The affirming affects of entrepreneurial redevelopment: Architecture,sport,and local food in Oklahoma City

Territorial assemblages, affect, and movement

Recent research in urban studies has often deployed various understandings of “assemblage thinking” to understand cities as relational, emergent networks of heterogeneous kinds or orders of actors and materials (cf. Amin and Thrift, 2002; Jacobs, 2012; McFarlane, 2011). A central emphasis of such approaches is to explicate how a particular urban assemblage comes to be coherent, durable, and lasting, or alternately, how an assemblage fails to achieve stability and coherence, or in losing coherence comes unraveled. From this perspective, social and/or political economic structures may be viewed as shaping future possibilities, but they are also phenomena that must be explained, rather than simply serving as explanatory variables themselves. A salient concept for this analytical challenge is Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “territorialization,” a fundamental aspect of their understanding of assemblage; indeed, they sometimes use the terms “assemblage” and “territorial assemblage” interchangeably, given that the development of an assemblage is, in their view, coterminous with the process of territorialization. They take the term from the ethological notion of territory—the territory-marking practices of bears are one of their entry points into understanding assemblage. In examining such phenomena, Deleuze and Guattari are concerned with how matter “becomes expressive,” that is, how particular arrangements of matter and space come to express specific meanings or values. As this formulation suggests, Deleuze and Guattari reject the idea that a given thing has an intrinsic identity, arguing instead that things take on meaning within webs of relations with other things, processes, and forces. More specifically, they cast the emergence of qualities in a given object as both mediated by and mediator of struggles to appropriate or “take possession” (Deleuze, 2006) of that object. As they put it in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze G and Guattari F, 1987: 316), “the territorializing factor must be sought[…]precisely in the becoming-expressive[…]; expressive qualities, or matters of expression, are necessarily appropriative and constitute a having more profound than being.” From this perspective, a territory gains durability and coherence through the enrollment and harmonization of various actors, whose continued cooperation in supporting particular senses or meanings attributed to specific things is crucial to the survival of the territory.

Thus, to understand the territorializing prospects of a given thing requires asking who or what seeks to take possession of it, how matter takes on particular meanings in the process, and what actors are enrolled in these territorial struggles. In contrast to the frequent critique, in other words, that assemblage thinking is apolitical, the Deleuzo-Guattarian notion of territorialization is fundamentally political in its emphasis on the often contentious relations between differently situated actors. Put as concisely as possible, territorialization is about the control of space by way of not just defining it, but assembling actors in such a way that particular meanings can take hold and become legible, coherent, and durable. A territorial assemblage at its most successful appears “natural,” inevitable, and immutable. Viewing entrepreneurial redevelopment from this perspective, the analyst’s task is to trace the work that has been done to imbue redeveloping urban spaces with specific meaning or values. Again, this is not a matter of identifying powerful actors and demonstrating their ability to impose meaning on pliable matter and docile subjects. Rather, we must view the emergence of a relatively coherent and durable assemblage as a laborious achievement, and one whose outcome, while perhaps likely was never guaranteed, and can never be permanent, regardless of how immutable it may appear to be. Here, it is important to add that Deleuze and Guattari understand territorialization as unfolding in three phases: an initial moment of demarcating a point or an anchor in space-time; the subsequent delineation of boundaries around that point through a process of becoming-rhythmic and coherent, thus distinguishing the interior of the territory from its outside; and finally, the emergence of openings to that outside, “lines of flight” from the territory to other (virtual or actual) territories and more or less striated space. As noted above, in the case study that follows, I focus primarily on the first two phases of the territorial expansion of redevelopment in Oklahoma City, leaving a fuller consideration of deterritorialization for another paper.

Deleuze and Guattari moreover devote considerable attention to the role of affect in territorial assemblages. The term “affect” is deployed here in a Spinozist vein to refer to the capacities and drives of a body that emerge in conjunction with other bodies and other materials or things, that is, as a body is articulated within a given assemblage (cf. Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 256). In this sense, affect is something like a field constituted by and also mediating the interplay of forces as they traverse bodies and other materials. This field is related to the precognitive, the embodied, and the more-than-representational elements of life; it is experiential and transcends discourse; it is perhaps visible in the (organic and inorganic) materials that it flows through and animates, and in the passions and emotions that it provokes, but given that it is distributed across the often disparate elements and kinds of actors that constitute assemblages, it is often fleeting, leaving only traces and vestiges of its movements. Indeed, movement itself, or rather relations of movement and rest, alongside different speeds and slownesses are vectors of territorialization, as well as deterritorialization. As Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift (2002: 81–82) note,

Cities exist as means of movement, as means to engineer encounters through collection, transport, and collation. They produce, thereby, a complex pattern of traces, a threadwork of intensities which is antecedent to the sustained work of revealing the city minute on minute, hour on hour, day on day, and so on.

As I demonstrate below, deploying these ideas in analysis of redevelopment processes in Oklahoma City brings into view the meticulous work that has gone into the expansion of entrepreneurial redevelopment strategies, highlighting the linkages between disparate types of actors as fundamental to that expansion. Before turning to the case, however, I briefly describe the research upon which my analysis rests and offer a background sketch of the city’s recent history.

