Neighbourly demands: Property,propriety and the racial identification of crime in Chicago

Introduction

On 1 October 2010, a Chicago weblog named Uptown Update published a photograph of a young black man in the parking lot of a mini-mall in Uptown, a gentrifying neighbourhood on the more affluent North side of the city. Since its inception in May 2007, Uptown Update has served as a medium for area residents to share information about events and issues that concern the legal security and economic prosperity of the neighbourhood, including neighbourhood restaurant openings, community policing meetings, and controversies involving local politicians. As part of this neighbourly exchange of information, a growing number of the blog’s readers have produced and shared photographs that show people and things that purportedly blight the urban landscape of the area. Once posted to the blog, the photograph of the young man in the parking lot was engaged as proof that illegal drug markets remain (a problem) in the neighbourhood. In submitting this image to the blog’s editor, the reader who took the photograph provided the following information about the circumstances in which it was produced, which appeared as the picture’s caption on the blog:

I noticed people in the UU comments mentioning the young gentleman with the red ball cap who flashes wads of money after ‘allegedly’ finishing drug deals. I have seen him quite often near Wilson & Malden and Wilson & Magnolia. The loitering in the Wilson Magnolia strip mall has returned. From 4 pm till after 5pm, the boys were back and they were hard at work on their cell phones with their lookouts on the sidewalk in front of Subway. (Uptown Update Reader, 2010A: original emphasis)

The publication of this photograph incited debate amongst the blog’s readers about how to most effectively deter ‘these youth’ from occupying public spaces around the neighbourhood. These disagreements are archived in the ‘Reader Comments’ forum of the blog, where readers routinely discuss and debate the significance of the images and stories that are posted. Upon seeing this image, one reader asked, ‘how about printing that pic of Mr. Redhat, print “known drug dealer” on it in bold type and scattering copys [sic] all over the area?’ (Uptown Update Reader, 2010B). To this suggested course of action, another reader responded that,

I like the idea of posting pictures of drug dealers on the web. However I doubt that this is going to stop someone from selling. Pictures of people buying drugs, however, is the key. You want to stop people from coming here to buy drugs? Post pictures of them or car plates on the web and you will see how fast they stay away from the hood. (Uptown Update Reader, 2010C)

Although these readers disagreed about how to rid the neighbourhood of the dangers represented by the presence of this young man, both wanted to act on the sight of urban danger in a manner that would extend and multiply the visibility of blackness for area residents concerned about local crime. While the last reader did not explicitly refer to the blackness of the people purchasing drugs, the visual field in which these texts circulated are saturated with photographs that assume and fabricate an association between blackness and criminality such that its readers identify crime and danger according to a distinctly racial imaginary.

In this article I track the racial force of these ‘neighbourly’ practices of textual exchange, attending to the discursive processes that configure blackness as the locus of legal intervention and displacement across gentrifying urban spaces. Following the work of Hesse (2004), Mawani (2009) and Stoler (1995), I conceive of race not as a quality that is inherent in individual bodies, but as a relation of power and force that governs people, places, and populations according to fabricated differences, be they biological, cultural, aesthetic, or historical. In post-industrial cities like Chicago, law and its attendant discourses of criminality have become principal axes of racial differentiation, determining what criminal behaviour commands the attention of local residents (Buffam, 2009; Manalansan, 2005), what bodies and populations are subject to legal scrutiny, surveillance, and incarceration (Hagedorn, 2008; Shabazz, 2009; Zukin, 1995), as well as how crime and violence are spatially distributed across the city (Davis, 2006; Nast, 2000; Wacquant, 2008). Here, I illustrate how this racial force of law extends across urban spaces through the practices of textual production and circulation that are facilitated by Uptown Update, attending to how the relations of visibility and political action they engender function as one of the many carceral technologies that shape the lives of black populations in American cities (Shabazz, 2009).

Critical theorists of race have recently cautioned against treating the visual, phenotypical appearance of bodies as the sole or even principal axis of racialization insofar as this habit reduces race to a property of individuals rather than operationalizing it as a quality of relations (Hesse, 2004). Yet, rather than ignore how visuality figures as a modality of differentiation, this article illustrates how racial relations of power are created through practices of identification that acquire their form and focus from hierarchical arrangements of people, places, and capital. In Chicago, these modes of visuality are at once a product and mechanism of the forms of racial violence that have worked to annihilate what McKittrick (2011) describes as a ‘black sense of place’, rendering black populations systematically vulnerable to displacement, dislocation, and death. To understand how race works through these modes of identification, visuality must not be understood as a mere extension of direct perception, but, rather, as an effect of a visual field that is in itself a ‘racial formation, an episteme, hegemonic and forceful’, one that is ‘built upon layers of racial knowings and displaced unknowing’ (Butler, 1993: 123). In gentrifying neighbourhoods like Uptown, these modes of identification determine what bodies are visible to legal and public actors, how bodies, places, and objects are seen and acted on according to legal logics, as well as what actors are authorized to observe and react to perceived dangers in public spaces. In this article I engage the photographs taken and shared by blog readers as artefacts of these differentiated relations of visibility and identification. This requires attending to the broader context and scale of these otherwise micro-social textual exchanges, tracking how the conditions and effects of racial identification are ‘stretched out’ across multiple spatial units as they render black bodies vulnerable to intervention, displacement and violence (Pulido, 2000: 20). Through the everyday workings of these modes of identification, a variety of private and non-state actors are enlisted in the juridical reclamation of public spaces, especially those people who identify themselves as ‘neighbours’, ‘business managers’, and ‘property owners’.

