ABOUT THIS BOOK
America’s public parks are in a golden age. Hundreds of millions of dollars—both public and private—fund urban jewels like Manhattan’s Central Park. Keeping the polish on landmark parks and in neighborhood playgrounds alike means that the trash must be picked up, benches painted, equipment tested, and leaves raked. Bringing this often-invisible work into view, however, raises profound questions for citizens of cities.
In Who Cleans the Park? John Krinsky and Maud Simonet explain that the work of maintaining parks has intersected with broader trends in welfare reform, civic engagement, criminal justice, and the rise of public-private partnerships. Welfare-to-work trainees, volunteers, unionized city workers (sometimes working outside their official job descriptions), staff of nonprofit park “conservancies,” and people sentenced to community service are just a few of the groups who routinely maintain parks. With public services no longer being provided primarily by public workers, Krinsky and Simonet argue, the nature of public work must be reevaluated. Based on four years of fieldwork in New York City, Who Cleans the Park? looks at the transformation of public parks from the ground up. Beginning with studying changes in the workplace, progressing through the public-private partnerships that help maintain the parks, and culminating in an investigation of a park’s contribution to urban real-estate values, the book unearths a new urban order based on nonprofit partnerships and a rhetoric of responsible citizenship, which at the same time promotes unpaid work, reinforces workers’ domination at the workplace, and increases the value of park-side property. Who Cleans the Park? asks difficult questions about who benefits from public work, ultimately forcing us to think anew about the way we govern ourselves, with implications well beyond the five boroughs.
REVIEWS
“A brilliant examination of the complexities of neoliberalization, the fluid categories of workers, and the constituencies the process produces.”
— Adolph Reed, University of Pennsylvania
“Who Cleans the Park? makes important contributions to the study of public-private partnerships, labor precarity, volunteerism, and neoliberalism. Krinsky and Simonet for the first time study the park as a workplace, describing and analyzing employment relations institutionalized in the park’s labor market and showing how through neoliberal policies workers are being undermined, dismissed, and restructured. In the end, the book is not just about the neoliberalization of public parks, but that of workplaces everywhere.”
— Luis LM Aguiar, University of British Columbia
“Provides useful insights on the current issues of public works and urban governance in contemporary cities. . .Written in a storytelling manner, the book is both descriptive and analytical and, it is hoped, will lead to a new set of inquiries on neoliberal public administration.”
— Journal of Urban Affairs
“A major contribution right at the intersection where studies of urban policy, political economy, and labor should meet studies of care work and of civic engagement. . . . Who Cleans the Parks? meticulously documents and theorizes everything you vaguely suspected about public/private/nonprofit partnerships. . . In this richly complex, colorful, and analytically provocative book, all the pieces fit together in relation to each other.”
— American Journal of Sociology
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction - John Krinsky, Maud Simonet
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226435619.003.0001
[fieldwork;access;interviews;sociology of work;urban politics;public sector;unions;conservancies]
Chapter 1 introduces the research question, Who cleans New York City parks?; the empirical investigation we conducted,140 interviews in 11 districts with public, nonprofit, volunteers and welfare workers cleaning those parks; and the construction of the book. It explains how a New York academic specializing in welfare and urban politics and a Parisian researcher on French and American spheres of volunteering got together to study the transformation of the workforce and governance of New York City parks maintenance system. It describes how we gained and lost entry to our fieldwork in the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, and how our “duo” used its different resources to conduct and handle a research project that not only crosses the lines between public and private but also among social classes. It then maps out the progression of the book, from an analysis of labor contracts and workplaces through organizations and up to larger public policies and to an understanding of the state that, in its diverse composition, is producing them. (pages 1 - 25)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
2. The Workers - John Krinsky, Maud Simonet
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226435619.003.0002
[labor;contracts;segmentation;broadbanding;labor markets;degraded work;public unions]
Chapter 2 takes a close-to-the ground look at the different kinds of workers who clean parks. It analyzes the shifts in the organization of work and categorization of workers with reference to two main processes: broadbanding and segmentation. Broadbanding refers to the consolidation of many categories of work into fewer. Segmentation refers to the expansion of the number of categories of workers and especially to the creation of distinction among them in terms of pay, workplace rights, and supervisory discretion, and the erection of barriers mobility among them. The chapter shows that these apparently contradictory dynamics actually work together in creating a segmented and “fissured” workplace in which systems of contracting and restructuring enable the degradation of previously decent jobs into more insecure and contingent ones not only outside the public sector--as with the emergence of the conservancies’ non-union workforces--but also outside of formal labor markets with the growing use of volunteers, workfare beneficiaries and community sentencees since the fiscal crisis of the 1970s. (pages 26 - 66)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
3. The Work
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226435619.003.0003
[cleaning;gardening;division of labor;dirty work;social hierarchies]
