World City E-Book

Doreen Massey

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 382

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Cities around the world are striving to be 'global'. This book tells the story of one of them, and in so doing raises questions of identity, place and political responsibility that are essential for all cities.

World City focuses its account on London, one of the greatest of these global cities. London is a city of delight and of creativity. It also presides over a country increasingly divided between North and South and over a neo-liberal form of globalisation - the deregulation, financialisation and commercialisation of all aspects of life - that is resulting in an evermore unequal world.

World City explores how we can understand this complex narrative and asks a question that should be asked of any city: what does this place stand for?

Following the implosion within the financial sector, such issues are even more vital. In a new Preface, Doreen Massey addresses these changed times. She argues that, whatever happens, the evidence of this book is that we must not go back to 'business as usual', and she asks whether the financial crisis might open up a space for a deeper rethinking of both our economy and our society.

Leseprobe

WORLD CITY

WORLD CITY

DOREEN MASSEY

polity

Copyright © Doreen Massey 2007

The right of Doreen Massey to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2007 by Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

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Malden, MA 02148, USA

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5482-9

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Preface: After the Crash

Introduction: ‘the future of our world’?

Part I Inventing a world city

  1  Capital delight

  2  ‘A successful city, but . . .’

  3  Imagining the city

Part II The world city in the country

  4  The golden goose?

  5  An alternative regional geography

  6  Who owes whom?

  7  Reworking the geographies of allegiance

Part III The world city in the world

  8  Grounding the global

  9  Identity, place, responsibility

10  A politics of place beyond place

Concluding reflections

Notes

References

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The arguments here have benefited from conversations, debates and political engagements with many people over many years. My efforts to pull them into some kind of shape for this book have also been greatly aided by others. Ellie Jupp provided early research assistance, organising my heaps of cuttings, hunting down documents, getting hold of statistics, and providing comments. Her efficiency set me on my way. A number of people read all or part of the manuscript, at various stages, and/or provided invaluable comments and clarifications – thank you to Allan Cochrane, Jane Wills, Ray Hudson, Adam Tickell, Ken Livingstone, Mick Dunford and Ian Gordon. Other friends working in and on London, academically and politically, have been a source of ideas and information both over the years and in the immediate preparation of this book. Way back in the 1980s there was the Ariel Road Group (Maureen Mackintosh, Hilary Wainwright, Michael Ward, Vella Pillay, Ken Livingstone, Robin Murray and Michael Rustin) that met in my flat once a month after the demise of the GLC to try to keep the ideas flowing and to begin to take them further into new times. Later, long discussions with Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift (which resulted in joint writing of our own) began the development of some of the ideas in Part II. I have learned much too from friends in more recent groupings, especially the London and European Social Forums.

Neeru Thakrar helped me with the initial stages of the physical preparation of the book. Throughout the latter part of writing, the help of Angela Daniels has been utterly invaluable – producing the typescript, chasing up queries, and being a constant source of support. It has been great working together. Finally, Caroline Richmond helped me through copy-editing with precision and warmth, and Emma Hutchinson at Polity, too, beautifully combined friendliness and efficiency. My thanks to all.

I am grateful to Jonathan Freedland and The Guardian for permission to reprint a substantial part of his article ‘It may be beyond passé – but we’ll have to do something about the rich’ (23 November 2005; copyright Guardian News & Media Ltd 2005); to The Guardian for permission to quote from their leader ‘Unbalanced Britain’ of 6 February 2003 (copyright Guardian News & Media Ltd 2003) and Larry Elliott’s ‘The United Kingdom of London’ (5 July 2004; copyright Guardian News & Media Ltd 2004); to The Observer for permission to quote from Nick Cohen’s ‘Without prejudice’ (22 February 2004; copyright Guardian News & Media Ltd 2004) and to the Evening Standard for permission to quote from C. Freeman’s ‘Mayor’s funding plea “will divide Britain”’ (26 June 2001). Jane Wills granted permission for me to use the information on the London Living Wage campaign shown in table 6.1, the Carbon Web illustration (figure 10.1) is courtesy of PLATFORM, and Ken Livingstone granted permission to quote from the press releases of 7 and 8 July 2005.