In the textual exchanges facilitated by Uptown Update, readers most frequently address each other as ‘neighbours’ who are morally obligated to each other by guarding against the threat of economic uncertainty and legal insecurity in their area, acting as though their habitation of a delimited urban area is the basis of their civic and political commonality. Yet, to suggest that these neighbourly ties are a function of spatial proximity assumes that the blog caters to a constituency of neighbours that pre-exists the discursive address of the texts it circulates. In this article I track how the readers of Uptown Update are addressed and interpellated as neighbours through their engagement with the discursive logics and emotional registers of texts related to crime in the area. Following Michael Warner (2002) and Nancy Fraser (1992), I illustrate how the relations of publicity facilitated by the blog engender different political commonalities, relations of visibility, and capacities for action amongst their members; from these relations emerge distinctly sociospatial processes of subject formation that interpellate readers as ‘responsible neighbours’ who are concerned with the territorial integrity of the neighbourhood (see Nast, 2000 for a more extensive discussion of the spatial dimensions of racial subject formation). By analyzing the texts that circulate through these practices of discursive engagement, this paper illuminates the modes of racial identification that saturate the public realm of restructuring urban spaces.

For this article, which is part of a larger project on the racial force of law in restructuring cities, I analyzed all of the texts uploaded to this weblog between 2007, when it was created, and 2010, when I ended the data collection for my research project. These texts, which are reflective of those that continue to be disseminated through the blog, included updates about community events in the neighbourhood, notifications about incidents of crime, photographs taken and shared by blog readers, comments on posts by blog readers, as well as links to news articles about issues related to the neighbourhood. Upon finding repeated references to specific legal ordinances amongst the readers’ exchanges, I also considered how the texts circulated through Uptown Update have reproduced and refracted the spatial and political logics of laws that target gang activity and ordinances that target loitering and nuisance properties. In focusing my analysis on this specific medium, my intention is not to condemn its users as willingly or singularly racist individuals, but rather to illustrate how this medium interpellates its readers in broader systemic relations of racial surveillance, territoriality, and displacement.

The remainder of this article is divided into four sections. In the next section I situate the emergence of these neighbourly relations in the broader historical genesis of race and its spatialization in Chicago, which have been documented in extensive detail by urban ethnographers, geographers, and sociologists (Drake and Cayton, 1993; Lloyd, 2006; Hagedorn, 2008; Massey and Denton, 1993; Wacquant, 2001, 2008; Wilson and Taub, 2008). The third section of the article analyzes the visual field of the neighbourhood that has been created through the texts circulated by readers of Uptown Update, attending to how racial bodies and objects are made intelligible to concerned neighbours. In the final section, I detail the kinds of ‘neighbourly’ political action that are engendered by the textual exchanges of the blog, including petitions to local business owners to better govern their property as well as positive loitering events held to deter the presence of unwanted criminal activity in the area. As with the previous section, my analysis illustrates how environmental criminology and the broken windows theory have reshaped public understandings of crime while repositioning the responsible property owner as the subject of ‘neighbourly’ urban politics. Finally, I conclude the article by explaining what this analysis of a neighbourhood weblog contributes to the existing literature on crime and gentrification, illustrating how race must not be thought of as a mere epiphenomenon of class and capital, but as a relation of power and force that shapes how urban spaces materialize.

Race and the neoliberal restructuring of Chicago

The modes of racial identification I document in this article must be understood as an artefact of neoliberal urban restructuring, a process that has reconstituted the geographies of race that organize Chicago (Hagedorn, 2008; Wacquant, 2008). Foremost amongst these changes is a shift in the principal economic functions of the city centre. Before the 1970s, Chicago’s city centre was a major site of manufacturing and industrial production, which, by the turn of the 20th century, had turned the city into a burgeoning metropolis (Cronon, 1991; Massey and Denton, 1993). Between 1890 and 1920, this industrial sector made Chicago a prime destination for the populations of formerly enslaved African Americans that were fleeing the South en masse (Drake and Cayton, 1993). Insofar as these movements were framed by the implosion of the region’s cotton industry and the proliferation of racial violence and formalized exclusions under the mantle of Jim Crow, Chicago was reconstituted through post-slavery institutions of racial governance and control (McKittrick, 2011; Wacquant, 2001)