Chapter 3 considers what work is involved in cleaning parks (from picking up trash to gardening, from shoveling snow to cleaning bathrooms) and how this work is divided across the different types of park, types of park-management agencies (i.e., public or private), the different seasons, and across the different types of workers. We begin with a description of the variety of tasks involved in cleaning parks, and in composing the jobs people do. We then focus on the logics driving the division of tasks within the park worksites and the park workforce. We show that in contrast to the mainly male fixed post “parkies” who used to characterize the Parks Department staff and who were not largely defined by the “dirty work” necessarily involved in their tasks, some categories of workers--mostly poor Black and Latina women--are now assigned specific tasks: the ones closer to domestic and polluted work. With the paradoxical specialization of parks maintenance through the combination of broadbanding and segmentation discussed in Chapter 1, a new hierarchy of tasks matches roughly to existing social hierarchies of race and gender.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
4. The Workplace
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226435619.003.0004
[workplace;favors;competition;sexual economy;sexual harassment;authority;union organizing]
Chapter 4 revisits some of the ways in which workers are divided from each other by studying their relations at the worksite. It first focuses on how parks workers are made to compete with each other and shows how the nature of this competition depends upon management strategies and workers’ status, but also by the paternalist system governing parks as workplaces. In the parks maintenance system, a lot of the competition among workers occurs for favors. This is widely recognized among workers, especially when it comes to the formation of what we call a “sexual economy” based on unequal power, structural domination and systematic sexual harassement at the workplace. The chapter also discusses the ways in which workers at different levels of the hierarchy sometimes resist personalism and division in the workplace. The chapter concludes by turning to the management of these workplaces, pointing that those in charge of putting these authority structures in place paradoxically make their own work of managing the park more difficult to do.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
5. Public-Private Partnerships - John Krinsky, Maud Simonet
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226435619.003.0005
[public-private partnerships;governance;regime theory;conservancies;repertoires;fiscal crisis]
Chapter 5 moves “up” a level of abstraction from the previous ones and examines the organizational arrangements that shape how the worksites operate. We introduce the new webs of organizations involved in parks maintenance and governance, and present the varied types of groups—public, nonprofit, and partnerships—that now maintain parks. Focusing on the three main conservancies that were created after New York City’s fiscal crisis, Central Park Conservancy, Bryant Park Corporation and Prospect Park Alliance, the chapter describes the growth of three distinct repertoires of blending the public and private in the operation of parks: a philanthropic, a corporate and a civic one. In describing these repertoires, the chapter traces the formation and operation of these conservancies, their performances of organizational leadership, labor relations and legitimacy, and their unequal influence on the more recent generation of conservancies and Friends-of groups from the 1990s until today. (pages 131 - 166)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
6. Institutional Boundaries, Accountability, and the Integral State - John Krinsky, Maud Simonet
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226435619.003.0006
[integral state;neoliberalism;boundaries;accountability;elite control]
Chapter 6 discusses how the partnership organizations and their governance arrangements blur the boundaries between public and private, and how the changes operated in the governance of public parks can be understand in terms of Antonio Gramsci’s conception of the “integral state.” In the integral state, political and civil society are mutually constituted and mutually reinforcing. This chapter considers the developing governance repertoire discussed in the previous chapter as a whole, and asks how the state integrates the corporate, civic, and philanthropic repertoires and their actors into the larger complex of parks maintenance. It further asks how it does so in the face of considerable and growing criticism about elite control and public accountability. (pages 167 - 191)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
7. The Politics of Free Labor: Visibility and Invisibility - John Krinsky, Maud Simonet
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226435619.003.0007
[free labor;invisible work;citizenship;reciprocity;ideological production;coercion;consent]
Chapter 7 considers the ideological production of the neoliberalizing integral state through the process of using and legitimizing different types of unpaid labor, that of the workfare workers, of community sentences, of the volunteers and the out-of-title work of the public workers. We describe how this ideological production involves managing the visibility of unpaid work which is done through three principal means: the production of a powerful rhetoric of citizenship and reciprocity, the coding of workers through clothing and the composition of works crews. Constantly contested, although mostly in the hegemonic language of citizenship and reciprocity, the ideological production of the integral state is never complete nor totally consistent in its effects. Hence, the strategies for mobilizing free labor form a spectrum from coercion to consent that are unevenly applied across social hierarchies. (pages 192 - 216)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
8. Valuing Maintenance, Valuing Workers
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226435619.003.0008
[value extraction;displacement;real estate value;accumulation;legitimization;contradictions]
Chapter 8 summarizes our findings and concludes by bringing the distinct parts of our argument together. It considers both the ways in which value is extracted from the process of parks maintenance via labor displacement and increased real-estate values, and the ways in which contemporary park maintenance fits in with broader neoliberal modes of governance. We show that if parks maintenance opens a window onto broader dynamics of accumulation, extraction of value from the labor process, and contests over class power, it does so in way that reveals the conflicts and cracks in the edifice of neoliberal governance as much as it shows neoliberalsm’s creativity, resilence, and adaptability. Out of these contradictions arise potentials for change. We conclude by identifying some of these potentials.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
