Construction of Public (Labour) Housing:
A Methodology of the Racism of Infrastructure

I’m old enough to remember another Harlem. Before the heroin game overtook the numbers game, before crack overtook heroin (…) Black restaurants, Irish bars, Italian social clubs, Latin dance halls. That Harlem of the 1950’s (…) Each block was its own microcosm of small-town Southern life. Each neighbourhood was associated with a particular region, so that you had the people who came from South Carolina living in one area, the ones from Virginia in another (…) Folks knew each other from back home. And that generated respect and a sense of safety (…) But in the years to come, as these small neighbourhood communities in Harlem were bulldozed and replaced by high-rise project buildings, the city started grabbing people with no concern for where they’d come from, disconnecting folk from each other and their way of life. Neighbours didn’t know each other, didn’t share anything, didn’t feel a sense of respect or safety amongst each other. Doors started getting pad locked. You ask me, I think a lot of the bigger problems in Harlem today can be traced back to the destruction of those houses and that more connected way of life.
-Dapper Dan, Made in Harlem: A Memoir

Why washest thous the man of Inde?
Why takest thou such pain? Black night thous mayest as soon make bright
Thou labourest all in vain…
Indurate heart of heretics
Much blacker than the mole;
With word or writ who seeks to purge,
Stark dead he blows the coal.[1]
-Unknown Racist Person

Introduction:

Project Public Government Housing, as an infrastructure has the face of the colonist and is created via racism. The design of the buildings ontology itself is a designed oppression (of the inhabitants) through geography and exclusion from society; but more importantly, it serves its purpose as an ideological segregation of the inhabitants from the concept of human altogether. Project infrastructure has a heart which beats, pumps, and profuse diseases throughout its system of capillaries; with one micro-aspect affecting the whole of the system in cancerous fashion. As infrastructure reflects not only the practical but the ideology, with the conscription of the building limiting not only one’s opportunities in the daily, but also in long-term life prospects.

Project housing is method of direct physical and ideological control of those populations who is deemed the other. The purpose of this paper is to detail the limitations that project (low-class) infrastructure places upon human agency and opportunity with a comparison case study of the Queensbridge Housing Project Complex (of the United States) as but the reflection of colonial-racist attitudes regarding those of Jewish/African descent. The emphasis of this essay being that Project Housing is attributed as the direct cause to the impoverishment, limited socio-economic prospects for specific human-beings, with correlations to one’s race-caste as a tool be segregated from the “main” societal infrastructure; in short, rendering those who are deemed the other into a quazi-member of society. A brief comparison will be then extrapolated outwards to the case study of migrants in the Persian Gulf, with variables of and methodology of segregation being found done in a similar sense, as seen in the Saudi state of Arabia. The paper will attempt to prove that Project housing is a tool for the creation of a caste, an imperative of subservient subject-relations (via class) to those of “white” or those who are considered to be “good”.
Agency (or lack thereof) in Project Infrastructure.

Before we can begin the separate and specific discussion upon the typology of variables involved in Project housing (also known as government housing/ Consul Estates in the United Kingdom of Great Britian) we must ascertain as to the existence of agency in infrastructure itself. This notion, upon the connection between such is best stated by Professor Larkin. Larkin understands this notion as rather, the Ontology of Infrastructure, in his work Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure, the professor states,
Infrastructures are matter that enable the movement of other matter. Their peculiar ontology lies in the facts that they are things and also the relation between things. As things they are present to the senses, yet they are also displaced in the focus on the matter they move around. We often see computers not cables, light not electricity, taps and water but not pipes and sewers.[2]
If infrastructure be understood in this sense, it brings about the concept of it (infrastructure) being a medium, a mechanism of transfer which places the connection, or even the ease of such connections, between variables of separate but interconnected beings. This ontology of infrastructure, gives bricks and mortar the power of agency, an ability of material to decide the fate of those of non-material entities we humbly term the human. The ironical aspect of the above mentioned quote (via Professor Larkin) being that in the “displacement of focus of the matter they move around” be applied to the notion of the human inhabitants of project housing, they reflect just that, matter[3] whom is made to be the un-seen.
Project Infrastructure is a human construct of putting material to an ideology of segregation, it is the giving of Infrastructure an agency to directly play upon human faculty / or much rather, the capacity for and of ability of such. Not only is project infrastructure a direct correlation of human agency, but (as Professor Larkin argues) it could be sufficiently decidedly cemented that in fact all which we deem to be infrastructure could be seen as such. Not only are their direct personifications of the human onto the building(s)[4] itself, one can directly argue that one can ascertain both the sex and race of such buildings as well[5].

