their ways to each other, of engendering architectures of differences without separability—to use da Silva’s terms; not in any sense of ideal hybridity or accommodation, but where the tensions inherent in the intersections might eke out new powers of affecting and being affected from everyday performances capable of disarming the surrounding architectures of control in ways in which “they”—those White apparatuses and their look-alikes—would not know what hit them. It is this sense of the public, then, that is being foreclosed, or at least there are so many attempts to do so.

For Rodriguez,

Strict enforcement of leases, lack of federal support for public housing preservation, and top down mandates for strict admission policies for redeveloped units steadily displaced the people and interests who resisted the normative construction of public housing residents set forth in its policies. Without these populations, tenant association politics failed to represent those who most needed representation. The absence of deviance resulted in the physical-political transformation of public housing developments, removing the need for tenant associations in its privatized form. (p. 216)

The still massive swathe of social housing in Greater London, in all of its variegated designs, locations, and material and social conditions, is still seen in aggregate as predominantly “social.” In other words, it is availed to those who cannot afford the acquisition of residence under fully market conditions, that is a right to the city on the part of those who might have no part or, conversely, in acknowledgment of the importance of their residency beyond the value calculated by wage or economic contributions. Additionally, it is understood as a disciplinary instrument used to assuage the potential dangers posited by the presence of the working and lower classes. Whether these presumptions are true or not, given the increasingly private character of such housing, the common understanding is that of a particular kind of sociality being reproduced and addressed.

Yet, the composition of such social housing varies greatly, especially when considering the elaborate territories of social housing that string one particular project after another. Each has its own distinctive proportion of leaseholds and renters, of leaseholders that bought cheaply under the “right to buy” policies of the Thatcher era, and those who acquired them under subsequent renditions of this policy. Each has its own form of management and specific relationships between those that nominally “own” them—such as local states, charities, trusts, community development groups, cooperatives, or private development companies—and the internal configurations of owners and renters on particular management committees, often supplemented by the authority of “extra-parliamentary” groupings that might exert control over specific facets of the housing scheme.

Schemes are also subject to various development plans, upgrades, privatizations, mandates to house specific kinds of residents, average lengths of stay, securitization of income streams, and work-arounds. Schemes vary in the ratio of space per person given the year of construction and the prevailing regulations at the time, and so they vary in terms of relative density, as various degrees of oversight also render some more susceptible to informal arrangements than others. The distribution of residential experiences is also intensely racialized in terms of capacities to acquire housing assets, to mobilize household and ethnic networks, and to secure preferential treatment.

Although all of these settings might nominally fall under the supervision of specific boroughs, regulatory frameworks, or sectoral authorities, each embodies distinctive residential experiences that exist side by side. Although not existing as thoroughly compartmentalized bastions, they still instill territories with a multiplicity of residential dispositions that themselves leak through each other in terms of an array of lateral exchanges among residents through different associations, gangs, religious institutions, and informal contacts.

Social housing as some kind of overarching entity might be vulnerable to the trajectories of spatial development plans, land value capture, gentrification, and private development, but each estate embeds within it different intensities of exposure to such vulnerability. As such, vulnerability is conventionally addressed through mobilizations of solidarity. This, too, depends on the degree to which particular housing estates are willing and able to render the interiority of their operations visible to larger audiences, and whether they are willing to translate often more tacit internal accommodations of resident differences into more formal vernaculars of representation. In such landscapes of London, to what extent is it possible to think of a “we” that “cannot return to normal,” where both the “we” and the “normal” within the immediate circumstances of everyday life vary even under more generalized and shared conditions of precarity at different scales?

It is precisely this ambiguity—of a situation available to negotiation, to various forms of description and translation—that seems to pose a danger to the new exigency to survive, to precisely decide who can safely work and who cannot, of what kinds of life conditions can be availed to whom.