Case study background: Oklahoma City, from renewal to redevelopment

By the 1960s, Oklahoma City’s urban core, like that of most large American cities, had begun to suffer a major decline due to the movement of capital investment, new construction, and the majority of its more affluent residents to the suburban periphery. In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, the city undertook aggressive “urban renewal” interventions, razing vast swathes of the inner city. Before the long-term vision guiding these interventions could be realized, however, the city’s economy was decimated by an oil bust and a major banking collapse. Urban renewal was mostly abandoned, leaving large swathes of the inner city vacant, while the city’s economy stagnated and very little new construction occurred in the inner city throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. The 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building left a massive rent in the fabric of the urban core, sparking discussions among city leaders about how to best approach the process of rebuilding. The discussions following the bombing ultimately led to the initiation of an ambitious series of redevelopment plans, the Metropolitan Area Projects Plan (MAPs), through which more than a billion dollars has already been funneled, with nearly $800 million in additional costs projected for the current phase. This plan, aimed at luring members of “the creative class” to the city through “quality of life” improvements (Florida 2014/2002), will be familiar to observers of urban development strategies of recent decades, with its focus on sports and entertainment venues alongside an artificially constructed downtown canal, modeled after San Antonio’s Riverwalk; the transformation, through the construction of several dams, of the North Canadian River—recently rechristened the “Oklahoma River”—into a landscaped park and kayaking facility; a new downtown public library; an additional 70-acre park designed to link downtown and the Oklahoma River; and a streetcar system, among other initiatives. These quality-of-life interventions, public–private partnerships, and an emphasis on attracting large companies and the educated labor force they require demonstrate an orientation towards the needs of private capital, thus aligning the city’s approach with the “entrepreneurial,” neoliberal approach undertaken by many cities (Hall and Hubbard, 1998; Weber, 2002). Key proponents of this approach to redevelopment in Oklahoma City have included city officials, land-owners, developers, and boosters such as local press outlets, as well as several large fossil fuel companies headquartered in the city, the most prominent of which are Chesapeake Energy and Devon Energy, two of the largest natural gas companies in the US. The results of redevelopment have been remarkable in terms of reworking portions of the built environment and rebranding the city, as I discuss further below. But as in many other cities, the benefits of these transformations have been highly uneven: the city center and adjacent areas have received the vast bulk of investment in new building and renovating existing buildings and infrastructure, while other parts of the city—especially the eastern and southern portions, which are predominately lower-income African American and Latino neighborhoods—have received little to no attention.

With this thumbnail sketch of the city’s redevelopment trajectory of the past half-century or so as a backdrop, I would like to now highlight an important shift in discursive strategies deployed by proponents of 1960s renewal and 2000s redevelopment respectively. To summarize an argument I have made in some depth elsewhere (Sarmiento, 2015b), I will note here that urban renewal discourse in 1960s Oklahoma City largely revolved around and sought legitimation through a binary opposition between stasis and movement, decay and growth, blight/disease, and vigor/health: the “blighted,” “decaying” inner city, it was claimed by proponents of urban renewal, had to be swept away to allow the city to return to social and economic vigor and health. By contrast, the city’s more recent MAPs initiatives have framed the urgent need for redevelopment in terms of attracting companies and their labor forces, which in turn revolves primarily around abandoning the negatively charged figures of the stasis/movement binary—“decay,” “stagnation,” “blight,” and so on—and foregrounding the more positively charged figures of movement, progress, excitement, and modernity, especially with respect to the urban core. This shift in redevelopment discourse can be traced to the fact that while urban renewal focused on devalorizing the urban core in order to raise the value of the suburban spaces where investment was concentrating, the MAPs era is concerned with revalorizing the urban core in order to maximize the opportunities for capitalizing on the rent gap produced by the long period of disinvestment in the core (Tierney and Petty, 2015). A statement by Mick Cornett, the mayor who oversaw many of the city’s redevelopment initiatives, makes this emphasis clear:

A city gets its identity from its core. One of the reasons Oklahoma City succeeded, now looking back 20 years, is that we convinced people who live in the suburbs that the quality of life downtown is important. We’ve convinced them their quality of life is directly related to the intensity of the core, that you can’t be a suburb of nothing. (Green, no date)