PREFACE

AFTER THE CRASH

This book was first published in July 2007. Its aim was to point to the dangers of the dominance of the finance sector and its surrounding constellation of activities, in London, in the UK, and internationally. It was on the basis of finance that London reinvented itself from the 1980s on. It was around this sector that emerged a remoulded social stratum of the super-rich. It was on the basis of the financial sector that the British economy was levered out of its long decline. And it was around this economic basis, too, that a new social settlement, commonly called ‘neoliberal’, was built and became hegemonic, its tenets embedding themselves deeply into popular common sense. Wider still, it was on the basis of the financial sector that London asserted a new imperial role. It was all so self-assured. It was a brave new world. This is the world that is scrutinised in this book.

That world has now imploded, and one of the central implications of the arguments here is that we must not go back to business as usual.

Cities (and especially those called ‘world cities’) were central to this social settlement; in their glitz, their gentrification, and their acute inequality, they are home base to a new global elite – London perhaps above all. As this book argues, London, or more precisely its financial constellation, was at the heart of the establishment of neoliberalism as hegemonic. Its fortunes were built on deregulation, privatisation and marketisation, and it was these forces that spread through the country and around the world.

‘After the crash’ this argument can be extended. For if London was at the centre of this kind of society in its pomp, then it is also at the crux of its crisis. It is often said that this crisis is global, or that it was made in the USA. Well, it was certainly triggered in the USA, through the collapse of the sub-prime markets, but an immediate trigger is not the same as underlying causal conditions. Likewise, the crisis is certainly global, in that it had effects around the world. But, as this book argues, globalisation is made in places. The global is grounded. And one of the key localities where financial globalisation was invented and orchestrated was London.

One question that arises now is: Is this ‘just’ a banking crisis or could it precipitate a wider shift in social forces? Could it herald the beginning of the crumbling of the social settlement that has characterised the last thirty years?

The 1980s, the decade when this social settlement was finally established, was a period of social contest – over Thatcherite cuts, over the closure of the mines and the decimation of manufacturing, over the government of London and other rebellious local authorities. That is how shifts between social settlements happen. They are moments when the future seems open.

Are we now – potentially – at another such moment? Is the dominance of finance now less assured? Could its crisis lead, as on occasions it has promised to do, to a wider questioning: of the rule of untramelled market forces, of growing inequality, and of a dominant culture of greed and self-interest? These are questions that will not be settled quickly.

The economic basis for the neoliberal social settlement was laid down under the Thatcher government, through the accelerated decline of mining and manufacturing and the rise to dominance of the City. New Labour accepted this inheritance, and used the taxes flowing from finance into the exchequer to fund its social-democratic programme through a public sector itself culturally remoulded to reflect the ideological tenets of the market. Thus was the economic settlement embedded in society more widely as an unquestioned common sense.

Even at its height, this settlement was fraught with problems. Finance proclaimed itself the golden goose, but its preference was to invest in assets rather than productive activities. Its very dominance made life more difficult for other parts of the economy. Inequality soared and could not be reined back even by a plethora of anti-poverty programmes, as the very rich grew in numbers and in wealth. The acute inequalities in London made running the city deeply problematical. The gap between North and South of the country widened as growth was concentrated in London/the South-East, and resources and skills followed. It was a pattern propagated around the world, as inequalities sharpened both between and within countries. All this is analysed in the pages that follow. But those pages were written as a trenchant critique of an economy and society widely judged, in spite of everything, to be ‘successful’. Today they must be read as a dire warning that, whatever way is found out of the financial crisis, we must not simply reconstruct those times.

Indeed, in many ways we cannot. That model is now broken. The dominant cry now is that ‘the public deficit’ must be reduced – that public expenditure must be cut back. It is a cry that has been forcefully contested. But it is what ‘the markets’ demand – the same markets whose behaviour produced the implosion and whose failure necessitated their rescue by the public. The result could be yet further inequality, nationally, within London, and between North and South. There are gender implications too, for, while it is women who tend to suffer more from cuts in public expenditure (through loss of jobs as well as of services), what is clear from the analysis in this book is that the group statistically most responsible for the sharp inequality resulting from thirty years of neoliberal growth is highly paid men.

‘The markets’ that demand such cuts are not some impersonal force of nature. They are the same social strata that, over the last three decades, have refused to be a serious motor of the economy and have been at the centre of the creed of selfish individualism. And now they take their bonuses again, and presume to tell us what to do. There are serious questions here of democracy itself.

