"Insuppressible alliances" (Part 2 of 3): Hostile architecture, haunting histories, and the utopian impulse amidst the abandonment (and care-taking) of the poor
Describing how the veneer of “opulent” homes and corporate headquarters of Sugar Land, Texas, masked the city’s history as the “Hell-Hole on the Brazos,” historian Andrea Raye Roberts acknowledged how, “in February 2018, the bodies of 95 formerly incarcerate men and women” discovered beneath a school construction site disturbed “nostalgic” historical narratives in which “Sugar Land’s landscape of plantations, prison farms, […] racial violence and bondage” had “been purposefully forgotten.” Two business partners—Cunninham and Ellis—had served in the Confederate Army before, in 1878, they achieved a five-year contract with the state to lease prisoners, before Cunningham’s refinery was sold and incorporated as the Imperial Sugar Company, among the most profitable sugar companies and the last remaining sugar manufacturer in Texas by 1932. These “[c]onvict leasing victims, their emergence in public discourse, and their physical discovery trouble the perceived order of Sugar Land’s landscape,” where, “[f]rom 1820 to 1920, sugar cane production went from being sustained through slave labor via convict leasing contracts, followed by state prison farm employees, and finally to a company-town.”
In this case, we might perceive what Kathryn Yusoff, Katherine McKittrick, and other scholars would describe as an afterlife of the plantation, in which prison labor and company-town labor are part of a continuum of unfreedom.
Scholar Avery Gordon, addressing institutional disavowal of the poor and the imprisoned—people relegated to condition of “nonperson,” a negation of life, a fatal designation—proposes that “the idiom of social death speaks about the captive but is only partially addressed to him.” Instead, the “idiom of social death […] is emphatically not a singular but a relational idiom that speaks most intensely, most essentially, to those ordinary people who need […] accept […] instruction in how to relate to those proximate populations—slaves, prisoners, undocumented migrants, the very poor, the abandoned, the enemy, the subversive […]—whose degraded status is deemed required.”
How, then, might we contest the hostility of sacrifice zones and other environments of socially-constructed precarity? How might we refuse to dismiss the marginalized? One potential rectification is to more forcefully critique the “routine” infrastructures of captivity latent in much urban space. If the idiom of social death speaks to “ordinary” people who, in accepting the disavowal of the marginazlied, legitimize that marginalization, then we are compelled to reconsider the ordinary.
McKittrick describes the haunted environments of Octavia Butler’s fiction, wherein “the built environment and the material landscape are sites that are intensely experiential and uneven, and deeply dependent on […] imaginary work.” McKittrick perceives a broader lesson and finds that “those without formal, or sanctioned, land-possession point to the limitations of existing geographic patterns and, consequently, reveal alternative spatial strategies and desires”; confronted with “pathological geographies” of dispossession, McKittrick invites us to “ask what this alienation brings to bear on processes of marginalization,” gifting to us an imperative to contemplate “a different sense of place” and to look for the “something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there.”
In July 2025, the US president signed an executive order titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on American Streets,” instructing the Justice Department to, in the words of ACLU Senior Staff Attorney Scout Katovich, “punish people for sleeping outdoors” and to “expand indefinite forced treatment.”
In the second line of the executive order, the first words of the president establish the subject of the policy: “Endemic vagrancy.” Section 3 instructs the Justice Department to “enforce […] standards that address individuals […] who are living on the streets […] by moving them into treatment center […] via civil commitment […] to the maximum extent permitted by law.” The move followed similar criminal-making policies across multiple major US municipalities in recent years.
In 2023 alone, San Francisco opened a “long-term homeless shelter on Treasure Island” while Phoenix municipal authorities cleared the block where most seniors and the elderly houseless people lived at “the Zone”—home to hundreds of people—on the 54th consecutive day of record-breaking heat about 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The isolating of the marginalized to island sites (as at Treasure Island) and the compounding danger of environmental conditions for the poor (as during Phoenix’s clearing of the Zone) illustrate the degree to which environment is weaponized. Within less than a year after the Phoenix incident, the City of Edmonton, in January 2024, was sweeping homeless encampments during a polar vortex event with temperatures of negative-50 degrees Fahrenheit; by March 2024, Florida’s governor signed a law which NPR described “seeks to move unhoused people off public property altogether.”
The role of environment, either as a barrier for containment or as an additional danger to the already-precarious, extends beyond homeless communities; the exertion of government pressure upon migrant communities is also entangled with spatiality.
Drawing attention to how the Northwest Regional Detention Center—one of the largest such detention sites in the US—is “sited on the edge of the Tacoma Tar Pits,” scholar Megan Ybarra asks, “Why is one of the largest detention centres in the United States built on industrial wastelands? What does this say about the value of both land and its captive residents?” The Tar Pits are formally zoned as a heavy-use industrial site, also containing a Superfund site near the intersections of railroad facilities and a port, adjacent to what was, historically, the tallest smoke stack in the world. But it’s not just the environmental hazards of the prison itself which enact violence via exposure to toxins; the spatiality of the NRDC also disrupts the legal defense of detainees and complicates the lives of the families of its captive residents. Ybarra asserts:
“This site demonstrates the relationship between an undocumented immigrant and her community—where remoteness signals the way that immigrants facing deportation proceedings have trouble demonstrating community support in Tacoma on Tuesday at 8 am because her community is a 22-hour bus ride away in rural Idaho.”
We find that not only can the apparently “routine” spatial siting of an installation—the material environment—perpetuate marginalization, but routine logistics can reinforce that marginalization.
The rhetorical—and, sometimes, legal—frameworks governing or vilifying migration and “vagrancy” are rooted in older practices which formalized limits on mobility and the containment of place.
Further linking the treatment of migrant detainees in Tacoma and the homeless of Phoenix’s Zone—each of whom are subjected to environmental hazards in the form of toxicity and heat, respectively—we can extend our interrogation of logistical obstacles and legalistic criminalization to both migrants and the homeless. Indeed, both are seemingly cast as possessing a “wayward interiority” requiring state intervention. Both migrants and the homeless, also, were historically policed under the same or similar legal devices targeting “vagrancy.” Operative in vagrancy is a state’s concern with mobility and the policing of movement.
Between 1870 and 1900, in an era of transnational mass mobility instigated by colonial-capitalist rearrangements of agricultural systems and the advent of steam and electricity, imperial powers passed suites of laws governing mobility: the Ottoman passport laws, the US’s Chinese Exclusion Act, and the French internal passport systems targeting Algerian migrants are stand-out examples.
Geographer Rayna Rusenko locates two significant features of vagrancy conceptualizations in this period: First, that “European anti-vagrancy laws were adapted” widely including in the Japanese empire, constituting a “transnational legal architecture” in which “border control systems” were “substantively shaped by imperial aversions to racialized ideas of uncivilised vagrants.” And second, that “[a]s vagrancy laws fell out of favour,” a “’vagrancy concept’ nonetheless thrived in welfare systems that similarly meted out punishment” to racialized others and those perceived as possessing “transgressive” or deviant interiority. Ultimately, these “practices of illegalisation” are very spatial. Rusenko points to the words of other scholars: The invocation of wayward interiority, particularly targeting mobile peoples, constitutes a “constant threat of removal, of being […] physically removed […] an expulsion from life and living itself.”
Here, the spatial is again entangled with the imaginative.
This expulsion from life enacted against “vagrant” peoples recalls McKittrick’s description of colonial subjects made damnable with geographical imaginaries, or Gordon’s description of the fatal sentence of being deemed a non-person.