In Chicago, African Americans were quickly circumscribed to the South Side of the city in what became known as the city’s Black Belt, which served as a site of racial containment and control. During this period, real estate practices of redlining and blockbusting were instrumental in redrawing and solidifying the boundaries of these geographies while amplifying concerns about black (sexual) criminality (Massey and Denton, 1993; Nast, 2000). While the adjacent industrial and manufacturing sectors served as the main source of employment for those living in the Black Belt, the institutional encasement of the South Side gave rise to a social division of labour that provided some measure of class diversity within the Black Belt, producing an idiomatic cultural and political milieu across these neighbourhoods (see Drake and Cayton, 1993 for a more detailed account of these everyday realities). For Wacquant (2001), the Black Belt of this era was akin to a kind of communal ghetto that insulated its residents from the discrimination they encountered beyond its boundaries even as they were sequestered to function as a supply of exploited labour for the nearby manufacturing sector.

The early 1970s were a turning point in these patterns of segregation. Amidst the civil unrest of this period, riots sparked by the Democratic National Convention in 1968 and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X had disastrous effects on the physical and economic infrastructure of the inner city (Hirsch, 1998). Faced with urban unrest and the demands of unionized labour, many businesses in the industrial sector relocated their operations to suburban and overseas locations, often with the promise of tax benefits and non-unionized labour, where businesses were free of the spectre of black criminality and disorder that had become the prevailing public image of the American inner city. With the departure of the city’s industrial sector, the Black Belt lost the principal source of work for its residents, once again reconstituting black geographies in terms of racial place annihilation (McKittrick, 2011). As middle class residents fled the South Side for safer black suburban neighbourhoods, the remaining population of the Black Belt faced inflated rates of unemployment; by 2000, twenty per cent of North Lawndale residents were unemployed, while half were on some form of public aid (Wacquant, 2008). In the absence of other opportunities, informal, typically illicit economies of drugs, sex, and violence proliferated in these spaces, often under the direction of street gangs (Venkatesh, 2009). While public housing complexes became notorious as zones of unrelenting crime and disorder, sociologists have shown how these spaces evolved their own social and economic orders that mitigated and, in some instances, magnified their economic and legal insecurity (Hunt, 2009; Levitt and Venkatesh, 2000). In the mid-1990s, the growing antipathy for the welfare state prompted a sea change in the national ethos of public housing away from vast agglomerations of residents in inner city high rise complexes to mixed-income housing distributed across the city.

In the wake of the city’s deindustrialization, retail and finance capital eventually supplanted manufacturing as its source of economic vitality (Sassen, 2001). After decades of public avoidance and institutional neglect, the city centre of Chicago acquired renewed importance in these new urban economies, distinguishing its economic future from other cities in the Midwest that have experienced different forms of urbicide (McKittrick, 2011). The gradual inflation of real estate prices in areas near the city’s downtown pressed minority populations to move to neighbourhoods in the South and Southwest peripheries of Chicago (Hagedorn, 2008). On the North and West sides of the city, neighbourhoods inhabited by Latino and African American populations became artistic enclaves, which, in turn, paved the way for the more intensive economic and political transformations of these areas (Lloyd, 2006). Through these processes of gentrification, Chicago has undergone an extensive demographic inversion since the 1960s as abjected black and Latino populations have been pushed to the suburbs while white capital reclaims the city centre from the inchoate threat of crime (Hagedorn, 2008).

Amidst the urban restructuring of the city, the enduring association of inner city spaces with blackness, crime, and danger has engendered landscapes of intensive surveillance and insecurity at the fault lines of gentrification. CCTV cameras, private security guards, and other technologies of crime control have been mobilized to create, maintain, and extend the spatial and moral boundaries of the neighbourhood. These assemblages of surveillance (re)situate black and Latino bodies in racial relations of force, observation, and displacement (Hagedorn, 2008; Herbert and Brown, 2006). The public realms of gentrifying neighbourhoods now serve as mediums of political concerns, fears, and anxieties about crime, which are projected onto a variety of people, places, and objects.

Situated amidst more economically prosperous and racially uniform neighbourhoods, Uptown has experienced a recent influx of retail and real estate capital, especially from prospective homeowners in search of affordable property (Rai, 2011). The ongoing gentrification of the neighbourhood has been slowed by the continued presence of a sizeable social service sector that caters to a predominantly African American and Latino clientele, exaggerating tensions between the putatively ‘liberal’ political establishment of the neighbourhood and property owners concerned about its safety and economic vitality. It was in this context that one area resident started a weblog where concerned neighbours are able to circulate information about matters related to neighbourhood safety.

