Critical Cities - VOL 2 INTRODUCTION

The Urban Industry and its Post-Critical Condition

Deepa Naik & Trenton Oldfield

Look it all sounds very interesting however we do ‘gateways’, we build ‘gateways’ so we just can’t have someone in one of our buildings called ‘not a gateway’, it’s just not possible. I’ve heard from the head of marketing who said ‘not a gateway’ is off message - our investors wouldn’t like it, we just can’t proceed any further.

Telephone conversation with a Corporate Social Responsibility Officer of a major British property development company, 14 September 2009

It would be more accessible to relevant urban actors than if it took place, as is usually the case with events organised by those with limited funding, in a dilapidated warehouse or factory on the city’s ex-industrial edge. As one of This Is Not A Gateway’s motivations is to bring together the people who are directly and indirectly involved in constituting ‘cities’, it seemed that holding the event in the financial district would provide an opportunity for the often conflicting and competing stakeholders to co-inhabit a highly relevant territory, and facilitate the participation of those who have daily experience of the area.

Our discussions with the owners of these and other unoccupied floors addressed how they and their staff might be involved in the festival. Suggestions included holding workshops on development finance and property law, as well contributing to the programme of discussions, attending film screenings, seeing exhibitions and of course meeting and exchanging ideas with new people etc. The corporate social responsibility (CSR) teams welcomed the proposition as a great opportunity for knowledge transfer, and the community outreach teams saw it as an effective way to engage new and already curious audiences. However, when the project was dropped like a lead balloon and the ‘gates’ subsequently closed, we learned that the people in these teams don’t propose projects upwards; they deliver projects passed down the chain to them.

What would inhabiting ‘the centre’, even for a few days, rather than the ‘the edge’ mean? Much has been written across a number of fields, including urban studies, political economy, art theory and contemporary philosophy suggesting edge spaces, the periphery or the in-between, as the place to study, explore, inhabit and research. Here, it is argued one will see and experience the most interesting, most avant-garde and the most complex and rich aspects of our urban lives. A number of practitioners and theorists, including Richard Sennett have argued we could apply a scientific view to these edge spaces, much like scientists have done in ‘the natural world’. Examples Sennett himself provides include the shore line as the space between the ocean and the land and the savannah being in-between the desert and the forest.[1] In the natural world these spaces are known to be the most bio-diverse. They are highly trespassed and home to many of the micro-organisms important to the surrounding eco-systems. Conservationists argue that, while often overlooked, these landscapes and habitats must also be protected. A self-reflexive moment appears when Sennett speaks of a street market he helped set up when was an employee of New York’s Planning Department.

In retrospect, he argues, they should have established the street market not in the centre of a neglected neighbourhood, but on the edge of an affluent neighbourhood. By doing so there would have been greater opportunity for a more complex and interesting public sphere to develop; a space where ‘others’ could meet or at least pass by each other.[2] He discusses this approach in Uses of Disorder, his first book.[3] By ‘disorder’ Sennett is proposing something like shared surfaces between cars and people or mixed-use developments; not a revolution. He argues that authorities, at the time he was writing, were ordering urban space and urban lives without taking the social and political changes of the period into account. The final paragraph of the book states: “extricating the city from the preplanned control, men will become more in control of themselves and more aware of each other. That is the promise, and the justification, of disorder”. The problem with Sennett’s nature-based theory – quite apart from the proposition of some kind of class-based urban tourism where through a process perhaps similar to osmosis inhabitants will absorb the intricacies of each other’s different cultural practices and thus subsequently respect them – is that he renders the natural world and consequently the urban edge as spaces free from violence, somehow harmonious and possibly idyllic. Among others, Slavoj Zizek’s reminds us that the natural world is full of catastrophes and violence (earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, predators), and his testimony of the inter-communal violence that pulled Yugoslavia apart, ‘and so on and so forth’, come to mind as necessary correctives.[4] Has ‘the edge’ been fetishised? As a result of the gaze being elsewhere, have the geographies and cultures of spaces such as the expanding financial districts been understudied, under-interrogated, left too much to their own devices?

David Harvey and others have shown that the recent earthquake and ongoing aftershocks of the financial crisis were an inevitable result of the entanglement of real and imaginary financial, legal and property service industries that can be found in any financial district, anywhere in world.[5] As capitalists in the 20th century worked to reduce or remove the major barriers impeding their pursuit of continuous large-scale capital accumulation, they also wanted to find new terrains for profit generation, which, Harvey argues, led to massive investment in the built environment. Their actions have resulted in the rapid urbanisation of the planet. Having a programme on urban issues situated, even for a few short days, in a financial district – the cultural context, vistas and geographies in which important elements of the permanent crisis of capitalism have been produced – would assist in making connections and encourage the urgently needed opening up of the debate.

Having failed to secure the temporary use of any of the 10 million square feet of unoccupied floor space in the City of London, and understood the drying up of the previous interest from staff in the development companies to contribute to the festival, we started to question our proposal for ‘bringing people together’. Despite having lived and worked on the edge of London’s financial districts and alongside many people working in the financial services industries, we realised that all but a very few experiences were technically and theoretically ‘visits from them to us’. Our experience with Cityside Regeneration[6] and Spitalfields, the area abutting the eastern edge of the City of London, provides a pertinent example.

An Easy Street is a Blind Alley

In 1997, an arm’s length, not-for-profit, regeneration company was established to redress the staggering rates of deprivation and alienation amongst the resident population in areas bordering central financial district – the City of London. The company was established by the local authority, the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, as a mechanism to collect and then deliver money from central government. As its remit was physically to the ‘side’ of the City and it was conceived as a co-operative body working along with the City’s operational and financial support, it was named Cityside Regeneration. The organisation moved into one of the numerous empty shops on the Commercial Road edge of the vast building known as Spitalfields Market but which was no longer operating in its intended use as a fruit and vegetable market.[7] The building’s new owner, a property development company called Spitalfields Development Group, whose director Michael Bear was also the chairman of the board of Cityside Regeneration for a number of years, generously agreed to subsidise the rent. The board, while consisting of representatives from the committees of the four local area offices and representatives of the City, was led and dominated by business people – local and corporate. Michael Bear resigned his chairmanship when he became an alderman of the City of London and when it was seen as an obvious potential conflict of interest to sell the market if he was still on the board. The next chairman was another prominent property developer.

