Rhythms of gentrification: eventfulness and slow violence in a happening neighbourhood

Introduction

Jo and I cross the street towards a fenced-off vacant lot on Dundas Street West. A black wooden monolith rises 20 feet into the sky with the letters DU/KE positioned near the top, signalling that this lot will soon be the site of a new condo development, cleverly named for its location near Dundas and Keele Street. Today, the site is not really vacant. We pay a $2 entry fee and wander into the Junction Flea, a monthly market with a lot of buzz. It’s July in Toronto and it’s hot, at least 30 Celsius and humid. The air shimmers; there’s no shade to be found. Merging into the crowd, we meander from vendor to vendor: vintage scarves, craft beer, handmade organic popsicles, old jewellery, mid-century furniture, dishes from the 1970s, and vintage portrait takers. We buy some buttons and scarves, take pictures, chat with a few friends, and eventually admit defeat to the high sun and high prices. We head west in search of ice cream. ¹

In the summer of 2013, I returned to my old neighbourhood, the Junction in west Toronto, to spend time sitting in on community meetings, talking to people who were organizing events like the Flea and attending a variety of local happenings. Sometime over the last 10 years or so, the Junction had become a place where things happened – or at least, a place where things that were worth noticing happened. Once seen as a place ‘stuck in 1974’ ² due to its history as a railroad hub and its lingering industrial sites in a city that is decidedly post-industrial, gentrification has transformed the Junction from a place where ‘nothing’ happens to one punctuated and even defined by events and eventfulness. Struck by the variety, frequency and regularity of these events, I wondered how they were produced and by whom, as well as how they might be altering the social space of the neighbourhood. As I investigated the activities of a cohort of interconnected neighbourhood organizations, I was intrigued not only by the new spatial landscapes but also by the new temporalities that were produced and performed. While spatial transformations have been well documented in the gentrification literature, temporality has rarely been foregrounded. ³ In this article, I consider the use of temporal power in remaking a neighbourhood. Specifically, I explore how social space has been altered by privileging new rhythms and timespaces of everyday life. As these assemble around a simulacrum of urban authenticity, exclusionary social spaces are produced through what I will call temporal displacement.

The shared spaces of neighbourhood life are important sites for investigating the effects of gentrification, especially displacement or displacement pressure. ⁴ Displacement may include outright evictions from shared space or symbolic exclusion from a sense of place or belonging. Mazer and Rankin ⁵ suggest that focusing on social space ‘exposes nuanced exercises of power and the marking of territory and difference that happen, almost invisibly, in daily life’. Zukin ⁶ notes that alternative consumption spaces, such as farmers markets, not only help create the conditions for gentrification, they require and promote particular forms of cultural capital and socialization techniques within an aesthetic code that favours White, middle class, young residents. These and many other studies point to the importance of the shared lived space of neighbourhoods in constructing geographies of inclusion and exclusion. This article extends this scholarship by paying attention to the new temporal landscapes of everyday neighbourhood life that are interwoven with the changing nature of social space in a gentrifying community.

These temporal landscapes in the Junction seem designed to bring to life an imagined authentic urban lifestyle, and its production requires the exercise of temporal power by neighbourhood organizations. Authenticity is, of course, a socio-cultural construction, one that reflects the values and power structures of those who get to decide what is, and is not, authentic. ⁷ The restructuring of neighbourhood rhythms around consumption-oriented and place-making events that recreate a particular version of ‘authentic’ urban street life requires participants to have the material means to synchronize some aspects of their everyday lives to the rhythm of eventfulness and to desire to enact a kind of ‘time travel’ to a simulacrum of a past urban timespace materialized through aesthetic tropes and performative practices coded as ‘vintage’. I argue that the reorganization of neighbourhood social life through the creation and privileging of specific temporal landscapes is itself a means of excluding, marginalizing or rendering invisible certain community members and their needs. The inability of some to participate in the new temporalities of the neighbourhood becomes a barrier to recognition, belonging and representation, one that both hides and enables the ‘slow violence’ ⁸ of gentrification.

