‘Project heat’ and sensory politics in redeveloping Chicago public housing

This article examines Chicago’s ongoing public housing reforms and more broadly, welfare reform, as a kind of sensory politics. I analyze experiences of home heating at a redeveloping public housing project to establish how neoliberal demands for self-responsibility have become tied to demands that transitioning residents reconfigure their subjective senses of comfort. These twin demands have distributed the risks of transitioning out of public housing across an individual’s understanding of personal security as well as her obligations to kin. I show how approaching welfare reform as a sensory politics illuminates the emerging conditions of political recognition available to Chicago public housing residents as their longstanding representational bodies face obsolescence. Moreover, I argue that this approach invites us to reconsider theories of contestation and survival within urban poor people’s social movements.