To take an example from a renowned resident of Atlanta, in Janelle Monáe’s opening cut, “Dirty Computers,” of the album of the same title, reference is made to Black queer life being the equivalent of a dirty computer with a processor that must be wiped out, cleaned, not so much of particular data and files, but of the specific way in which calculations, computing, and processing are actually conducted. The dispositions of such processing might indeed be hard to handle, but what is more dangerous is their capacity to generate outcomes that normative regimes of sense-making and sense enforcement cannot readily anticipate; that they surface propositions for the world that appear to come from the world in ways that disrupt the ability to know in advance just exactly what that world comprises. This is perhaps the political opportunity Atlanta public housing residents must always grapple with. This is why Monáe talks about being subjected to, made a subject from the erasure of processing, to be reduced to a body that does not compute.

Commentary by D. Asher Ghertner, Department of Geography, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, USA.

Akira Drake Rodriguez’s meticulously researched Diverging Space for Deviants is a book that you want to dwell in. It invites you to linger in textual details, worrying as you read that little asides or biographical flourishes might actually contain the code of the city’s racial order. Stories about charismatic characters such as Susie LaBord, for example, grow beyond what at first glance appears as a mere account of the first public housing tenant finding her way onto Atlanta’s Housing Board. You soon realize the transformative moment this minor history represented—how her letter to President Lyndon B. Johnson, in which she passionately described the day care center she ran out of a vacant apartment in the Grady Homes development, garnered the funds for a whole new phase of insurgent community planning centering the experiences of single women. Seemingly mundane policy decisions reverberate out like shockwaves, such as the 1951 Plan of Improvement, an act of municipal boundary expansion common during postwar suburbanization, but in this case a deliberate strategy to integrate whole new White-majority fringes into Atlanta’s electoral fold to defend against the recent enfranchisement of Black voters.

This is a book highly specific not just to Atlanta, but especially to the clustered Black public housing developments in inner Atlanta. By tracking shifts from the nation’s first public housing project constructed in Atlanta in 1936 to the demolition of the city’s last remaining project in 2011, however, the book also charts urban policy’s broader shifts: from Jim Crow liberalism of the New Deal era all the way up to the muscular privatization triggered by the 1996 Summer Olympics.

As the other commentaries in this review forum keenly observe, the book has much to offer to our understanding of the contradictions of Black spatial practice, specifically the tensions between postwar, Black political opportunity structures—which were largely governed by norms of middle-class propriety—and the spatial erasure of all those forms of Black life that diverge from those norms. For this commentary, I want to zoom out to a master spatial concept expressed in the title, Diverging Space for Deviants.

There are multiple ways to read the title, Diverging Space. Is the word diverging here a gerund, an adjectival use describing a divergent quality of space? Or is diverging an active practice performed by someone, as when a mirror defracts light, causing its rays to diverge and spread? The word was indeed only popularized after Newton’s use of it in his thesis on Opticks, describing rays of light (Oxford English Dictionary n.d.). In this sense, diverge implies a shift in direction, a line, ray, or transect that deviates from its original course. To diverge is an ongoing process, not a single change; the ray of light continues to become more distant from its source or original trajectory. As an adjective, divergent includes a sense of deviation, of deviance, or of arching away from the mainstream. In psychology, divergent thinking implies a splintering of reason, and the optical use of divergence in entry four from the Oxford English Dictionary [taken from Grubb’s 1879 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society] describes a divergent power, or the capacity to skew vision, skew direction, or, in Rodriguez’s hands, skew plans.

The first usage of diverge in the book draws from this sense of divergence as a transitive verb, as the practice of skewing an outcome—as deviant planning. “Diverging Space for Deviants examines how politically deviant public housing tenants reappropriate, or diverge, the marginalized spaces of public housing communities to the political interests of those intentionally excluded from planning” (p. 4, italics added). I was puzzled by this at first, wondering why appropriation, or insurgency, were not used instead. The multiple senses of divergence used in the book, though, offer an unstated theory of urban politics, one that stitches together scales, refusing any distinction between the fight for a roof over one’s head and a right to the city. This complex and open-ended use is hinted at in the very next use of the word, where we see divergence as a noun—as an outcome or achievement: “These spatial divergences include the construction of the first public auditorium for Black Atlantans to safely assemble in the ‘slums’ of the 1930s, and the transformation of vacant public housing units in the ‘projects’ to use as temporary foster care for children of substance abusers in the 1980s. These divergences provide a new means of conceptualizing political participation, spatial production, and urban planning” (p. 5). I would like to dwell on these two uses—as transitive verb and as noun—as they allow us to see a hidden set of geographies of divergence at work across the book.