In this article, I briefly survey the gentrification literatures that explore public social spaces and modes of exclusion. I then bring a temporal lens to this scholarship by drawing on work on geographies of temporality and rhythm, as well as the work of cultural theorists who address eventfulness, recognition and slow violence. I explore the data – drawn from participant observation in the neighbourhood and analysis of archival materials – through the two major themes of rhythmic eventfulness and the performance of a ‘vintage’ timespace to argue that as new temporal landscapes become dominant, subtle and indeed uneventful moments of exclusion fall out of sight as they are rendered out of time.

Producing the social space of gentrification

Gentrification is widely understood as a structural process tied into cycles of uneven development and capital accumulation in the city, especially as real estate markets become primary sites for capital investment in a post-industrial age. ⁹ It has been recognized as a major force reshaping residential, retail and commercial urban landscapes through redevelopment and the displacement of previous residents and land uses. In this way, gentrification can be described as a place-taking process, but it is also a place-making process in that new kinds of lived spaces are produced. ¹⁰ Mazer and Rankin ¹¹ offer a helpful definition of social space:

Social space, in our formulation, encompasses both the material amenities associated with particular places in the public domain (goods and services provided by retailers, housing, social services) and the social, symbolic, and affective dynamics that are also constitutive of those places (the collective use values, feelings of security or insecurity, processes of inclusion and exclusion, symbols of neighbourhood identity). As such, social space is experienced differently depending on one’s social location, e.g., as middle-class homeowner, commercial tenant, rooming-house tenant.

These lived spaces are shaped by material practices such as evictions, rent increases, changes in retail offerings, residential renovations and so on. ¹² They are shaped as well by representational strategies that work to create different identities and new symbolic boundaries signifying belonging and exclusion. ¹³ A wide variety of actors and structural forces have been identified as agents in these changes, including legislators, real estate agents and developers, homeowners, business owners, foreign investors, municipal governments, growth coalitions and cultural organizations.

The literature on social space in the context of gentrification addresses both public spaces such as parks, streets and squares, and quasi-public consumption spaces such as shops, restaurants and cafés. While cost-based exclusion is a major factor limiting access, there are also more subtle forms of exclusion that, despite being less ‘material’, that is, money based, still materialize in bodies and practices as place meanings are altered. Public spaces function as zones of contact and conflict, with multiple groups seeking to impose formal and informal regulatory norms that often implicitly mirror racial or cultural divides. ¹⁴ Trouille’s and Langegger’s ¹⁵ studies of parks in West Los Angeles and Denver, respectively, illustrate how changes to the structure and regulation of parks function to indirectly exclude Latino park users by fundamentally altering the daily lived space of the park in ways that are antithetical to Latino cultural norms. Others have explored exclusion in and among new gentrifier consumption spaces. ¹⁶ Sullivan and Shaw’s ¹⁷ research on gentrification in a historically Black neighbourhood of Portland found that new retail spaces were often perceived by Black residents as unwelcoming or hostile based on the symbolic language and aesthetic codes employed within. Slocum’s ¹⁸ work on race, embodiment and urban farmers markets details the complex ways in which differently racialized groups negotiate these spaces (and one another). Sometimes opportunities for connection are opened up, but sometimes persistent racial and class divides are reproduced in space and time.

These examples emphasize the importance of symbolic, everyday and practice-oriented changes to neighbourhood spaces in producing a sense of displacement or dispossession for some community members while simultaneously attaching a dominant or newcomer group’s meanings and norms to everyday life. As Shaw and Hagemans ¹⁹ note, social spaces are particularly significant sites to look at since not all low-income or long-time residents are displaced from their homes during gentrification, but their sense of place may be deeply affected. Changes in the aesthetic and performative codes of neighbourhood places affect some peoples’ abilities to participate in everyday life or mark them as ‘other’ and not belonging. This is a form of displacement in the sense that ‘people can be displaced – unable to (re)construct place – without spatial dislocation [. . .] as place-making activities are altered, commodified and/or destroyed by gentrification processes’. ²⁰

Connecting temporality and gentrification

Geography’s attention to time has often been more implicit than explicit, ²¹ but it is fair to say that in the four and a half decades since Hägerstrand ²² first published his work on space-time paths, multiple yet interconnected theoretical and empirical trajectories related to temporality have emerged in the discipline. Building on the early time-geography studies pioneered by Hägerstrand, Pred and others, ²³ geographers have explored the phenomenological and aesthetic dimensions of the relationship between time and place, ²⁴ engaged deeply with Lefebvre’s concept of rhythmanalysis and the structure of everyday life ²⁵ and worked with notions such as timespace to ‘acknowledge the extent to which time is irrevocably bound up with the spatial constitution of society (and vice versa)’. ²⁶ While not the only spatial realm to be engaged here, the urban has figured prominently as a site, scale and way of life wherein ‘multiple temporalities collide’ ²⁷ and produce a complex polychronic world.