Another manner of definition of interrupting this relationship (of infrastructure-agency) is as defined by Professor Bennett, as she states upon the relationship of human and building in The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout,
the radical kinship of people and things, is indebted to a rich and diverse tradition of ecological thinking, including a variety of pantheisms, vitalism, and materialism. Its ontological monism is a riff on the ecological theme that all things are interconnected. There was never a time when human agency was anything other than an interfolding network of humanity and nonhumanity. What is perhaps different today is that the higher degree of infrastructural and technological complexity has rendered this harder to deny.[6]
The above quote detailing in simple profoundness that this phenomenon of interconnection being impossible to understanding as being sperate from what we call humanity itself. Of great interest for us scholars of infrastructure is to note that the concept of human is now more “inter-folded”, compounded into, and supra-infra-imposed so much so that one effectively cannot separate the ontology from the two.

The Interplay of Race as an Infrastructural Component
To bring about the cross-over of Race-Caste within the paradigm of infrastructure studies Itself, the path of least resistance would be in crossing over the variables of first Race/Caste as distinct categories separated at least by some perceived essential difference in category; spoken in another method, to show that Race and Caste are themselves categories of social infrastructure. Racialization refers to the systematic signification of a number of factors including phenotypical features that serve to create social boundaries and division among humans[7]. Put rather aptly by its distinct capacity to “exist as a construct of power through its consequences for the distribution of social goods and resources in society.”[8] Therein lies a rather magnificent cross-over of sorts which puts forth the variable of Race as that befitting within the infrastructural paradigm of study. Cited further by Omi and Winant (1994), one can effectively state that the concept of Race itself was designed to directly limit the infrastructure of existence in such that Racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed primarily for the purpose of configuring bodies and bloodlines along particular lines that are then used to distribute or deny social resources in specific social contexts.[9] In the utilization of these concepts as base infrastructural variables allows the scholar of Infrastructure to see not only (whom) infrastructure is providing for, but much rather, to whom infrastructure is deigned to be providing against. We can effectively dub this phenomena, as the Infrastructure of Segregation.

The Necessity of Race as Caste: A Division of Labourers not Labour
"Who can deny that in the descendants of the Jews there persists and endures the evil inclination of their ancient ingratitude and lack of understanding, just as in Negroes (there persists) the inseparability of their blackness. For if the latter should unite themselves a thousand times with white women, the children are born with the dark colour of the father. Similarly, it is not enough for a Jew to be three parts aristocratic or Old Christian for one family-line alone defiles and corrupts him."[10]

Race must be seen in a category of ideological and material subservience. As such it must be employed as a category of caste (to be as understood) comparatively prescribed in such examples such as the Laws of Manu[11], in the Brahmins or Aryan myth of superiority; without such a cosmological ordering of resource allocation, there would be no need to control “the lower classes” through infrastructural components. Class interest is the key-term of such subject-relations, for even the builder of any infrastructure must be able to build (or better understood as to provide finance) for such infrastructure; more importantly within this debate is the function of not only the infrastructure in relation to the inhabitant, but the function of the infrastructure in relation to the infrastructure of the whole, more importantly to whom is to be the non-habitant.
In true fashion from the genealogy of infrastructural othering, the term raza itself was first applied in the late fifteenth century to the people of Jewish and Moorish ancestry[12] (ironically and purposefully) a pre-cursor to those whom the term Ghetto[13] was to be first applied for. It is worth noting that the imagery to the (presumed) intrinsic connection of morality is to physical appearance as it is to geography[14] was founded long before the concept of European Expansion[15]. As stated by Professor Lemelle on this connection of colonial European conceptualization, one can directly trace the formulation of the dichotomous complex of white/black, pure/diabolical, spiritual/carnal, good/evil, and Christ/Satan added that this “system of thought being exported to the world in complicated ways”. [16]

