Page:“Trench Town Rock”： Reggae Music, Landscape Inscription, and the Making of Place in Kingston, Jamaica.pdf/2

2 and are seen as part of a broader discourse on issues relating to urban spatial identity, commoditisation of space, spatial exclusion, struggle, resistance, and change.




 * Location Map of the Trench Town community, Kingston.

2. A Social Geography of Trench Town

Trench Town is located in the western section of Downtown Kingston. The community is situated in the large low-income settlement belt that stretches south of Kingston from Duhaney Park to Rollington Town through Olympic Gardens and West and Central Kingston (Figure 1). This section of Kingston has long accounted for the highest population densities and unemployment rates and is characterised by a high incidence of poverty, political tribalism and a relatively high incidence of crime, and violence.

The spatial inscriptions seen in Trench Town are best understood through a broader urban perspective. Factors such as crime, poverty, and social exclusion contribute to the urban experience and shape urban discourse which finds expression through urban phenomena such as graﬃti, murals, or even gated communities. Cities can be conceived of spaces awash with multiple identities. However, from a more conflict-oriented “urban arena” perspective, cities are also battle grounds for diﬀering identities and spatial use. Contestations over urban space are a well-established discourse in the literature on urbanization, but much of this work has focused on spatial contestation and exclusion with regard to quantitatively conceived distributions of race, unemployment, housing, homelessness, population growth, and density, and so on.

Qualitative approaches have shifted away from such measuring of claims to space, and are increasingly studying space knowledge, and power as intimately connected. Building on the writings of authors such as Foucault, we are interested in the particular ways power is manifested and contested in space by this marginalized inner-city community. We argue that power is manifested not only through the use of “spatial strategies” or “disciplinary diagrams” of surveillance and control by those in power but also through the spatial and discursive tactics of marginalized groups. This shift in emphasis also entails broadening the focus from struggles over control of access to and uses of spaces and places, to include the cultural politics of symbolic struggles over the meanings of places and sociospatial boundaries.

2.1. The Making of Trench Town. Trench Town can be regarded as one of Jamaica’s most ambitious social engineering exercises—a cluster of homes with cedar doors and windows and gable roofs built around courtyards with