I am especially interested in those investigations attentive to power in relation to time and place and to the two interrelated modes of temporal power that I see operating in my case study. The first is related to rhythm, relevant here in the context of the newly constructed eventfulness of the Junction. The second is related to the aesthetic and phenomenological experience of a timespace as it is constructed through the performance of a vintage, authentic urban street life. In this article, I use the term timespace to denote a place where multiple temporalities coexist and co-constitute one another (e.g. the present and a simulacrum of the past) and to highlight the ways in which practices and performances work to constitute temporal landscapes. Operating together, I suggest that an eventful rhythm and a vintage timespace work to create a new temporal landscape for the Junction that has material effects in terms of the exclusionary dynamics that are set in motion.

Rhythm is one dimension of the complexity of temporal patterning described by Adam ²⁸ as including tempo, timing, duration and sequence, as well as rhythm. Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis ²⁹ has provided rich material for geographers seeking to understand everyday life, especially in cities, within the context of advanced capitalism. Concerned with the ways that the demands of industrial capitalism impose increasingly standardized linear rhythms on top of and in competition with ‘natural’ human and environmental cyclical rhythms, Lefebvre posits that everyday life and even human embodiment are restructured to promote synchronicity with the rhythms of capital accumulation. Powerful groups and systems imprint rhythms upon place that shape normative rules about various behaviours, practices and identities. However, Lefebvre argues that there is no repetition without difference, and thus, something new and unforeseen may be introduced into standardized rhythms.

Two collections on the geographies of rhythm position rhythms as essential to the construction of place. While Mels’ ³⁰ collection represents a more explicitly humanistic and phenomenological approach to identity and sense of place, Edensor’s ³¹ collection is more concerned with the rhythmic regulation of social life. Both approaches offer insights into the ways in which places and landscapes become recognizable and shared entities through the stabilization and routinization of social, economic, mechanical, environmental and embodied rhythms. Rhythm seems a particularly useful lens for thinking about the patterning and organization of urban social life, as temporal structures and processes ‘(re)produce connections between individuals and the social’. ³² Rhythms code (and are encoded in) normative everyday practices; they become part of the ‘backdrop against which the usual and unusual unfold’. ³³

These rhythmic elements of everyday life are weighted with power precisely because they are so commonplace as to be unremarkable or beyond critique, but it is useful to examine how powerful groups imprint their own temporalities, especially in the context of gentrification. A common example of this is urban rhythms being set up to coincide with consumption in order to maximize commercial interests. Degen’s ³⁴ examination of changing rhythms in a gentrifying neighbourhood of Barcelona suggests that gentrification imposes a rhythmic and sensory uniformity, one which ‘makes recognizable environments for tourists, [with] self-consciously designed spaces that produce familiar sensations and draw on common cultural capital’. Kärrholm ³⁵ connects temporal control to territorialization as shopping rhythms interpolate with and transform existing city rhythms. Clark ³⁶ engages a more abstract rhythmanalysis to understand the application of capital to different kinds of land rent and the development and closure of rent gaps, illustrating a deep polyrhythmic ‘dance’ underlying gentrification dynamics. In my project, the power of neighbourhood organizations to imprint rhythms through the production of events highlights the importance of rhythm in thinking about temporal power.

These events are not only powerful in their inscription of new rhythms; they are also constitutive of a timespace that is organized around the aesthetic coding and performative practices of a vintage authentic street life. As part of the aesthetic and phenomenological experience of place, timespace is critical in the construction of sense of place and place identity. Wunderlich’s ³⁷ work on areas of London such as Fitzroy Square develops the notion of place-temporality to explore the connections among a collective sense of time that develops in cities, the performance of temporalities and the aesthetic experience of time and place. Simpson’s ³⁸ studies of street performance in Covent Garden and Bath also point to the connections among affect, embodiment, and linear and cyclical rhythms in shaping human relationships to place. Within the humanistic literature on time and place, a normative urban past is often implicit, for example, in Seamon’s ³⁹ valorizations of the ‘place ballets’ of traditional urban neighbourhoods. In my case study, I observed a concerted attempt to promote and celebrate a vintage timespace. This recreation of the past is significant in that it privileges certain identities, aesthetics and practices over others. Attending to its creation is therefore a second way of considering the exercise of temporal power.

