IN-PERSON: Livable Cities – New York

Abstract

Roads are legible public spaces that provide access and mobility that foster economic growth and social interaction. Roads also encompass less visible systems of economic power, political control and policing practices that provoke fatal civilian encounters involving law enforcement. A review of fatal encounters in New Jersey from 2020 to 2022 – during state enforced Covid-19 restrictions – sheds light on the spatial and social entanglements of roadways in a highly populated state. Through a close examination of the sites of fatal civilian encounters with law enforcement, the carceral and infrastructural entanglements of roads are exposed utilizing multi-scalar range of qualitative and quantitative methods within a Feminist Political Ecological (FPE) framework. Material studies include a review of policing policies, governmental documents, media coverage, mapping, and photography of the sites. This study reveals the temporal and physical presence of factors that may have contributed to the fatal incidents. With a particular focus on Paterson, New Jersey, the country’s first planned industrial city, the resulting assemblages give layered meanings to a civil discourse that underscores the spatial power dynamics, and social disparities of a place-based struggle for equity and impedes mobility under the law. As the pandemic’s impact on everyday life begins to wane, the promise of funds through the infrastructure bill is built on principles of environmental and social justice. While rhetorically ennobling, if civic services are not engaged in the discussion regarding the use of force and fatal encounters, these events will constantly pit the environment against spaces of safety.