Stuart Hall - Divided City - The Crisis of London.pdf - Kulturoznawstwo - Stuart Hall - gorylicolandia

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Divided city: the crisis of London

By Stuart Hall ,

Created 2004-10-27 23:00

In an article written in 2000 I posed what I called ‘the Multicultural question’. It runs something

like this: What are the chances that we can construct in our cities shared, diverse, just, and

egalitarian forms of common life, guaranteeing the full rights of democratic citizenship and

participation to all on the basis of equality, whilst respecting the differences which inevitably

come about when peoples of different religions, cultures, histories, languages, and traditions are

obliged to live together in the same shared space?

At the time, despite the many evident tensions of modern city life, it was plausible to believe that

the contemporary metropolitan city – cities like my own home, London – might be able to offer

the model of a workable form of ethnic inter–culture, predicated on a practical cosmopolitanism.

The outlook now, four years and a ‘war on terror’ later, is much less optimistic. The promise of

the city, which David Theo Goldberg argues for in his contribution [0] to this debate, is

increasingly looking a broken one, and it is time to name the forces which are articulated

together in a process which is sub–dividing shared space into discrete, differentiated warring

enclaves, before it is too late. My argument, though it applies to many cities across across the

world, will be focussed largely on the city I know best, London.

A tale of many cities

Cities are the product of their times. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the great English

cities were motors of industrial production and centres of world trade, commerce, and finance.

Some – Bristol, Liverpool, London – were also integrated into the networks of imperial power

and colonial trade: monuments to the imperial life of the nation. Later, cities became the sites for

a modernist aesthetics of corporate power, a development more evident in New York’s

skyscraper skyline and elsewhere in the US than in Europe, as the axis of world power shifted

westwards. Western cities are no longer like this.

The social and spatial configurations of London and other metropolitan cities have been

significantly re–shaped in recent years by three forces above all – post–industrialisation,

globalization and migration. The first is the uneven transition from an industrial to a

post–industrial economy. Cities today not only embody this shift towards the service and

information economy, but vividly represent the dislocations which have inevitably accompanied

this process.

The second is globalization. Of course, a kind of globalization has been in progress since

Europe broke out of its confines towards the end of the fifteenth century, and began to construct

the beginnings of a world market and to explore, conquer, subdue by trade and naval power,

and ultimately to colonize much of the rest of the globe. But the globalization I have in mind here

is that represented by the new forms of the ‘global’ economy, based on the multi–national

capitalist corporation and augmented financial flows, which began to emerge in the mid–1970s.

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The third factor is migration, which is a consequence of the other two. What concerns me

especially is how the ethnic, social, and cultural diversity that results necessarily from migration

is changing the face of the modern urban landscape and reconfiguring the social divisions and

conflicts characteristic of so–called ‘global’ cities [1].

These issues have to be addressed now in terms of what cities are becoming. Cities have

always been divided. They are divided by class and wealth, by rights to and over property, by

occupation and use, by life–style and culture, by race and nationality, ethnicity and religion, and

by gender and sexuality. The template of these social divisions can be read into the

differentiated zones of the city’s cartography. The boundaries between these spaces, however,

have never been absolute. Enclaves merge and overlap at their invisible borders, shift and

change across time. The various zones, however distinctive to those who know how to ‘read’

them, are never uniform in look or homogeneous in social composition. Differences edge, slide,

and blur into one another. The city, as Walter Benjamin reminds us, is ‘ porous [2]’.

Intangible as these boundaries often are and maintained as they are by complex cultural and

social codes, they tend nevertheless to divide the city into distinct clusters. On the other hand,

cities also bring elements together and establish relations of interchange and exchange. They

function as spatial magnets for different, converging streams of human activity. This is the basis

of their often unplanned ‘ cosmopolitanism [3]’. The points of convergence, as well as the routes

and passages through and across them, are as significant as the spatially defined and socially

maintained differences. Cities both divide and connect.