There is, nonetheless, and as a result of the crisis, a widespread recognition that the finance sector, especially in its wilder reaches, must be made more accountable and its regulation strengthened. One clear message of this book, however, is that while this is necessary it will not be enough. What also needs to be addressed is the sheer size and dominance of this sector, both in the national economy and in the economy of London. And that will mean challenging its hegemonic stories. As this book shows, much work is put in to ensure the popular currency of these stories. Equivalent work is needed to address them: that finance is the golden goose without which the economy would crumble, that it is the motor of a productive economy, that if any attempt is made to intervene it will leave (it doesn’t actually go, and it is a moot point whether anyway that would in the long term be such a loss). These stories are already challenged in the pages that follow.

And what of London in all of this? The national economic model was accepted as inevitable in London too – that the City would be the leading sector – and, while this book was written when Ken Livingstone was mayor, the shift to Boris Johnson did not alter that particular prioritisation. Yet, as it is argued here, London is in many ways a progressive city, and the dominant presence within it of one of the founding localities of global neoliberalism has been an anomaly from which most political debate on the left has averted its gaze. Now, with the (potential) puncturing of the hubris of these social strata, will it be more possible to challenge this shape of the city? Can we question the identity of place itself?

London is also a world city in that it has effects on the wider planet beyond it, and it is argued here that we can build a responsible ‘politics of place beyond place’ that asks serious questions about the global impact of the local – a global ethics of the local place. Here, too, both the importance and the urgency of the argument have been dramatically reinforced by the way in which the financial crisis rocketed around the world, wreaking havoc in so many places so far away.

Both because it is a hearth of neoliberalism and because it is basically a radical and progressive place, the contest over London matters. In the 1980s, when the neoliberal hegemony and the dominance of finance were still being contested, London was at the heart of the political confrontation, not least in the battle between the Thatcher government and the Greater London Council, with London’s voice demonstrating a way out to the left. What will London’s voice be raised for now? One of the questions this book persistently asks (and asks us all to ask) is: What does this place stand for?

But while the text starts in London, and while it is from this city that many of its key themes emerge, it is not about London alone. These are questions that face us all.

Running through this book is the term ‘neoliberalism’. It is the name we have frequently given to the social settlement of the last thirty years. So, when the banks failed and had to be bailed out by the state, it was easy to point to the logical contradiction. Some even pointed, perhaps in hope, to the end of neoliberalism. But things are not so simple. First, neoliberal thinking achieved an astonishing hegemony, and its tenets – the naturalness of market forces, the inevitability of individual self-interest, the negative attitude to state intervention – still run deep in popular consciousness. Political arguments are about more than economic logic. Second, as this book shows, the nostrums of neoliberalism were always applied selectively, when useful, and disregarded when not. Neoliberalism as an economic doctrine has been a legitimating tool in the armoury in what is, at bottom, a submerged contest between social forces. It is with this contest, within London, in the country as a whole, and in the global ramification of these, that this book is fundamentally concerned.

So, turning the page now means plunging back into that world when finance was in its imperious pomp. London had just won the competition to hold the Olympics. But it had also just been bombed.

London, June 2010

INTRODUCTION: ‘THE FUTURE OF OUR WORLD’?

In the numbed days after the first bombs went off on London’s public transport, in July 2005, Ken Livingstone, the city’s mayor, said: ‘this city is the future’ (GLA, 2005b). ‘This city’, he said, ‘typifies what I believe is the future of the human race and a future where we grow together and we share and we learn from each other’ (ibid.). He set London in the context of cities around the world, and of a longer history:

If you go back a couple of hundred years to when the European cities really started to grow and peasants left the land to seek their future in the cities there was a saying that ‘city air makes you free’[,] and the people who have come to London [–] all races, creeds and colours [–] have come for that. This is a city [where] you can be yourself as long as you don’t harm anyone else. You can live your life as you choose to do rather than as somebody else tells you to do. It is a city in which you can achieve your potential. It is our strength and that is what the bombers seek to destroy. They fear freedom, they fear a world in which the individual makes their own life choices and their own moral value judgements and that is what they seek to snuff out. But they will fail.

This year for the first time in human history a majority of people live in cities. London continues to grow and I say to those who planned this dreadful attack[,] whether they are still here in hiding or somewhere abroad, watch next week as we bury our dead and mourn them, but see also in those same days new people coming to this city to make it their home to call themselves Londoners and doing it because of that freedom to be themselves. (Ibid.)