When divergence is used as a transitive verb, Rodriguez is invoking a learned spatial practice, a “critical spatial literacy” (p. 13), as she calls it, through which Black women in particular learn from the everyday challenges of social reproduction to claim political power by claiming territory for community. The use of a vacant space as a temporary community day care is a localized example, but divergence as an ongoing flight from middle-class normativity also uses the political arena of public housing as a platform for producing wider participatory geographies. For example, amidst the Atlanta child murders in 1980, an organization of area residents from both inside and outside the Techwood Homes development formed an organization to defend children. It was called the Bat Patrol, as discussed in chapter 5. Because they were declared a vigilante group of outsiders by the mayor, Bat Patrol members were detained by police when they entered Techwood, prompting a march among area residents. As Rodriguez writes of this protest as a practice of diverging public housing away from resident safety alone onto a wider platform of Black community care, “The gathering of people and the occupation of public streets and spaces … act as brief articulations of the expansive … geographies of Black housing politics” (p. 157).

There is a second use of divergence as a transitive verb in the book, though, one emphasizing ideological divergence: “Not only were these radical politics inclusive of a more deviant set of interests, but they manifested into political expressions that diverged from the long-standing political norms of the “city too busy to hate” [i.e., the pro-business growth regime]” (pp. 117–118). But, and this is a key argument of the book, such challenges to dominant ideology were only possible due to prior spatial divergences, or appropriations of political space. In other words, gaining influence over elite Black political spaces became the spatial platform for a working-class critique of elite Black politics. Here, spatial access to Auburn Avenue, where political power was concentrated, is what enabled ideological critique.

This became more crucial in the face of the increasingly conservative political dynamics of the 1980s, where in the context of the war on drugs—which evicted so-called “undesirables,” often leaving single mothers and children behind as deviant remnants—“Black women took initiatives to reclaim Black children and mothers from the deviance construction of those in power” (p. 166). This challenge was only enabled “by diverging disinvested spaces for deviant residents” (p. 173, italics added). The critique of social deviance, in other words, rested on spatial divergence that preceded it.

The spatial predicates of divergent planning, however, also reveal the limits of tenant politics and the ability to articulate claims in the name of those constructed as social deviants. This is where the book introduces divergence as a noun, as a fixed space, as a material geography of possibility—but also of constraint. If, as Rodriguez puts it, “These divergences of the public housing development … were temporary appropriations of space” (p. 50) that provided an expressive terrain for deviant political interests, then they were also always prone to a coopting influence—a kind of gravitational pull of the divergent back into the norm. The very origins of public housing as a space that, for the first time, assembled land centrally for Black community formation, after all, had a conservative origin, rooted in New Deal–era plans to “mainstream deviant Black communities of Atlanta” (p. 76). In the 1970s, too, as tenant participation in housing policy became instrumentalized through federal funding mandates, “dominant regime interests could co-opt and demobilize the more radical interests of the tenant council … [by drawing the council away from] the spatial divergence” they had previously practiced (p. 141).

Geographies of divergence, or spatial divergences, as Rodriguez calls them, that had become radical spaces carved out of otherwise revanchist housing policies could subsequently be themselves policed and governed as discrete political spaces from which nearby residents could be excluded “from the opportunities afforded” previously (p. 170). This dynamic of ring-fencing spaces of political opportunity was extended into the mechanisms of government in the 1990s. Counterinsurgent politics hence became not just a matter of containing the size of tenant organizations or diluting their influence by backing boards with White leadership, as had been done in the past, but also about literally spreading out the sites of deliberation, decentering the locations of governance through a game of spatial attrition. In other words, this was a state-driven divergence of political opportunity into scattered sites: neoliberalism as spatial deconcentration of Black political opportunity; a scattering or defraction of deviant political interests, so that no single divergent ray could blast away from the dominant regime of property.