The Conscription of Locality – Geography of Oppression
Up until this point of this work, we have managed to ascertain some overlap of variables which then places Race within the framework of Caste, in association of moral character and phenotypic representation, to the notion of geography; or spoken in a simpler sense, we have over-lapped the variables of Race-Caste- to that of subject-position-infrastructure. The purpose has been (thus far) to overlap understandings of such variables from structural compositions to understanding the interplay (of such) between the above-stated notions of dynamic nature of infrastructure. To further this point, this paper will now attempt to undertake a synthase too (in connection of) the notion of the “other” as represented via this subservient geographical structuring. The attempt of this paper to expose the connection of such conscription of geography to disenfranchise and segregate said the “other” from the primary or main section(s) of society.
This paper will now attempt to showcase two minor case-studies of infrastructure which were precisely crafted in such a way as to not only segregate certain members (or in certain cases, non-members) from not only society, but to the right to exist in society as a equal, this phenomena we can title the Geography of Oppression.

THE BRIDGE – QUEENS

“They did not hire here- they brought in their own people. My thing is: if you build here, hire here”.
– Ms. Simpson Queensbridge Resident[17]

There are still a lot of problems with the apartments – the lack of heat and hot water, non-working elevators, mold, and broken front doors”
-Jimmy Van Bramer (Councilman for Queensbridge)[18]

Not everyone here has a Ph.D., but anyone eager to work should be able to get job. It can’t be nothing but a plus.
-Andrew Johnson (The local book-vendor of the Bridge)[19]

Queensbridge is a very dear place to this humble author. I was arrested there more than a couple times for simply trying to live. The living conditions and creation of such conditions serves well to use as a guiding block to such segregation as is represented via the genealogy of this thread; of not only the notion of whom is the other, but the ever-changing nature of such a process (of racial fluidity). Encompassing 3,149 apartments over the space of 12 regular sized city blocks[20], with rudimentary plumbing and light shafts less than 1.5m wide[21], Queensbridge Housing Projects, were designed to maximize the effect of population versus actually being proper housing. Added to the still un-respondent report by the New York times regarding the use of lead-paint in all major New York project housing complexes, it only became apparent in 2016, after years of deceit and false claims by the Department of Housing and Urban Development[22] of the fatal living conditions. For us, living in and near those houses was literally death from more than just the paint.
Not only are the living conditions the very anthesis of living, the notion of policing such demographics often result(ed) in unwarranted racial and economic repression. Stop-and-Frisk, a law which was found unconstitutional based upon its “violation of stopping people without reasonable suspicion, and that those people were disproportionately Black and Latino, in clear violation of the fourteenth amendment.”[23], was but the result of such, structural repression. When 95% and above of all stops were people of color, the understanding was simple, those who are the other must not be allowed to live a human life, and must be reduced to a number in Rikers Island.

This correlation (of geography-morality) survives in Queens via and by a designed structural segregation, one of which has evolved from the first usage of the Ghetto for white Irish-Jewish labourers to then be replaced via economical variables of Racialization, to that of Black and Latino. To hark back to the earlier proposed paradigm of the genealogical progression of the process of such segregation via social-economic variables, denotes the fluidity of which is required to subsume and shift the other, the cas(t)e-study of Queensbridge Housing Projects shows this process unfolding through such a vivid display of the brutalist categorization of structure. In a sense, to unfold back the notion of whom was the Black-Evil-Devil implanted and conscripted via the imagery of Whiteness-Good-God, one could effectively state that the original Black was the Jew or Irish, whereas due to the process of such (racialization) negated the need for them to be labelled as such. With then the process shifting to deduce out the “blackness from the Jew or Irish” and to place such a notion within the (created) demographics of Africans and Latinos. Again to match theory to practice, the use of the theoretical framework to example, it was via the redistribution projects of households based upon income, which then segregated further the demographics of the infrastructure. For any household making above a certain wage (middle class income of the 1940’s)[24]; via the constant shifting of whom was the other, Black and Latinos were then imported to such a location[25]. Albeit the limitations of this work are such that this topic cannot be explored further the notion of such geographies of oppression, have been demonstrated to link the very bricks of Queensbridge to that of racial oppression via a casteist demarcation to peoples who are deemed the other.

