When the Street Disappears: Eminent Domain, Redevelopment, and the Dissociative State

Abstract

In this article, we examine how the state of New York and a private developer deployed eminent domain, or the seizing of private property by the government, in order to build the Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park project in Brooklyn, NY. We use ethnography to examine how the state operated in partnership with the developer through neoliberalizing discursive practices that allowed it to dissociate itself from the assertion of its governing power. In this dissociative context, the state successfully implemented eminent domain in the absence of street‐level bureaucrats, relying instead on the creation of multiple publics, on the ambiguity of public–private partnerships, and, ironically, on the efforts of activists who fought the project. In addition to facilitating the seizure of land, this relationship between the state and the developer imposed the logic of neoliberal for‐profit development, espousing the creation of a public good for certain types of publics to the exclusion of others and creating a discourse wherein arguments against it seemed almost impossible.