Corporate accumulation turns inhabited places into zoned Nowheres where residence is lost for generations

Evidence

Roy’s obsession with the politics of scale and the politics of visibility call to mind a similar preoccupation in the writings of John Berger, one of our most astute contemporary writer-activists on the links between neoliberal globalization and the transnational devastation of place, as community and ecosystem. In his preoccupation with ways of seeing and not seeing—with the invisibility industry—Berger is especially insightful on the violence wrought by the rationalizing developmental rhetoric of the zone:Extensive areas which were once rural places are being turned into zones. The details of the process vary … The initial dismembering, however, always comes from elsewhere and from corporate interests pursuing their appetite for ever more accumulation, which means seizing natural resources (fish in Lake Victoria, wood in the Amazon, petrol wherever it is to be found, uranium in Gabon, etc.), regardless of to whom the land or water belong … People in such zones lose all sense of residence … Once this has happened, to restore any sense of domesticity takes generations. Each year of such accumulation prolongs the Nowhere in time and space. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 448

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Berger’s theory of the zone — place-to-zone transformation as resource seizure that destroys residence itself for generations — is a dense, paradigm-shifting concept worth sitting with.
• XREF: Directly parallels Nixon’s ch4 ‘displacement without movement’ and the Soundscape’s erosion of lived-in place identity; ‘losing all sense of residence’ is the acoustic violence of a turned-place. — connects to: Capital profits from local cultural uniqueness while destroying it via gentrification and homogenization — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 463; Late capitalism requires spaces abandoned by capital that it later exploits; Preindustrial cities mixed rich and poor dwellings within single quarters — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 226 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Residential mobility prevents urban villages from forming and persisting #expands (0.85) — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 799
• Capital profits from local cultural uniqueness while destroying it via gentrification and homogenization #expands (0.82) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 463
• Financialized ownership of housing and land degrades living conditions and inflates asset prices #expands (0.80) — Gerald F. Davis & Suntae Kim, Financialization of the Economy, 87
• Late capitalism requires spaces abandoned by capital that it later exploits #corroborates (0.78)
• Postmodern city space lost its modernist sense of place and situatedness. #corroborates (0.78) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 308
• Preindustrial cities mixed rich and poor dwellings within single quarters #complicates (0.75) — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 226
• Capitalist accumulation itself systematically produces a redundant working population #expands (0.72) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 243