It is important to emphasize that this positively charged emotional shift is not universally felt in the city, which should perhaps be no surprise given the unevenness of redevelopment that I mentioned above. The first MAPs initiative passed by a relatively slim margin of voters, and the third and most recent phase was met with considerable criticism. In the 2014 mayoral race, city councilman Ed Shadid mounted a challenge to Mayor Cornett based in large part on a critique of redevelopment as it has thus far unfolded. ² Shadid ultimately lost the election, but I make the case in the following pages that to understand the politics of redevelopment in Oklahoma City, we must also attend to the positive affective shift experienced by a number of residents and its links to the shift in strategies from the urban renewal era to more recent redevelopment efforts. Viewing this shift in development strategies in terms of territorialization calls for us to focus attention on precisely how redevelopment’s territorial expansion was achieved as particular actors were drawn together to enable the positive values enshrined by redevelopment discourse to take hold, cohere, and become durable in the city and the lifeworlds of some of its inhabitants. In what follows, I demonstrate that the positively charged framing of the MAPs era promoted by city officials and boosters is not simply a marketing tool or even primarily a discursive strategy, but rather an approach that relies on the careful orchestration of a range of materials—especially those relating to sport, architecture, and food—constituting redeveloping urban spaces in such a way that the positively charged elements of redevelopment are intensified and viscerally felt by many Oklahoma Citians. Ultimately, I argue, these affective elaborations were crucial to the heretofore relatively successful territorial expansion of redevelopment.

Redevelopment’s refrain 1: An “architectural renaissance”

The most visually obvious, dramatic sign of redevelopment’s remarkable trajectory in Oklahoma City is a series of structures built over roughly the past 15 years that diverge strikingly from the surrounding urban landscape in terms of style and visual impact. In this section of the paper, I describe this topological network of structures that serve not only as icons of the city’s redevelopment boom, but as components of affective machines meant to create or perhaps extract certain qualities from the urban landscape and resonate with bodies in carefully designed ways. In exploring such capacities of buildings, I don’t claim to be discovering something new about architecture—concentrating on the links between space and bodily affects is of course a basic element of architectural theory and practice, and the subject of much recent critical scholarship, as I noted above (cf. Kraftl and Adey, 2008). My goal is rather to examine the qualities sought by architects in Oklahoma City, and the reasons given by these architects for pursuing those qualities, so as to better understand the “sense” taken on by redevelopment, and to set the stage for understanding how these sense-making architectural icons articulate with interventions in sport and food in the city. Put in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, the task at hand is to begin understanding the becoming-expressive of redeveloping spaces through the articulation of materials and bodies in the city.

In the early 1990s, much of central Oklahoma City had seen little new construction aside from a scattering of boxy office blocks of a type that proliferated in many US cities in the 1970s and 1980s, conveying the feeling of a time capsule from the period when oil was flowing voluminously in the state. The past two decades of redevelopment in Oklahoma City have produced a flurry of construction activity, from infrastructural interventions to building renovation to newly built structures, led by the work of three prominent architects—Hans Butzer, Rand Elliot, and the firm Pickard Chilton. Butzer in particular has played an important role in promoting specific architectural values in the city, from the Oklahoma City National Memorial to his recently designed SkyDance Bridge. In Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, the Memorial, which was formally dedicated and opened in 2000, served to mark a stabilizing point in the urban fabric that helped anchor the nascent territory of redevelopment: this site received positive national media attention for its understated, elegant, and elegiac tone and soon became a tourist destination (Sturken, 2007), creating a focal point in the heart of the city’s long-moribund downtown for renewed activity. In the subsequent years, a number of architecturally forward-looking iconic structures went up in the central city, including Butzer’s SkyDance Bridge, a pedestrian walkway inspired by the scissor-tailed flycatcher, represented as an immense angular form that lunges forward horizontally while sending a series of vertical lines racing towards the expansive prairie skies (Figure 1). Another central figure in the city’s architectural renaissance is Rand Elliot, whose firm has designed more than a dozen buildings for Chesapeake Energy and a number of other buildings in the city and state. As with Butzer’s work, many of Elliot’s designs, composed largely of steel and glass arranged in stark angles, emphasizing the play of light and evoking a sense of dynamic movement, tend to strike a strong visual contrast with the more traditional styles and materials of much of the city’s built environment. Elliot’s work is centered on the Chesapeake campus, but also includes buildings in the Boathouse District along the redeveloped Oklahoma River (Figure 2). Completing the trio of iconic architectural firms working in the city is Pickard Chilton, a firm that has designed corporate headquarters for energy, finance, and banking companies from Houston to Riyadh. The Devon Energy Center tower that they designed in Oklahoma City is a gleaming pillar in the midst of downtown that dwarfs all previously existing structures in the city (Figure 2). OPEN IN VIEWER

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Rand Elliot’s Chesapeake Boathouse and Pickard Chilton’s Devon Energy Center; photograph by author.

Such structures are clearly part of an effort by city officials and the energy companies based there to provide emblematic and instantly recognizable visual markers as part of a global branding strategy, as explored in research on a number of other cities (cf. Evans, 2003; Kaika, 2010; McNeill, 2005). Butzer’s Skydance Bridge is an explicit example—the piece resulted from a 2008 design competition for a work of “iconic status,” as the city’s website puts it, “that reflects the cosmopolitan and vibrant qualities of Oklahoma City and serves as a symbol for the City.” This and the other buildings of Elliot, Butzer, and Pickard Chilton make dramatic statements about the city’s future; these structures, in their skyward racing lines and strident articulation of motion, make palpable a sense of a city “on the move,” a striking contrast to the sensation of stagnation, immobility, and decay that permeated the city in the 1980s and early 1990s. In their proliferation and harmonization with one another, we can recognize these structures as key components of the second movement of territorialization in the city, the stabilization of the territory of redevelopment, and the delineation of this territory from its outside. It should be noted that these forward-looking structures are roughly situated along a north–south axis centered on the downtown area, the linear swath of the city that redevelopment seeks to transform into a continuous zone of revalorization, in terms of land value and the social esteem that intensifies land value. ³ It appears that this process of revalorization rests in part on the capacity of these buildings to function as signifiers of the cityscape.

