by Andrea Gibbons
Community workers striving for spatial justice on the ground have a lot to offer critical theory: Seeking Spatial Justice in L.A.
Communities in L.A. fighting for spatial justice (photo: www.sage.net)
At SAJE I worked as an organizer and researcher for many years in the area where Central and South Central Los Angeles intersect. In my time there we created tenant unions, L.A.’s first Displacement Free Zone and a community land trust, worked on the environmental justice issues of lead poisoning and asthma, challenged gentrification and development, and unveiled the spatial injustice of slumlord holdings which we leveraged into unprecedented action by the city resulting in a trial that convicted the building’s owners on 21 criminal counts. In a word we fought for spatial justice. We never labelled it that way, as it sat among the multitude of justices we fought for. The reality of the American inner city is that everything is unjust in certain neighbourhoods in a way that it is not for others. You go to South Central and you have to ask yourself: Where are the banks? Where are the clinics and hospitals?
Where are the grocery stores? Where are the parks? Why are there no full-time jobs paying wages above poverty level? How can a for-profit methadone clinic exist, much less operate across the street from an apartment building full of kids? Why do the high schools have thousands of students, yet fail to provide the classes required by the state university for matriculation? Why has the city government allowed slum housing to become so widespread that a local doctor has to remove cockroaches from kid’s ears at least three times a week? How can tens of thousands of people remain homeless in a city with so many boarded up buildings? And it shames me deeply that in the presence of all of these absences, you also have to ask yourself, where are all the white people? (Unless you are in a gentrifying area, where the rectification of these absences almost always joins with the brutal displacement of people of colour).
Creating a displacement free zone in the city (photo: www.saje.net)
This is the meaning of geography in a capitalist and deeply racist city. The fury of it. People in the ghetto know perfectly well it is different in other neighbourhoods that are whiter and wealthier. They know that this is not accidental. They might be fuzzy on the history and the exact actors, and might even have bought into the sizeable efforts to blame the poor for their own poverty, but the culpability of banks, city officials, employers, corporations, and absentee landlords is widely, if rather intuitively, understood. Which means that people understand that they live in a space that is socially produced, and could even tell you how that works though they would never articulate it using this kind of language. It is often a space that they love and find strength in, but they know full well how dangerous and destructive it can be. And the considerable ongoing struggle to improve it could never take place without the belief that this can change. It must.
Engaging with activists on the ground
Perhaps theory is required for everyone else to catch up to this knowledge. Los Angeles is not alone in being structured in such a way that worlds operate in parallel, and those living in the wealthier places never have to see the other side, much less engage with its residents, fully confront the reasons for its existence, or deal with the horror of its effects. The poor, on the other hand, cannot escape these differences given television today, and the homes they clean, the children they take care of, the food they cook, the gardens they manicure. This creates an immense gap in how reality is perceived depending on where you are standing, which results in widely different views of what the issues are, and what is required of the solutions. My time as a Masters student in Urban Planning at UCLA provided valuable tools for research and the presenting of information, and a source of funding for my work in the community. Yet I found it incredibly hard to bridge this gap both in theory and experience. I am still not sure how to manage it.
Flyer for community action in Los Angeles organised by SAJE
We believed (and still believe, and of course SAJE’s work continues) that this had to change. What we brought to this struggle was an organizing methodology based in popular education and the theories of Paolo Freire, bringing people together to articulate what was simply intuitive, collectively naming reality and questioning it as the first step to changing it.
We also shared the conviction that change needed to be driven by those who are most oppressed. There are three principal reasons for this. One is that whatever you don’t do with people, you are actually doing to them. This simply reinforces capitalism’s limited conceptions of democracy and public participation, and exhibits the same patronising contempt, however kindly expressed, that anyone growing up in poverty knows to expect from those with any kind of power. Another is that it is only through collective struggle against oppression that we can transform ourselves, replacing the internalized judgments and aspirations of an unjust society with new values and visions of what is possible, and thereby ensuring that we do not simply recreate injustice at any scale. Lastly, with an understanding that ending injustice will require radical change and a redistribution of wealth and power, how can we imagine that a large number of those who are comfortable now would volunteer to give some of that up, much less undertake a long and difficult struggle to do so?