On the day itself, speaking from Singapore where London had just won the competition to hold the Olympics in 2012, he had addressed not only Londoners but the world at large:

I want to say one thing specifically to the world today. This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and powerful. It was not aimed at Presidents or Prime Ministers.1 It was aimed at ordinary, working-class Londoners, black and white, Muslim and Christian, Hindu and Jew, young and old.

. . . we know what the objective is. They seek to divide Londoners. They seek to turn Londoners against each other. I said yesterday to the International Olympic Committee, that the city of London is the greatest in the world, because everybody lives side by side in harmony. Londoners will not be divided by this cowardly attack. They will stand together in solidarity alongside those who have been injured and those who have been bereaved[,] and that is why I’m proud to be the mayor of that city. (GLA, 2005a)

And he had addressed ‘those who came to London today to take life’:

I know that you personally do not fear giving up your own life in order to take others – that is why you are so dangerous. But I know you fear that you may fail in your long-term objective to destroy our free society and I can show you why you will fail.

In the days that follow look at our airports, look at our sea ports and look at our railway stations and, even after your cowardly attack, you will see that people from the rest of Britain, people from around the world[,] will arrive in London to become Londoners and to fulfil their dreams and achieve their potential.

They choose to come to London, as so many have come before[,] because they come to be free, they come to live the life they choose, they come to be able to be themselves. They flee you because you tell them how they should live. They don’t want that[,] and nothing you do, however many of us you kill, will stop that flight to our city where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another. Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail. (Ibid.)

The Olympic bid had emphasised, above all, London’s ethnic and cultural diversity. A host of messages, on websites and posters, on banners and in interviews with people on the street, said the same thing. At a gathering of 25,000 people in Trafalgar Square a week later Ben Okri read a poem he had retitled ‘A hymn to London’: ‘Here lives the great music of humanity’ (Evening Standard, 15 July 2005, p. 6). And Ken’s entry in the Book of Condolence read: ‘The city will endure. It is the future of our world. Tolerance and change’ (The Guardian, 12 July 2005, p. 3).

With the Evening Standard (the city’s newspaper) running a special issue on 21 July with the banner headline ‘London United’ and distributing a poster ‘London stands united’, and Time Out (‘London’s weekly listings bible’) running a front cover that said simply ‘Our City’ (13–20 July edition), it was plain that what was being proclaimed here was an identity of place; a London ‘we’. Moreover, while there is little doubt that the particular events reinforced a sense of identity, and of this particular identity, it was not a brand-new construction. In the spring of the previous year, MORI had published the results of an enquiry into ‘What is a Londoner?’. As well as demonstrating high degrees of both identification as Londoners and satisfaction with London as a place to live (with, in both cases, ethnic minorities being the most positive), the interviews also revealed cultural diversity and cosmopolitanism together as the things that most made people ‘proud of London’ (MORI, 2004).2 In January of 2005 a special supplement of The Guardian newspaper had been published: London: the world in one city: A special celebration of the most cosmopolitan place on earth (The Guardian, 2005). This last, perhaps inevitably, tended to map different groups, so-called communities, and this is indeed one aspect of what is at issue. More importantly, what was being hailed in July 2005 was a ‘mixity’, so to speak, of lived practices, the criss-crossing multiple allegiances described by Saghal and Yuval-Davis (2006) and what Gilroy (2004) has described as a convivial demotic cosmopolitanism, rather than, as ‘multiculturalism’ is sometimes understood, the juxtaposition of, and negotiated relations between, mutually boxed-in communities.

This, then, was a claim to place identity precisely as a constellation that might problematise inside and outside: ‘London is the whole world in one city’ (Livingstone, in Time Out, 13–20 July 2005, p. 3). It was a claim to ‘place’ as open rather than bounded, as hospitable rather than exclusive and excluding; to place as ever changing rather than eternal. Place as a constellation of trajectories; as a meeting-place (Massey, 2005). The city as ville-franche (Derrida, 2001). And it was a claim to place identity made not only by the powerful but by many on the streets as well.

It was in this guise that London was being celebrated as a world city. All of these claims – to specificity, to unity, to holding out a future for the world – were built round the rich ethnic and cultural diversity of London. Livingstone’s passion, in particular, sounded out in stark contrast to the manufactured sincerity of Tony Blair. Nor did Ken speak of good and evil, but of real grounded politics. His commitment to diversity and hospitality rang a clear note after a general election, some months previously, in which dismally negative debates about immigration and asylum had been prominent.