For an assessment of how American space articulates race see David Theo Goldberg The

Space of Multiculturalism ( September 2004 [3]).

The new multicultural city

The question is how the cartography of the contemporary city is being re–configured under the

impact of globalization and migration. In significant ways, the old, hierarchical ordering of urban

space seems to have disappeared for good. As Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson [4] put it, in

their essay ‘City Economies’: “Global cities are a result of transactions that fragment space,

such that we can no longer talk about global cities as whole cities – instead, what we have [are]

bits of cities that are highly globalized – and bits juxtaposed that are completely cut out [from the

globalizing process].”

The major forces driving these changes are the result of the new forms of globalization. They

reflect the new division of labour, a result of the general decline of manufacturing in the

developed west and its trans–nationalization to other, less developed parts of the globe, with

which corporate and financial centres in the west can remain connected through ‘ space–time

condensations [5]’ which the new technologies of finance and communication make possible.

These forces for change are associated with the dominance of the trans–national corporation,

the renewed power of finance capital, the pace of global investment flows, currency switching,

and the spread of a global consumer culture and media. These are the engines of the now

hegemonic deregulating, free–market, privatising, neo–liberal economic regime known in

another context as ‘ the Washington Consensus [5]’ (to which New Labour in the UK is a

paid–up, loyal, junior signatory). These forces constitute and define the true, substantial

meaning and content of that deceptive term ‘the global’ (which implies a parity it is designed not

to deliver).

For a debate over the contours and meaning of contemporary globalisation see David Held’s

essay Globalisation the dangers and the answers ( May 2004 [5]) and responses from Martin

Wolf, Maria Cattaui, Patrick Bond, Roger Scruton, Megnard Desai and David Mepham [6].

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This is now the governing world system, rooted economically in the free play of deregulated

market forces, global capitalist penetration, the privatization of public goods, the monopoly of

scarce or valuable resources, the dismantling of welfare and health programmes, and the lure of

‘free trade’ between profoundly unequal partners on a fundamentally skewed playing field.

All this has severe consequences for global / multi–cultural cities, which are linked to this new

world–system of power through corporate global economic networks, rather than in their earlier

function as the city bases of giant industrial firms, as centres of imperial investment, national

greatness, and colonial rule. Their characteristic new skyline is now increasingly dominated by

the corporate headquarters of globally–dispersed transnational companies, surrounded by their

ancillary and supportive out–sourced dependencies in financial services, marketing, banking,

investment, advertising, design, and information technologies. The urban architecture which

mirrors this shift is most paradigmatically to be found in London’s Canary Wharf [7]: corporate

‘towers’ of glass and steel, functionally–exposed transparent cubes or architect–inspired

cucumber shaped pods now dominating financial centres and urban skylines around the globe.

Meanwhile, the promises designed to make the poor complicit with their global fate – rising living

standards, a more equal distribution of goods and life chances, an opportunity to compete on

equal terms with the developed world, a fairer share of the world’s wealth – have

comprehensively failed to be delivered.

The rapidly growing disparities between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have–nots’, which is glaringly

obvious at the global level ( The UN–Habitat Report [8] recently reported that the global urban

population increased by 36% in the 1990s and that there are 550 million urban slum dwellers in

Asia, 187 million in Africa, and 128 million in Latin America and the Caribbean), are being

reproduced within the richest societies of the developed world. Following the long period of

levelling incomes and wealth after World War Two –– the era of re–distributive welfare states –

these inequalities rose exponentially after 1980. The gap between rich and poor in the UK is

wider now than when New Labour took power in 1997.

Reliance on market forces as the sole driver of global economic and social development has

brought in its train insuperable problems: ecological and environmental disaster, the disruption

of the fragile balance of indigenous economies, the destruction of peasant farming and of

subsistence agriculture, and the collapse of world commodity prices. The result has been rapid

and unsustainable urbanisation and – coupled with collapsing post–colonial state regimes, civil

unrest, and the militarization of ethnic conflict – the phenomenon of mass migration. These

global disasters and the mass migrations they trigger are the invisible forces behind the only too

visible crisis of the metropolitan city.