Throughout the book, Rodriguez uses the framework of “political opportunity structures,” an institutionalist approach that theorizes political change as an effect of three things: organizational strength, insurgent consciousness, and what this framework calls “political opportunity,” or vulnerabilities within an existing political regime that can be exploited. What Rodriguez does so brilliantly is spatialize this approach, treating the questions of spatial access as core to all three components of political change: organizational strength, opportunity, and insurgent consciousness. Her theory of divergence is a specific attempt to show how spatial politics at the micro-neighborhood scale—such things as access to community space or routine garbage disposal—lay the groundwork for what she calls “concentrated Black areas that would become both spaces of exclusion and spaces of opportunity” (p. 211). In the aftermath of public housing removal, exploring the question of whether these concentrated areas can retain divergent possibilities or are forced into convergence with the regime of property, this powerful book shows that these are the sites where the urban future will be decided.

Response by Akira Drake Rodriguez, Department of City & Regional Planning, University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design, Philadelphia, PA, USA.

I would like to extend my thanks to the reviewers, Deshonay Dozier, D. Asher Ghertner, Ashanté Reese, AbdouMaliq Simone, and Celeste Winston, for agreeing to read and engage with the book, present at a virtual conference on a Saturday evening, and then commit to writing this book review forum with me. I would also like to thank the imitable supportive scholar. LaToya Eaves, whose invaluable contributions to Black geographies, Southern studies, and queer Black geographies in the South (“central to advancing Black geographies in Southern studies is the deconstruction of queer sexual identities, spatial productions, and sociospatial interactions” [Eaves, 2017, 87]) push me to rethink many of my approaches to and conclusions from studying Atlanta’s public housing. All these individuals have influenced my work in some way, and it is an honor and extreme pleasure to be able to discuss Diverging Space with Deviants: The Politics of Atlanta’s Public Housing with and through them.

I am grateful for the way Deshonay Dozier’s review summarizes the book’s epistemological approach as one that centers those who “are conscripted into a political landscape of deviancy” and “ignite[s] spatial interventions as divergent geographies of refusal.” Dozier also rightfully notes my own contradictory approach in using the terms deviant and deviance throughout the text in ways that reify these harmful conscriptions of public housing tenants. These harms are exacerbated when, from a methodological perspective, there is not an affirmative attempt to robustly engage the perspectives, needs, and grievances of those categorized as deviant. They are flattened into one abstraction that perpetuates their sole identities as deviants, as opposed to behaviors and spatial practices that are policed and marginalized by mainstream social, economic, and political institutions.

Despite the shortcomings of my interpretations and uses of deviants and deviance, I see parallels in the description of the utility of Black participatory geographies as a space of insurgency and refusal, and Dozier’s own research on Black spatial visions in Los Angeles’s Skid Row. Examining three communities across the 1980s and 1990s, Dozier theorizes on the politics of refusal, the insurgent spatial practices, and the eventual political opportunities that emerge and are foreclosed as the demographics shift toward more youth and Black residents. By studying the cultural production of these communities over time as another means of understanding alternative spatial visions for Los Angeles, Dozier captures much of the nuance of conscripted deviance that is lost by relying on official archives and papers produced by the bureaucratic state. There are parallels also in the limits of these alternative spatial imaginaries, as Dozier (2022) noted that one community “inevitably produced a vision for alternative development, they were restrained by the regional landscape of property and the social services that created Skid Row and marked the structural conditions of their spatial planning” (765).

Black participatory geographies and Black alternative spatial visions both require what Dozier says, to “rid the cop out of our heads.” This cop, and subsequent policing, are not just concerned with the line between legality and illegality, but of maintaining the existing social, economic, and political structures through our innate relationship with carcerality. Ridding the cop from our heads means taking an abolitionist approach to spatial visioning and political participation that enables the full suite of possibilities for life, for all urban residents, regardless of address permanency and housing tenure.

Ashanté Reese’s comments about public schools and public housing highlight a critical component of Black participatory geographies that I would like to explore in this response. Reese and I met for the first time in Baltimore in 2018 at the Anti-Blackness in the Metropolis workshop (Roy et al. 2020), where I presented an early version of the book’s final chapter on the Black women urban regime and the limits to descriptive representation for Black working-class politics. Reese mentioned her time as a public school teacher in Atlanta, and how important it was to treat these Black woman leaders with care—alluding perhaps to the nuance Reese highlights as the messiness of Black political leadership and Black participatory geographies. I immediately rewrote those sections of the chapter, and carry this lesson forward in my current work about Black participatory geographies in Philadelphia’s public schools.