However, while these icons of redevelopment clearly function as symbols or “signs” (Domosh, 1989), viewing redevelopment in terms of the Deleuzo-Guattarian conception of territory—which emphasizes that territorialization rests on the alignment of meanings and materiality, values and spaces—requires us to focus on the ways that the architects of these buildings explicitly sought to deploy particular material properties through which these buildings could act to intensify bodily experiences and energies. Beginning with the Devon Center, it should be noted that at 50 stories, the tower’s verticality is an important aspect of what makes it a “key symbol for Oklahoma City,” in principal architect Jon Pickard’s terms, and “emblematic of […] the renaissance” of the city (Broome, 2012). But explaining the design of the structure, Pickard notes that the tower itself is modeled on an equilateral triangle, with each point gesturing towards and allowing a view from the interior of the structure onto a prominent feature of the redeveloped downtown surrounding the structure (Broome, 2012). This gesture towards surrounding sites of redevelopment by the tower’s equilateral triangle shape is, according to Pickard, more than representational: “We wanted the building to radiate that attention and energy” (Broome, 2012). The use of light and the foregrounding of the expansiveness of the building’s plains setting are central to this sense of radiating energy and dynamism and are incorporated into the design in a number of ways, from the glass shell surrounding the structure, which allows “awe-inspiring views out to the endless landscape,” to inset corners on the floor plates that highlight “connections to the outside” (Broome, 2012). These efforts to blur or reverse an inside/outside dichotomy in the service of a sense of energy and expansiveness are reiterated in the panoramic views from the restaurant at the top of the tower, simply named Vast. Such considerations also extend to the botanical garden surrounding the base of the tower, one of the few components of earlier urban renewal plans to have reached fruition. The garden was originally flanked by earth berms that shielded much of the space from wind but also from street view. As project designers describe renovations, removing these berms was part of a larger effort to create a “more integrated, urban space that feels comfortable with its surroundings, rather than closed off from them, [which] provides a dynamic energy that more closely resembles an urban landscape” (No Author, 2012). These are precisely the sorts of “nitty-gritty, material-performative details that are so important to both architects’ designs and users’ experiences that evade perhaps (all) visual symbolism,” as Peter Kraftl and Peter Adey put it (2008: 214).

According to Pickard, intriguingly, the Devon Center and its surrounding complex, in contrast to the hierarchy and competitive dominance conveyed by earlier generations of skyscrapers in the US (Domosh, 1989), seek to integrate the sense of vertical power with a sense of community and collectivity. A range of spaces in and around the base of the tower are open to the public, including a six-story rotunda, a cafe, and seating areas inside and out that segue into the updated Myriad Gardens. These spaces, it must be noted, are highly monitored by private security, and indeed it wasn’t long after the tower was completed that it became a focal point of direct contestation when activists associated with the Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance chained themselves to the doors of the building (Griffin, 2013). This confrontation hints at the deterritorializing vectors emerging from redevelopment in the city, as we might expect to find when considering the third phase of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of territorialization. The fact that a glitter-coated banner unfurled in the building by protesters led to efforts by the police to charge them with staging a “terrorism hoax,” which carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison, calls attention to questions of who is able to define appropriate use of this space and what kinds of dialogue about collective benefit will be tolerated here. Without eliding this important point, I would like to maintain focus on the fact that this conscious merging of building materials, urban spaces, and the sensory and emotional capacities of bodies through the intensification and direction of affects of movement, energy, and community can be noted across many structures of the city’s recent architectural boom. As another example, Chesapeake architect Rand Elliot seeks to harness “the power of color and light” in his work, designed in explicit contrast to “today’s office buildings [which] lack kinetic energy from the street”; as with the Devon Center, architectural design at Chesapeake is explicitly linked to democratic values, in this case through the “egalitarian” imperative that all offices are the same size and have windows (quoted in Cohen, 2012).