When we were introduced to new board members who were consistently recruited from City of London banks or large landowners in the area, they would almost invariably comment without irony on how remarkable the changes were in just the few hundred yards between their office and ours. As successful and benevolent businessmen (and very occasionally, businesswomen), they embodied wisdom and foresight, super-human abilities to be consistently efficient and effective, along with knowledge of what really motivates and inspires individuals. They were, of course, more than happy to share their expertise and surplus income; philanthropy came naturally to them. Their character was portrayed as honourable and incorruptible. Their success and therefore the logic of the businessman, with or without an MBA, was it seemed, beyond question. These ‘men of the city’, unrestrained from competing economic and philosophical theories since 1989, had the answers that would once and for all remove inequality and injustice

Despite the aura of co-operation, there was no programme to upskill the financial industry’s staff or the property developers’ staff with our knowledge and ideas. One company that kept winning the annual Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Awards, presented by the City of London, explained that the reason they kept winning was because the CSR work they did was not constituted as charity but as team-building exercises. Described as a ‘win win’ situation, the deprived neighbourhoods received a lick of paint and costs were saved on previously expensive team building away days. Paintball was replaced with paintbrushes.

When Cityside Regeneration was set up, the boundary of the City was at Bishopsgate. There was never once a request to bring our skills and knowledge to the other side of Bishopsgate. Technically and theoretically it was always a visit from them. It was not a site Richard Sennett could describe as one where different people, ideas and rituals could come together. By the time Cityside was disbanded, the gentrification line had been shifted east to Commercial Road. Five years on, the line had encroached still further to encompass Brick Lane. Despite our knowledge that many areas of the East End having consistently been among the capital’s worst examples of poverty and deprivation created through aggressive capitalist techniques,[8] and despite a Labour government nationally and locally winning with a massive majority in 1997, somehow, a regeneration programme that sought to redress inequalities ended up using the very logic that had created them in the first place.

At What Speed Does a Glacier Move?

Many of the contributions to this book critically examine different aspects of the processes, outcomes and theories underpinning situations like these – how spaces once used as community centres became ‘creative hubs’, charities reorganised themselves to become social enterprises, schools were replaced with luxury student housing, public housing became shared ownership, the public sphere including streets were privatised and policed by private security and people started to understand and then start communicating through business lexicons and analogies etc. In the case of Spitalfields, its reality – as the place asylum seekers across generations and from across the world have chosen to settle and set up homes and micro-businesses, as the site of significant and successful resistance against fascist ideologies – was remoulded and projected as a ‘story’ of constant change, a hub for fashion and some kind of special habitat for entrepreneurs, artists and other creative people.

In many ways the building we eventually negotiated use of for the festival, Hanbury Hall, embodies the East End’s nuanced history of cultural radicalism, religious entanglement, resistance, internationalism and, more recently, attempts at corporatisation and privatisation. The surrounding area has experienced three successive regeneration programmes: Bethnal Green City Challenge, SRB3 Building Business and SRB5 Connecting Communities (completed in 2004). Hanbury Hall was built in 1724, and the current façade added in 1864. Also known as Hanbury Community Project or Christ Church Community Hall, previous uses include a French church, German church, Baptist chapel and Methodist chapel. In 1887 the owners removed the galleries and pulpit so the building could function as a parish hall. A year later, in 1888, Annie Besant and Eleanor Marx-Aveling used the hall to hold meetings with the ‘match girls’ who worked at the Bryant and Mays factory in Bow. The term ‘strike’ is thought to have been coined in the building by these workers who collectivised to address their terrible working conditions. It was an important milestone in the development of unionised work forces in the UK. In its recent history, the building has been used as offices for charities and as an open-access community hall. However, when we visited the space it was empty and in a state of disrepair. According to Christ Church Spitalfields, who have owned the building since 1887, newly imposed fire by-laws were forcing them to limit public access to the ground floor only and to consider selling the top floors to a developer for conversion into private residential flats. Though it was disappointing to learn of these plans – particularly for a building that has for centuries remained an important place for local people to meet, hold events and organise – we were not surprised.

New financial, private and corporate peninsulas have grown out from the City into the abutting neighbourhoods. A short walk from Hanbury Hall and just behind the partially maintained façade of the Old Spitalfields Market is one of the most significant though visually masked ‘new growths’. The City of London bought the market building in 1920. In 1991 it forced the market to relocate to Leyton in preparation for the sale of the site, partial demolition of the building and subsequent replacement, in 2006, with offices for over 2,500 corporate lawyers from the international law firm Allen & Overy. The strong public resistance to this new extrusion of corporate offices and up-market shops was founded on the fact that the market (left in limbo after the last recession) had sprouted and was supporting a bio-diversity of micro-urban practices and uses that should not be erased through privatisation and top-down regulation, not be organised and made smooth to conform to City desires. These quotes from a BBC online news story[9] indicate the spectrum of opinions among local residents:

Among those who would prefer to see the site used for community, rather than commercial, purposes is 72-year-old Michael Myers, a part-time taxi driver who lives in a flat in the old market building. "With office blocks going up, you'll have Next and Starbucks and all those things that serve their needs and don't meet any of ours.

But not all locals are up in arms. The writer Jeanette Winterson, who lives within view of the coming building, says Spitalfields is an area that is constantly undergoing transformation. The City's encroachment is merely part of that process.

