[P2P-F] Fwd: [CommonGood] Fw: [aepf] London, whose city?

Mon Jul 3 09:16:45 CEST 2017

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Birgit Daiber <bir.dai at hotmail.com>
Date: Mon, Jul 3, 2017 at 2:14 PM
Subject: [CommonGood] Fw: [aepf] London, whose city?
To: "commongood at listi.jpberlin.de" <commongood at listi.jpberlin.de>

Dear Friends and colleagues, looking to the city of Barcelona inspires us -
but looking to London shows the disastrous consequences of  selling out of
people's basic interests. Tina Ebro sent us this interesting article:
Le Monde diplomatique - English edition <https://mondediplo.com/>
mondediplo.com
“This is a war against normal life.” So said CNN correspondent Clarissa
Ward, describing the situation at this moment in Syria, as well as in other
parts of the ...

London, whose city?

The fire that destroyed Grenfell Tower and killed so many who lived there
made clear what many have felt for years: London has become a city for
capital not people. It builds for financial transactions, not for homes.
by Rowland Atkinson  <https://mondediplo.com/2017/07/06london#partage>
[image: JPEG - 113 kb]
Jon Arnold · Getty

Government ministers seen as responsible for unceasing cuts to public
services gave uncomfortable street interviews after a massive fire rapidly
engulfed Grenfell Tower, a public housing block in one of London’s most
affluent districts. The disaster made clear the terrible results of
ideological commitments to cut corners and costs in building safety
regulations, including the installation of what may have been
fire-conducting cladding. Besides the anger and trauma at the loss of life
(some 80 dead), people are questioning the political and economic choices
that forced low-cost safety choices. There is a strong sense that poor
people matter less in a city run for the rich.

Cutting funds to local authorities and public services, and red tape around
health and safety regulations, combined with deep social inequalities to
produce a catastrophe with major political repercussions. The tower was in
the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, a parliamentary constituency
that changed in the general election, by just 20 votes, from Conservative
to Labour for the first time, mostly due to concerns over housing. The
borough ran budget surpluses and offered council tax rebates, while
choosing to do public housing maintenance and safety on the cheap. London’s
inequalities are most evident in the social geography of its inner western
zones, where public estates offer vital affordable housing to those on no
and low incomes among multi-million pound homes whose prices are inflated
by offshore investment capital and wealthy buyers.

The slow-motion social disaster of austerity created a burnt-out landmark
as a visible symbol of the callous political choices of the past decade.
People sensed that the poor mattered less and got a raw deal in social and
physical protection; some began to feel that the disaster might even be
part of a plan to rid the area of unsightly low-income housing and poor
people. The disaster seemed the defining moment of a precarious government
struggling to build an alliance to govern, as promises to posture
aggressively at Brexit negotiations were being broken.

The mood of London and its populace is changing. There is a sense of
possibility that may generate more emphatic changes at future elections,
with a now engaged youth vote and new respect for Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn.
People are asking who London is for, and the answer isn’t capital. The
Grenfell disaster has led to calls to invest in and reconstruct
high-quality and affordable housing, and to recognise that declining public
investment and the callous treatment of the urban poor are the problem, not
public housing.
Massive inequalities

Most of London’s current and future high-rises aren’t public housing (1
<https://mondediplo.com/2017/07/06london#nb1>). More than 400 high-rise
developments are now in progress or have received planning permission.
Almost none of their homes will be affordable, and very few are public
housing. In the stories now told of London’s massive inequalities and
housing problems, the private towers signal the city’s social extremes and
the inability of state or market to resolve social needs. These pads are
intended for the global elite and look like a disposable environment that
fits the need, in many cases, to rest money. The ‘community’ imagined by
starchitects and estate agents on billboards and in brochures is a sales
pitch to a floating class of the rich and investors. Whatever drugs the
architects of the gold apartment block at Battersea Power Station were on,
their inspiration was a pound sign, not the floating pig on Pink Floyd’s
*Animals* album cover. Much of the development along the Thames is a parody
of place and a mirage of communal life. These are dead spaces and
dwellings, their lifelessness important for the realisation of maximum
exchange value, rather than being valued for their residential use. The
question of who benefits from such development is an ongoing irritant to
managers and politicians.

*Whatever drugs the architects of the gold apartment block at Battersea
Power Station were on, their inspiration was a pound sign, not the floating
pig on Pink Floyd’s Animals album cover*

London’s position as a beacon for the global super-rich has not been good
news for its wider population. When the good times rolled, they were marked
by an aggressive expansion of gentrification, private tenant evictions, the
demolition of dozens of public estates, welfare reforms and household
displacement. The investment and destruction may be related; with Brexit
deliberations, the potentially negative role of international investment
has been glossed over by London’s elite.

Social philosopher Erich Fromm might be a ghost guide to the new follies
and ruins created by investors and developers; in later life he was
exercised by our culture’s focus on things rather than people, on having
rather than being. He thought our desire for lifeless things suggested a
necrophiliac culture, fixated on the denial of death and pursuit of shiny
objects. Is London’s inflated skyscape the result of an urban political
economy harnessed to the death drive of capital, and the unchecked global
accumulation strategies of the wealthy?
Empty interiors

In *The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness* (1973), Fromm identified
necrophilia as an attraction to anything dead, a mechanical interest that
evades social or human connectivity. This seems an apposite framing of the
love for dead things of the world’s super-rich. Properties are snapped-up
as signs of personal progress and status while remaining wholly or
partially uninhabited. Marketing materials for many developments show empty
interiors looking out over the city. Prospective buyers are able to project
their presence as the city’s triumphant captains without having to witness
community life or troublesome social difference.

This might not matter if these lifeless spaces were not so corrosive to the
social life of the city. Massive injections of international capital have
encouraged the logic of building for the needs of the wealthy and
international buyers. Such investment damages the legitimacy and vital role
of public housing, which is framed as lavish public expenditure while
higher bidders wait in the wings. The wider sociality of the city withers
as parts of the urban body are starved of a vital supply of people and
social circulation by absent owners and their investment vehicles. All this
is overseen by a political system that believed a city’s standing was to be
indexed by the presence of wealth, rather than its creation and wider
distribution.
[image: JPEG - 211.9 kb]
Inferno: local residents in shock as flames rip through the 27-floor
Grenfell Tower housing block in west London
Daniel Leal-Olivas · AFP · Getty

If you want to see this process of accumulation and emptiness, wander past
One Hyde Park or the many empty mansions lining The Bishops Avenue north of
Hampstead Heath. People are exercised about the cost and lack of housing in
London because they witness competition for these resources juxtaposed with
a landscape of empty shells that should be homes. A surprising percentage
of private housing is rarely or never occupied, while many households on
local authority waiting lists are exported outside their borough or outside
the city; and a third of a million households remain on waiting lists for
public housing in London. Walking along the Thames’s south side near Nine
Elms, you can see many new towers, apparently suspended along the river’s
corridor. Like dead mackerel, these developments shine, but also stink of
corrupt planning agreements and a housing system out of sync with the needs
of ordinary folk.

The sense that there are outright winners and vulnerable losers raises big
questions. If we bought the argument that the wider economy and population
benefit from such investment, the new skyscape might be defended. Yet such
arguments are threadbare. Those with economic and political power identify
property and finance as the machine driving living standards and
reputation. London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, has moved in a slightly different
direction, launching an enquiry into the number of unoccupied homes bought
by offshore investors. A recent study examined utility records to locate
homes with abnormally low electricity use, concluding that around 21,000
homes are empty long-term. Around 5% of homes in central and western London
lie empty according to the government’s statistics agency (2
<https://mondediplo.com/2017/07/06london#nb2>).
‘Secrecy jurisdiction’

Non-partisan groups have also highlighted the criminal and anonymous
purchase of thousands of homes. The head of the National Crime Agency has
suggested that criminal money has driven up London property prices, and
hundreds of millions of pounds of purchases are under criminal
investigation as suspected proceeds of corruption, yet these figures only
represent a fraction of the total (3
<https://mondediplo.com/2017/07/06london#nb3>). Transparency International
has revealed that around 10% of properties in Kensington and Chelsea, the
borough in which the Grenfell tragedy occurred, are owned through a
‘secrecy jurisdiction’, tied to £122bn of offshore money. Many cases are
not pursued by resource-starved tax authorities.

One of the worst injustices is that while essential workers and even those
on respectable incomes struggle to access decent housing, London is
building thousands of apartments for people who may never use them. How
broken is a planning system that does not challenge the construction of
blocks of hundreds of flats in which a studio costs over £600,000, while
including a few affordable homes is said to threaten market viability?
Evidence shows that developers and planning consultants work hard to
circumvent their duty to offer affordable housing or cash contributions to
the local authority. Criticism has been growing for years, but now there is
intense and rising anger, even if effective resistance remains elusive.

In 1951 the population of Greater London — its 32 constituent boroughs and
the square mile of the City — was 8,164,416, making it a peak year for
London (and many British cities). But by 1981 and the nascent Thatcher
government, the population had fallen to 6,608,513 due to a changing
economy and outward migration from most of Britain’s major cities to
suburban areas. It is now hard to remember the time when Britain’s inner
cities were places of economic stagnation, social decline and
out-migration, and ‘inner city’ evoked a social imaginary marked by these
features as much as any geographical place.
[image: JPEG - 179.3 kb]
How much? Launch of a global tour of the Battersea Power Station
development exhibition at the Mandarin Oriental Tokyo
Ken Ishii · Getty

The most recent census, of 2011, shows London’s population at an all-time
high of 8,173,900. Yet this apparent demographic health belies massive
shifts in the structure of London’s economy and new casualties in housing
markets. With changes in London’s economy as it moved towards becoming a
node in the world financial economy came changes to many neighbourhoods
previously thought untouchable by gentrification.

Today London again faces an uncertain future. Economic pre-eminence in a
global system of urban command centres is giving way to anxieties about the
city’s future, including the possibility that financial institutions may
move away. Trying to keep the goose that lays the golden eggs, even if it
does little for London’s working class, is ever more the name of the game
under Brexit.

Such worries add vigour to capital’s grab for land and sky, with
projections for the numbers of the super-rich in London set to grow
significantly. Those criticising construction aimed solely at international
investors are called out of touch with the realities of selling in a global
market (4 <https://mondediplo.com/2017/07/06london#nb4>). Yet even the
trade in premium real estate appears fragile in the context of Brexit and
the possibility that key financial institutions may be lured to competitor
cities as crisis talks continue, with sales at the top of the market
dramatically reducing in volume. Despite this, concerns about social
inequality and exclusion have been pushed aside by a government that is
scrambling to attract buyers and institutions to keep the national books
balanced.

London’s patrician class recognised where the money is some time ago. What
was once the establishment might now be better called ushers to capital and
vendors of prized assets and products. The international rich come for
financial services, generate construction and jobs for decorators and
nannies, and are prepared to pay fees and taxes on property sales (or work
hard to avoid them). Property professionals and financial wizards offer
portentous assessments of how tariffs, taxes or regulatory moves would kill
the flow of capital investment. This may be true now but it wasn’t just two
years ago when selling £10m flats before they were built was possible. The
systemic threats being revealed today will injure London’s poor and working
classes even more given the inability of governments to extract more from
the presence of the wealthy when times were good. If in the last decade we
hung on to the Maserati exhaust pipes of the super-rich, our grip must
tighten in the future. There will be less going spare.
London’s Achilles heel

The City’s strength is London’s Achilles heel. While the economic role of
the City is well understood, its asymmetrical dominance in the structure of
the urban economy presents risks. Any economic geographer will tell you
that a key danger for any single-industry town is that it is more likely to
die as its fortunes change because of competition from rivals. Where such
change once devastated Glasgow, Sheffield, Birmingham and many others,
London’s fate may be to lose core services to Dublin, Paris or Frankfurt.
Analysts are now pondering how many bankers or institutions will leave
after Brexit. The likely answer is thousands. Even if banks are not as
mobile as the currencies and services they deal in, an orderly or partial
evacuation over years remains a real possibility.

In the good times before the Brexit vote (bear with me if you were on a
waiting list, crammed two to a rented room or saving for a deposit to get
on the housing ladder), we were told not to touch the market, in order to
maintain a low-tax environment to enable overseas monies to benefit London.
With the risks to London’s economy from Brexit, this is more emphatic, and
London now has a large neon ‘for sale’ sign. Many prized assets are the
property of foreign wealth funds or individuals (Harrods, The Shard, Harvey
Nichols). Much of the commercial property on Sloane Street is owned by the
Qatari sovereign wealth fund. These changes symbolise shifts in class and
taste and reflect a move from gentry and landed wealth to an expanding
cadre of those who have benefited from globalisation, the lucky control of
state assets, or associations with international criminal activity. Their
brashness and raw money power is only matched by the hatred felt by the
last wealthy long-term residents of inner west London who didn’t realise
that others in their class put up the first ‘for sale’ signs.
It’s the money, stupid

The most obvious answer to any question about London’s problems is money.
Money is why our political interests turn a blind eye to offshore and
criminal purchasing of real estate, no matter how shady its source. Money
is the reason that public housing is being demolished in the name of
‘affordable’ housing. Money is why gentrification is a good thing and poor
residents might be better sent elsewhere. Money lies at the heart of
keeping taxes low and regulations slack. Money is the reason for the dead
spaces along the Thames and beyond. The London shaped by this dominating
rationale is a negative doughnut with wealth and high-rise housing its
centre, falling away to suburbs marked by slow physical decay and the
exported city poor. London’s claim to world standing is playing host to the
most ultra-high net-worth individuals of any city globally — 4,750 — of
whom 80 are billionaires (5 <https://mondediplo.com/2017/07/06london#nb5>).
Such boasts are poor slogans for a city that has become a sorting machine
for opportunity and fortune: the rich come in one door, the poor go out the
other, necessary casualties of a city dominated by a prime real estate and
finance economy.

London’s dead homes result from demands for unfettered markets and
ambitious urban remaking. Yet we need to recognise that for many others,
London’s new architecture indicates a move in the right direction. The new
director of Zaha Hadid architects, Patrick Schumacher, frankly disclosed
values in some practices when he suggested paving over Hyde Park, removing
public housing and letting the market dictate who lives where (6
<https://mondediplo.com/2017/07/06london#nb6>). He misjudged the views of
the wider audience (London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, slammed the suggestions)
but such ideas remain dominant among those whose bread is buttered by
capital. Meanwhile, protecting municipal housing, alleviating real poverty
in a rich city and wider regional inequalities, or caring for the elderly
and disabled are seen as unfortunate problems for which there is no money
due to the profligacy of a previous government. The prospects for
challenging the overall direction of London and its politics could look
dismal.

Twenty years ago, there was a television sketch in which the Ritz, one of
the grandest of London’s hotels, was sold to an oligarch. He told the staff
there would be few changes, but he had a small request: to change the name
to the Titz (7 <https://mondediplo.com/2017/07/06london#nb7>). Such
possibilities have become thinkable. The culture shock and clash of capital
with everyday life are features of a city barely serving its working
population. Gross excess is now a mainstay of reality TV about the
super-rich, their tastes and demands gawped at by millions, with the
unnecessary as the mark of success. More, bigger, shinier, emptier.

Rowland Atkinson
Rowland Atkinson is chair in Inclusive Societies at the University of
Sheffield and the author (with Sarah Blandy) of *Domestic Fortress: Fear
and the New Home Front *(Manchester University Press, 2016) and co-editor
of *Building Better Societies: Promoting Social Justice in a World Falling
Apart* .

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