The claiming of this place identity also threw up bigger questions, not least that of its validity (Keith and Cross, 1993).3 Although there were references to ‘harmony’ and simple ‘unity’, this wasn’t, at least at an explicitly political level, about some unproblematical, happy-clappy diversity. Indeed, in the days that followed, ‘multiculturalism’ was a contested term. At the end of July, there was a thoughtful debate between Jonathan Freedland, a Guardian columnist, and Livingstone in which Freedland criticised Livingstone (whom he had praised for his initial ‘healing’ words) for introducing divides into this diversity. The accusation was of being too accommodating to ‘contemporary Islam’, and in particular Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, and of taking sides on the Palestine/Israel question. ‘ “They seek to turn Londoners against each other,” Livingstone said of the terrorists on July 7. Yet what was he doing last week?’ (Freedland, 2005b). The following week, in an article of his own, Livingstone wrote of how London could make itself safer. Among his proposals (which included withdrawal from Iraq) was the need to ‘shrink the pool of the alienated that bombers draw on by treating all communities as equal parts of British society – not only theoretically, but in reality’ (Livingstone, 2005). He makes clear that he disagrees with Qaradawi on a whole range of issues but that the latter should not – any more than Ariel Sharon – be banned from entering the country: ‘It is impossible to say that Britain’s Muslims should be treated with respect but that their religion’s most eminent representatives must be banned.’ The key word is respect.

This, then, is an attempt to construct not a bland diversity so much as a recognition of differences with all their conflicts and problematical implications. It does not mean not being critical, or not taking up clear political positions. It recognises that this may be a conflictual negotiation of place. But it insists that participants should both be allowed in and treated with respect. It is a thoughtful political position.

However, that in itself means that this is a particular position. It is secular; it is Western. Indeed, Livingstone specifically claims it as such, naming it ‘the best of the West’ (Evening Standard, 21 July 2005, p. 13). It assumes a framework of negotiation and respect. If multiculturalism is a universalism (as is sometimes suggested) then there are other universalisms which might differ from it, even oppose it, even be a source of the bombings themselves. ‘London represents the best of the West, and for that reason alone it is a target for terrorism’ (ibid.). The opposition to liberalism from Sayyid Qutb to bin Laden is well documented (for one analysis see Boal et al., 2005). Moreover, even multiculturalisms develop in particular guises and within particular hegemonic assumptions that frame its working (Hall, 2000; Hesse, 2000; Mitchell, 2004; Nash, 2005). Indeed, only given some hegemonic assumptions (always themselves negotiated and open to further negotiation) can the negotiation of place take place.4

Claiming London as the future, then, is actually on this logic to claim it as one potential future among futures. It is not just a description, or a claim to be at the front of the historical queue. It means, rather, that London stands for something, a particular kind of future, but it also carries the possibility that this may be one future in a still varied and plural world. Maybe other places, other cities, will be different.

There is a long tradition of trying to dragoon cities into a singular linear history (from Athens to Los Angeles, or some such). It was never a story that was capable of capturing, of recognising, the multiplicity of the world. (What of Samarkand? What of Tenochtitlán?) The framing of London as ‘standing for something’ also, actually, leaves open the possibility that the future will be equally multipolar. London stands for one kind of future, but there may be others.

* * *

All of this reflection and establishment of place identity was framed within a geographical imagination of London as a world city. But ethnic and cultural mixity is only one aspect of its being a world city, only one aspect of the city’s relationship with the world. For one thing, it focuses on the internal, on people arriving (the world coming to it). And this is indeed one side of ‘a global sense of place’ (Massey, 1991). But world cities, as indeed all places, also have lines that run out from them: trade routes, investments, political and cultural influences, the outward connections of the internal multiplicity itself; power relations of all sorts that run around the globe and that link the fate of other places to what is done in London. This is the other geography, the external geography if you like, of a global sense of place. For each place this geography, this tentacular stretching of power relations, will be particular. For London, precisely as a world city, this is significant, not just for the metropolis itself (it could not survive for a day without the rest of the world) but also because of the effects it has even in the remotest corner of the globe.

