D: En Desacuerdo
51. Mi área de trabajo tiene suficiente ventilación
Seen through a political-economic lens, the previous case seems to prove that the entrepreneurial imposition of urban re-imaging is not an end in itself, but the means, among others, to another end: rent gap accumulation (Hubbard, 2004). However, as some recent conflicts in the renewing neighbourhoods of Barcelona show, the social and spatial effects of the highly localised, fragmentary entrepreneurial urbanism might be contested by adjacent low-income local communities that see the stability of their neighbourhoods or chances to remain in the place threatened by exorbitant increases in rents or land taxes, if the surrounding land of a large urban project is to be overvalued.
Or it might happen that, due to its motivation rooted in the rent gap profit, urban renewal comes not where it is socially needed but where it is financially needed (Shaw, 2005). Urban entrepreneurialism being a highly speculative business environment, and financial capital set on urban renewal so volatile, any counter-reaction must be disciplined too, while interdictory urbanism and authoritarian state practices impose their entrepreneurial economic rules (Flusty, 2001). For its own social risk-aversion, the entrepreneurial urban space becomes a city of physical proximity but institutional rupture where islands of relative affluence need to secure themselves amidst seas of spreading decay (MacLeod and Ward, 2002), be this decay real or imagined as justification for future ‘regeneration’ (Gilbert, 2007; see below).
Since entrepreneurial projects need to bypass their inelegant surrounding territories, low-income inhabitants must not be visible. Therefore, strategies of entrepreneurial regeneration are generally based on zero-tolerance policies26, forms of invigilation of some awkward surrounding areas, and eviction from the new central places (Bernd and Helms, 2003). Physical and societal forms of discipline are present in several forms of architectural design, CCTV (Van Criekingen et al., 2006), private security and a range of legal impositions, as a way to inculcate acceptable patterns of behaviour in accordance with the imposed new commerce and new aesthetics. This can be understood as reclaiming public spaces for the groups who possess economic value as
26 Policies based on the core idea of punishing even insignificant forms of disorder or public misconduct (drinking in public, begging, vandalism, graffiti, etc.). In western societies, where the state is the legitimated monopoliser of power, this idea drives legal frameworks and police behaviour to prevent such actions through the prior removal of undesirable people from certain areas (Bernd and Helms, 2003).
producers and/or consumers, virtually excluding the others27. In general, this tendency to control and towards social rejection has come to be called ‘revanchism’28.
Entrepreneurial discourses of urban regeneration have emphasised the concerns about personal safety and fear of crime as fundamental issues to be addressed by urban redevelopment projects (Flusty, 2001), attempting to construct new suitable and safe urban realms, based on “principles of social mixing, sustainability, connectivity, higher densities, walkability, and high-quality streetscapes” (Coaffee, 2005: 448). The new urban space promoted implies the establishment of “a new morality by referring to the
‘good community’ and it thereby attempts to engineer behaviour and social norms”
(Bernd and Helms, 2003: 1848). Thus, behavioural restrictions are reified as ‘normal’
by the middle class society, as the price to pay for security (Coaffee, 2005).
Atkinson (2003a, b) argues that the artificial spatial boundaries between redevelopment and decay and the ruled behaviours imposed by entrepreneurialism over the space of renewal obscure the real social implications of inner city decline, which are political and economic. Entrepreneurialism simplifies the social and economic chains that lie behind working-class neighbourhoods and stigmatises the local population with insubordination when they do not respond to the macro-economic revivals affecting them. What entrepreneurialism does is then to install a prophetic and dystopian image of urban malaise in the inner city, or the imposition at any cost of the idea about the
27 But evictions are not only constrained to social-spatial reconfigurations in inner city space. They also happen in academic realms. Some authors have recently observed trends of de-politicisation and eviction of critical theoretical perspectives from gentrification studies (Slater, 2006; Slater et al., 2004; Watt, 2008), displacement of the working-class’ perspective from studies on neighbourhood change (Allen, 2008) and even criminal prosecution of gentrification researchers (Smith, 2008).
28 Or the triumph of a dominant entrepreneurial urbanism in which the state has to exert power for cleansing from the city what the Keynesian state had produced previously (Smith, 1996a, 1996b, 1996d, 1998, 1999), not only in terms of socio-spatial distribution but even by destroying the welfare system and social benefits developed (Baeten, 2002). From a privatist rationale, revanchism means blaming the dispossessed for the economic losses to the public treasury generated in the past (Keith and Rogers, 1991), a ‘compassion fatigue’ and erosion of public sympathy for the dispossessed. Revanchism does not simply make the poor invisible but it penalises them in defence of the victorious’ privileges. Widespread anti-homeless policies have been epitome of revanchism (DeVerteuil, 2006). Although it has been considered too radical a hypothesis not applicable in every context (Slater, 2003; Uitermark and Duyvendak, 2008), the fact is that revanchist institutional practices have been observed in many cases from Europe and the USA (Atkinson, 2003a, b; Bernd and Helms, 2003; Hubbard, 2004; MacLeod, 2002; Niedt, 2006; Smith, 1998; Van Criekingen et al., 2006) and even in South America (Swanson, 2007).
superiority of some forms of middle-class lifestyle, over the working-class environments, even if the latter, as many case-studies reveal, generate more benefits to the ‘segregated’ inhabitants of the low-income inner city neighbourhoods than the supposed more beneficial mixed-communities (Lees, 2008; Lees and Ley, 2008; Wyly and Hammel, 2008).
