Manufactured housing and the dialectics of enclosure and commoning
本文通过比较美国移民劳工营和印度非正规住区的田野调查，运用基础设施暴力、地域化污名和圈占三个概念框架，论证预制房屋社区是理解北美城市边缘性的关键，揭示了其面临的圈占与共用的辩证关系。
This commentary draws on comparative insights from fieldwork on migrant labor camps in the US and informal settlements in India to argue that manufactured housing communities (MHCs) are central to understanding urban marginality in North America. It does so by using three conceptual frameworks: infrastructural violence, territorialized stigma, and enclosure. Infrastructural violence manifests through MHCs’ segregation into hazard-prone geographies and substandard infrastructural networks, and through regulatory abandonment that produces preventable suffering among residents. Territorialized stigma links place-based degradation to negative stereotypes about “trailer trash,” creating administrative neglect and blocking governmental responsiveness to resident needs. Finally, the dialectic of commoning and enclosure reveals how MHCs enable collective land uses and informal economies essential to social reproduction yet face growing threats from corporate consolidation. Private equity investors benefit from regulatory constraints on new construction and immobile tenants to densify, gentrify, and standardize communities under the guise of improvement, squeezing common land uses into privatized and aestheticized landscapes. Taken together, these frameworks show MHCs to be contested sites of peripheral urbanization that demand more explicit theorization in urban studies.