F´ısica en espacios curvos y la acci ´on de Einstein-Hilbert

―Whether categorised as the ‗mob‘, the ‗dangerous class‘, the

‗residiuum‘ or the ‗undeserving poor‘, the urban working class that lived in the ‗great gloomy cities‘ of the 19th century were both reviled for living their lives in social and moral degradation, and feared for their potential to contribute to civil unrest and social disorder”. (Shaw and Robinson, 2009:136)

―The earliest debate over housing reform and urban problems reflected British society‘s broader preoccupation with the ‗social question‘ moral and social health of the working classes‖. (Burden et al., 2000:163-164)

The beginnings of urban decline in the late 18^th and 19th Centuries can be linked to the massive increase in urban populations created by the transformation of the British economy from an agricultural to an industrial base (Midwinter, 1994; Tallon, 2010). It could then be argued that industrialisation laid the foundations for an urban society in Britain (Herbert, 2000). By the mid-19^th Century, more people were living in towns than in the countryside

98 (Tallon, 2010). This population surge led to socio-spatial distancing or „a gulf‟ between the social classes in major industrial cities (Sibley, 1995), with the working classes becoming increasingly separated socially, economically and geographically from the middle classes (Holmes, 1988; Mooney, 1998). This can be referred to as residualisation, that is, a situation whereby people move away from an area because it is considered as not able to cater for their needs, while those without economic power are unable to move. The divide was more pronounced in cities like London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, Oldham, Preston, St Helens and Salford. The notion of a significant gulf in cities was widely perceived as one of the main social problems facing Victorian society (Cooper, 2005) and was encapsulated by Disreali in 1845 who noted that England had become a country of „two nations‟, „rich and poor‟ (Mooney, 1998). These views were common in industrial cities, predominantly London, which had by the 1880s and 1890s become the main symbolic examples of urban decay, for much of the first half of the 19^th Century. For instance, Manchester was referred to as Britain‟s „shock city‟ (Mooney, 1998). Friedrich Engels gave the following account of the separation of the classes in Manchester in the 1840s:

―The town itself is peculiarly built, so that person may live in it for years, and go in and out daily without coming into contact with a working people‘s quarter or even with workers, that is, so long as he confines himself to his business or to pleasure walks. This arises chiefly from the facts, that by unconscious tacit agreement, as well as with outspoken conscious determination, the working people‘s quarters are sharply separated from the sections of the city reserved for the middle class; or, if this does not succeed, they are concealed with the cloak of charity‖. (Engels, 1999 184:85)

99 This gulf was often geographically represented in the form of an East End versus West End divide, for instance in London, with parallel geographical expression in Glasgow and other large cities (Mooney, 1998). Williams (1985:220) argue that the real physical contrast between these very different parts of Victorian cities had, by the last quarter of the century become what he termed as an „interpretative image‟. The West end came to symbolise all that was prosperous, whilst the East End was dark, sinister, forbidding and threatening: a home to very different „tribes‟ of people (Mooney, 1998). This gulf was perceived as serious threat to the social and physical structure of the city. There was real concern that this social

„dissolution‟ would have disastrous consequences on class relationships. This view was accompanied by middle-class fears about „the city‟ and dangerous classes. Social problems were interpreted as „urban‟ or at least often regarded as the inevitable outcome of urban life.

In view of this, the city was perceived as „dystopian‟ – a place that would eventually be engulfed by social disorder, crime and violence. It was a place where poverty and disease were rampant (Mooney, 1998). Thus a strong anti-urbanism pervaded many accounts of social life, social commentaries and social problems in Victorian Britain (Mooney, 1998).

