‘We live like prisoners in a camp’: Surveillance, Governance and Agency in a US Housing Project

Abstract

This chapter uses a study of the everyday practices of residents of a housing project in the USA to challenge the understanding of these projects as either communal or hyper-ghettos. Situating such housing projects within wider socio-spatial forms of containment, oppression and urban marginality in the USA, the chapter uses residents’ ‘hidden transcripts’ to reveal gendered, racialized and class-based forms of social orientations. These are shaped by wider disciplining and stigmatizing urban processes but also create contexts and spaces for different behavioural responses.