The shotgun of selective belonging

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, activist and institutional groups undertook localised building efforts as catalysts to recovery. Apparently rejecting establishment planning wisdom, these initiatives appropriated counterculture claims of bottom-up movements to credibility, resistance and authenticity. Design schools, revisiting community design–build initiatives begun in the late 1960s, have undertaken building programmes using student labour, sometimes widely publicised. Presented as seed projects, these undertakings claimed to revitalise community and the urban fabric. The case examined, however, with its focus on single-family houses and the transformative virtue of home ownership, can be understood as a promotion and reinforcement of familiar neo-liberal mythologies. In the university programme examined, houses built by student labour in troubled neighbourhoods received significant purchase-price subsidies, but buyers have been predominantly middle class. The design approach, aspiring to authenticity through its allusion to local elements and materials, has nonetheless been criticised as insensitive to the area’s true character. Instead, it may be understood as conferring the ‘gift’ of architecture, and thus of taste and distinction, on the neighbourhood, thus participating in less emancipatory economies than the claims of community revitalisation would suggest. This instance of design and its explicit and implicit social ambitions for ‘improvement’ reveal a dual condition of ‘selective belonging’ (Watt, Paul. 2009. ‘Living in an Oasis: Middle-Class Disaffiliation and Selective Belonging in an English Suburb.’ Environment and Planning A 41 (12): 2874–2892), characteristic of ‘multiculturally sensitive’ gentrification rather than of recovery.