It is important to note that people of course experience the iconic structures of redevelopment in any number of ways, many of which may exceed or diverge entirely from the intentions of their designers; I will return to this crucial idea below. However, my main point here is that these structures were intentionally designed to generate and intensify embodied sensations of energy, dynamism, excitement, and some notion of community and collectivity. This point is in keeping with similar arguments made in recent critical studies of architectural geographies, such as Adey (2008) and Merriman (2011). In Oklahoma City, however, it is reasonable to conclude that in addition to the experience of bodies moving within individual buildings, a more expansive affect of movement is generated by these buildings as they function together in urban space: viewing the iconic structures of redevelopment as a set or a series, a topology emerges in the urban fabric that is meant not only as a symbolic network, a series of signs to be read off of inert structures, but also as a generator of sensation and feeling for urban residents as they move about the city. These forceful figures, and especially the Devon Center, are rarely out of view for anyone driving through much of the city. Glimpsed from the corner of the eye, their striking angles gleam in the sun, pulling one’s attention towards the vast plains skies, jutting out from and glimmering against the brick, stone, and wood backdrop of much of the inner city as it existed for decades prior. Thus, beyond simply affecting those bodies that come into direct contact with them, these buildings potentially act on many urbanites, coloring their experiences of the city. Some of the territorializing vectors of redevelopment begin to be discernible here.

The point of this brief discussion of architecture in the city, however, is not to make an argument about the effectiveness, in terms of harnessing affects and animating bodies, of these architectural interventions on their own. My claim rather is that these iconic structures are important components in a broader assemblage, the effectiveness of which depends on the interweaving of architecture with other types of actors. The built environment may structure experiences in the city, but it is also produced, maintained, or transformed by the movement of people and things in and through the city. It is here where the role of sport—a particularly affect-laden form of movement that is important to redevelopment strategies in many cities—is critical in mediating Oklahoma City’s transformations.

Redevelopment’s refrain 2: Sport in the city

In this section of the paper, I begin with the notion that sport is a particularly potent form of movement in the city, where the exquisite movements of athletic bodies in turn move the bodies of fans and spectators in ways that resonate for many urban dwellers with the changing fabric of the city itself. Sporting—in this case professional basketball in particular—can intensify bodily energies in spectators (to say nothing of players, of course), generating an affective surplus of its own. We shall see that this surplus has been for many Oklahoma Citians fused with pride in their city and excitement about its future; as such, this fusion plays an important part in “making sense” of redevelopment, in further enabling the territory of redevelopment to become coherent and durable.

Throughout the 1990s, nascent redevelopment efforts in the city centered around a former warehousing district that was rebranded by developers as “Bricktown.” In and around this area, the sports arenas that hosted the revival of the city’s minor league hockey and baseball teams played an important role in the initial phases of redevelopment by drawing suburbanites into the inner city for home games on evenings and weekends. This influx of visitors supported the opening of a number of restaurants, bars, and other entertainment venues in the 1990s (Lackmeyer and Money, 2006). As such, the hockey and baseball teams in Bricktown can be seen as an initial anchor in the territorial development of the sub-assemblage of sport in the city. Subsequent developments in sport in the city then bear witness to the increasing coherence and durability of this territory and the spatiality of its impacts in material-semiotic terms. In the early 2000s, the city government reworked the North Canadian River, the path of which runs less than a mile south of downtown, to create a new entertainment zone called the Boathouse District. This area hosts an official Olympic and Paralympic training site for rowers and has been promoted by the city as a tourist destination and recreational area offering boating on the recently re-engineered river, a zip-line, and ropes courses. The most dramatic expansion in sport in the city, however, occurred in 2008 with the arrival of the state’s first major league professional sports team, the basketball team the Oklahoma City Thunder. From its first season in the city, the Thunder was successful in terms of performance on the court and ticket sales; as with the hockey and baseball teams in Bricktown, and rowing and other athletic activities in the Boathouse District, Thunder games brought Oklahoma Citians into the urban core, but in even larger numbers than those attracted by the minor league teams that preceded them.

But beyond simply drawing consumers to the urban core, these developments in sport also had a hand in re-signifying the inner city for many Oklahoma Citians. The Thunder in particular have played a central role in redefining the urban core and the city more broadly during the period of dramatic transformation ushered in by redevelopment. There is nothing novel in this claim, of course; as with architectural interventions in the city, proponents of redevelopment in Oklahoma City, like those in many cities (Hall, 2006), have sought to use sports to bolster the image of the city. Numerous examples of this trend can easily be found, but a profile of the Thunder in VeloCity, the official magazine of the city’s Chamber of Commerce, perhaps best expresses this dynamic (Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce, 2014). The piece foregrounds the team’s success as a key to rebranding the city, devoting considerable attention to a cover story that ran in the New York Times Magazine in 2012, which focused on the Thunder but also covered the dramatic changes occurring in the city more broadly. The spread also prominently includes the following quote, attributed to “noted urbanist Joel Kotkin in Forbes”: “The Oklahoma City Thunder have helped to put a spotlight on what may well be the most surprising success story of 21st century America.”