In earlier phases, the problems of religious, social, and cultural difference were largely kept at a

safe distance from the metropolitan homelands of imperial systems. Today, the new kinds of

differences whose deep, underlying causes we have sketched, intrude directly into the heart of

the western metropolitan city, disturb, challenge and subvert the social and political space of its

urban centres, disrupt its long–settled class equilibrium, and subvert its relatively homogenous

cultural character. They project the vexed issue of global poverty, social and religious pluralism,

and cultural difference into the largely settled mono–cultural spaces of the Western metropolis.

New kinds of space

The global city has been significantly transformed by these forces. Manufacturing in Britain is

now in general decline, and large–scale industrial production no longer dominates city centres,

governs their economies or defines the character and tempo of their social life. These are now

often urban areas of extensive social deprivation and economic dislocation, endemic

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unemployment, and environmental degradation as well as sites of a widespread social despair

leading to the defensive mobilization of difference – and thus of ethnic tension, intra–class

hostility, racial conflict, social alienation, and civil unrest.

We can identify two types of London neighbourhood as typical of these degraded urban spaces:

The first are run down inner urban areas in which the conflict is between an old white working

class lamenting the loss of a golden and ethnically homogenous past and non–white immigrants

claiming a right of place, often against one another. The second type consists of ‘white flight’

suburbs and estates dominated by an aspirant working class or inward–looking middle class

repelled by what it sees as the replacement of a homely white nation by another land of ‘foreign’

people and cultures. [Quote from Ash Amin, Ethnicity and the Multi–Cultural City [9]]

Both types of neighbourhood can be found in London. In between, there are many mixed

neighbourhoods which seem relatively settled after years of patient negotiation, but which are

nevertheless, in a subterranean and invisible way, ‘riddled with prejudice and conflict between

their varied ethnic groups’ (Amin).

This article is an edited extract of the lecture ‘Divided Cities’ given by Stuart Hall as part of the

Oxford Amnesty Lectures series, see their website [10] for more information and upcoming

lectures.

The ‘flashocracy’, the creatives and the rest

No longer ‘the workshops of the world’, English cities have become the service centres, the

financial and speculative investment engines and consumer retail hubs, of the global economy.

The suited executives – those well–groomed, toned, and limousined corporate ‘heroes’ whose

well–fleshed faces adorn the business pages of the quality newspapers and magazines – are

either a new global entrepreneurial class or, alternatively, the remnants of an old stuffy one who

have undergone a make–over. They are equally ‘at home’ in New York, Los Angeles, Hong

Kong, Kuala Lumpur or Tokyo as they are in London, or their country homes in Hampshire.

Individually, their fortunes rise and fall but, as a class, they are installed as the permanent

executive officers of the new global capitalism.

Many wealthier executives now live well outside the city or in its increasingly gated enclaves and

pied–à–terres. They are ‘cosmopolitan’ in orientation. They travel constantly for work and

pleasure. They remain in touch, through the circuits of instant communication, with mobile

transnational elites elsewhere as they glide in comfort and style across the globe. They are ‘at

home’ anywhere, and the more so since ‘elsewhere’ is increasingly like ‘here’, only more so.

They are focussed on profit margins and share values, on restructuring core–businesses and

absorbing other companies.

They are remorselessly attuned – and without a shadow of embarrassment – to salary

settlements unrelated to any calculable performance achievements, guaranteeing the steady

supply of staggering amounts of money for skiing holidays and private school fees. Their wives

or servants are fully occupied ferrying the children in SUVs to select and selective private

schools, those launch–pads to success. Fitzjohns Avenue in north–west London, where there

must be twelve or fifteen private primary schools and nurseries within a half–mile stretch of

traffic–crammed road, is notorious with taxi drivers. The ‘school run’ brings an army of jeeps,

with their ranch–like bumpers, some parked in driveways, others perched on the bank–sides,

others still blithely reversing into on–coming traffic.