The spaces targeted for reinvestment are hence depicted as part of broad areas of intense poverty and decay. This is a way to justify policies of gentrification based on the appearance of diversity and ‘social mixes’, but sustained instead by processes of deliberate (or even involuntary) displacement or exclusion of the poorer (Shaw, 2008).
This has been largely observed in British cases (Atkinson, 2000; Lees, 2008) and also in Spain (Díaz, 2008; Sargatal, 2000).
The political manipulation of social/urban deprivation is channelled precisely toward describing a reality of deficiency as justification of renovation and market-led growth.
The main attempt might be to impose an agenda of easy ‘regeneration’ without (or with very little) social accountability (Wyly and Hammel, 2008), and to create a consensus around the idea that working-class inner cities must be rehabilitated, renovated or replaced anyway, escaping from closer public scrutiny. The rhetorical impetus of urban renewal depends on a movement away from a depressed present without necessarily portraying too detailed a picture of the destination those policies are moving to (Keith and Rogers, 1991).
This idea is shared by Alan Gilbert, who has recently observed the return of the word
‘slum’ into the language of developmental policies, as well as a too-heavy emphasis on disease, crime and difficulties associated with slum life. He claims that this is the kind of fears that already encourage the rich to move to their gated communities or, in this case, accelerate the destruction of yet perfectly liveable neighbourhoods. This political attitude is based first on an advanced desire for homogenised ‘healthy’ places and second on the fact that in cities where the general quality of housing gradually improves, areas that do not change at the same pace are condemned to be labelled as
‘slums’, because of their relative neglect to change (Gilbert, 2007), even if they are in good condition. But
[w]hat makes the word ‘slum’ [even more] dangerous is the series of negative associations that the term conjures up, the false hopes that a campaign against slums raises and the mischief that unscrupulous politicians, developers and planners may do with the term. […] I am complaining about resuscitating an old, never euphemistic, stereotype; one that was long ago denounced as dangerous and yet has now resurfaced in the policy arena29 (Gilbert, 2007: 701).
Rachel Weber (2002) uses the concept of ‘urban blight’ to refer to a similar phenomenon. Blighting is necessary for identifying and targeting, through quasi-scientific methods, the most interesting areas for private redevelopment, using biological or medical metaphors referred to ‘cancers’ or ‘ulcers’. Blighting is, therefore, a primary justification (or a facilitator) for creative destruction. Furthermore, with the laudable purpose of ‘healthy’ cities, the moral implications of blight blur the boundaries between private and public responsibility since destruction becomes a prioritised goal at any cost, and these depictions can be expanded even towards areas which are only
‘potentially’ decayed.
Obsolescence has become a neoliberal alibi for creative destruction, and therefore an important component in contemporary processes of spatialized capital accumulation. […]
Obsolescence poses a greater threat to exchange values than to use values, whereas blight threatens both. An obsolete building, eg one that has overly high ceilings, is not physically unusable but rather cannot be used as profitably as one with lower ceilings and modern heating systems. (Weber, 2002: 526-532)
Always operating on the surface of appearances, entrepreneurialism refers to recycling, upgrading, and renaissance as antonym to blight. Even gentrification in some ways has become a nice world, symbol of social progress, equity and social justice in moribund spaces (Slater, 2006). Nevertheless
[t]he language of revitalization, recycling, upgrading and renaissance suggest that affected neighborhoods were somehow devitalized or culturally moribund prior to gentrification. While this is sometimes the case, it is often also true that very vital working-class communities are culturally devitalized through gentrification as the new middle class scorns the streets in favor of the dining room and bedroom. (Smith, 1996b:
35)
29 Gilbert is not only criticising entrepreneurial policymakers and planners but also researchers that, according to him, are too biased at observing the worldwide proliferation of slums as pure effect of neoliberalism, e.g. Mike Davis (2004).
The political rhetoric behind blighting might imply precisely the opposite to the declared social aims of entrepreneurialism, which are trickle down, jobs increased, and the social benefits of mixture – in an intended reconstruction of community which comes rarely along with gentrification (Colenutt, 1991; Lees, 2008; Lees and Ley, 2008;
Lees et al., 2007). Instead, policies of blighting, when they target low-income neighbourhoods, might prevent the accumulation of ground rent by local homeowners, reproducing in turn forms of large-scale class-monopoly accumulation. Therefore blighting policies aim at producing dispossession of probably the most important economic asset of low-income homeowners: their ground rent (Harvey, 2006a).