Infrastructural Activism: Google Bus Blockades, Affective Politics, and Environmental Gentrification in San Francisco

Abstract

Between 2013 and 2018, the San Francisco Bay Area saw the rise of “Google bus blockades”—a form of protest against gentrification, growing inequality and a housing crisis linked to the economic impacts of the technology sector on the region. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with housing activists in the San Francisco Bay Area, this article argues that the disruptive tactic of “the Google Bus blockade” can be understood as a form of infrastructural activism—a flexible political form that uses the interruption of infrastructure for political ends. The blockades politicised the “Google buses” and transformed them into symbols of gentrification and sites of resistance. Protestors constructed a political analysis that drew connections between struggles for housing, racial and environmental justice and brought together material, affective and political critiques of infrastructure.

Beyond the Chokepoint: Blockades as Social Struggles

“…Blockades are thus capable of encompassing a wider range of activist demands, often drawing geographically disparate struggles and participants into coalition. Social movements have used blockades to obstruct flows—of traffic, oil, or other critical commodities—assert Indigenous jurisdiction (Bosworth and Chua 2021; Scott 2021; Spice 2018), intervene in imperialist extraction (Gilbert 2022), and call attention to the racialised and structural violences of the political economic systems within which transport infrastructure sit (Arcilla 2022; Maharawal 2021; Savitzky and Cidell 2022).…”

“…Moving away from articulating the chokepoint as a magic bullet for organising, authors in this Symposium nuance our understanding of their practice in broad historical and geographical scope. Beyond their obstruction of flows, blockades are powerful because they build networked forms of anti‐racist and subaltern agency (Featherstone 2021); act as sites for the material, political, and affective critique of infrastructure (Maharawal 2021); demand a right to the housing while disrupting real estate capital pathways (Arcilla 2022); assert the sovereignty of Indigenous lifeworlds (Bosworth and Chua 2021); disrupt military and state‐sponsored circulations (Davis 2021); reveal the white supremacist underpinnings of infrastructure (Savitzky and Cidell 2022); and establish models for alternative agrarian futures (Gilbert 2022). Authors also caution against romanticising such forms of resistance, arguing that we should examine how blockades act as regimes of governance (Davis 2021); become targets of settler‐state securitisation (Bosworth and Chua 2021) and anti‐protest legislation (Savitzky and Cidell 2022); and are a condition of possibility (rather than the certainty) of coalitional politics (Danyluk 2022).…”

“…Though all three blockades analysed were dismantled through state‐corporate repression, Gilbert underscores their generative long‐term effects: logging blockades “galvanised the world rainforest movement”; the blockade of Indorayon paper factory “helped elaborate an Indonesian expression of environmental justice”; and the Kayan Dayak's blockade of a palm oil plantation publicised modern agribusiness’ “violence, exploitation, and destruction”—contributing “space‐claiming action” to agrarian movements that “remain in motion worldwide” (Gilbert 2022:4). Martin Danyluk's (2022), Chester Arcilla's (2022), and Manissa Maharawal's (2021) contributions also draw on thick ethnographic study to explore how blockades became central tactics in struggles over housing and gentrification struggles. In Arcilla's (2022:5) words, blockades “resignify spaces”, in the process co‐constituting “emancipatory subjectivities and spatialities” where subaltern solidarities can emerge.…”

“…In Arcilla's (2022:5) words, blockades “resignify spaces”, in the process co‐constituting “emancipatory subjectivities and spatialities” where subaltern solidarities can emerge. Maharawal (2021:3) considers how the disruption of transportation was an occasion for activists to connect the privatisation of public transport to housing crises, turning the blockade into an “affective domain of struggle”. Likewise, Davis (2021:1) argues that blockades “are not just attempting to block something, but attempting to reorient social relations and material circulations”.…”

“…In demanding the material redistribution of resources, blockades also expose the injustice of current channels of flows. Maharawal (2021) and Arcilla (2022) describe ways that blockades allowed “right to the city” movements to articulate capacious demands. In revanchist San Francisco, Maharawal (2021:2) describes the blockading of private buses used to transport workers in the city's technology industry, which activists identify as “vectors of gentrification”.…”