Race and the infrapolitics of public space in the time of COVID-19: The case of Harlem, New York.

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe COVID‐19 pandemic has fundamentally altered our associational life and relationship to public space, revealing deadly inequities in access to health care and other resources, particularly in communities of color. In Harlem and other areas of New York City that are experiencing neoliberal redevelopment, the response to the pandemic has also rearticulated public spaces, introducing new and diverse spatial uses and users, and providing low‐income and working‐class African American and Latinx residents with increased opportunities to contest their exclusion from public and quasi‐public spaces and the symbolic economy of gentrification. Based on ethnographic research conducted during the pandemic, I show how black and brown residents in West Harlem encountered, negotiated, and contested these race‐cum‐class–based, spatio‐symbolic exclusions through infrapolitical practices and, in the process, demanded and exercised their “right to the city.” [race, infrapolitics, public space, gentrification, redevelopment, right to the city, COVID‐19, Harlem, New York City]