Black bodies and broken windows: the visual field of gentrification

Since the creation of Uptown Update in 2007, its readers have produced and shared a variety of photographs that feature signs of urban blight and decay, which are visible against the built environment of the area. Although black bodies are often the focal points of these images, many others centre on inanimate objects that are thought to signal the presence of crime in the area. Between 2007 and 2010, the blog featured at least 24 photos of litter and dumpsters overflowing with refuse, more than 49 photos of vacant storefronts and unkempt properties, and at least 63 images of graffiti tags on street signs and buildings around the neighbourhood. For most readers of the blog, the objects pictured in each of these photographs have acquired multiple semantic associations as their presence conjures a series of phantasmic images and scenarios of urban danger. On the one hand, these objects are perceived as traces of some past criminal or indecent behaviour: abandoned shopping carts indicate the theft of private property, dumpsters overloaded with garbage signify the neglectful behaviour of property owners, and graffiti tags index the willful destruction of private property as well as the presence of gangs in the neighbourhood (as is indicated by captions like ‘thugs leave their mark on Silvia Center’ and ‘gang initiation has begun’). Yet, to these readers, each of the objects pictured also signals the future criminality that threatens to overwhelm the neighbourhood should their presence remain ignored, reflecting an ontology of urban danger popularized by the broken windows theory of policing.

Broken windows theory was first formulated by the social scientists James Q Wilson and George Kelling (1982) to advance a new method of maintaining legal order in city neighbourhoods given the uneven distribution of crime across contemporary urban landscapes. Fundamental to this new mode of urban governance was the idea that police officers and neighbourhood residents must vigilantly react to and displace seemingly minor signs of disorder or risk having their area overwhelmed by more serious forms of criminal activity. Like theories of environmental criminology and situational crime prevention, broken windows posits that a neighbourhood’s built environment communicates messages to its inhabitants about the area’s vulnerability to crime (Herbert and Brown, 2006). According to these logics, the persistence of objects like those pictured on the blog suggests that a neighbourhood has accepted a certain measure of disorder and incivility in its midst, attracting more serious crime to the area (Wilson and Kelling, 1982). Often credited with reducing rates of crime in New York City in the mid-1990s, the tactics of broken windows policing have been lauded and deployed by police departments, private security companies, and neighbourhood watch groups across the United States, even as social scientists dispute the validity of its methods of explanation and intervention (Kemple and Huey, 2005; Valverde, 2006).

On Uptown Update, the logics of broken windows policing often mediate the intelligibility of objects that were photographed and circulated by readers. Readers even refer explicitly to ‘broken windows’ theory in some of their posts, particularly in the wake of the local Alderwoman’s public opposition to its tactics on the grounds that they often work to the exclusion of more vulnerable populations. In response, one reader submitted an image of a broken window at the Alderwoman’s office with the caption, ‘we don’t wish harm or victimization on anyone, particularly our neighbours, but it is rather ironic that someone who opposes the theory of “Broken Windows” has suffered so many instances of her office windows being broken’ (Uptown Update Reader, 2008). More generally, readers often engage photographed objects as physical traces of the ‘outsiders’ whose presence in the area poses a threat to its legal order. While Wilson and Kelling (1982) differentiate the neighbourhood ‘outsider’ in abstract, depoliticized terms, the sociospatial imaginary they mobilize assumes that residents can visually distinguish between those who belong in a given neighbourhood and those who do not (Herbert and Brown, 2006).

Insofar as these tactics of crime prevention have been deployed amidst growing anxiety about the instability of enduring geographies of race, neighbourhood groups on Chicago’s North Side typically treat the sight of blackness as a symptom of danger, signifying a person whose presence demands a territorial response. In this discursive context, the objects pictured on the blog also signify the presence of blackness in the area, especially as spectral memories of white flight configure these objects as harbingers of the area’s racial future as well. For instance, on a blog thread about an image of a shattered car window, which featured the caption ‘Broken Windows: Not just a theory anymore’, one reader even postulated that these signs of blight and disorder were part of a calculated plot to initiate white flight, writing that ‘the break-ins, shootings and other assorted mayhem is “block-busting” to get the upper classes to move out of Uptown. The busters want to make [money] buying “distressed” property and selling higher’ (Uptown Update Reader, 2010D). As with this comment, these modes of identification project layered temporalities of danger onto the urban landscapes of the neighbourhood, insinuating that the present is pregnant with dystopic possibilities unless legal and community action is taken to guard against signs of blackness. In the next section of this article, I will revisit the particular sociospatial processes of subject formation that are forged in the face of this concern with the apparent instability of racial geographies of crime.