This ‘bio-diversity’ was smothered[10] when the edge or cliff between the City and the East End was pushed hundreds of yards east on the evening that the Tower Hamlet’s Planning Committee voted for the scheme to construct the purpose-built lawyers’ offices designed by Foster + Partners. More than the biblical ‘thirty’ pieces of silver were exchanged that evening as the new landowners agreed to pay the council a record-breaking £21 million in Section 106 contributions in order to mitigate the impact of the new development.[11] Section 106 can also be understood as externalisation, a method used by businesses to remove real or potential ‘speed bumps’ in their way. In this case they paid the local authority to remove the ‘inconvenience’ of designing and providing urgently needed housing, jobs, medical centres and public open space – all of which could have been provided on the site itself or in the City of London, which had vast quantities of unoccupied floor space and numerous empty buildings. Continuing reluctantly with Sennett’s habitat metaphor, the City was a ‘protected habitat’, out of bounds, while its surrounding landscapes were ideal for hunting, enclosing and exploiting.

The decision was made by councillors in Mulberry Place, the Town Hall located in London’s new financial district, Canary Wharf. Cityside Regeneration’s senior management and board attended the meeting and a number of them presented arguments to the committee on why the proposal should not go ahead. Most of Cityside’s staff (community development workers, project managers) and many people we worked alongside, including a number of the Brick Lane restaurant owners who correctly feared a significant reduction in business, came to the office in Spitalfields to await the decision. We were almost certain it would be passed as the technical and legal requirements had been met over a decade previously, a tenant had been secured and design work had already started.[12] The council meeting was really a negotiation over money, perceptions of design quality and to measure how seduced by big business promises and potentialities the councillors and the local authority staff were.

That evening most, but not all of us, in the Cityside office discussed how it would be possible for us, as individuals and as an organisation, to address the underlying causes of multiple deprivation when the most symbolic case in the borough since the inequality-creating development of Canary Wharf would cascade over the edge flattening out whatever was in front of it. Unlike Canary Wharf, which was created through government dictate, this time local representatives voted for it. Just over a year later Cityside Regeneration was seen as surplus to requirement, no longer needed by central and local government, and closed down . It had been the vehicle for injecting over £150 million of government funds and the same amount of private ‘match funding’ (along with the latter’s embedded business ethos) into this thin strip of geography. Of course, with that amount of money, the streets in such a small strip of land were now, in the owners’ terms, paved with gold. There were accusations and, in the end, one senior local regeneration manager from the council was suspended and then quickly resigned on health grounds, and another senior regeneration manager spent a year in jail.[13] Not much later Cityside’s office was transformed into a shop selling designer leather couches. Following a few years of full tenancy, many of the surrounding shops are once again unoccupied. A friend, whose mother still lives in one of the remaining flats above Spitalfields Market, where he grew up with his two brothers and two sisters, says the only benefit his Mum experiences is not having to walk past as many prostitutes on her way to collect the milk.

Of course there are counter narratives: the same friend was able to build a substantial part of his career taking photographs for regeneration companies; Tracey Emin was happy to lend her face to the pro-development lobby and later the hoardings surrounding local development sites which regularly, though incorrectly, claim it is Europe’s largest ‘cultural quarter’. While most of the organisations Cityside worked with evaporated soon after it was closed, a few have benefited from ‘corporate spill over’ and continue today. Some of the programme’s consolation prizes include: Spitalfields Small Business Association (SSBA), Creative Industries Development Agency (CIDA) and Chicksand Estate Business Park. Despite the more than 40,000 signatures collected to prevent the redevelopment of Spitalfields Market (and its surrounding streets) from becoming what it has turned into today, there now seems to be a sense of resignation. In just five or six years it has become part of the City and another of the “malls without walls”.[14]

Capitalism creates and accumulates ‘gateways’ for it to later drive through.[15] Once destroyed these spaces without their previous barriers appear open to be transgressed, to be manipulated and taken advantage of. The director and board members of Cityside may have genuinely thought it was possible to address acute inequalities by applying hyper-capitalist methodologies and thinking. When questioned, their likely response would have been to ask what other options there were.

In some ways it is not surprising that many people working on and in cities have felt there is no alternative to business-led developments. No doubt this is a consequence of the obvious gates or barriers that The Urban Industry constantly attempts to place in front of us including extremely poor educational leadership and teaching throughout urban disciplines (from geography, to planning and architecture), as well as a focus on profitability and aesthetics rather than on politics and issues of equality. Furthermore, cities have continually been promoted as centres of everything commercial (innovation, trade, creativity etc.) while ignoring the injustices of urbanisation. Urban forums (regeneration conferences, architecture festivals and international ‘city’ conferences), a potential space for people working in the field to critically reflect on pressing questions, are often little more than expensive networking opportunities. There has certainly been a significant failure of these events to represent the views from the street. As a result, the more critical thinkers and actors remain unknown to the status quo (who seem enclosed in a self-referential network). It is also fair to say people with counter views are perceived as ‘persistent mosquitoes’ annoyingly buzzing around the ears of bankers, bureaucrats, local authorities and bulldozer drivers. They would much prefer us to ‘just piss off’ and not bother them.

