The PUBLIC SPACE RESEARCH GROUP welcomes, Chantal Gailloux presenting, The Post-Political Violence of Racial Property Regimes: Maintaining Gardens’ Land Insecurity through Abstract Codes in East Harlem, NYC.

Six community gardens on City-owned land in East Harlem have been evicted and relocated for a private mixed-income and mixed-use development under Mayor de Blasio’s citywide affordable housing plan, Housing New York. Although the licence agreements enabling gardeners to use public land contained a clerical error concerning which lots gardeners could use, public–private coalitions generating urban space production forcefully affirmed their authority on the interpretation of documents, feeding into the bureaucratic violence of spatial abstraction and racial land injustice. Licence agreements are devices of control over space and its users, and tools of abstraction toward accumulation and racial capitalism. Black and Brown community gardeners have led efforts of urban regeneration when the City rolled back public services in inner-city neighbourhoods and appropriated land improvements through licence agreements. Housing New York is now catalysing urban regeneration—or City-led gentrification—for middle-income and wealthy earners in neighbourhoods with a past of decline. Through the violent story of spatial abstraction and commodification of land used as community gardens, I show how the contestation around a piece of land during participatory governance unfolds through the state’s demonstration of authority with an aura of legality and transparency.

Chantal Gailloux’s research focuses on local and global agrofood networks and the socio-ecological transition. She received a postdoctoral grant from the FRQSC to conduct an ethnography of fruits and grains as ferments in Eastern Quebec, Canada, which she led at the Fermented Landscapes Lab at the Texas State University Geography department. For her SSHRC-funded doctoral project in Sociology and Anthropology (Concordia University, 2020), she conducted a multi-sited ethnography in community gardens of East Harlem, NYC, that were threatened with eviction by the city’s affordable housing plan. During her fieldwork, she was a visiting scholar at the Public Space Research Group.

Twitter: @ChantalGailloux

Find Dr. Gailloux’s article, “The Post-Political Violence of Racial Property Regimes: Maintaining Gardens’ Land Insecurity through Abstract Codes in East Harlem, NYC” in Antipode at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/anti.12837

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