Not only was the idea of a divide between East and West, between a city of darkness and a city of light, widely interpreted and expressed as a specifically urban and/or geographical phenomenon, it was fundamentally considered as a social one, underpinned by class relations (Mooney 1998). Therefore, the city was depicted and theorised based on dystopian ideas and metaphors. For instance, the East-West metaphor was among a number of images used in the 19th Century to „distance‟ particular groups in a city, constituting them as a „social problem‟

(Mooney, 1998). Thus, the social gulf, while giving an explicit and strong geographical referent, was also imbued with moral considerations about the state of urban industrial

100 society. These moral considerations frequently drew upon images of a mythical past, evoking the return to what was viewed as an orderly, rural society (Mooney, 1998).

The period from the 1880s onwards witnessed the emergence of urban slums, dereliction and

„moral dangers‟. Added to these was the perceived threat of the working class mob and migrant communities, particularly the Irish (Atkinson and Moon, 1994). As these areas were deemed dangerous, so too were the people who lived in them. Invariably, embedded within the Victorian narratives with regard to the city were the notion of „dangerous‟ places and classes and „communities set apart‟ (Cooper, 2005: 2008).

Victorian writers branded social disorder as a normal behaviour. It was not perceived as a product of a lack of socialisation and culture, but an issue to do with different cultures and values (see Young, 1981). Henry Mayhew, for instance, argued that the health of the economic body - those unproductive „…vagabonds who prey upon the earnings of the more industrious portions of the community‟ were a threat to social progress (cited in Cooper, 2008:33). Mayhew noted that there was a large class which belonged to the criminal race, living in particular districts of society and (containing those) who are, in reality, dangerous (quoted by Gatrell 1980:242-3). In Victorian writing, phrases such as „residuum‟, a

„community left behind by industrialisation‟, „alien‟, or a „race apart‟ were used to describe the working class communities in the cities. As Victor Gatrell noted:

―....the indiscriminate equation of the 'criminal class', the 'poor' and the 'working classes', and the loose assumption that the terms were rhetorically interchangeable, had become commonplace in the more sensational writings on the urban crisis which now began to proliferate. It was not only the motley, vast and hitherto little regarded populace of paupers and pimps, vagrants and sharp practices, pickpockets and beggars, unemployed and derelict, thieves and robbers, who were now

101 transformed into that collectivity which Frenchmen in the 1840s were to term the 'dangerous classes'. The whole world of the poor tended to be accommodated within a system of criminal labelling, not only to express the social fear of the respectable, but also to justify a broader strategy of control to cope with that fear‖. (Gatrell 1980:270)

It is important to note that the label of dangerousness and the „diseased other‟ were applied to both the „local‟ working class communities as well as their migrant counterparts. The latter were seen as places of overcrowding, disease and squalor, and high levels of criminality (see Chapter 2 of this thesis). Together these areas were viewed as being at the centre of the myriad problems facing cities.

The use of such negative imagery and metaphors in social commentaries about working class and immigrant communities, served to constitute the poor as a „race‟ (or class part). This discourse employed various labels and juxtapositions to emphasise the difference between the working classes and the emerging middle classes. Juxtapositions used included

„savage‟/„civilised‟; „immoral‟/„moral‟; human/ subhuman; „diseased/healthy‟ and foreign/English, with foreign being a label often applied to the Irish immigrants (Mooney, 1998). According to Cohen (1988), racist ideology was dominant in the representations of immigrants in the 19th Century, and it was based on a method of classifying human beings in a hierarchical way: the ruling class represented the „naturally cultured‟ and below them were two groups: „the uncultured‟ with the potential to be „civilised‟; and the „subhuman‟, that is, those deemed to be „savages‟ and wild‟. The English working class was, at various times, classified as „uncivilised‟, whilst immigrants were regarded as „subhuman‟ - a discourse that was based on an imaginary relationship between them (the immigrants) and dirt and disease.

Therefore, immigrants with political demands came to be identified with an invasive and

102 contagious virus which must be isolated in order to achieve a more stable society. As Cohen (1988) points out, the Irish immigrants in Britain were the first „beneficiaries‟ of this process of classification, racialisation, screening and segregation. The Language of subordination served as tool for reforming and civilising the „other‟ of Victorian Society. According to Mooney (1998) the poor slum-dwellers became not only objects worthy of detailed investigation, but also objects of disapproval which required regulation and supervision.