The response to the bombings did not touch on this other aspect of being a world city. Yet as well as being so ethnically mixed, London is also a seat of power – political, institutional, economic, cultural. Its influences and its effects spread nationally and globally. It is a heartland of that socio-political economic formation that goes by the name of neoliberalism. It was forces in London, articulated above all around the financial City (capital C), that took the lead in advocating and developing the deregulation that lies at the heart of that formation; and it is a command centre, place of orchestration, and significant beneficiary of its continuing operation. This city stands, then, as a crucial node in the production of what is an increasingly unequal world. Economic inequality has over recent decades and on most measures increased globally. It has also increased nationally; within the UK the old ‘North–South divide’ has widened (Adams, Robinson and Vigor, 2003), and has increasingly taken the form of an ever-expanding London ‘versus’ (we shall come back to that) what is usually, tellingly, called ‘the rest’ of the country. And London itself, already the most unequal region in the nation, is becoming increasingly so, in terms both of earnings and of income (Hamnett, 2003). Livingstone was surely right, in defiant response to the bombings, that people flock to London and will continue to do so because of the freedom it offers them ‘to be themselves’. But people find their way here for other reasons too. They come because of poverty and because their livelihoods have disappeared in the maelstrom of neoliberal globalisation. They come out of destitution and desperation (and millions more are left behind). And it has to be at least a question as to whether London is a seat of some of the causes of these things.

Moreover it is not only into London that people are crowding. Livingstone cites the now well-known fact that ‘for the first time in human history a majority of people live in cities’. However, the biggest cities, and those growing the fastest, are in the global South. And in these cities, in Asia and in sub-Saharan Africa, over half the people live in slums (UN-Habitat, 2003; 2004) in conditions that Davis (2004, 2006) has documented with such power. Ken Livingstone spoke, thoughtfully and correctly, of the need to shrink the pool of the alienated in London and in the UK as a whole. Others, writing in the aftermath of the attacks on New York, have reflected on the festering anger in cities of the majority world, what they call ‘the slum conurbations of the World Bank world’: ‘never before – this is the truly chilling reality – have the wretched of the earth existed in such a bewildering and enraging hybrid state, with the imagery of consumer contentment piped direct into slum dormitories rented out by the night, at cutthroat prices, to hopelessly indebted neoserfs’ (Boal et al., 2005, p. 173).

Cities are central to neoliberal globalisation. The increasing concentration of humanity within them is in part a product of it. Their internal forms reflect its market dynamics (the shining spectacular projects, the juxtaposition of greed and need). The competition between them is both product and support of the neoliberal agenda. And in certain cities (those we call world cities, or global cities) is concentrated the institutional and cultural infrastructure that is key to all of this. It is not just ‘that neoliberalism affects cities, but also that cities have become key institutional arenas in and through which neoliberalism is itself evolving’ (Brenner and Theodore, 2002, p. 345; Sassen, 1991). Cities, then, are crucial to neoliberal globalisation but they figure in very diverse ways within it. London as a centre of command and orchestration and as, indeed, a focus of migration and a home to an astonishing multiplicity of ethnicities and cultures is a part, and a powerful part, of the same dynamics that produce, elsewhere in other cities, Davis’s ‘planet of slums’ where, ‘instead of becoming a focus for growth and prosperity, the cities have become a dumping ground for a surplus population working in unskilled, unprotected and low wage informal service industries and trades’ (UN-Habitat, 2003, p. 46). Is this then another side of London as ‘the future of the world’? Does London also stand for this?

* * *

‘What does this place stand for?’ is a question that can and should be asked of any place. Its import and urgency will vary between places (global cities may have more possibility in the sense of room for manoeuvre, and more responsibility in the sense of the magnitude of their effects), but it is a question that makes each and every place a potential arena for political contest about its answer. The constraints are undeniable (from the global movements of capital to the corsets imposed by national policy), but there are possibilities for responses that question and even rework and undermine those constraints. Conceptually, it is important to recognise that the global is as much locally produced as vice versa, that an imaginary of big binaries of us and them (often aligned with local and global) is both politically disabling and exonerating of our own (and our own local place’s) implication, and that the very fact of specificity (that places vary) both opens up the space for debate and enjoins us to invent. Moreover, it will be argued, not only is it politically possible, it is also a political responsibility, to find some way of addressing that question. It is a challenge not only for the local state, but for the grass roots of the city too, indeed for all those who in one way or another take a part of their identity from the fact that they are here.