The tendency towards regularization of rhythms and timespaces is of course ‘susceptible to disordering by counter-rhythms and arrhythmia’. ⁴⁰ No temporal landscape is static, just as place is always constituted and reconstituted. While synchronization – as a ‘strategy of assembling, framing, and coordinating’ ⁴¹ – seems to be the objective of powerful forces, city life is not isorhythmic nor is it defined by a unified timespace. Even within the city’s polyrhythmic temporalities, however, arrhythmias or suppressed temporalities can develop and persist. It is important, I suggest, for any account of social life and social space to go beyond the charm of the ‘place ballet’ and grapple with the rhythms, tempos and timespaces that are marginalized in urban life.

Paying attention to that which is out of step with the dominant temporal landscape invites us to think critically about exclusion, recognition and different forms of violence. Povinelli ⁴² offers a compelling interrogation of the relationship between eventfulness and ethical recognition. Asking ‘how is eventfulness distributed in late liberalism?’, Povinelli suggests that ordinary forms of suffering, enduring and struggling – forms that are chronic, cruddy, everyday, not crisis laden or catastrophic, that neither happen nor not happen – are not apprehended as ‘events’ and therefore escape ethical recognition under neoliberal conditions. She is concerned with the production of eventfulness as a form of power that can confer recognizability and care on some groups while others remain out of view. Temporal power, in this instance, is the power to define something as happening or as having happened. The implicit flip-side of this is the invisibilization of non- or slow-moving events, resulting in a kind of temporal displacement for those who experience them. Nixon ⁴³ describes slow violence as ‘a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales’. As the temporal landscape of the neighbourhood shifts and develops an eventful rhythm, slow violence and less eventful occurrences are erased, smoothing ‘the path for amnesia, as places are rendered irretrievable to those who once inhabited them’. ⁴⁴ Informed by these concepts, this article asks, how is the temporal landscape produced by gentrification in the Junction generating new geographies of recognition and exclusion? And in the context of this new neighbourhood temporality – one which is eventful and focused on an idealized version of the past – can the slow violence of gentrification be apprehended and addressed?

A neighbourhood left behind

Until recently, the Junction was framed as a place several steps behind the ‘revitalized’ post-industrial, global metropolis of Toronto. An area with lingering industrial uses and pollution, ⁴⁵ a 94-year alcohol ban (1904–1998) and little redevelopment of former brownfield sites or vacant lots, the Junction was seen as mired in its ‘rough and tumble past [. . .] full of used appliance shops and empty stores with old tin cans in the window’. ⁴⁶ Words used in media and real estate publications included languishing, empty, dreary, dull, grey, elderly and beleaguered. ⁴⁷ Prominent architecture critic John Bentley Mays describes other areas near the Junction as having had their ups and downs, but asserts that the Junction’s main strip has ‘always been on the seedy side, and it still is’. ⁴⁸ More bluntly, a magazine states that the Junction was once considered ‘too shitty to even wreck’. ⁴⁹ In contrast, similar areas in the city had been actively rezoned in the 1990s to allow for new retail and residential development. Liberty Village, King West and Leslieville, for example, had similar characteristics in terms of being run through by inconvenient railroad tracks, hosting unpleasant land uses such as abattoirs and containing brownfield sites from former industries. These areas became hotspots of new development during Toronto’s late-1990s condominium boom and attracted new businesses and residents. ⁵⁰ Although artists were present in the Junction from the 1980s on, ⁵¹ there were few signs of gentrification that had any staying power and there was very little attention from condominium developers despite the city-wide condo boom.

