<underfire> More on the affects of organized abandonment

[Brian Holmes]

The city of Chicago has built a new Millennium Plaza including a 
fascinating ellipse-shaped reflective sculpture by Anish Kapoor entitled 
"Cloud Gate," 66 feet long, 42 feet wide, 33 feet high, made to look 
like a scintillating drop of mercury, known by Chicago residents as "the 
Bean." It instantly became the promotional emblem of the city.

The circulation of affects is perfect here, because there is no product, 
no star, no logo, no punchline, only you and your friends and the 
ebullient crowd, elongated, distorted, mobile, undulating, an animated 
image at one with the reflections of the clouds and the blue sky and the 
scrapers. Underneath, where the ellipsoid sucks up from the ground to 
form the shimmery dome that the artist calls the Omphalos or navel, just 
look up and become your own firmament.

Right next to the Bean is not only the Gehry-built "Pritzker Pavillion" 
bandshell, but also Crown Fountain plaza, built around two 50-foot 
towers made of glass bricks with LED video screens installed behind 
them. The towers exude 50-foot video portraits of nearly 1000 Chicago 
residents, looking beatific until the moment when their lips purse into 
an "O" and a jet of water gushes out onto the plaza, then they open 
their eyes and smile, the children squeal with delight in the 
summertime, check it out on Google image search, there are about 500 
photographs.

Cloud Gate cost $23 million but it was all paid for by individual and 
corporate donors so who's complaining?

What the United States tries to hide with the kinetic (and of course, 
copyrighted) images of its own endless diversity is truly staggering. 
Ryan Griffis talks about an occupation at home. Follow the link from the 
Ruth Gilmore interview he quotes 
(www.yourblackeye.org/YBE_Interview_Gilmore_1Q05.html) to another site 
called www.realcostofprisons.org, and look at the carefully drawn 
educational comic book called "Prison Town: Paying the Price," which you 
can download as a pdf. The booklet is addressed to people living in the 
rural areas where America's ever-expanding park of prison facilities are 
built by private corporations, run by the state and paid for by the 
people, including the people in them. "There are more prisons in America 
than Walmarts. There are more prisoners in America today than farmers." 
Those who come back traumatized and insane from their "service" in Iraq, 
unable to find a job as a security guard or a mercenary or anything 
else, denied the benefits they were promised when they signed on, will 
likely as not end up doing time in these places.

Concerning the economy of the built space of oppression, the amazing 
thing that comes out of the "comic book" (which is clearly phrased, 
touchingly and respectfully drawn, and peppered with footnotes to back 
up what it says) is that under the neoliberal system where there is 
ideally no redistribution and every public program should ideally "pay 
for itself," what many impoverished rural towns that have decided to go 
down the prison route in hopes of making money by renting out jailspace 
to the state actually end up doing is floating bond issues of the more 
expensive kind known as "Revenue Bonds," designed to be paid off by the 
revenue that  the infrastructure earns, all because the cheaper "General 
Obligation Bonds," backed up by the taxing authority of the local 
government, have to be approved by voters and are usually rejected. So 
you have a situation where the containers of the "human trash" produced 
by the organized abandonment of places like New Orleans (or East LA, or 
the South Side of Chicago, etc.) proliferate in a competitive economy 
which is actually a dupe's market for local collectivities that are 
supposed to act as public entrepreneurs competing for contracts from 
state and federal governments, all of which are looking to "cut costs" 
by letting the "magic of the marketplace" provide the needed services, 
in this case incarceration. Page 13: "Reeves County, Texas, found itself 
servicing a bond debt close to $1/2 million a month for three prisons 
they built on spec. When they couldn't keep one of them filled, they 
paid $62,000 a month to GEO Group, a private prisons corporation, to 
find inmates."