Once these photographs are uploaded to Uptown Update, they often become catalysts for campaigns to rid public spaces around the neighbourhood of any signs of urban decay. The captions that accompany these photographs often speak of actions taken by readers to clean up blighted areas. When readers are unable to directly address these problems themselves, they often call non-emergency services (‘311’) to clean graffiti off of residential buildings or issue fines to property owners who do not comply with civic sanitation regulations. User-generated photographs of graffiti even featured captions like ‘Call to Action: Dial 311 for Tag Removal’, and ‘Taggers out in full force, call 311’. A variety of retail actors are also enlisted in these practices of identification, either at the urging of concerned neighbours or because of their concern about the economic prosperity of the area. After one reader circulated a photograph of a shopping cart parked on the sidewalk, where it had been secured to a tree, another reader responded that, ‘anyone who sees [this shopping cart] should call 311. Next time I eat at Jimmy John’s I’m going to tell them about it and ask that they should call too’ (Uptown Update Reader, 2007). Because Jimmy John’s employees are optimally positioned to observe and report visible changes to the surrounding urban landscape, this blog reader engaged them as strategic allies against the encroachment of urban blight in their neighbourhood. Insofar as the pictured objects function as the pivots of these networks of surveillance, they command a racial force that is irreducible to their semantic or ideological association with black bodies. That is, in these relations of identification, graffiti, litter and other broken windows not only function as racial objects because of the meanings they signify to readers but also because of the practices of territorial displacement and exclusion in which they are enfolded.

As I mentioned above, the blog’s readers also take and share photographs that purport to show black people engaged in various criminal and criminogenic behaviours. Between 2007 and 2010, more than 80 user-generated photos of black bodies were uploaded to the blog, including images of black men and women gathered in front of commercial storefronts, older black men resting on benches and sleeping in ATM drive-throughs and vestibules, as well as young black men in parking lots and street corners around the neighbourhood. Readers rarely make explicit reference to the blackness of the people pictured, providing them with a certain measure of plausible deniability in the rare instances when concerns are raised about racial profiling (concerns that are typically projected onto ‘trolls’). Like other ‘post racial’ or ‘color blind’ modalities of racism (Goldberg, 2009), these modes of identification materialize racial relations of force without invoking its usual phenotypical and biological referents; instead, these images mobilize a self-evident visual grammar for the reader that associates the stasis of black bodies in public spaces with the potential for crime, danger, and violence. The vast majority of these images do not show criminal activity as it is occurring; in each image, the apparent incivility of the black people pictured signals the probability of their past or eventual criminality. Just as the persistence of certain objects is now a measure of the neighbourhood’s tolerance of crime and incivility, the continued presence of black people in public spaces has become a symptom of a neighbourhood’s eroding legal order. In these textual exchanges, the logics of broken windows theory are extrapolated to explain the continued public presence of black bodies, such that a neighbourhood demonstrates its health and vitality by remaining vigilant against the incursion of blackness into its midst. Through these practices of identification, black bodies are afforded the same ontological standing in the neighbourhood as inanimate objects, as their fabricated objecthood allows readers to assume their inevitable contribution to neighbourhood disorder.

These practices of racialization have a long history in American cities, where they have functioned as a technology of sociospatial segregation since the post-slavery geographies of movement and displacement brought African American populations to the industrial north in unprecedented numbers (Drake and Cayton, 1993; Wacquant, 2008). With the neoliberal restructuring of these urban spaces, racial modes of identification have acquired new epistemic and juridical forms that enfold black bodies in carceral geographies of surveillance and containment, which affect a sense of ‘placelessness’ amongst black populations (McKittrick, 2011; Shabazz, 2009). In 1992, the City of Chicago passed a law known as the ‘the Anti-Gang Ordinance’ that empowered police to displace any group of people that ‘remains in any place with no apparent purpose’ (as cited in Levi, 2009: 132). Like quality of life measures introduced across the US, the Anti-Gang Ordinance augmented the legal powers of police to help create a new moral and aesthetic order in restructuring urban spaces (Levi, 2009). However, whereas quality of life measures target specific behaviours, the ambiguous wording of the Anti-Gang Ordinance afforded police the discretion to decide what constitutes ‘purposive’ behaviour (Roberts, 1999). Because of this ambiguity, the United States Supreme Court declared the ordinance unconstitutional in 1999. In its majority ruling, the Court even notes that it was curious that legislators targeted ‘unpurposive behavior’, given that gangs usually inhabit public spaces to effect specific ends, ‘either by an apparent purpose to publicize the gang’s dominance of a given territory, thereby intimidating non-members, or by an equally apparent purpose to conceal ongoing commerce in illegal activities’ (City of Chicago v Morales, 1999: 34). Before the Court’s ruling, police used the ordinance to issue more than 40,000 orders of dispersal and arrest, the majority of which targeted the city’s black and Latino residents (Roberts, 1999). For Dorothy Roberts, the creation of this ordinance is indicative of the ‘racialized division of Americans into the presumptively lawless whose liberties deserve little protection and the presumptively law-abiding who are entitled to rule over them’ (1999: 779–780). Beyond these legal ramifications, the ordinance helped produce the racial conditions of intelligibility to engage the public presence of black and Latino bodies as a source of juridical instability, one that demands the attention of police and concerned neighbours alike.