In just the last 10 years, though, the Junction has seen rising incomes, new residential development, sharply rising housing costs and dozens of new retail and consumption spaces. ⁵² Recent media coverage now lauds the neighbourhood as up and coming, exciting, hot, booming, eclectic, trendy, changing, creative and young. ⁵³ There has been an accompanying proliferation of neighbourhood-level organizations that seek to govern, loosely speaking, neighbourhood development, events and identity. These include formal organizations like the Junction Business Improvement Area (BIA) and the Junction Residents Association (JRA), as well as groups oriented towards producing regular events, including the Farmers Market and Night Market, Flea Market, Summer Solstice Festival, Design Crawl, Function in the Junction fundraiser, Contact Photography Festival and Music Festival. The JRA also coordinates regular events such as community clean-up days, yard sales and walking tours with the West Toronto Junction Historical Society. Other groups seek to control the development of particular neighbourhood spaces, such as the Vine Avenue Park group, and the Junction Commons Project (JCP), a group working to transform an old police station into a community hub. These organizations are often extensions of local business interests (e.g. business owners may be involved in or leading these organizations), and many organizations have considerable overlap with one another. While organizations such as these are often highlighted as markers of gentrification, ⁵⁴ there has been less attention to how they collectively function to transform neighbourhood life.

Although signs of gentrification in the Junction are clearly present, there are also a number of factors that work to reduce the likelihood of direct displacement for some low-income and marginalized community groups. ⁵⁵ These include subsidized housing for people with disabilities and mental illnesses, a women’s shelter, a halfway house, single-room occupancy housing and a school for people with developmental disabilities. Expanded diesel train traffic along the tracks, as well as ongoing industrial activity, means that there are environmental disincentives to working or living in the Junction. Thus, gentrification here is characterized by a good deal of social and economic mix. The crucial question, however, is whether this ‘mix’ actually permeates everyday practices and rhythms in an equitable way or whether different socio-economic groups lead asynchronous lives. ⁵⁶

Methods

Unlike many other scholars of rhythm and timespace, I did not set out to study rhythm or conduct a rhythmanalysis of the neighbourhood. As I observed how people and organizations negotiated gentrification processes, it became apparent that the changing rhythms and timespaces of the neighbourhood were significant in shaping interactions, identities, inclusions and exclusions. Thus, this article is not a systematic study of neighbourhood rhythm or timespace; instead, it is a detailed case study of gentrification processes that seeks to foreground some of the key temporal changes and suggests that they play a role in processes of place-making and marginalization, or the slow violence of gentrification.

In order to explore the role of neighbourhood-level organizations and the events they ‘curate’, I spent time over the summers of 2013 and 2014 in the area, engaging in participant observation in the Junction’s social spaces, public spaces and at community events and meetings. My entry into neighbourhood life was facilitated by the fact that I had lived in and around the area for about 10 years from 2000 to 2010. Summer is certainly a time of heightened eventfulness in many cities, and the Junction was no exception; what was noticeable, however, was the new variety of weekly and monthly events that had cropped up in recent years. I found that my research was shaped by the new rhythms of the neighbourhood as I timed my excursions to coincide with weekly happenings (the farmers market, the art group in the shelter) and with special occasions (the flea market, the Solstice). On a day-to-day basis, I felt how gentrification had shaped new rhythms as I waited mere minutes for the busy number 40 bus, once infrequent and half empty. I waited in lines at cafés and vendor stalls for my turn to be served. During the day, the rhythm of walking was shaped by the pace of toddlers ambling alongside parents with strollers. At night, the streets were busy late into the evening as people visited wine bars and brew pubs. All of these combined to create a temporal landscape that stood in contrast to the one I had experienced a decade earlier, where businesses struggled to attract customers, the bus never came and night was not considered a safe time to be on the street. These experiences together suggested that new rhythms were part of the process of change and worth exploring further.

Summer is, of course, just one season and so some of the rhythms that I observed are not stable throughout the year, and other kinds of events and rhythms take over at other times. In order to complement my participation observation, I made use of textual materials that I have been continuously collecting since 2010. These include news articles, real estate reports, promotional materials, event listings, local blogs, business websites, community organization reports and minutes, travel guides, BIA documents, city councillors’ newsletters and more. Both field notes and textual materials were coded for recurring phrases, themes, actors and places. As key themes such as events, happenings, energy, life, vibrancy and so on emerged repeatedly in relation to descriptions such as vintage, authentic, old and new, historical, retro and so on, I asked questions such as the following: Who is in charge and what are their visions for the event and the neighbourhood? Which community members are explicitly included? How are marginalized groups represented, if at all? What uses of the neighbourhood social and public spaces are diminished, moved or temporally shifted by the dominant new rhythms? What kinds of people, things and practices are valued and normalized in the new temporal landscape? These questions formed a framework for thinking about the shifting possibilities for mutual recognition in a gentrifying neighbourhood.

