“No More Proletariat, or Unhappy People, or Oppressed”: Living Besides and the Collective Sensibilities of “Urban Popular Territories”

Abstract If not resilience, rebellion, or redemption; if not the last will become first; if not the romance with the wretched, how to characterize the places where the poor inhabit if the intent is to exceed the terms of victimhood and underdevelopment? While fully embracing the need for comprehensive genealogies about how popular territories—those places of low-income inhabitation—got to be way they are, and engaging the material underpinnings of impoverishment and the adverse power relations at work, how might these popular territories be understood as more complex iterations of calculations aimed at navigating disparate orientations, affective economies, and ambiguous affordances? How to see them as continuous works in progress that exceed assessments of household income, political viability, crime rates, and general social dissolution? Here, notions of precarity—as both volatile exposures to uncertainty and destitution and all the tentative experimentations with livelihood and collective living that offer no guarantees—might offer a socio-poetics capable of grasping the intricate yet fraught methods of problem-solving, even social computation, that is at work day in and day out across such popular territories. Based on the author’s experiences with multiple popular territories across the world over many decades, this article examines the doubleness of precarity as an atmosphere of both how life is made marginal and how life exceeds the margins imposed.