That area residents take photographs of blighted bodies and objects during their everyday movements through the neighbourhood is suggestive of their participation in growing networks of surveillance that govern gentrifying urban spaces (Kemple and Huey, 2005; Zukin, 1995). Neighbourhoods on the frontlines of these restructuring urban geographies have been blanketed with security cameras and other technologies of surveillance that are intended to cultivate feelings of safety and security amongst the new urban gentry (Hagedorn, 2008). The proliferation of handheld photographic technologies, particularly digital cell phone cameras, facilitates the inclusion of concerned neighbours into these networks of electronic surveillance, which consolidate the governing capacities of otherwise distinct autonomous agents of surveillance distributed across the city. Haggerty and Ericson (2000) gesture to the new, sophisticated practices of ‘dataveillance’ that are facilitated by these coordinated networks or ‘assemblages’ of surveillance. In the gentrifying neighbourhood of Uptown, assemblages of neighbours, legal authorities and digital technologies coordinate the more intensive racial governance of urban space(s). In so doing, these public assemblages of actors and technologies ultimately multiply the planes of sight, through which black bodies are visible to agents and institutions of law. Insofar as these networks of surveillance affect the racial identification of danger, they extend the racial force of law across the city, prying open its infinitesimal spaces to the juridical gaze(s) of these actors. Under these circumstances, the technologically-mediated bodies of concerned neighbours become mechanisms of the carceral geographies of dispersal and containment that have reconstituted the life circumstances of black populations (Gilmore, 2002; Shabazz, 2009).

These racial relations of identification also materialize through the distinctive temporality of the textual exchanges and engagements that are facilitated by the blog. On average, the blog publishes three updates a day, and each of these posts usually generates a series of comments within twelve hours of the time of its original publication, especially if it features an image of blighted objects and bodies. Because of the abbreviated punctuality of the blog’s exchanges, the texts circulated through it command a specific, political interpellative force. According to Michael Warner (2002), a public’s capacity to organize and mobilize itself is directly connected to the temporality and regularity of its discursive engagements. With regard to Uptown Update, the frequency with which photographs and other texts are uploaded to the blog ensures that the topical concerns of these publics are returned to the attention of its readers, regenerating the discursive and affective conditions of their commonality.

As the spectators of these photographs, readers of Uptown Update are confronted with images of black bodies and objects that saturate the visual field of their neighbourhood. In these photographs, images of urban blight and danger are preserved indefinitely, regardless of how long a body or object remained in the space where it was pictured. Consequently, these textual engagements extend the duration of associations between black bodies and the spaces where they are pictured in photographs. In this regard, contrary to the prevailing notion that practices of surveillance help assuage feeling of insecurity, the racial modes of identification they engender actually amplify feelings of fear, anxiety, and paranoia as they circulate scenarios of danger and depravity across the mediated fabric of the city.

Public interventions and the preservation of property

In August 2009, a resident of Uptown filmed a night-time brawl that erupted between two groups of youth on one of the neighbourhood’s residential streets. Filmed from the vantage point of a third story condominium, the clip resembles many of the images and videos that are uploaded to Uptown Update insofar as it shows black bodies from inside the homes of concerned neighbours and property owners, making tangible the relations of social and physical distance that differentiate the concerned neighbours from the people that are seen inhabiting the street. After the video circulated through local news media and neighbourhood blogs, including Uptown Update, area residents organized a series of ‘positive loitering’ events at the street corner where the fight occurred, practicing a mode of community policing that, by most accounts, originated in Chicago (Rai, 2011). At positive loitering events, neighbours gather in public spaces to displace the presence of those who use the space for criminal or other disorderly activity, deterring crime by modelling the kinds of lawful activity they want to occur there. That positive loitering recurs at the site where the brawl took place suggests that these events evoke and virtualize the violence they intend to displace and expel. Insofar as the video of the fight circulates alongside the photos of racial bodies and objects discussed in the last section, it lends blackness a certain measure of spectrality, once again ensuring its phantasmatic presence exceeds the physical or material presence of the bodies pictured there.

On the North Side of Chicago, neighbourhood groups have innovated their own distinctive modes of positive loitering that model different kinds of civility in public space. In Edgewater, the Chicago Community Area immediately north of Uptown, positive loitering events resemble block parties, at which neighbours play board games, grill food, and consume children’s entertainment. ‘Instead of trying to deter negative activity through fear and pressure’, one of the event organizers explained, ‘we’re trying to do it simply by filling that space with positive activity. It’s a more community-creating than community-dividing approach’ (as cited in Malooley, 2009). In Uptown, positive loitering events abide by a more divisive ethos as neighbours purposefully occupy public space with the express intent of deterring others who inhabit the space for illegal purposes. Following the circulation of the video of the night-time fight, concerned residents organized a series of positive loitering events at the corner closest to the site of the fracas. There the positive loiterers gathered, with cell phones in hand, for two hours every Friday night until the onset of winter, often with signs that read, ‘WE LIVE HERE. WE CALL POLICE’. According to one participant in these events, ‘when we’re here, people sitting there get up and leave. We’re saying, “We’re in your face. We’re in your space. You don’t belong here. You have no right to be here”’ (as cited in Malooley, 2009). While these forms of positive loitering have manifestly different rationales, both are regarded as ‘positive’ insofar as they oppose the negativity ascribed to black bodies, which acquired specific semantic and material valences as residents acted on their public presence around the neighbourhood.

