Gentrification, Colonialism, and Anti-Production: Notes on the Failed Stadium

It’s been a while since I’ve written a local piece, and something has been happening around Kansas City that has gotten me thinking. On Tuesday, the second of April – in the future from when I’m writing this bit of the introduction to this piece, but in the past from when I publish it – Kansas City is voting on whether to build a new sports complex, moving it from its current location in the easternmost portion of the city to a more central location near the downtown loop, formed by the complex intersection of I-70, I-670, I-35, and US-71 (I-29, north and south of town.) Specifically, into the eastern portion of a neighborhood called the Crossroads.

The current location, many contend, is inconvenient: it’s further east on I-70, in a spur of the city limits sandwiched between Raytown and Independence, two smaller suburbs (Independence, technically, is the county seat, but it’s a smaller and newer city than Kansas City.)

The site proposed for the stadium is right by that tangle of highways in the lower right.

However, they are not thinking about the fact that this construction (which doesn’t have additional parking attached to it, thus necessitating street parking for any visitors) would destroy a neighborhood that still forms a significant part of the metropolitan identity: several dozen small businesses – largely restaurants, music venues, and art galleries – will be destroyed if this gets passed.

Needless to say, we’re not really pro-stadium.

But this casts a number of shadows that are important to consider.

1.

This is, at root, a gentrification issue. Gentrification is something that a lot of people talk about, and has led to any number of different camps, mostly with annoying acronyms for names – YIMBYs, NIMBYs, NUMTOTs, and so on.

The root issue of gentrification is that it involves the people living in an area being displaced to make way for newer residents. Edgar and I were previously gentrified out of a neighborhood and found a spot that might be what is referred to as a “nail building” in Chinese. The landlord hasn’t sold it yet, knock on wood, and rents are fairly low. This sparked a number of thoughts on my part about how cities work. Or, in the case of my own home town, don’t.

In ecology there is a succession of different plants that colonize a space before it becomes woodland: the weeds move in first, and then they are followed by grasses, bushes, and then trees of various stripes, each prepares the way for the next and is displaced by it to one extent or another.

Diagram taken from Forestrypedia, utlimately from exploring-nature.org. I first heard about this topic on the Poor Proles Almanac podcast.

In American cities, gentrification appears to go a certain way, it seems to have a succession of its own: into a working class or poor neighborhood, a group of punks or other, similar, subcultural types will move in. They tend to be obnoxious, but not necessarily bad neighbors. After them come a series of artists, who are followed by yuppies, and then property developers.

Each of these groups have their own behaviors that are, to a greater or lesser extent, damaging to the environment that they move into. To continue the ecology metaphor, from the perspective of capital, they enrich the ground -- quite literally, allowing capital to demand more money in exchange for its use -- unlocking resources that are tied up in existing structures. These changes are not just physical – it’s not just about punks spray-painting walls or developers knocking down houses – but also social. As a later group moves in they displace an earlier one not just by making it too expensive to live there, but by invoking law enforcement against behaviors that were previously unstigmatized, if not necessarily legal (playing loud music, drinking on one’s porch, congregating in the street, and so on.) Increased police presence creates a feedback loop. To some it may be the appearance of sheepdogs to drive away the wolves, to others it might be a sort of zamboni-like smoothing or – and I’m inclined to see it this way – capitaliforming.

However, while a forest can be self-sustaining for a while, a gentrified neighborhood cannot. It will eventually suffer what we think of as urban decay and become a place where individuals displaced from newer gentrification projects can go live.

On the one hand creation, on the other destruction.

On the one hand production, on the other anti-production.

But it’s not time for that yet.

2.

Before the nations of Europe colonized the rest of the world, they colonized themselves. England conquered and anglicized Ireland, but a picture much clearer and messier unfolded on the continent: France, Spain, Germany, and Italy were all collections of squabbling kingdoms that slowly became unified into centralized nations. This was not always done purely through violence or purely toward the collection of taxes: much of it took the form of projects of “civilizing”.

In his book Seeing Like a State, anthropologist James C. Scott discusses how the imposition of systems of measurement, cadastral surveys (those indicating which individual person owned a particular stretch of land) and surnames during the Late Medieval and Early Modern period were largely an effort to make the countryside legible to the metropole. We can see other projects as having a similar purpose. For example, consider the standardization of certain languages – Castilian Spanish in Spain, privileged over the eastern Catalan (a dialect more closely related to Occitan), the northern Basque (a language isolate) or the north-western Asturian and Galician (more celtic-inflected dialects); likewise French in France over Breizh, Provençal and the other Occitanian languages, and a number of others. For another, consider the standardization of timekeeping around not just the twenty-four hour day but particular time zones, creating a sort of false simultaneity that races ever westward around the world and carves your day up into discreet hours, minutes, and seconds.

All of this rationalization is aimed at “legibility”: making the countryside make sense to the metropole. This, to take things even further, is to make the capabilities of the countryside – with its “standing reserve” of natural resources and labor – and allow the metropole to extract from nature and from people the necessary material and capability to enact its will at a greater and greater scale. Scott would probably argue that this has always been the case: in Against the Grain he suggests that early city walls were probably more to keep people penned in, rather than to prevent assaults from without. Chances are, in my opinion, it was a bit of both.

But this process making-legible and consequent extraction isn’t over. I would argue that in gentrification we find a small- to medium-scale process of autocolonialism. Or, perhaps more accurately, a kind of inter-metropolitan or inter-clique colonialism. I will be sticking with the first term, though, as – on the scale of a whole country – it’s autocolonial.

Alexander Austin’s mural at 31st and Troost.

