ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how the contestation takes shape over time, space, bodies, policies, and discourse in the historical present on the streets of New York City. Tracing the struggles over public space, the chapter focuses on young people's experiences negotiating the contradictions of broken windows policing in the context of the gentrifying spectacle of sparkling office towers, new condos, and hipster bars in New York City. Drawing upon the intergenerational participatory action research project Researchers for Fair Policing, the chapter offers insights into the social and spatial exclusions of the aggressively policed neoliberal city and its resistance. Common experiences of New York youth offer a lens for analyzing the everyday geopolitics of accumulation by dispossession in a heavily surveilled public sphere. The struggles over sidewalk space may potentially lead to forms of imprisonment and all that is lost, stolen, and destroyed, or end in premature death.