While these representations of the Thunder and its impacts on the city may appear to be merely media hype and Chamber of Commerce boosterism, several comments from readers who wrote to the Times in response to their piece on the Thunder begin to indicate the team’s emotional impacts on many Oklahoma Citians, particularly with respect to how they feel about the city and the state. “As an Oklahoman living away from his home state who routinely gets asked what Oklahoma’s like,” one reader wrote, “I am printing this article off and carrying it in my person at all times. This is a near-perfect representation of the Oklahoma City I love, and a near-perfect representation of the Thunder.” Another wrote, “As a native of Oklahoma City, I appreciated the way you wrote about our city … as a modern American place, with all the contradictions, sophistication, red, blue, etc., that characterizes any city of 1.3 million people. It’s validating.” To be sure, these comments posted by anonymous respondents—who could actually be city employees or Chamber of Commerce staff—should not be taken to represent the feelings of Oklahoma Citians writ large. However, such comments do in fact resonate forcefully with similar sentiments I heard expressed in numerous contexts, both as a participant observer in local food and redevelopment-related activities and functions and in various milieus of everyday life, from restaurants and bars to family living rooms and backyards. For a city and state that typically appear in national media coverage in reference to devastating weather events and various “worst of” lists, the positive attention drawn to the city in recent years thanks in no small part to the Thunder was a welcome change of pace for many Oklahomans. The utility of the team to redevelopment’s territorial trajectory then resides in the potential to link such potent affects to the spaces of the city. A blog post on a Thunder fan website from 2010 explicitly draws the connection between the team and the city’s redeveloping core:

The Thunder have done a lot of things—created a ton of goodwill, given us an extra entertainment option, increased OKC’s profile, brought Kevin Durant into our lives and a lot of other things—but one of the best things they’ve done is make downtown relevant. (Young, 2010)

Again, this is not to suggest that all viewers experience sports or architecture in the same way, but rather that these realms have been intentionally woven together, and that to whatever extent these realms are powerful in their capacity to shape urbanites’ experiences of redevelopment, their power comes in part from their mutual imbrication. The website for the Boathouse District makes the intended synergies between sport and architecture explicit: “Everyone appreciates the iconic architecture of the structures along the river, each designed by architect Rand Elliott, Elliott & Associates,” the site asserts, adding, “Together, the architecture and athleticism of the Boathouse District are becoming recognized as a world-class destination by local and international visitors alike.” Following Deleuze and Guattari, such interweavings are arguably necessary to the continued success of redevelopment’s territorial expansion. Having briefly considered sport and architecture, the contours of this territory become increasingly clear, but the grand dramas of sport and architecture, necessary as they may be to redevelopment, are surely not sufficient to explain its unfolding. I turn now to another realm that has been imbricated alongside sport and architecture in the expansion of redevelopment’s territory, food culture in the city.

Redevelopment’s refrain 3: Consuming the city

In addition to ebullient media coverage of architectural and sports interventions in Oklahoma City, food culture in the city has been seen to be undergoing a profound transformation. During the past several years, the motif of a food “revolution” has become common in the local press: one journalist, for example, writes that a local food truck’s victorious appearance on the Food Network’s “Great Food Truck Race” contributed to a burgeoning gourmet food truck industry in the city, “and paved the way for a delicious revolution in the city’s food consciousness” (Hardy, 2014). Another asserts that “Many local chefs believe the state is experiencing a food revolution, one that is luring more foodie pilgrims from around the US in search of the next holy edible grail,” and quotes a local chef as saying, “Oklahoma City is going through a culinary awakening,” (Golden, 2013; see also Burch, 2014; Green, 2013). Following the opening of the city’s first Whole Foods Market, one journalist dubbed this expansion of food options “the Whole Foods effect,” noting that “Local, organic and high quality foods never had it so good in these parts” (Cathey, 2011).

Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of enterprises offering specialty foods are located in and around wealthier parts of the city—Whole Foods Market, located in the affluent Nichols Hills area, is perhaps the most iconic example of this. Moreover, several enterprises have served as anchors in redeveloped and redeveloping spaces in the city, such as Native Roots, a specialty grocer located in the gentrified Deep Deuce district (Sarmiento, 2015b). These spaces, moreover, coincide with the spatial contours delineated by the territorial sub-assemblages of architecture and sport described in the preceding two sections. While an abundance of research details the colonizing roles of specialty foods alongside other cultural actors in gentrifying areas (cf. Guthman, 2003; Jarosz, 2008), I’d like to emphasize a different point here and draw attention to the ways specialty foods in Oklahoma City contributed to the affirming affects of redevelopment that we have glimpsed in architecture and sport. “Foodie” culture in many forms has recently become significantly more popular in the US, and that alone might be viewed as a sufficient reason for the proponents of redevelopment to cultivate such a culture in the city. But beyond the general popular enthusiasm for foodie culture, we can see in Oklahoma City how particular qualities of foods were foregrounded and intensified in the lifeworlds of many city residents through the efforts of a dynamic local food movement in the state which centered on the city. Briefly summarizing a trajectory I explore in detail elsewhere (Sarmiento, 2015b), Oklahoma’s local food movement began with the establishment in 2003 of the Oklahoma Food Cooperative (OFC), an innovative enterprise linking food producer-member/owners and consumer-member/owners across the state. In the territorial development of the sub-assemblage of food in the city, the founding of this cooperative dropped an anchor around which much subsequent territorial expansion would follow. The OFC and a number of related enterprises and organizations that followed in its wake grew rapidly: by 2011 the OFC had 5000 member/owners, and a number of other enterprises specializing in local food were operating around the state, particularly in Oklahoma City and Tulsa, the two largest cities. With farmers and ranchers, processors, distributors, and retail outlets involved, these enterprises together constituted the beginnings of a locally based food system.