Temporal landscapes of gentrification

Conclusion

At Monday art group in the women’s shelter I work diligently on my first quilting project: a small pincushion with a geometric pattern on the front and stripes on the back. Cynthia has a magical touch with the antique sewing machine and stops her work often to help me run my squares through. She whips off pincushion after pincushion, handing them to Emily to stuff with fabric scraps. Kay asks her what she wants to do with the pincushions, and Cynthia replies that she hopes to sell them at the Flea, or give them away to be auctioned off in the next charity fundraiser in the neighbourhood. Not surprisingly, she insists I keep my lumpy and crooked pincushion for myself. ⁸⁶

The literature on the changes to social space wrought by gentrification has rarely paid explicit attention to time, although transformations in the use patterns of space are always also temporal, and rhythms of everyday life are experienced in and through space. This article has sought to draw attention to the ways in which temporal power can be exercised at the neighbourhood level by a cohort of organizations seeking to remake place through the imposition of new rhythms and timespaces. These transform the social space of the neighbourhood in ways that render it unfamiliar and perhaps inaccessible to long-time residents and marginalized community members. I suggest that a simulacrum of everyday urban authenticity is a central element of the temporal landscape that is produced through new rhythms and timespaces. As a power-laden socio-cultural construction, authenticity is shaped by the particular norms, values and identities that dominant groups decide are important and worth preserving. ⁸⁷ Participation or lack thereof in this temporal landscape materializes social and economic distinctions on bodies, in space and through time.

The purpose of this article is not to argue against the use of public space and the creation of public events. Indeed, my field note about the pincushions points to the vexing paradoxes embedded in this critique: even as the women at the shelter are excluded from the eventful neighbourhood in so many everyday ways, they may try to make use of these events to make themselves visible and to be recognized as community members rather than transitory shelter dwellers. Given these colliding temporalities, my intention has been to focus on the kinds of power that necessarily circulate through public space and public life, and where and with whom power resides in the everyday politics of neighbourhood change. Little has been written about the role of neighbourhood-level organizations and their effects on social space and neighbourhood rhythms, but their place-making capabilities highlight their crucial role in transforming everyday life. While this place-making process draws on social, cultural and affective elements, it is also inextricably connected to the economic. The new kinds of social space promoted through eventfulness and an aesthetic rebranding are attracting an influx of capital in the form of condominiums and new consumption spaces, which will drive up the cost of living in a short time frame. The events and activities described here are often linked to consumption opportunities and/or have an upfront cost of participation. Thus, these new rhythms and timespaces are themselves geared towards opening up new times and places for capital accumulation. And drawing vacant lots, street corners and parking lots, as well as late nights, early mornings and weekends into the formal economy displaces alternative and informal economic activities from these times and places and limits opportunities for social interaction without a price tag.

I have argued that the temporal displacement of certain people and activities impedes mutual recognition and masks the slow violence of gentrification and other urban inequalities. As the Junction is remade into a ‘happening place’, some lives and practices may be in temporal conflict with the new eventfulness and symbolic timespace of the neighbourhood. As eventfulness and a particular notion of authenticity begin to redefine everydayness, disruptions to everyday life build up into significant displacement pressure for marginalized groups. For the most part, these displacements comprise a variety of very ordinary, non-catastrophic non-events. The removal of a bench from outside a café eliminates a place to sit and smoke near the shelter. Coffee prices go up at all the local shops. Sex workers move north of the train tracks. Retired men sit alone on their porches. ‘No loitering’ signs appear. These non-events, as ‘a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’, ⁸⁸ do not seem to demand ethical response or reflection. Against the register of the celebratory, carnivalesque eventfulness of the changing neighbourhood, their occurrence is not noticed or apprehended as harm. ⁸⁹ Taken together, though, they ask us to bear witness not just to the structural and catastrophic transformations wrought by gentrification but also to the everyday slow violence of cruddy, chronic urban inequality.