AN INTERNATIONAL PROCESS – CASE STUDY OF SAUDI ARABIA

This process of demarcation of pseudo-scientific clauses and attachments of morality to geography is not limited to the west, nor to that of the “white’, but can truly be called a global phenomenon; found in most social orderings in the contemporary division of race-class. This further adds to the concept of Racism as Universal by Etienne Balibar, but that is, alas another paper. To add to this heinously conscripted global example would the case of migrants laborers and the structural segregation and disenfranchisement found in the Persian Gulf States, particularly that of Saudi Arabia.

In great similarity to the previous case-study, this process is but another project of racialization. This process is found using the similar variables of othering. The oil rich Gulf States utilize an overwhelming number of migrant labour, particularly those peoples of South-Asian descent. These contracts are offer precarious situations of employment security; securing not even basic human rights, and utilizing heinous structural components of disenfranchisement via pre-meditated segregation.[26]

There was a purposeful lateness upon the banning of slavery happening in but 1962 making Saudi Arabia the last country to ban the legal slavery of human beings([27]). It is of no coincidence that many migrants call the contemporary living conditions nothing short of slavery. A report by Professor Ray Juredini which was later used the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (regarding the infrastructural segregation of the Arabian region) details the profuse structural components of the xenophobia thusly, stating,

Xenophobia with regard to foreign workers, and domestic workers in particular, has three aspects. First, it is demonstrated by the preference for temporary contract labour that excludes possibilities of citizenship. Second, preferential treatment is usually given to nationals, although particular kinds of menial work have now been “allocated” to foreigners. Third, the attitude of disdain and abuse toward those who are visibly different (particularly Sri Lankans, Filipinas, and Ethiopians and other Africans) is observed in the kind of treatment that is meted out to them by nationals, particularly employers.

This brings back the connection of the Racialization process as one which infinitely demarks the notion of segregation onto the other via a categorically infrastructural sense[28]. With official numbers upon the details of migrants not cited, nor even the migrant undertaken as a member of census, one cannot measure any information on the treatment of the matter from the Saudi State itself. [29] However, from the many details that researchers can gather on the matter, Saudi Arabia itself has organized society and its infrastructure to remove both the (migrant) labourer from not only society, but from the very notion of humanity itself. The vivid example being an interview I did with a fellow villager from Laroya, Punjab. Mr. Avatar detailed to me, how he “cannot interact with the rest of what the Saudi’s deem proper society”, he states, “we are made to live in a town outside of the city limits, in basic shacks in which electricity does not work so we resort to hand-swept fans like our grandmothers used”. He continues, “they only let me drive the truck full of diesel, back and forth, and that’s all I do or can do”[30]. Mr. Avatar asked me to research more upon the town of Raffa, or what he states is an immigrant slum outside Riyadh, built and structured to remove the migrant labourer from the very gaze of Saudi sights, but I found the information to be purposely contained within a Saudi firewall, both digitally and physically.

Conclusion
I am a black More born in Barbary,
Christian men for money oft doth me buy
If I be unchristened, merchants do not care.
They buy me in markets be I never so bare.[31]

To bring conclusion to this brief expose on the agency of public project housing complexes, this paper has shown the intrinsic connection between not only the concept of infrastructure and agency but more importantly, to the geography which aids in the promotion or removal of human agency. The usage of the paradigm of race and caste has been shown to be another variable which should be overlapped to bring about an understanding of such. Using the brief case-studies of Queensbridge and Saudi Arabia, this paper has proved that geography in the structural sense, has as much agency as that of a human, to allow for proper life, or even the repression of such. This expose being but a start to the discourse, of infrastructure, the segregation it creates, and the struggle in the rectification of.

