Postcards from Pigtown

Within this article, the author draws upon his (lived) reflexive autoethnographic experiences within the city of Baltimore. Focusing on the pathways, decisions, and negotiations the author has taken through the city, the author offers a case study framed by a series of “picture postcards” that—despite official rhetoric centered on an urban glamour zone and a civic administration who panegyrically espouse the market logics of neoliberalism—emphasize the polarized nature of the polis. In particular, through these postcards, the brutal demarcation of winners and losers in Baltimore is discussed in an effort to elucidate, and expose, the practices and processes of social governance, through which both valorized and pathologized urban bodies are made visible (and are effectively regulated) as they contribute toward materializing the differentiated (and indeed differentiating) new urban landscape.