However, there is a future for the finances of Reeves County because new 
supplies of inmates are being produced in innumerable urban environments 
like Baltimore, which after pioneering the "creative city" model of 
waterfront redevelopment back in the 80s is now getting ready, through 
organized abandonment, to extend its capacities for the gentrification 
and beautification of the people's real estate by literally imposing the 
decay of vast, mostly black neighborhoods left untouched by the wealth 
of the waterfront renaissance. What City Hall does - as I learned from 
the work of www.campbaltimore.org, check out particularly the 
"Indypendent readers" in the library section - is buy up for peanuts the 
houses of whoever goes broke or dies without heirs or can't pay the 
repair bills or whatever, and then "landbank" the property which is 
boarded up and cemented closed, leaving deserted streets and even entire 
abandoned neighborhoods which you'll never see reflected in the 
corporate media bean, but which do serve as temporary crack houses or 
gang hideouts further encouraging the decay of the surrounding real 
estate. Then on the transitional fringes of these urban "dead zones" 
they have some pretty impressive police practices in operation, which 
include creating an outdoor incarceration ambiance by parking portable 
floodlight masts on the side of the public street, equipped with their 
own generators that run all night and sometimes even throughout the day, 
while also installing pretty much everywhere these incredible 
telephone-pole-mounted surveillance boxes outfitted with cameras, 
microphones, who knows what kinds of other movement detectors and a 
weird flashing blue light that pulses like a staccato unconscious 
reminder of where you're actually living. Some of these surveillance 
units, which I have also seen in Chicago, apparently have loudspeakers 
in them (just like the good old days in the former east-bloc countries) 
and in Baltimore they are all surrealistically emblazoned with the 
single word "BELIEVE," which refers to some municipal policing slogan 
whose significance every resident is assumed to know. The ultimate fate 
of the landbanked areas will be demolition, a victory John Hopkins 
University just achieved for its new biotech complex, driving out the 
former inhabitants of a neighborhood known, appropriately enough, as the 
"Middle East" (see the intense conversation between David Harvey and 
Marisela Gomez in the Indypendent reader #1).

Meanwhile back in Chicago, it seems like the "problems" of too many poor 
people getting in the way of urban redevelopment have finally been 
solved with the destruction of the last public housing projects at 
Cabrini Green and Stateway Gardens (see pictures at 
www.voicesofcabrini.com; stories at www.viewfromtheground.com; and for 
some chaotic circulation of affects around the Chicago Housing 
Authority, http://areachicago.org/issue1/chaos.htm). As with the 
construction of "country homes" in the rural prison towns, the new 
"mixed-income" housing is supposed to pay for itself, not so hard to do 
when the mandated "low-income" units in the new buildings are calculated 
as affordable for people earning 80% of what the US Department of 
Housing and Urban Development, HUD, calls "median area income" - an 
inflated "average" based on a total population including all the 
corporate highrollers and multi-millionaires or billionaires in a 
financial center like Chicago, who can afford to pay for a $23 million 
bean sculpture just on the bet that it's gonna increase the value of 
their already sky-scraping downtown real-estate holdings.... If you want 
to find out something about the upbeat rhetoric of government and its 
relation to the airy affective lift of the Cloud Gate sculpture, maybe 
just read what HUD says about how hard and faithfully they're working on 
affordable housing for the public good 
(www.hud.gov/offices/cpd/affordablehousing) and contrast that with what 
Nicolai Ourroussoff reports in the New York Times about HUD's role in 
New Orleans, where, he says, "the rebuilding of this city is emerging as 
one of the most aggressive works of social engineering in America since 
the postwar boom of the 1950s" (archived at, where else, 
http://realcostofprisons.org/blog/archives/2006/11/ny_times_new_ol.html).

After reading all this, if you are white and middle-class you probably 
still don't know much about what Ryan Griffis, quoting Anna Deavere 
Smith, evoked as the particular sadness of black people in the USA. But 
you could guess something about the affect that made me forget all the 
supposedly urgent things I had to do this morning and write this post. 
Echoing what Anna Deavere Smith added about the particular sadness of 
white Americans, the "comic book" Prison Town says at the end of its 
story, about Anytown USA, "What is unknowable is what the prison will do 
to the hopes and the dreams of the people who live here."

best to all, Brian