In terms of territorialization, many actors in the local food movement recognized that one of their primary obstacles was the habituation of Oklahomans over several generations to the tastes and practices associated with industrial food systems. Re-educating consumers was thus a major focus of the movement. The OFC, for example, sent out weekly email newsletters with recipes, shopping and storage tips, and notes from individual producers about life on farms and ranches, all designed to draw cooperative members into a more intimate relationship with freshly grown, minimally processed foods, and the specific environments that produced that food. Similarly, Ludivine, Oklahoma City’s first farm-to-fork restaurant, produced a series of videos showing chef/co-owner Jonathan Stranger exploring farms and ranches around the state, talking with producers about their production methods, asking about food-related legislation, and so on. The dining room at Ludivine is also oriented around the kitchen, which is prominently open to view by patrons, where chefs prepare orders during busy moments but during downtimes in the evening also display slower preparation processes such as salting pork or canning vegetables. Through Ludivine’s video series and the experience of dining at the restaurant, diners are drawn into the various stages constituting food “production” from the farm to the kitchen, which are then linked to the sensory experiences of eating foods such as sand plum preserves, roasted bone meal, and a range of other tastes that diverge from the experience of eating at a fast food outlet. A final example of the pedagogical efforts of the movement comes from a grass-fed beef and organic wheat producer called John’s Farm, which enrolls nutrition science to “validate the healthiness of the product,” as John’s Farm’s online description puts it, certifying through lab testing that the content of carcinogenesis-inhibiting omega-6 fatty acids “in the sample of [John’s Farm] beef falls in the highest range[…] reported in the literature.” In these three examples, we catch a glimpse of the ways in which the local food movement sought to teach Oklahomans how to recognize and savor the tastes of locally produced food, while linking those foods to more environmentally friendly production methods and improved personal health. The linkage of local food to health concerns was clearly a key element of the initial growth of the movement: in my interviews, a number of participants in the local food movement traced their involvement to serious health problems, from battles with cancer to chronic digestive ailments, and the movement quickly gained support from the state’s Department of Health, an agency tasked with combating Oklahoma’s considerable public health issues (Sarmiento, 2015a, 2015b).

But while the local food movement played an important role in imbuing locally grown and produced foods with positively charged values—health, freshness, taste, and pride in place—the more salient point for my present argument is that we can discern in several sites how the pedagogical labors of the local food movement offered an opportunity for proponents of redevelopment to enroll specialty foods in the territorial expansion of redevelopment. The arrival of Whole Foods Market in the city offers an instructive example. As was widely known in the city, the store’s opening was the direct result of negotiations between Whole Foods and Chesapeake Energy, who reportedly offered the high-end grocer a deal on retail space on a parcel owned by Chesapeake and located directly across the street from the energy company’s expansive corporate campus. In his public comment on the deal, Chesapeake executive Aubrey McClendon, a prominent figure in the city at the time, unequivocally linked Whole Foods’s arrival to redevelopment, asserting that it “validates the revitalization we have experienced in Oklahoma City in the past ten years” (Bustillo, 2012). In another public comment, McClendon states

The addition of a Whole Foods Market[…] contiguous to our corporate headquarters campus signifies a major step forward in our vision to create the most vibrant and dynamic urban environment for our employees and neighbors to live, work and play in Oklahoma.[…] We are taking the retail, entertainment and business environment to a new level in Oklahoma City while simultaneously furthering a mission of sustainability and healthy living with the addition of a Whole Foods Market. (Lackmeyer, 2010)

But just as architecture and sport can be seen to be woven together in the Boathouse District in support of redevelopment’s affirming affects, several sites in the city provide glimpses into the efforts of redevelopment actors to create direct linkages between specialty foods and the other realms under consideration here. The Whole Foods Market, for example, adjacent to the Chesapeake Campus shares many of the same design sensibilities that characterize the iconic structures discussed above: stark angles, a clean and spare but dramatic series of lines and surfaces, and the effect of a hypermodern contrast to the built environment as it appeared previously (Figure 3). Even Chesapeake’s organic employee garden, where workers can earn credits for gardening each week, features an elegant and modern design sensibility. Similarly, Ludivine’s stylish interior design also embraces the minimalist, urbane aesthetic that one might expect to encounter more in Brooklyn or East London than Oklahoma City. In Vast, the restaurant atop the Devon Center where diners are meant to feel the expansiveness of the city’s plains setting, local and seasonal foods are of course emphasized on the menu. Traces of such linkages are perhaps less obvious with sport, but one example stands out: the chefs for the Thunder’s well-publicized sourcing of ingredients from Urban Agrarian, one of the most prominent enterprises to spring from the local food movement. In a TedX talk in 2014, the owner of Urban Agrarian noted that