Though we have outlined some of the politics and circumstances that are specific to East London, unfortunately, the pernicious expansion of corporate space and power is occurring in cities around the globe. One of the main themes emerging from the essays in this book is how these processes of enclosing space are similar though different across the world. They are very apparent in many former Eastern Bloc countries where the social, economic and political transformations in space and place have occurred at rapid speed. Despite the potential for ‘cracks’ to emerge within dominant systems, through which multiple actors can subvert and resist, as well as the perception of openness resulting from the removal of the previously created barriers, many of the re-formed spaces remain as isolated and legally remote from ordinary people as ever. For example, in the process of assisting the removal of existing ‘barriers’ (as Cityside Regeneration did), it soon becomes apparent that technically, theoretically and philosophically the places (such as the former Spitalfields Market) transform into a conceptual ‘one-way street’, made seductive through the ever shifting mirage of openness as capitalists’ promise and re-promise. The ‘third way’[16] pseudo-philosophy driving urban policy results not in the social justice it continues to promise, but in the rapid injection of a virulent new strain of capitalism throughout urban life that is causing the increasing inequalities and injustices that so many are experiencing today. Putting this calamity aside momentarily, it is important to ask what of any importance or any public benefit has actually evolved from such ‘regenerated’ places in the last decade? What is their role in the surges and crises in capitalism? How does the seemingly benign ‘redevelopment’ of such spaces create the ‘cover’ for neo-liberalism to colonise and enclose cities? What role will the people in places like Spitalfields play in future crises? How might, for example, the creative industries of Spitalfields be involved in the further colonisation of people and resources, this time via trademarks and intellectual property?

For many the latest catastrophe caused by unregulated capitalism is an experience not unlike learning of a partner’s love affair; in other words, a deep betrayal of what was a formal or unspoken agreement between intimately involved partners. Discovery of the lies and deception puts everything into question. For the ‘digital generation’, this collapse of capitalism is being experienced for the first time; a previously inconceivable situation is occurring simultaneously with reports suggesting there is today the highest number of unemployed young people, ever, across the globe.[17] This digital generation is not only in the process of breaking up but could also be facing fatigue and frustration of unemployment. If educated at all, most of this ‘cohort’ will have been educated in a post-critical context, arguably reducing, in the short term at least, the possibility of pushing the boundaries of examining and questioning.

How was it possible to have such faith in something so fragile, in a set of beliefs that has failed so many times before and continues to reduce and abuse, while all the time promising the opposite? This faith in capitalism is what Mark Fisher calls “capitalist realism”.[18] According to Slavoj Zizek, many people think the end of the world is more likely than the end of capitalism. Capitalism is after all ‘natural’, is it not? How was it possible for a collection of lies to form such a façade? What questions weren’t asked? What was ignored? How is it that some ideas are understood as ‘given’, ‘natural’, seemingly un-questionable, somehow existing outside of ideology? What other lies have we believed? Who knew of the lies? How was the deceit developed? Who helped manage the deceit? What were their plans? Did they want to be found out? Did they want their primary relationships to collapse so as to be able to rebuild anew? What was ignored in order to believe? What was agreed and what was denied in order to participate?

Gateways

The current fascination with ‘cities’ is entwined with the current strain of capitalist logic, which was made possible through the bleak failures of communism, the encouragement of capitalist ‘think-tanks’, and legitimated by ‘pragmatic’ politicians. It is a logic that requires collective ‘leaps of faith’ and denial of the injustices and inequalities that are needed and created for it to persist. One of our goals in forming an organisation was to draw attention to and attempt to rectify the injustices and inequalities resulting from much recent urban development and consequently we looked for a name that would reflect this. By calling the organisation ‘This Is Not A Gateway’ we are endeavouring to address our concerns in a serious and but also humorous way. We wanted to place a ‘figurative flag of protest’ in, for example, the mudflats of projects like the Thames Gateway,[19] a central government project supported almost universally by The Urban Industry to build tens of thousands of very low quality suburban homes across a floodplain to the east of London. We also wanted to raise a protest flag against attempts by businesspeople and bureaucrats to homogenise and create gateways in education.[20] With the Bologna Accord getting ready to roll out, our aim was to extend the potential spaces of ‘education’, increase opportunities of ‘getting educated’ and encourage critical pedagogies outside of ‘the institution’. The name is also a self-reflexive critique. We don’t wish to establish a canon or be seen as a ‘gateway’ to certain knowledges or approaches. The name is a challenge to the knowing or unknowing attempts to enclose and de-politicise the processes of conceiving, making and managing cities. While obvious in the formal education system, attempts at establishing these enclosures are sharply illuminated when studying the ‘public’ events of The Urban Industry: the conferences, lectures, festivals. The name stands in opposition to a concept embedded in the ideas and lexicons that are the foundations of The Urban Industry. It is an attempt to highlight the politics of cities and the politics of making cities, and a lampoon of Thatcher’s slogan: There Is No Alternative[21].

There is no beginning or end of a city, there is no place of entry and exit, there is no entrance that can be opened, there are no gateway texts, no gateway knowledges. In choosing to recognise ‘gateways’ we give others the ability to create boundaries, borders and limitations to our lives. In more cases than not, the barrier is first erected as a speculative and opportunistic manoeuvre. By accepting that a gateway exists we are in effect handing over our agency. Acknowledging the right for a gate, for enclosures to exist, either in the physical or metaphorical sense, is resigning oneself, submitting to the person or ideas that erected the barriers. These fences, these gates, must of course be challenged.

Not unlike Rene Magritte’s 1928 series of paintings The Treachery of Images and in particular Ceci n'est pas une pipe (This Is Not A Pipe), along with the arguments in Foucault’s book of the same title,[22] we wanted to problematise agreed meanings and realities along with addressing Magritte’s and others’ call for a critical pedagogy. The need to do so was urgent as our experiences within cultural institutions, academia and urban regeneration revealed that many people were, unwittingly but in significant ways, legitimising aspects of the new strains of neo-liberalism across cities and thus themselves ushering into the fields a state of de-politicisation or post-criticality. It is the refusal to accept that space, place and cities could be depoliticised that inspired the name of the organisation.