This new global executive class are ‘flash, fast, fun, feckless, and fantastically frivolous’, as the

editor of Tatler , Geordie Greig – who should know – describes the ‘ flashocracy [11]‘. Rapidly

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trading tweed for ‘bling’ (a multiculturalism of consumption only), they are experts in visualising

for the rest new forms of urban style and status: not ‘status’ as an alternative to ‘class’, as in the

old Marx vs. Weber [12] dialogue, but status as the cultural signifier of new riches, as the

materialization of social success. They are living their imprint on the global city.

The ‘creatives’ who service this corporate and celebrity world are very different in background

and in attitudes to the older professional and managerial middle–classes. They are more

individualistic, consumer–oriented, culturally–savvy, life–style focussed, entrepreneurial, and

hedonistic. More often they are on fast–track mobility or aspirational escalators from lower in the

social order. Here, rather than higher up the urban pecking–order, the leading edge of the rising

Asian and Afro–Caribbean new middle classes are beginning to carve out an elegant niche. The

places they aspire to live in, the life–styles they covet, and the kinds of leisure pursuits and

entertainment they invest in are very different to older, more puritan tastes.

They are the advance party of the new urban living – the agents of the ‘gentrification’ of older

working–class residential areas and of industrial small–manufacturing dockland or storage areas

of the city, whose abandoned warehouses, refashioned into loft–spaces and city–centre ‘pads’,

they are rapidly colonising. Good food, art galleries, smart cafes, and health–clubs are the

necessary accompaniments to this life–style. These are the pioneers of an intense,

designer–shaped, global consumerism, the cultural happy few exquisitely attuned to every minor

shift in global postmodern taste and design.

At the other end of the scale are the poor areas which surround this vibrant ‘global’ centre. As

city centres are increasingly colonized for urban night–life and clubbing, their older inhabitants

are pushed towards the ‘outer ring’. In London, this means Harlesden, Cricklewood, Wembley,

Southall, Tottenham, Haringey, and Tower Hamlets: White Teeth [13] or Brick Lane [14]

territory. These are areas of mixed residency in which the new multi–culturalism is being

stretched to breaking point in a myriad everyday encounters. Here the better housing is highly

sought after by professionals harried by ferociously rising house prices and land values. But

these are typically areas of high and multiple disadvantage, with poor schools, forbidding

estates, run–down or boarded–up high streets, high crime and drug rates, and drab terraces.

They are often dilapidated, poorly serviced, and grim in terms of the conditions of life they offer.

Increasingly, these are the colonised areas of immigrant settlement, whether by the first

(Afro–Caribbean), second (Asian sub–continent: Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi), third (West

African, Turkish, and Greek Cypriot), fourth (North African: Somali, Sudanese, Moroccan,

Algerian, etc.), fifth (Bosnian, Albanian, and Kosovan), sixth (Afghan, Iraqi, and Middle Eastern),

or seventh (post–Soviet East European) migrant waves.

In these areas, white residents – who feel threatened by change, abandoned by modernising

and multi–cultural political agendas, and neglected because they lack the entrepreneurial and

‘creative’ skills which the new service economy demands – meet the ‘ethnic minority

communities’, whether in their young posse, trapped–and–deprived, veiled and turbaned or in

their aspirational, socially and occupationally mobile, manifestations. Corner grocery shops,

greengrocers’, market stalls, record shops, newsagents, mini–cab firms, small under–the–bridge

mechanics and car–repair yards, cafes and fast–food late–night outlets are the small ‘motors’ of

the local high–street economy of these city enclaves.

The fragile promise

Les Back [15], among others, has charted how, in some largely black areas of South London

and elsewhere, a certain genuine cultural syncretism [16] has emerged among young people in

which music and urban street style are critical zones of interchange, not only cementing a ‘new

ethnic’ urban life–style among black and Asian youth, but drawing in a section of white

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Stuart Hall - Divided City - The Crisis of London.pdf

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