Respected Authors Cited

Ania Loomba, “Race and the Possibilities of Comparative Critique” (2009) 40 New Literary History 501
Ashford GS, “The Queens Precinct Where Stop-and-Frisk Survives” (City LimitsMarch 24, 2017) <https://citylimits.org/2017/01/09/the-queens-precinct-where-stop-and-frisk-survives/&gt; accessed May 21, 2021
Baber Z, “Racism without Races: Reflections on Racialization and Racial Projects” (2010) 4 Sociology Compass 241
“I. Migrant Communities in Saudi Arabia” (Bad Dreams: Exploitation and Abuse of Migrant Workers in Saudi Arabia: I. MIGRANT COMMUNITIES IN SAUDI ARABIA) <https://www.hrw.org/reports/2004/saudi0704/4.htm>&nbsp;
Jureidini R, “Migrant Workers and Xenophobia in the Middle East” [2005] Racism and Public Policy 48
Kilgannon C, “Amazon’s New Neighbor: The Nation’s Largest Housing Project” (The New York TimesNovember 12, 2018) <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/nyregion/amazon-queens-queensbridge-houses.html?referringSource=articleShare&gt; accessed May 21, 2021
Larkin B, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure” (2013) 42 Annual Review of Anthropology 327
Lemelle A, “Reviewed Work(s): Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities by Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein” (1993) 19 Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 174
“‘Bad Dreams’ Exploitation and Abuse of Migrant Workers in Saudi Arabia” (Human Rights WatchNovember 17, 2020) <https://www.hrw.org/report/2004/07/13/bad-dreams/exploitation-and-abuse-migrant-workers-saudi-arabia>&nbsp;
[1] Cited from Loomb, A. Race and the Possibilities of Comparative Critique of Thomas Palmer’s Two Hundred Poosees (1566).
[2] Larkin, B The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure in annual Review of Anthropology, 2013, Vol. 42 (2013), pp 329
[3] An unfortunate understanding but nonetheless prevalent in the equation of Racial Capitalism. See Cedric Robinson for such.
[4] See examples of Big Ben, or the Burj Khalifa to reflect such personification.
[5] In the notion of the gendering of female/male objects or the notion of Nationalist symbols.
[6]
[7] Baber, Z, Racism without Races: Reflections on Racialization and Racial Projects, in Sociology Compass, 4/4 (2010) pp.243
[8] Ibid
[9] Cited by Babar, ibid,
[10] Biography of King Charles V, cited in Loomba, A. Race and the Possibilities of Comparative Critique, in New Literary History, Summer 2009, Vol. 40, No. 3, Comparison pp. 505
[11] In the sense of a natural division of human species
[12] See 10, Loomba, A.
[13] In the sense of the original Jewish ethnic enclaves, which would later become the first “Government Project Housing”. See History of Queensbridge Projects in Queens, New York.
[14] See Pliney the Elder, Natural History
[15] Lemelle A. Reviewed Work(s): Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities by Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein in Humboldt Journal of Social Relations, 1993, Vol 19. No 1 (1993), pp. 177
[16] Ibid, 178
[17] Kilgannon, C, Amazons New Neighbour: The Nation’s Largest Housing Project in The New York Times, 2018 , Nov. 12.
[18] ibid
[19] ibid
[20] Gray, G, Housing and Citizenship; A Study of Low-cost Housing, in Architectural Forum 1940, 13-15
[21] Woningbouw, W, Queensbridge Houses, in Global Housing, 130-139
[22] See Weiser and Goodman, New York City Housing Authority Accused of Endangering Residents, Agrees to Oversight, in New York Times, 2018, June 11
[23] Decision by Federal District Judge Shira Scheindlin (2013) cited by Ashford, G, The Queens Precinct Where Stop-and-Frisk Survives, in CityLimits, 2017, Jan 9.
[24] See 21, 22 for details
[25] Ibid.
[26] See Human Rights Watch data report Migrant Communities in Saudi Arabia, for raw figures. Found at https://www.hrw.org/reports/2004/saudi0704/4.htm
[27] (Human Rights Watch, “Bad Dreams” Exploitation and Abuse of Migrant Workers in Saudi Arabia 2020)
[28] Balibarian paradigm of thought.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Interview, May 1, 2021, with Avtar Laroya, done via WhatsApp and Transcripted
[31] Boorde, A in Book of Knowledge, Cited by Loomba, See 10
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