With the perspective that power (agency) is a limited entity that can’t be grown, nor extended through husbandry, nor bequeathed (as proposed by the current UK government’s ‘Big Society’, for example), that power can be quickly re-colonised if distracted, and that agency is a continuous process of ‘pulling away’ from authority, along with our research demonstrating that although ‘participation’ was increasing, influence was draining from citizens as cities expanded, we aimed to attempt to hold onto as well as take power back in an effort to address the causes of persistent inequalities by starting a micro-funded, part-time staffed, European-based organisation that had no products to sell but had a desire to sit outside ‘the institution’ and to promote critical thinking about social enterprise activity. There was also the wish to be the metaphorical but resolute mosquitoes in the ears of so-called decision-makers in The Urban Industry.

After months of discussion the resolution to bring our analogous work together was made while sitting in The Grand Café where the trading floor of the Royal Exchange once operated[23]. While only ever provoking one perhaps two paragraphs from historians, the Royal Exchange can be considered as one of the most important sites of early capitalism. It predates the Bank of England by well over 100 years, received royal title in 1571 and was, in today’s lingo, a ‘hub’ for those engaged in both the transatlantic slave trade and the colonial projects.[24] Now filled with luxury shops, restaurants and a café that is a popular meeting place for those working in the surrounding financial and legal services industries, it is an important research site for observing ‘the City’ at work. Off the street, behind big doors, in a cavernous hall with an almost homogenous community, it allows for disclosures that seem not to occur in other spaces.

It was here we decided to set up This Is Not A Gateway to address what we considered urgent questions through four main areas of production: publishing alternate voices, creating discussion through a series of open debates, building an online library and archive of critical projects from around the world and creating a participatory annual festival. By bringing together diverse critical thinkers as a result of an open call and by creating such pedagogical contexts, we aimed to interrogate the status quo, elevate the overlooked, hold on to and take power back, and most crucially, create the space for new possibilities to arise. As we set about examining our own fields and experiences, and referring to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s ideas of the Cultural Industry,[25] we started to use the term ‘The Urban Industry’ as a way in to exploring the interlocking and often self-referential fields, disciplines and ideas we had ourselves endured.

The Urban Industry

Written in a post World War II context, Adorno and Horkheimer’s thesis is that the population is kept inert and distracted through popular media, allowing capitalism to not only perpetually market itself but also dominate discourse, creating artificial and homogenised needs. This renders many people into what Danny Dorling[26] calls conditions of ‘despair’, resulting in the high levels of depression and other mental illnesses that Mark Fisher draws attention to his book Capitalist Realism[27]. Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory gives too much credibility to the skills, imagination and influence of the privileged and overlooks those who act against the mainstreaming inertia. It fails to notice the people TINAG is attempting to bring together – the critical, the frustrated, the exploited, those subverting and interrogating the status quo and through their refusal of capitalism and oppression are already starting to forge alternate ways of living and thinking. Adorno and Horkheimer’s work does however help us understand how it has been possible for many people working in The Urban Industry, including academics, to slide their way into a post-critical milieu.

It helps us analyse how the fields of architecture, property development, real estate investment, planning, design, urban regeneration, conservation management, the creative industries and visual cultures (along with their related foundations, festivals, media, PR and academia) have assisted in attempts to assemble the many in subservience to capitalist interests. Like Marcuse, Harvey, Massey, Sassen and many others, we see a link between the promotion, expansion, fragmentation and centralisation of power in cities and the latest surge and subsequent failure of western capitalism. We are interested in exploring how, despite all the assurances otherwise from those in The Urban Industry, social inequality and injustices have persisted, to paraphrase the title of Danny Dorling’s recent book[28].

Pierre Bourdieu’s theories on cultural capital and habitas also offer a very useful way into interrogating how The Urban Industry, specifically its recently acquired and most celebrated discipline of ‘architecture’, has slid into a condition that doesn’t blink at the curator of the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, Kazuyo Sejima, stating in her introduction that “Nowadays, it feels as if we are living in a post ideological society”, or at architect Eric Owen Moss asserting “I am a guy who has on my wall a picture of the guy in front of the tank [close to Tiananmen Square in 1989], but I’ve never turned down a project in Russia and or China”[29]. They help to explain how the 2010 London Festival of Architecture used the strap line ‘The Welcoming City’ not to suggest a city that is open to new people, refugees and migrants, or even new ideas, but because it “refers [to] the design of cities that are amenable and enjoyable as well as to refer to the 2012 slogan that London will welcome the world”.[30] Here the director is suggesting ‘welcoming’ within the framework of ‘hotel style hospitality’ and the commercial catchphrase ‘open for business’. Despite most of the festival’s events occurring in the public realm, it divorces itself wherever possible from politics and critical analysis, and thus openly sets out to manufacture consent around capitalist interests and attempts to de-politicise ‘cities’. The logic, its ontology and lexicon sponsor an approach that conceives of ‘the city’ as a place of progress and opportunity defined by entertainment, exchange and profit.

As Diana Mihai argues: “Post-critical architecture pretends to be politically neutral/post-political and rejects social critique, but the fact that it is modelled on contemporary business practices and market mechanisms renders it inherently political and partisan. Post-criticality implies that architects should DO, not think. It has been argued that the deconstructivists were misguided in resisting cultural hegemony and capitalism, and that they should embrace it instead, and surf the wave of the capital. But this is a vague and anti-theoretical position, and their design strategies, such as the diagram and parametric modelling, are modelled after market practices.”[31]

Our thesis for the introduction to Critical Cities; Ideas, Knowledge and Agitation, Volume 2 is a proposal to shift the nebulous phrase, ‘those that work in built environment professions’ and identify the many disciplines that come together to conceive, build and manage cities as ‘The Urban Industry’. This concept, The Urban Industry, needs to be seen much like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Cultural Industry in order to better understand the contemporary condition, not in popular media alone but in the rooms we wake up in, the streets we walk along, the range of buildings we work inside and the places we try to meet each other – with the proviso that much greater focus is placed on those who are engaged in subverting the mainstream tendency. The Urban Industry is creating an environment that rejects social critique and critical philosophy. It projects its actions and approach as politically neutral or post-political, while in fact perpetuating the intrinsically political and partisan ideology underlying contemporary business practices and market techniques. The condition of post-criticality in The Urban Industry facilitates unquestioning acquiescence and contribution to the five drivers of present-day injustice, identified by Danny Dorling and summarised here as: ‘elitism is efficient’, ‘exclusion is necessary’, ‘prejudice is natural’, ‘greed is good’ and ‘despair is inevitable’.

