The Struggle over Place: Redeveloping American Can in Southeast Baltimore

This paper attempts to understand the social construction of place through a study of the ‘politics of space’. It does so by way of a case study of socio-economic restructuring in a Southeast Baltimore waterfront neighbourhood. Specifically, the paper explores the contradictions and social conflict surrounding the future of American Can Company’s redundant site where speculative forces are now intent on exploiting its latent commercial redevelopment potential. The research begins from the basic proposition that although the geographical landscape exits as a material ‘thing’, it is nonetheless a conflictual social process and must be comprehended as such. I argue that by rendering less opaque the history, social relations, and struggles involved in the transformation of the material landscape, we can begin to grasp place as constituting one ‘moment ’ in the overall dynamics of capitalist space production. On the basis of research findings from Southeast Baltimore, the paper invokes the necessity to reformulate the manner in which the urban landscape is evaluated. This has important implications for the sharpening of critical theoretical understandings of contemporary urban change, and of the dominant role played by the financial sector therein. It also raises vital political questions concerning local democracy and the empowerment of ‘place-bound ’ groups and communities as they struggle against the exclusionary and ‘pulverizing’ tendencies of the current phase of capitalist urbanization.