The chefs that feed the Oklahoma City Thunder came to us this year, because they wanted to support their community and they wanted to feed the players the best foods possible. They receive deliveries from us at least once a week these days. They are eating local, and we are not surprised at all that [then-Thunder player] Kevin Durant went out and scored fifty-four points—a career high—just a few days ago! OPEN IN VIEWER

Discussion: Potential implications for redevelopment politics

The point of my argument is not simply that redevelopment deploys iconic architecture, sports, and food culture to rebrand and symbolize the city. That point has been made for each of these realms in a number of studies in other cities, and indeed proponents of redevelopment in Oklahoma City make such goals more or less explicit in all three realms. Instead, I have argued that the territorial assemblage of redevelopment has expanded and become durable in significant measure through the careful weaving together of these three realms, especially their most positively charged, affirming elements or qualities. If, as Nietzsche argues, passion is among the most potent forms of power, then the ability to harness such passions is one of the keys to power in the city. And this is why, despite common criticisms of the supposedly apolitical or uncritical nature of assemblage thinking, I have taken the approach I have here.

The genealogy of redevelopment’s territorial expansion that I have provided above suggests that political struggles against the unevenness of the so-called entrepreneurial approaches that dominate redevelopment strategies in many cities around the world should perhaps take into account that they are confronting the entrepreneurial city as an active, affirming array of forces. While reactive forces, according to Deleuze (2006), can and often do come to dominate active forces—that is, redevelopment is not powerful simply because it is active—it is worth considering the extent to which entrepreneurial approaches to redevelopment perhaps appeal to some of urban dwellers’ highest aspirations and most life-affirming tendencies and desires: self-worth, the desire to live an exciting and rewarding life, and to be one’s most vital and vibrant self in a place that facilitates such aims, that enlivens and animates the body and the spirit. In Deluezo-Guattarian terms, moreover, the force of such appeals resides in the extent to which they are grounded in the matter of the city itself, including not just the built environment and other “concrete” elements but also in more fluid and seemingly ephemeral phenomena such as the energetic exchanges of bodies and food, athletic bodies in motion, the space surrounding the city and the particular way it is punctuated by a skyscraper, and many other elements of the affect of sheer motion. Such phenomena—and the interplay of materiality and meaning that characterizes them—are then a primary ground upon which urban political struggles take shape. If this is correct, offering a different narrative or an alternate set of representations will not be sufficient to counter existing power structures as they inflect with redevelopment processes. Instead, more-than-representational strategies are called for (see Thrift, 2004).

Put a bit differently, proponents of more just, inclusive modalities of redevelopment might view the account I have offered here as something of a manual for building, expanding, and maintaining territory. Ed Shadid’s mayoral campaign, discussed briefly above, may have failed simply because of political apathy and disenfranchisement in the city, and Shadid may have simply been outspent by the powerful interests that supported the incumbent. But viewing the mayoral race in assemblage terms, apathy, disenfranchisement, and funding are components of redevelopment’s territorialization, which also includes and arguably rests in part on the interweaving of the three realms I have discussed in the preceding pages. Shadid perhaps grasped something along these lines: he launched his campaign at the Farmers Public Market, which has in its own right become something of a countercultural redevelopment icon (see Sarmiento, 2015b) and emphasized his links to the local food movement and his commitment, as a medical doctor, to improved public health. But foodie culture and “healthy living” were already felt as abundant by many of those who have benefited from redevelopment in the city, perhaps leaving them to wonder what else Shadid might be offering them. The most potent difference in Shadid’s position from that of the incumbent was of course his critique of the unevenness of the benefits and burdens of redevelopment. But perhaps what he lacked was a way to decouple the current entrepreneurial approach from the affirming affects cultivated in the city and link them instead to the urban social justice concerns that he eloquently and powerfully voiced.

Here, the attempt by the owner of Urban Agrarian to link local food to the Thunder, as I mentioned above, might be enlightening. Despite being a supplier of food to the Thunder, which we might view as just the kind of linkage that has empowered the territory of redevelopment, Urban Agrarian closed its doors in December 2016, citing among other factors the difficulty of competing with corporate versions of local food such as Whole Foods. As I argue at length elsewhere, however (Sarmiento, 2015b), Urban Agrarian and many other offshoots of the OFC mostly abandoned the early OFC’s strong commitments to food justice, which was the quality of the cooperative that most set it apart from the more fetishized, romanticized versions of local food on offer in Whole Foods and similar outlets (see also Alkon, 2008; Mount, 2012). By abandoning that distinguishing feature, local food enterprises like Urban Agrarian may have become largely indistinguishable in the eyes of many consumers from Whole Foods and its corporate peers. Urban Agrarian could not then simply step in and re-appropriate the affirming affects of redevelopment by invoking the Thunder. The early OFC, by contrast, with its strident commitments to social justice, linked so effectively to local environments and healthy living, may well have been better positioned to harness the power of the Thunder in the name of a very different vision for food systems and for urban redevelopment.