In her ethnographic account of positive loitering in Uptown, Candice Rai (2011) distances her economic analysis of these tactics of crime prevention from Herbert and Brown’s (2006) conclusion that both broken windows and situational crime prevention theories materialize a racial imaginary of crime. ‘While it is critically important to remember the fact that race and class inequity map onto each other quite starkly in Chicago,’ Rai explains,

I would argue Herbert and Brown’s focus on racism risks obscuring the systemic economic conditions underscoring the tensions in Uptown and is in danger of characterizing activists like the positive loiterers as racist or strictly concerned with property market values. (2011: 84)

Here, Rai mistakes an analysis of the racial logics and practices that animate processes of gentrification for moral judgments about the individual failings of the participants in this practice of neighbourhood watch. Although classed concerns about property value shape how these tactics of crime control are mobilized, these groups of concerned neighbours are reconstituting the bounds of urban spaces as they ascribe blackness a negative valence in determinations of property value and local economic vitality, illuminating the effects of what George Lipsitz describes as a distinctly ‘white spatial imaginary’. Across American cities, this white spatial imaginary has remade urban landscapes according to the values of homogeneity and exclusivity in order to augment the exchange value of particular properties and neighbourhoods. Under these circumstances, contract law, deed restrictions, and other legal technologies of real estate have served as mechanisms through which black bodies and places are subject to surveillance and dispersal (Lipsitz, 2007).

Positive loitering and participation on Uptown Update facilitate these spatial transformations as responsible property ownership is configured as a necessary condition of neighbourliness. For instance, in a blog post about the recurrence of fights on streets around the neighbourhood, one reader remarked that, ‘for some reason, the gangs believe they have the [right] to commit mayhem over “turf”, even though they don’t own an inch of it and their names appear nowhere except in their scrawled tags on other’s property’ (Uptown Update Reader, 2009). Here, property ownership is explicitly invoked as the principal criteria of belonging and inclusion in the neighbourhood, likening graffiti to a perversion of proprietary claims to space. Yet, in these relations, the subject position of ‘neighbour’ is reserved for those who demonstrate responsible property ownership by vigilantly guarding against racial signs of danger. In October 2010, the City of Chicago formalized this form of responsibility when it passed an ordinance to hold property owners accountable for ‘chronic illegal activity’ that occurs on or within a certain distance of their property. To be deemed in violation of this ordinance, a property must be the subject of three or more separate requests for police service within ninety days. Should a property violate the ordinance its owners are made legally responsible for implementing a nuisance abatement plan, which may require them to employ security personnel, provide more extensive sanitation services, or install security cameras and new lighting in designated common areas. Each of these tactics of crime prevention forces property owners to eliminate the opportunities for crime through alterations to the built environment of their property, once again gesturing to the epistemic force of environmental criminology in public understandings of crime.

Under the terms of the ordinance, property owners are also responsible for watching public spaces that are close to their property, specifically ‘within one city block or one thousand feet of the premises’ (Daley, 2010). With this stipulation, property owners are legally enjoined to participate in the juridical surveillance of public space and the racial identification of danger this requires. Insofar as the ordinance makes the governance of public space the responsibility of private citizens, it resembles other laws and institutional practices that have facilitated the gradual privatization of public space (Mitchell, 1995). In describing the value of this ordinance, then Mayor Richard M. Daley explains that,

a small percentage of property owners habitually allow their property to be used for illegal activity or fail to take reasonable steps to prevent chronic illegal activity from occurring on their premises, which affects the quality of life for neighbours, decreases the value of surrounding properties and places an undue burden on the City’s police and emergency service resources. (Daley, 2010: emphasis added)

For Daley, the conduct of irresponsible property owners is a problem of law insofar as the failure to remain vigilant against crime imperils the economic vitality of urban neighbourhoods. In acting to preserve ‘the quality of life for neighbours’, the legal apparatus of the city has addressed the potential immorality of property owners as a source of juridical instability, as any disassociation from their responsibilities as property owners is thought to allow crime to move across the racial geographies of the city.