I’m hardly the first person to use this term: it showed up here in an analysis of the situation of Jackson, Mississippi, in relation to the state and national government, for example. Parallel to this, Colin Woodard, in American Nations described the inland southwest – specifically Nevada and Arizona – as a kind of internal resource-extraction colony. Even earlier, Huey P. Newton described the relationship of White America to the Black Community as one of colonization (given the geographic segregation of my own hometown, this becomes uncomfortably spacialized, and it’s something that I noticed even before my full political awakening.)

All of these serve as two-way roads. They draw value – commodities, cheap labor, and so on – towards the metropole, and it forces out a cultural influence commonly thought of as a “civilizing influence”. In Europe, it began close to home and spread outward: in America and other settler-colonial nations, it tends to extend in all directions at all times. Do not doubt: gentrification is an internal process of colonization.

For example, to keep things tightly focused on the impetus for this piece, the current owner of the Royals – the major league baseball team whose downtown stadium is being proposed – has received several pieces in the local media positioning him as “the billionaire you can trust”, pumping money into educational programs designed to prepare people for workforce participation.

Comparing charitable gifts to colonialism is most likely something that will seem overblown to many people. We all see the horrible violence going on throughout the world that stems from colonialism, after all: surely it’s a bit overblown to say this?

And I admit, yes, the comparison can easily be taken too far, but both a cloud passing in front of the sun and a hurricane count as “weather phenomena”. As an education worker – and I wish to stress, as I have not looked through all of the education programs in question, that I speak for myself and not any of my employers (and I have a policy of not naming my employers, just as I don’t write the name of any sitting US President) – I have to at least acknowledge that there is a history of education being used in the course of a colonial project: one need only look to the history of Boarding Schools for indigenous people in the Americas, in both the US and Canada. I view education, in the abstract, as an unalloyed good: the problem comes when we get concrete and alloy it with other necessities.

This will be something that I tackle in a future piece – and the discussion of “civilizing processes” will, no doubt, be long and complicated, weaving through colonialism and gender analysis – but it is a piece for another time.

This image — the vandalized door of a cathedral in Saskatoon — has stuck with me since I first saw it. Knowing about what prompted it, I am struck by the restraint of the people making this statement. A lot of horror goes into a “civilizing” process, and — as an educator — I don’t want to “No True Scotsman” my way out of this. There is an uncomfortable proximity.

3.

The vote failed, by the way.

I rejoin this piece Wednesday morning, polishing it up before I leave to go teach. The split was ~42% for and ~58% against, which is fairly decisive. It’s unclear what the future holds: the teams were discussing the possibility of leaving Kansas City, but given the city’s ascendant profile in certain areas – including sports – it seems unlikely to me, at least, that they would.

As one of the interviewees in that Guardian piece I linked to says “It’s not that we mind paying the three-eighths-cent sales tax. I think the problem is putting the stadium where it is . . . We’re saying don’t ruin businesses that have been established down there for years.” And while there are many problems with small businesses – as many as there are with large businesses, just different in character – it seems that what was rejected was not so much the teams but the destruction of a district that is important to what Kansas City sees as its culture.

The parking garage of the Kansas City Public Library.

There are, also, knock-on effects that would have followed from this – the stadium would have been given a property tax exemption, cutting about a million dollars annually out of the city and county budgets that would mostly go to schools and libraries.

As an aside, the coverage that I’ve seen kind of missed a key component: the fact that the new plan included no additional parking, seemingly ignoring that all of the parking they pointed to is already spoken for and ignoring the prevalence of much larger vehicles (note to self: don’t think about emissions, don’t think about all that heat reflecting off of the concrete.)

Kansas City is not the biggest or most complicated city – don’t get me wrong, it’s big, and it’s complex, but it’s small compared to Chicago, New York, or LA – but sometimes a smaller, simplified model of something is necessary to understand the processes at work. Cities are not just collections of people, nor are they about just the physical infrastructure. The city, itself, is about complex interrelations of all of these things and more besides: the physical environment, the actions of the people that make it up, the institutional policies and actions of governmental, private, and semi-private organizations, the instance of crime and its measurement by the enforcers of the law, the flows of money and traffic and attention and resources.

I know that there are people who will be upset about this particular decision.

I’m going to let them be upset.

4.

You knew it was going to get weird at some point. Hop in.

This will be brief. A marginal sketch of something that I have been thinking about for some time now.

I mention above production and anti-production.

Conceive of a city as a pool of viscous liquid – the X and Y axis is the map of the city, the Z axis is the wealth per capita of the people in a given area: a wave moves through it, but slowly, and the front edge of the wave is gentrification, the back edge is urban decay. The goal would seem to be to raise the level of the pool, but there is a problem with that. What is desired by the system itself is not a high water mark, but the motion of the wave.

I have said several times that capitalism always requires an outside. Far from there being no such thing as a free lunch, the system’s diet is made up solely of free lunches. As it moves to consume the whole planet – and there are few places on our planet that can be said to be “outside” of it – it reaches a crisis point. There is now no outside from which to get the free lunch.

Some people look for an outside: one idiot says “let’s go to Mars” and another idiot says “maybe there’s more free lunch inside the computer”.

Others engage in a different strategy. You see, capitalism always needs to grow, but it doesn’t need to keep everything that it takes.

At some point, it takes a portion of itself and calves it off as a kind of anti-production. This term ultimately comes from Deleuze and Guattari, by way of Nick Land, but it’s been heavily theorized by those who came after, specifically on the left. I’m still engaging in a search for sources on this, but it seems to me that – when you get down to it – far from being an externality of the system, a waste byproduct of the business of being a city, urban decay is part of the process. It’s necessary for a portion of the city to wither so that there is a place to gentrify – sorry, renew – in the future, because we can never allow this process to be complete. We can never allow it to stop.

Once I’m done with my reading on this, you can expect me to write a great deal about the concept of anti-production. It will appear here.

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