The parallels between public housing and public schools are numerous and make for an interesting set of cases to deploy a Black participatory geography framework (Rodriguez, Quinn, and Morial 2021). There are two parallels that are useful for considering the potential for these spaces and institutions to foster or inhibit the capacity and possibility for Black participation: the disinvestment that coincided with the desegregation of public housing and public schools (1962 and 1954, respectively), and the neoliberal turn in both that shifted significant financial and decision-making power from public to private hands. Although the temporalities of these parallels varied across public housing, public schools, and the different housing authorities and school districts that govern them, a common feature across majority-Black cities (with many Black women-headed households) was the installation of Black women leadership. Across many majority-Black cities, we see an almost identical pattern of isolation, disinvestment, carcerality, and displacement of Black, working-class feminist individuals and interests from public institutions. This pattern highlights the need for a Black feminist praxis, which Reese and Cooper (2021) described as “an expressed and intentional divestment from patriarchy, which also entails divestment from destructive patterns of domination that extend to the land and all that inhabit it” (454).

The messiness of spatial struggles will define the post-public-housing (and public school) deviant politics in majority-Black cities experiencing increasing land values. A liberatory response requires broader organizing and mobilization, what goes beyond identity politics to one(s) that are more comprehensive of land and environmental issues, which often includes building coalitions across race, class, gender, and age (e.g., Black eco-feminism). This coalition-building produces recurring issues about the racist, gendered, and classed ways Black women are encountered in working-class organizing. We need further exploration of how to prevent harms on the most vulnerable organizers, while also understanding how such a focus can exacerbate vulnerabilities (e.g., hypervisibility).

Although not the book’s intent, I do agree with Winston’s comment that this is a book about policing and its centrality to organizing the spatial, political, and social lives of public housing residents. One of the many structures maintaining the delineation between “political deviant” and “political participant” is the police. Through a broad framework of policing powers—housing manager surveillance, bureaucratic social welfare program administration, and land-use policies declaring what is a livable community and what is a slum—this book attempts to understand deviance construction and maintenance through the lens of public housing. From a methodological perspective, I attempted to construct the making and remaking of deviant categories in public housing developments through legal aid cases, housing authority board meetings, tenant disagreements, community organization programs, and private developers and affordable housing manager lease agreements.

Winston also rightfully assesses how these deviant categories were central to community construction for certain segments of public housing tenants, particularly in the decades following the neoliberal turn in public housing policy. This neoliberal turn into ever-more austere politics with greater surveillance, bureaucracy, and regressive land-use policies precedes the rapid disinvestment and abandonment of the built environment of public housing developments, which spatialized the communities as deviant territories once more. I am reminded of her own work on maroon geographies, and their role in liberatory politics, as “spatial strategies of entanglement [as] encompassing the generative use of the physical and built environments of structurally abandoned places to adapt to systemic constraints and simultaneously maintain spaces of Black freedom. … The strategic entanglements of maroon geographies provide lessons for how to grapple with freedom struggles when the path to liberation is not clear cut” (Winston 2021b, 2195).

I see postabandonment public housing developments as housing maroon geographies rooted in the ground truths—derived from “Black generational knowledge and present-day Black experiences and consciousness” (Winston 2021a, 816). How we perceive and center these strategic entanglements to describe the ground truths of our most vulnerable community members more accurately is critical to Black liberatory futures.

I find a great deal of inspiration reading AbdouMaliq Simone’s work on Blackness in the city, and am honored he found some interesting tidbits in the book. I particularly appreciate his comments on community and commonality produced in public housing developments, despite “the intensified salience of the household unit as a fiscal and managerial entity.” Considering these public housing households in the postwar/pre-Olympics era were often living below the poverty line, the need for communal survival strategies such as mutual aid superseded the ability for households to exist as individual units. Simone goes on to note that these cooperative and communal approaches to care and livelihood in the public housing development are subject to “shifting networks of affiliation” of provisionally formed solidarities that are threatened by the specter of anti-Blackness. This makes me reconsider the perceived solidarity of the early public housing developments, which appeared as united in their uplifting ideological approach and organizing, but were perhaps subject to the same provisional solidarities limited by anti-Blackness.

