Mayorga, Sarah. Urban Specters: The Everyday Harm of Racial Capitalism. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Reviewed by Minh Q. Nguyen Sarah Mayorga’s Urban Specters: The Everyday Harms of Racial Capitalism provides an in-depth analysis of...
Mayorga, Sarah. Urban Specters: The Everyday Harm of Racial Capitalism. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2023.
Reviewed by Minh Q. Nguyen
Sarah Mayorga’s Urban Specters: The Everyday Harms of Racial Capitalism provides an in-depth analysis of material life within two neighborhoods in Cincinnati, a Midwestern Rust Belt city, from the perspective of residents—both renters and homeowners. The book carefully and artfully weaves neighbors’ accounts and logics (the author uses “logics” to refer to local ideologies and sensemaking that are subjective and varied) with the theoretical work of racial capitalism scholars and abolitionist scholars. Mayorga makes a case for more inclusive futures envisioned by such scholarships while painting a full picture of the temporal and spatial complexities of urban development. The book details how reenforced interpersonal norms and discursive slights intricately tie the material effects of racism and capitalism, and it also reveals the spatial manifestations of uneven development.
Urban planning scholars have emphasized the role of spatial economic development, historical spatial discrimination, and regional patterns of (re)development in the dynamics of neighborhood change. Mayorga chooses two neighborhoods to illustrate dynamics of inequality within the “dual form” of Cincinnati, a place where poverty and reinvestment map onto historical spaces—Riverside and Carthage are both working-class neighborhoods on the Western and Northern edges (respectively) of Cincinnati. Mayorga’s narratives of Riverside and Carthage demonstrate the interconnected outcomes of economic development through the lens of racial capitalism: historical redlining and homeownership restrictions shape who inherits housing today; focused investments in a middle-class, downtown development geared toward highly educated professionals distract from the needs of poorer communities; and a uniquely American form of commodified housing obfuscates root causes of structural poverty—poverty resulting from political and policy choices. These historical analyses, among other narratives of migration and intergenerational residency in the Midwest and Appalachia, define and clarify the book’s story arc of analyzing neighborhood change through the lens of racial capitalism.
Map of Cincinnati with Riverside circled in blue and Carthage highlighted in red. Modification to “Carthage-Cincinnati-map” by Wholtone, Wikimedia Commons, 2008, CC BY 3.0 DEED.
Discourse analysis and a critical examination of logics carry the reader through local interviewees’ understandings of their residential neighborhoods and surrounding communities. Mayorga explores the creation of discursive insiders and outsiders as she examines comments that take on racialized, xenophobic, or stereotyped characterizations of Cincinnati residents within and outside the two neighborhoods. Mayorga relies on everyday descriptions, which she calls “urban specters,” defined as “partial recognitions of the material realities of racial capitalism.” The book takes readers back and forth from the micro/local logics and explanations of place to the macro-picture of Cincinnati, Ohio, the Rust Belt, and the political economy more broadly. Organized through three specters—“neglect and underdevelopment,” “trash talk and private property,” and “security and policing”—the book evaluates residents’ logics and commonsense understandings of their local neighborhoods, while also providing Mayorga’s bird’s-eye interpretations and insights from academic and research literatures on discourse and place. The effect is convincing and insightful; readers are given a chance to see interview dialogue and a scholar-activist’s interpretations presented side-by-side.
Alluding to the work of scholars such as Neil Smith and Ananya Roy, Urban Specters presents the regional realities of underdevelopment before showing readers the lived experiences of residents who interpret observable material results through the “specter of neglect”—whether from supposed “public” officials, developers, or nonowners. The “specter of trash” becomes a point of discursive analysis, as commonsense takes on a clean/dirty dichotomy that logically maps onto dichotomies of homeowners/renters, insider/outsider, and us/them. Mayorga’s take on an expansive vision of safety echoes what Jane Jacobs has called eyes-on-the-street, a neighbor-to-neighbor approach to safety that relies on an empathetic, mutually respectful, and synergetic community approach to safety that can transcend a destructive “specter of security.” Hope for the transcendence of all three specters runs throughout the book, as readers are invited to ponder how to challenge deeply entrenched inequalities that are reinforced in everyday discourse.
Urban Specters leaves readers with a set of important questions and the provocation that “most moments of care in Riverside and Carthage did not meet the standard of creating a new world.” Through many instances of sensemaking portrayed in the interviewee’s own words, Mayorga interprets a reentrenchment of power dynamics—of the workings of racial capitalism—within the mundane and quotidian aspects of life in Riverside and Carthage, and the book purposefully leaves readers with a sense of history’s weight and ideology’s persistence. Though these challenges are deeply entrenched, Urban Specters provides hope in interpersonal acts of resilience and a growing self-awareness made possible by public scholarship that looks at a different world. The possibility of urban exorcisms, an expulsion of harm, exploitation, and dehumanization from the city, begins with insights and self-awareness of Mayorga’s powerful book.
Dr. Minh Q. Nguyen is currently an independent scholar and writer whose work spans public policy and geography. He earned his PhD at Columbia University’s Urban Planning Department and his MPP at the Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy. As a mixed methods researcher, Minh’s work spans geospatial data analysis, archival research, and ethnographic research, and his applied policy work includes projects on transportation, housing, and city planning in the North American context. Minh’s doctoral research documents Southeast Asian American community formation in the San Francisco Bay Area, and he is working on a book manuscript on the role of Asian and Pacific Islander queer activists during the AIDS crisis in San Francisco.
Featured image (at top): “Welcome to Carthage, Ohio” (2019), photograph by Brent Moore, flickr.com, CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED.