{"title":"Manifold Enclosures","authors":"Janette Kim","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9937368","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n In 2021, the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative (EB PREC) purchased Esther's Orbit Room—the last remaining venue of Oakland's West Coast blues scene—to build a haven for Black culture and livelihood. As a novel system of land ownership inspired by land trusts, cooperatives, and social movements, EB PREC orchestrates local, collective governance to harness the staying power of ownership and resist its commodification. EB PREC's complex institutional structure is mirrored in the manifold enclosures of the Orbit Room property, which expands, contracts, and subdivides an ever-contested form of parcelization. As an architectural designer and member of EB PREC, the author combines an analysis of the Orbit Room's as-built conditions with an institutional portrait of EB PREC. This article asks how alignment and misalignment between ownership and property lines can enable—and preclude—the decommodification of property and transform it into an enduring source of power for those so long excluded from it.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1000,"publicationDate":"2022-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Public Culture","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9937368","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"ANTHROPOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
In 2021, the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative (EB PREC) purchased Esther's Orbit Room—the last remaining venue of Oakland's West Coast blues scene—to build a haven for Black culture and livelihood. As a novel system of land ownership inspired by land trusts, cooperatives, and social movements, EB PREC orchestrates local, collective governance to harness the staying power of ownership and resist its commodification. EB PREC's complex institutional structure is mirrored in the manifold enclosures of the Orbit Room property, which expands, contracts, and subdivides an ever-contested form of parcelization. As an architectural designer and member of EB PREC, the author combines an analysis of the Orbit Room's as-built conditions with an institutional portrait of EB PREC. This article asks how alignment and misalignment between ownership and property lines can enable—and preclude—the decommodification of property and transform it into an enduring source of power for those so long excluded from it.
期刊介绍:
Public Culture is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal of cultural studies, published three times a year—in January, May, and September. It is sponsored by the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU. A four-time CELJ award winner, Public Culture has been publishing field-defining ethnographies and analyses of the cultural politics of globalization for over thirty years. The journal provides a forum for the discussion of the places and occasions where cultural, social, and political differences emerge as public phenomena, manifested in everything from highly particular and localized events in popular or folk culture to global advertising, consumption, and information networks. Artists, activists, and scholars, both well-established and younger, from across the humanities and social sciences and around the world, present some of their most innovative and exciting work in the pages of Public Culture.