Within The Urban Industry straight-forward illustrations of these precepts might include: the evolution and deployment of star architects (elitism); the invitation-only, global-investment-bank-sponsored, networking conferences exclusion); the urban design and architecture that encloses parts of the city for the sole benefit of specified groups (prejudice); the planners, architects and developers that concur in demolishing social housing projects to substitute meaner reduced spaces in greater number for increased profit through private or part-private schemes designed to last no more than 60 years (greed); and a decade or more of luxury education being translated into architects and planners convincing themselves (and others) that temporary community gardens address an urgent need or that homes and communities can simply be erased should a Commonwealth or Olympic Games be ‘needed’ in their neighbourhood (despair). At the 2008 TINAG festival, we presented statistics on The Urban Industry’s conferences and events, and further collected data on inequalities relating to race, expenditure and gender also support Danny Dorling’s analysis.[32]

We argue that the condition of post-criticality in The Urban Industry that is contributing to these injustices can in part be understood through the lens of Bourdieu’s theories of Cultural Capital and habitas. Due to its relentless self-promotion and the horrendous collection of statistics that show it as one of the most elite professions in Britain (and elsewhere most possibly), ‘the field’ or ‘practice’ of architecture is the most obvious discipline in The Urban Industry to interrogate. As architecture is at the bottom of academic hierarchies and publications – journals that do exist are situated in the corporate sphere of ‘trade magazines’ and ‘access journalism’ – Garry Stevens’ book, The Favoured Circle: The Social Foundations of Architectural Distinction,[33] is highly relevant. Applying Bourdieu’s theories to his experience as a teacher at an architecture school over a number of decades, Stevens seeks to demolish the idea of the existence of ‘creative genius’, a concept much favoured by architects. While this is not our focus, Stevens’ significant statistical research provides evidence supporting our thesis on the link between The Urban Industry and mechanisms that increase inequalities and injustices via the production of cities.

Stevens’ research following Bourdieu shows how people in the architectural discipline, knowingly or unknowingly, use mechanisms to breed, disguise and maintain authority and prestige. Architecture, through its preoccupation with aesthetics, codes and the spaces of our everyday lives, has a distinct advantage to affect culture by symbolic means. And, as architectural education and practice require the mastering of ‘presentation’, many of its intentions are misperceived as benign, disinterested and objective when, in fact, architects and their hangers-on are often working to promote and secure the interests of some in The Urban Industry at the expense of others. The pseudo-political debate around the curation of the Venice Architecture Biennale or the make-up of the committee responsible for selecting the annual Stirling Prize, for example, assist in maintaining misperceptions.

Despite its insincere protestations otherwise, Stevens demonstrates that architecture is an important cultural apparatus and is therefore, following Bourdieu, critical in perpetuating class inequalities. Cultural capital is handed down from generation to generation or quickly learnt in architecture school in order to join the influential class or at least to fit in. While symbolic and economic capitals are dissimilar, the cultural world has economic elements; in a capitalist context, cultural disciplines increasingly operate along economic lines, becoming subsumed within the economic sphere; economic accumulation must also be met with cultural accumulation. Stevens suggests one of the main themes of Bourdieu’s theory can be paraphrased as “it’s the economy, stupid” and that through studying the attempts to accumulate symbolic and economic capital we can better understand the motivational logics of individuals and the groups (or relational space) they belong to or want to belong to. As Bourdieu suggests, this is often done through situating oneself apart from others through the use of culture, even if participating in it creates the context for one’s own subjection. Culture or the pretence of culture is ultimately “used to conceal the true nature of power relations between groups and classes”.[34] Like Weber, Bourdieu argues the predominance of a certain class or group is maintained through culture and cultural apparatus, by “erecting symbolic boundaries around itself ... as well as project[ing] symbolic symbols of power and prestige”; often through the use of the concept of ‘taste’.[35] Stevens draws attention to one of the most insidious outcomes of this condition: the use of culture by the dominant to promote their own interests under the guise of promoting wider societal interests, and at the same time undermining both the value and formation of counter-cultures. It doesn’t take more than a moment to think up a list of examples where The Urban Industry, specifically the field of architecture, is involved in this process and deeply implicated in increasing elitism, exclusion, prejudice, greed and despair.

Continual criticality

Despite attempts by ‘hungry capitalists’ to render ‘the best and brightest’ into unquestioning participants in their quest to continually maintain their advantage, there are many within, adjacent to and affected by The Urban Industry who have not been seduced into ‘erasing, stretching and relinquishing’ cities. There are alternatives as history keeps demonstrating. In his conclusion to Injustice, Dorling states that he believes there is no conspiracy to the increase and metamorphosis in inequalities and injustices in contemporary Britain. He does however highlight, throughout the book, co-ordinated actions by those with a vested interest in maintaining their dominance by allowing and creating inequalities. Nor does Bourdieu propose a conspiracy, rather a collection of unconnected apparatus deployed haphazardly by the elite wishing to maintain and extend their dominant position whenever, wherever and however possible. What is important, as a result, is the potential this creates to go beyond the status quo, through interrogating and re-proposing it, generating a shift to new realities. Of course, as Marx points out and evidence shows, the pulling away from oppression and the mechanisms of injustice is an endless process as new freedoms and critical practices can be re-colonised or begin to impose their own forms of oppression. The need for continual criticality seems to elicit two main responses: one of resignation and exhaustion, the other of motivation and excitement.