I also find the discussion of the public in public housing—especially Black public housing developments—useful for understanding these tensions around solidarity. As Simone notes, the organizational capacity of public housing communities does not have an “ideal hybridity or accommodation,” but actually leans into the tensions inherent in creating a common public. These tensions in Atlanta’s public housing revolved occasionally around control of the tenant association, which was not just control of some budgetary or programmatic decisions, but also the relationships that support the tenant association as political opportunity structure. This relationship development and maintenance made CAP effective in the 1960s, as a precedent for the eventual transition of the Atlanta regime from White to Black in the 1970s and 1980s. As the regime neoliberalized, though, so, too, did the relationships made available to the tenant leadership. It leaves me to wonder how one can effectively build solidarity with those entrenched in positions of neoliberal power.

Finally, the application of Janelle Monáe’s song “Dirty Computer” is, like Dozier’s application of Woods’s blues epistemology, a useful way of understanding the contradictions of making the marginalized public. It helps to think about the wiping and cleaning (displacement, dispossession) of not just the existence of perceived Black deviance, but also the ways of public-making and space-making that come with that existence. Simone’s own work also discusses another important aspect of making Black life, and perhaps, Black publics: time. That the daily space-making practices were both

familiar and remarkable, uncovering new manifestations of cherished values or the possibilities of reversal. Youth gangs, clerics, local enforcers, street sellers, women’s savings clubs, mystics, and fixers took bits and pieces of each other’s ways of operating to carve out a niche with their own strategies for survival. Each was allowed to come into view, have its own space for operating as long they took ‘turns” and enabled others to re-adapt to whatever they seemed to offer, or potentially take away. (Simone 2022, 4)

I interpret this to mean that there exist new possibilities and political opportunity structures for Black life in the city as a challenge to the White heteronormative spatiotemporal fixes to crisis in capital: the mortgages, securitization, and financialization that facilitate its accumulation. The messy, accommodating approach to community, Black space-making, and time all provide useful frameworks for rethinking what solidarity politics actually entails.

During the writing, editing, and rewriting stages, I found myself obsessing over how to weave each thread within and across the cases. I admit I selected the title because I thought it was catchy, and had not intentionally drafted the book to focus on deviance/deviants or diverging/divergents/divergence. Findings ways to articulate these distinctions and conflations was challenging (and perhaps not so successful in the case of deviance), and I am grateful for the framing of Ghertner’s comments to understand the position, evolution, and hidden geographies of divergence in the text.

Diverging, diverge, and divergence—as a transitive verb and noun—all make appearances throughout the book. My original interpretation of LeFebvre’s term détournement, which the 1991 translation of The Production of Space interprets as “diversion,” was “detouring” from an original spatial conceptualization and use (Lefebvre 1991, 167). Although the two terms (diverting and detouring) are similar, I conceive of the prior as one that breaks cleanly from the original (often top-down) spatial practice and representation and the latter as one that breaks, returns, and maybe goes back again. The terms diverging and divergence capture that allegiance to the original (normative, exclusionary) spatial practice and representation—and spatial politics of refusal and insurgency the reviewers have mentioned Atlanta public housing tenants enacted are shaped by these normative spatial practices and representations, for better or worse.

It is through Ghertner’s conceptualization and use of fungibility and fungible or the “means to keep open an urban imaginary in which other subjectivities––of non-racialized and non-individuated forms of possessing—are possible” (Ghertner 2020, 573) that I can begin to parse the many uses of divergence found in the book, as well as think through the more complicated demands tenants had around ownership and property. Fungibility in Atlanta tended to occur when there was little outside interest in the real estate market and city leaders were eager to legitimize (but not fund) reconceptualizations (divergences) of the urban imaginary. This legitimacy afforded additional capacity to build broader notions of community, and thus new spatial practices and representations of ownership and property. As Ghertner (2020) wrote, “the community, where co-presence—or the capacity to accommodate and be accommodated by others—establishes a collective subject of property” (573). The ability to accommodate others for a collective subject of property, that was outside the extractive approaches to it, was a struggle in Atlanta, and these struggles continue to stymie mobilization efforts around housing justice in the present-day, fractured Atlanta metro area.