Working class representation struggle parallels: NYC and Cape Town

An article published last year in The Nation provided interesting insight into a post-hurricane Sandy New York City, showing the emerging cracks in a city’s social-economic structure when it’s experienced from the position of the working class.

“But perhaps the biggest change is that workers and their families are less socially visible than in the past… Increasingly, the image of the city as the home to great wealth or layabout hipsters (sometimes, as on Girls, living off their parents’ bank accounts) has camouflaged the struggle of middle- and lower-income New Yorkers simply to get by.”

http://www.thenation.com/article/173866/what-happened-working-class-new-york

Having stumbled upon the article more than a year later, the parallels with my experience of Cape Town for the time I lived, worked and studied there were uncanny. Regardless of developed or developing status, the same sort of core tensions and experiences (albeit in different intensities) of everyday life for the urban majority remain much the same. Same shit, different city. It seems that regardless of spatial scale and location, the working class condition is just too mundane and not sexy enough to be brought to the table in context and place making conversations.

In thinking around these politics of representation I don’t mean to glamorise or romanticise a working class struggle either. That’s doing the complexity as much a disservice as just glossing over it. What I mean is that the ways that race, nationality, economic class, politics and social division plays out in the day-to-day getting-bys of people are so diverse and so cross-cutting; that to not come to terms with those urban realities (experienced, imagined it otherwise) is to fail the urban majority. A failure to appreciate and to start coming to terms with how varied terrains of social-economic-political life are realised in very real ways by urbanites that sustain the very existence city. A failure to work with and accommodate the frictions and contestation around social differences that is often harshly embodied in the working class experience.

For my personal interest this often plays out (or rather fails to) at a very interpersonal level centered on what gets perceived and portrayed as the “right” city, as the written and visual vernacular in the city that has authority to define place. The lower and working class seem to be an uncomfortable annoyance that just doesn't fit in and seems to be at constant odds with the idealised and pristine urban vernacular spoken and written by those wielding substantial place making power. Researchers, PR, city councilors, architects, engineers, creatives, etc. Power that is still exclusive at its essence no matter how inclusive the rhetoric that is pushed as a justification seems to be.

It’s time to start claiming that power back but in doing so, making a commitment to refuse to represent the diverse experiences of varied working class publics as a quick, once-off, glossy magazine and website ready feel good piece. It is rather a long-haul effort to start getting a voice out on how nuanced those incredibly diverse experiences are — to make them powerful in their complexity and to have these experiences portrayed as varied terrains of identity and struggle. In doing so, one-sized fits all categories slapped on the “urban poor” and the “working class” will organically be revealed for the bullshit tick-box appeasement in policy and place making discourse that they are.