State intervention in urban life started in the late 19^th Century, when ideas of regulating the industrial cities emerged (see Hall, 2006; Atkinson and Moon, 1994). According to Tallon (2010), the intervention was in response to the catastrophic consequences arising from unregulated urban growth, associated with the ongoing process of industrial capitalism and industrialisation. Social reformers and politicians alike recognised that intervention was required to address the problems of the industrial cities of Britain. It was during this time (the late 19^th Century) that formal planning systems began to emerge in urban areas, to regulate the developments of these places, and to initiate new forms of control in order to maintain social order (see Cullingworth and Nadin, 2006; Hall, 2006).

State urban intervention in the 19th Century was focused on the physical conditions of the urban poor neighbourhoods through town planning, sanitation improvements and sunlight laws. Thus, the intervention efforts of the 19th Century were dominated by public health discourse, characterised by what Topalov (Cooper, 2005:74) described as „cleansing‟. The expression of the class divide in terms of topography and health was crucial. As Sibley puts it:

103

“The poor, down there on the swampy clays, were living in their own excrement and were subject to contagious diseases like cholera. The middle classes, up there on the suburban heights, were free from disease and uncontaminated by sewage, but threatened by the poor and their diseases. Nineteenth Century schemes to reshape the city could thus be seen as a process of purification, designed to exclude groups variously identified as polluting - the poor in general, the residual working class, racial minorities, prostitutes and so on‖. (Sibley, 1995: 55).

Accordingly, intervention came in the form of different public health legislation with specified minimum housing standards, and measures to be taken when these were breached.

Examples included the Nuisance Removal Acts of 1846 and 1855 that enabled local authorities to deal with urgent threats to public health. According to Burnett (1986), the 1851 Common Lodging Houses Act also gave the police powers to inspect accommodation, largely to control the „…filthy, overcrowded thieves‟ dens and „twopenny brothels‟ (Cooper, 2005:

74). The 1868 Artisans and Labourers‟ Dwellings Act, and the 1875 Artisans and Labourers‟

Dwelling Improvement Act, permitted local authorities to clear unfit houses and areas of unfit housing respectively (Cooper, 2005). Such measures „…dealt with the problem of the putrid masses‟ (Sibley 1995:58).

The process of urbanisation and industrialisation in the UK intensified and continued apace.

For example, Birmingham saw an increase in its population from 71,000 in 1800 to 765,000 by 1901 (Tallon, 2010). This brought about its own problems and challenges, as reform could not keep pace with the sheer rapidity of change. The internal geographies of many cities were radically altered, along with the economic, political and physical links between them, and these foundations greatly influenced future urbanisation in the UK (see Hall, 2006).

104 However, towards the late 19^th Century and the early 20^th Century, the growth of transportation altered the course of the urbanisation process. According to Tallon (2010), from around the 1920s onwards, more flexible transport systems and the rise of the private car facilitated the deconcentration and decentralisation of people and capital from urban areas, and this began a counter-urbanisation process leading to the decline of cities.

Transportation has been referred to as both the maker and the breaker of cities (Herbert, 2000).

The counter-urbanisation process was accompanied by a growing regional-scale shift in population and economic activity. This led to the dispersal of urban populations and their settlements in the outer ring of cities – a process that was vigorously continued in the 20th Century and beyond (see Hall, 2006). This process of urban decentralisation (de-industrialisation and counter-urbanisation) had great implications for the working class and for poor people who lived in the cities, as they remained in the old industrial cities whilst the more affluent social groups moved out, into the suburbs. This led to the concentration of the more disadvantaged within the old industrial towns. The old cities became increasingly associated with the poor, whilst the suburbs were associated with the rich. Thus, the foundation of the „inner cities‟ were laid. Accommodation in the old cities became cheaper, allowing more immigrants and poor people to move into those areas in the early 20th Century. Thus, in terms of dwelling, the city increasingly became associated with poor housing.