In Uptown, a group of concerned neighbours utilized these logics of crime control following the shooting of gang member Aaron Carter, which was discussed in the introduction, when they organized a petition of the owners of a mini-mall down the street from where the shooting occurred. According to the petitioners, who exceeded 600 in number, the owners’ failure to properly manage their property had led to ‘the loitering, gang activity and drug dealing that occurs daily on the property’, which are identified as catalysts for Carter’s shooting (Uptown Residents and Citizens, 2010 as cited in Uptown Update, 2010). In signing the virtual petition, many of the petitioners also addressed pleas to the property owners, imploring them to ‘quit harbouring criminals’; to ‘please show your property some respect’; and to ‘please be good neighbours and help make your property safe!’ For these readers and neighbourhood actors, inaction in the face of urban danger, which is projected onto the bodies of young black men, contravenes the collective obligations that qualify area residents as ‘good neighbours’. In the weeks after the petition was first formulated, readers of Uptown Update occasionally circulated information about how well the property owners were complying with the demands of the petition, however vaguely those demands were articulated. Although readers initially noted improvements to the security of the property, including the presence of a security guard during the operating hours of the mall’s businesses, readers eventually complained that (black) youth were once again loitering around the mini-mall. By the logics of these practices, ‘neighbourliness’ necessitates the responsible and vigilant supervision of the space within and immediately beyond one’s property, ideas that are embedded in the legal armature of the city as well as the political practices of its residents.

Conclusion: race and the aesthetics of urban danger

In Camera Lucida, Barthes (1988) formulates a typology of emotions or intentions that are a function of people’s relation to the photograph: (1) the intention of ‘doing’ the photograph, which is specific to the camera operator, (2) the emotion felt by the spectator ‘looking’ at the photograph, and (3) the experience of ‘undergoing’ the photograph, which is experienced by the target of the camera. In the practices of textual exchange documented in this article, race differentiates how people are positioned in the relations of visibility that constitute the public realm of this gentrifying neighbourhood. Insofar as these positions correspond to the photographic typology posited by Barthes, they determine which actors are entitled to observe and act on the sight of urban danger and whose bodies and behaviours are the loci of legal intervention. Whereas black bodies and objects figure as the ‘target’ or ‘referent’ of these photographs, concerned neighbours and property owners engage each other as the authors and spectators of these images. For Barthes, the ‘targets’ or ‘referents’ of these photographs can be likened to a simulacrum, that is, ‘any eidolon emitted by the object, which I would like to call the Spectrum of the Photograph, because this word retains, through its root, a relation to “spectacle” and adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead’ (1988: 9). In these terms, the black bodies visible in the blog’s photographs can be understood as figments of a spectacle that command the readers’ attention as well as a kind of spectre that remains and disturbs the neighbourhood well beyond the duration of their physical presence there (see Biber, 2007 for a more extensive analysis of race and crime photography).

In this article I have detailed the practices of textual exchange and legal intervention that are animated by this spectral presence of blackness in the virtual and material spaces of the neighbourhood, contributing to the new aesthetic of danger and (in)security that has reconstituted post-industrial urban spaces. To date, sociologists and geographers have primarily documented how this aesthetic has manifested in securitized built environments that magnify processes of racial exclusion and displacement (Davis, 2006; Hagedorn, 2008; Herbert and Brown, 2006; Zukin, 1995). This article shows how racial modes of identification are actually generative of the public realm of these urban spaces, engendering the discursive logics, modes of perception, and emotional registers that form this aesthetic of danger. Of course, the practices of textual production and circulation centred on Uptown Update aspired to reflect and document the threat of crime and danger as it actually exists in public spaces; yet, as I explain above, the modes of perception these texts generate exaggerate the extent and proximity of crime, ensuring that feelings of concern, anxiety, and insecurity mediate residents’ experiences of their neighbourhood. These practices of textual circulation function as yet another vehicle for what Nast describes as ‘a historicizing “unconscious” imaginary-symbolic stories scripting black life and place as threats to white life itself, covering over and repressing fears forged out of a long history of sociospatial repression of black bodies, places, and life’ (2000: 232).

Amidst the proliferation of these concerns about crime, law has become a pivot of public engagement for the different, otherwise ‘private’ actors who inhabit restructuring urban spaces. Under these conditions, the neighbourly relations of the public sphere have become a proxy and extension of legal apparatuses of surveillance and displacements, especially as the vigilant, almost paranoid identification of crime and danger is tied to the economic vitality and legal security of the neighbourhood. As readers are enlisted in these practices of textual exchange, they become enfolded in processes of subject formation that are marked by racial geographies of surveillance, dispersal, and containment. While much attention has been paid to the role that class and capital have played in processes of urban restructuring, this research illustrates how racial modes of identification, which are related but irreducible to these economic processes, play a crucial role in circumscribing the publicity of urban spaces. In this context, the collective political engagements of ‘neighbours’, ‘property owners’, and ‘business managers’ work to extend the racial force of law across urban spaces as they dictate whose bodies are the objects of observation, surveillance, and displacement and who gets to act as the agents of this juridical mobilization.