* * *

In this more complex picture, then, London’s character as an image of a future world is at least ambiguous. Internally, too, like most cities, it is both enormously pleasurable and a site of serious deprivation and despair. The account presented here attempts to weave a course between on the one hand the dystopian visions and apocalyptic urban accounts, generalised perhaps from experience in the USA (and further generalised through the power-geometries of academe and the publishing industry), and on the other hand those overeasy skateboarding celebrations of cities as pure fun. In part, this is a general position (few cities if any are solely one or the other); moreover an insistence on complexity leaves open more opportunities for politics. In part too, and for similar reasons, although all the arguments here are generalisable, I want also to insist on specificity. London is, indeed, even more ambiguous than already described. This is a metropolis that, drawing on its history as imperial capital, is now a seat of neoliberal globalisation, but also one that has twice elected a mayor who lambasts global capitalism. (When newspapers seized upon this during his second electoral campaign, presumably aiming to indict him with ‘loony-leftism’, his popularity increased still further.) ‘Neoliberalism’ is sometimes written about as though there is an automatic transmission belt from some ethereal sphere of greater forces to ‘how it plays out on the ground’. It is not so. There are indeed pressures and constraints, often of immense power, but there are also agents who play along, or resist, or struggle mightily. There is room for political intervention. The urban ‘is not a policy area in which outcomes are given, in which a single agenda is being or can be forced through. It relies on continuing the construction of different visions for the city, which also turn out to be different visions for the wider society’ (Cochrane, 2007, p. 145). The current administration of London is, in many ways, radical and left-leaning. The first years were expended upon a highly political, popular, though ultimately unsuccessful campaign to prevent the New Labour national government from privatising elements of the provision of underground transport. There are campaigns against racism, redistributive policies on transport and on affordable housing, and radical approaches to climate change and a wide range of environmental issues. There is a genuine concern about the poverty and inequality within the city. When George W. Bush came to London (in its guise as seat of the national government) the mayor quite explicitly did not welcome him. On the contrary, in 2006 he welcomed, as a result of a specific and personal invitation, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. And of course there has been the stance against the invasion of Iraq – 2 million people on the streets and the mayor on the platform. And the city is full of grass-roots campaigns. This is no simple transmission belt for neoliberalism. And yet it is made here.

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This book is centred on London. It is not concerned with the detailed documentation of the city. There are some wonderful books that do this (Buck et al., 2002; Hamnett, 2003; for instance) and I draw on them in the argument here. The aim of this book is to stand back a bit and explore some wider questions. If this city is in any sense a herald of the future, these are questions that must be addressed. And they are questions that affect far more than London. They do this both because, as a global city, what happens in London affects far more than London and because they are questions that should be posed to all those places – and they are many, for going global has become a universal urban imperative – that aim or claim to be world cities too.

So, if this book is centred on London it is not really only about London. It is an essay, rather, that arises from London. For one thing, there is the question, anyway, ‘what isLondon?’ In its normal guise this is an extremely tedious question. There is a ritual, well established, which occupies every conference about this city, or about the geography of the UK, for at least half a session. ‘But where does London end?’, someone will cry, to nods and murmers of assent that this is indeed a serious issue. Certainly London spreads beyond its administrative boundaries; probably it reaches to Bristol and Cambridge; maybe from the Severn to the Humber . . . The question in such conferences is always and only: where do we draw the line around this city? And it may be important to ask such a question for a whole host of purposes.

But maybe space, or geography, does not work like that any more (if it ever did). Maybe places do not lend themselves to having lines drawn around them. (London is an extreme example – a good laboratory for the argument – but this is a general point.) A high proportion of Londoners were born outside the administrative boundaries. But it is far more than this. There is a vast geography of dependencies, relations and effects that spreads out from here around the globe. This is not to slide into some easy declaration that ‘everyone is a Londoner’, but it is to argue that, in considering the politics and the practices, and the very character, of this place, it is necessary to follow also the lines of its engagement with elsewhere. Such lines of engagement are both part of what makes it what it is, and part of its effects. Questions of identity run throughout this book.