Exhaustion appears to be a response from those who want to transform the world as they want it to be. Reports of ‘exhaustion, resignation and bitterness’ tend to increase when their attempts to create their own version of utopia for others fail. In contrast, those who see critical analysis and the pursuit of justice as a continual condition, an ongoing process, report excitement and boosts of energy at the prospect of having to learn more, read more, discuss more and always challenge themselves anew. Every moment is then filled with potential.

Without wanting to overstate, it is this latter condition we recognise in the authors of the essays in this book. To quote Dorling: “almost every time there is a victory for humanity against greed it has been the result of millions of small actions ... examples include votes for women, anti-colonial victories, civil rights in America, or ... the freedom to just to say that the earth goes around the sun”. Other examples could include the pulling down of the walls around the once private Royal Parks, the removal of private gated streets and the erection of public housing. Putting the process into a broader context, examples might include slave-led defiance and revolt, the battles for academic independence and freedoms of sexuality, the eating away from within of totalitarian communism, land reform in the Americas and maybe even micro-publishing. We believe a future list might include the interrogation of The Urban Industry at the start of the 21st century – a time as unequal in nations like Britain, according to Danny Dorling, as when Charles Dickens was writing Hard Times and doing readings in Hanbury Hall. Will cities become ‘owned’ by global investment banks and operated as their command and control centres? Will capitalism become more dominant or follow communism into collapse and demise and be replaced by something new? Hanbury Hall was the site of the 2^nd This Is Not A Gateway festival from which many of the propositions in this book derive. Whatever results from an interrogation and re-proposition of The Urban Industry, there is no doubt that 150 years from now people will be meeting in or close to Hanbury Hall to critically think through the newest attempts to colonise freedoms, and come together to build resistance and forge new freedoms.

[1] Richard Sennett, ‘The Public Realm’, essay for BMW Herbert Quant Foundation, published on www.richardsennett.com (date unknown).

[2] ibid., Sennett.

[3] Richard Sennett, Uses of Disorder (New York: Knopf, 1970); re-issued (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

[4] Slavoj Zizek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2010).

[5] David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism (London: Profile Books, 2010).

[6] Our involvement with Cityside Regeneration began in 2002 when Trenton started working there and Deepa began to study their cultural policies.

[7] John Bennett, E1: A Journey Through Whitechapel and Spitalfields (Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications, 2008).

[8] Mark Brodie, The Politics of the Poor: The East End of London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004); Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron, and Michael Young, The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict (London: Profile Books, 2006); Loretta Lees, Tom Slater and Elvin Wyly, Gentrification (Oxford: Routledge, 2007).

[9] ‘Spitalfields bows to market pressure’, Tuesday, 14 January 2003, 12:14 GMT, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2410393.stm.

[10] Transformed and then shifted further east to Brick Lane and north to Dalston.

[11] ‘Property Development and The Community. What are the ‘hidden benefits of Development’, British Property Federation, available from www.bpf.org.uk/en/files/.../Property_Development_and_the_community.pdf.

[12] http://www.building.co.uk/19-years-17-architects-and-a-rich-roman-lady/3056136.article.

[13] Regeneration and Renewal Magazine, 24 January 2004; http://www.courtnewsuk.co.uk/online_archive/?name=whitechapel&page=18.

[14] Anna Minton, Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First-Century City (London: Penguin, 2009).

[15] David Harvey, ‘Urban Manifesto: Down With Suburbia; Down With Bloomberg’s New York’, http://www.fastcompany.com/1673037/david-harveys-urban-manifesto-down-with-suburbia-down-with-bloombergs-new-york.

[16] Alex Callinicos, Against The Third Way (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001).

[17] Highest Youth Unemployment Ever: An Interview with ILO Economist Sara Elder, 12 August 2010, http://www.ilo.org/global/About_the_ILO/Media_and_public_information/Broadcast_materials/Videointerviews/lang--en/docName--WCMS_143367/index.htm.

[18] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Ropley: Zero Books, 2009).

[19] Philip Cohen and Michael J. Rustin, London's Turning: The Making of Thames Gateway (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008).

[20] ‘Non Aligned Initiatives in Education Culture’, http://summit.kein.org/.

[21] Slogan attributed to Margaret Thatcher, ex-Prime Minister of Great Britain.

[22] Michel Foucault, This Is Not A Pipe (Berkeley CA: Quantum Books, 2008).

[23] ‘The City of London Slave Trade Trail’, http://heritagematters.org.uk/slave_trade_trail.html.

[24] ibid.

[25] Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London; Verso, 1997).

[26] Daniel Dorling, ‘Why Social Inequality Persists’, talk at Royal Society of Arts, 22 April 2010.

[27] ibid., Fisher (2009).

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The Urban Industry and its Post-Critical Condition

Deepa Naik & Trenton Oldfield

Telephone conversation with a Corporate Social Responsibility Officer of a major British property development company, 14 September 2009

Until we had the telephone conversation quoted above we thought we were only weeks away from holding the 2^nd This Is Not A Gateway festival in a recently refurbished skyscraper in the City of London. All but two of the 25 floors in the building were unoccupied and, at the time, ‘the square mile’ alone was estimated to have over 10 million square feet of vacant floor space. Holding the festival in some of this empty space was plausible, sensible, logical. As the three-day festival programme is essentially a series of discussions, film screenings, book launches and exhibitions on urban issues, and there was a large empty space in an urban area without residential neighbours along with a serene environment for reflection and debate, it seemed straight forward and mutually beneficial to have the festival there.

It would be more accessible to relevant urban actors than if it took place, as is usually the case with events organised by those with limited funding, in a dilapidated warehouse or factory on the city’s ex-industrial edge. As one of This Is Not A Gateway’s motivations is to bring together the people who are directly and indirectly involved in constituting ‘cities’, it seemed that holding the event in the financial district would provide an opportunity for the often conflicting and competing stakeholders to co-inhabit a highly relevant territory, and facilitate the participation of those who have daily experience of the area.