From this perspective, any critical theory that seeks to change society needs to be grounded in specific experience and connected to concrete practice. It is precisely in its ability to negotiate a balance between the concrete and the abstract, to continuously inform and be informed by practice that its usefulness should lie. Yet critical theory seems to remain in conversation with itself, and actual contestation and struggle play a very minor role. While it is vital to deepen our understanding of what we are up against, it has been hard to find any variants of critical theory where the forces of power and might do not appear so massive and sweeping that it seems impossible to even imagine a different world, much less the strategic avenues to create it.
Seeking Spatial Justice, the new book by Ed Soja, 2010
In view of this, the simple statements that justice is spatial and that change is possible set Seeking Spatial Justice apart, yet I don’t know how helpful it is in actually imagining change. On this subject, those engaged in practice appear much further ahead than those working in theory. Radical groups working on issues of poverty and racism think spatially, they cannot help it given the continuing segregation of race and class in America. The rallying cry behind which they do so has to be an entirely practical decision, contingent on what resonates with them. The real difficulty lies in building a useful dialectic between the abstract and the concrete, and building theory into a grounded and transformative practice. And this process should start where the most innovative work is happening in a way that is connected to how organizers and local people themselves think of what they are doing and how it is building towards change.
The absence of this kind of grounding possibly explains why I find both the celebration and criticism of much community work and contestation to be generally inadequate. While any group or organization needs to collectively form and hold themselves accountable to their own evaluative criteria for their work, I think a broader discussion of what possible criteria could be might be very useful to build a radical and effective praxis. This has to be done in dialogue with those working on the ground.
To finish then, I have some initial thoughts, primarily from my experience as an organizer, on how to think about each of the campaigns Soja mentions in his book Seeking Spatial Justice (above). They are somewhat overlapping and by no means comprehensive:
1. Did the campaign remain within the limits to discourse and imagination imposed by capitalism, or did it work to challenge them and open up alternative visions and values? This seems our only hope of moving beyond our current reality. I wouldn’t celebrate getting a slightly larger sliver of someone else’s choice of pie, but rather, how that has moved us forward as a strategic step towards building our understanding of more broad-reaching and radical goals, and how to achieve them.
2. Did the campaign build towards scale – and a larger, more long-term and radical change? How to do this is the real question if you’ve come to accept that revolution really isn’t imminent. This seems to be one area where theory is vital, particularly in building work across regional, national and international scales without losing a firm grounding in the local struggle of people working collectively.
3. How broad was the base involved, and have they continued to be involved at some level after the specific campaign? This is the only way I know to build a larger sense of movement and widespread critical thought. It is a good measure of how successful you’ve been in terms of the following two criteria, which are deeply intertwined.
4. How was decision-making and power managed and distributed in the running of the campaign? Did it deepen democratic practice and build the skills that people need to work collectively towards a different future? Because these are skills that have to be learned and practiced and perfected over time. All this has to be done in the face of extreme pressure, and capitalism’s inculcation of the opposing values of individualism and self-interest.
5. Did it transform consciousness? We are wrapped in oppressions like onions, and we probably have all internalized more of the capitalist paradigm than we think. It is also key to remember the continuing existence of every prejudice imaginable, and that these should not be simply glossed over. Ever. This transformation makes work sustainable and capable of more exponential growth over time, and builds a real possibility of creating a new world, rather than reshuffling the old one.
I don’t know that the continuous rear-guard action of the past few decades has been getting us very far at all, and a life spent stopping bad things from happening or making the best of bad situations is not one I particularly look forward to. All of these criteria look towards building and growing, and I think the final criteria should quite simply involve a conscious look at how defensive campaigns, important as they are, are carried out alongside positive campaigns that actually move us forward, create something new and beautiful, and give inspiration. And shouldn’t theory bring us inspiration as well?
Authors bio is coming up shortly.