Most books on places stay within the place. Peter Ackroyd’s huge tome (2000), a ‘biography’ of London, evokes the voraciousness of the metropolis, its lifespring in profit and speculation, its spewing out of huge amounts of waste, the dominance of many London trades even in the nineteenth century by immigrants from the rest of the country. It focuses on the past of the city and on its internal genius loci. But it does not enquire about the effects of all this elsewhere. Iain Sinclair, in Lights out for the territory (1997) and a host of other writings, draws out another, stranger, past. But what of those wider, and stranger, geographies of the present day? The response to the bombings celebrated the internal diversity, emphasised the peoples that come to London; it focused on (these elements of) the city’s internal structure. But, as already argued, there is another, wider, geography to being a world city.

There is a disjunction here. On the one hand space and places are increasingly the product of global flows; on the other hand we work with a politics both official and unofficial that is framed by a territorial imagination and formal structure. It is a disjunction that is disabling (to some) and highly useful (to others), and the distribution of that spatial entrapment and enablement varies, from situation to situation. It can be associated with closure, competition, and the evocation of external enemies. Trades-union and other working-class-based struggles can find themselves caught, and thereby weakened, in the us–them structure of, for instance, North versus South. The organisations of the financial City and other elements of capital, on the other hand, construct an identity for London, a London ‘we’, that serves their purposes, not only setting ‘London’s’ interests against others’ but also thereby covering over the yawning inequalities within London itself (and indeed on occasions using that very inequality to argue that ‘London’ needs more resources from the national treasury). Meanwhile a left-leaning administration needs those resources but does not want either to alienate the most powerful local forces or to set itself against the working class in other regions. This is just one example, explored in Part II, of another theme that runs through this book – the jarring of a territorialised politics with another geography of flows and interconnections.

It is a dislocation that points above all to a need to build a ‘local’ politics that thinks beyond the local. What is developed here is an argument against localism but for a politics of place. There is a need to rethink the ‘place’ of the local and to explore how we can rearticulate a politics of place that both meets the challenges of a space of flows and addresses head-on the responsibilities of ‘powerful places’ such as global cities. Such cities raise questions about ‘local politics’ that are quite different from the more usual ‘local versus global’ framings of the politics of place. They are issues that have been raised for me, again and again, by working in and reflecting on London politics. And the geography of the politics they raise is set, not only in the context of London within the United Kingdom (Part II), but also in that wider spatiality of London in the global world (Part III). What is needed is a politics of place beyond place.

Actions in one place affect other places. Places are not only the recipients of the effects of global forces, they are – in cases such as London most certainly – the origin and propagator of them too, and this raises the question of responsibility, and specifically responsibility beyond place. If actions and policies adopted within one place negatively affect people elsewhere, what responsibility is involved, and what accountability? If a place’s very character is integral to sets of relations at the other end of which is produced poverty or deprivation, how should this be addressed? If the economic sectors upon which the local economy of a place is founded entail unequal relations with elsewhere, with other places, how can this be acknowledged? If the reproduction of life in a place, from its most spectacular manifestations to its daily mundanities, is dependent upon poverty, say, or the denial of political rights, elsewhere, then should (or how should) a ‘local’ politics confront this?

Such questions can be asked of any place. But they are peculiarly urgent in global cities. The idea that the local is a product of the global has become common currency (and this is indeed one aspect of what must be addressed) but it is less often recognised that the global is also, conversely, locally produced. ‘The global’ so often is imagined, implicitly, as somehow always out there, or even up there, but as always somewhere else in its origins. In fact it exists in very concrete forms in local places. And some places more than others are home-bases for the organisation of the current form of globalisation. London is such a place.

Behind those issues of politics lies a changing world and national geography. In the world as a whole big cities are increasingly dominant. In the United Kingdom, London increasingly overshadows everywhere else. These are huge changes, but they are barely addressed by conventional politics. Within the UK, as will be argued, national government policy has been to acquiesce in and also in numerous ways to feed this voracious growth. Is this the geography we want? The question is rarely posed explicitly in democratic debate. On the planet as a whole the World Bank, one of the institutions that has pursued the policies that contributed to this massive flow of people into cities, has argued that it is through competitive cities that nations as a whole can develop (World Bank, 2000). And cities, of course, compete with each other; it is now virtually de rigueur to claim, or to have as an aim, to be in some way or other a ‘world city’. It is not clear that this is what people would desire, were they to be asked. Not only are the problems of world cities increasingly under scrutiny (see especially the work of Saskia Sassen), but when cities are ranked in terms of liveability it is not the major global cities that come out on top. At the very least, the question needs to be posed.