Our discussions with the owners of these and other unoccupied floors addressed how they and their staff might be involved in the festival. Suggestions included holding workshops on development finance and property law, as well contributing to the programme of discussions, attending film screenings, seeing exhibitions and of course meeting and exchanging ideas with new people etc. The corporate social responsibility (CSR) teams welcomed the proposition as a great opportunity for knowledge transfer, and the community outreach teams saw it as an effective way to engage new and already curious audiences. However, when the project was dropped like a lead balloon and the ‘gates’ subsequently closed, we learned that the people in these teams don’t propose projects upwards; they deliver projects passed down the chain to them.

What would inhabiting ‘the centre’, even for a few days, rather than the ‘the edge’ mean? Much has been written across a number of fields, including urban studies, political economy, art theory and contemporary philosophy suggesting edge spaces, the periphery or the in-between, as the place to study, explore, inhabit and research. Here, it is argued one will see and experience the most interesting, most avant-garde and the most complex and rich aspects of our urban lives. A number of practitioners and theorists, including Richard Sennett have argued we could apply a scientific view to these edge spaces, much like scientists have done in ‘the natural world’. Examples Sennett himself provides include the shore line as the space between the ocean and the land and the savannah being in-between the desert and the forest.[1] In the natural world these spaces are known to be the most bio-diverse. They are highly trespassed and home to many of the micro-organisms important to the surrounding eco-systems. Conservationists argue that, while often overlooked, these landscapes and habitats must also be protected. A self-reflexive moment appears when Sennett speaks of a street market he helped set up when was an employee of New York’s Planning Department.

In retrospect, he argues, they should have established the street market not in the centre of a neglected neighbourhood, but on the edge of an affluent neighbourhood. By doing so there would have been greater opportunity for a more complex and interesting public sphere to develop; a space where ‘others’ could meet or at least pass by each other.[2] He discusses this approach in Uses of Disorder, his first book.[3] By ‘disorder’ Sennett is proposing something like shared surfaces between cars and people or mixed-use developments; not a revolution. He argues that authorities, at the time he was writing, were ordering urban space and urban lives without taking the social and political changes of the period into account. The final paragraph of the book states: “extricating the city from the preplanned control, men will become more in control of themselves and more aware of each other. That is the promise, and the justification, of disorder”. The problem with Sennett’s nature-based theory – quite apart from the proposition of some kind of class-based urban tourism where through a process perhaps similar to osmosis inhabitants will absorb the intricacies of each other’s different cultural practices and thus subsequently respect them – is that he renders the natural world and consequently the urban edge as spaces free from violence, somehow harmonious and possibly idyllic. Among others, Slavoj Zizek’s reminds us that the natural world is full of catastrophes and violence (earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, predators), and his testimony of the inter-communal violence that pulled Yugoslavia apart, ‘and so on and so forth’, come to mind as necessary correctives.[4] Has ‘the edge’ been fetishised? As a result of the gaze being elsewhere, have the geographies and cultures of spaces such as the expanding financial districts been understudied, under-interrogated, left too much to their own devices?

An Easy Street is a Blind Alley

In 1997, an arm’s length, not-for-profit, regeneration company was established to redress the staggering rates of deprivation and alienation amongst the resident population in areas bordering central financial district – the City of London. The company was established by the local authority, the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, as a mechanism to collect and then deliver money from central government. As its remit was physically to the ‘side’ of the City and it was conceived as a co-operative body working along with the City’s operational and financial support, it was named Cityside Regeneration. The organisation moved into one of the numerous empty shops on the Commercial Road edge of the vast building known as Spitalfields Market but which was no longer operating in its intended use as a fruit and vegetable market.[7] The building’s new owner, a property development company called Spitalfields Development Group, whose director Michael Bear was also the chairman of the board of Cityside Regeneration for a number of years, generously agreed to subsidise the rent. The board, while consisting of representatives from the committees of the four local area offices and representatives of the City, was led and dominated by business people – local and corporate. Michael Bear resigned his chairmanship when he became an alderman of the City of London and when it was seen as an obvious potential conflict of interest to sell the market if he was still on the board. The next chairman was another prominent property developer.

Their visits to our office were frequent. Less often, though regularly, we took them on visits to already existing housing blocks, employment and training centres, doctors’ surgeries or ‘pocket parks’. Afterwards there were conversations about how fortunate we were to have such experts available to us, to guide us. It is difficult to explain the sense of relief colleagues seemed to experience. It was curious how, during their visits, our own knowledge – that of people who had grown up in the City’s fringes, the housing officer, the secretary of the resident’s association, the tailor, the under-employed, with numerous personal perspectives, academic studies and previous professional experiences – was at best suspended and most of the time considered ‘out of date’, irrelevant. There was a sense of needing to ‘catch up’ and an urgency to learn their lexicon so we could at least communicate. There were regular courses and conferences to attend so as to immerse ourselves in the new cultural apparatus and methodologies. Cityside Regeneration’s programme was focused around ‘building business’ in areas of multiple deprivation and every aspect of it was infused with the precepts of business, the panacea for poverty.

Despite the aura of co-operation, there was no programme to upskill the financial industry’s staff or the property developers’ staff with our knowledge and ideas. One company that kept winning the annual Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Awards, presented by the City of London, explained that the reason they kept winning was because the CSR work they did was not constituted as charity but as team-building exercises. Described as a ‘win win’ situation, the deprived neighbourhoods received a lick of paint and costs were saved on previously expensive team building away days. Paintball was replaced with paintbrushes.

At What Speed Does a Glacier Move?

Gateways

The Urban Industry

Continual criticality