Contested Cities

David Harvey asks, “why is it that we tend to think of the built environment of cities as somehow or other not being the environment? Where did that separation come from?” This is an excellent question. In a similar vein, I want to ask why we think of homeless people or ‘anti-social behavior’ is seen as somehow not belonging to the city. Ten years ago I was living in Elizabeth Bay, the densest suburb in Sydney, historically populated by single working women who occupied studio apartments in buildings now highly prized for their Art Deco features. Elizabeth Bay borders Sydney’s red light district, Kings Cross. Shortly after I moved there, the City embarked on a major upgrade project in the area. Brick sidewalks were replaced with high-grade granite and peppered with brass plaques commemorating Kings Cross’s colorful history. Well before I decided to study planning, the newly-installed exclusionary seating (with the third armrest) made me deeply uneasy. The area was famous for its ‘seediness’ and street life, yet the new development was excluding the very people that gave the area its identity at the same time it celebrated the area’s notoriety. Whilst the area has gentrified rapidly since, the homeless population has not entirely dissipated - instead, a smaller population has concentrated along the granite street. I’m pleased that King’s Cross has not completely lost its grit, even despite the decade-old high grade polishing which shows that exclusionary measures aren’t always successful, I think to the area’s benefit.

(An aside)

An article in today's paper sums up the first half of this class nicely. It is the tale of two tire factories in France, one doomed to failure due to a powerful union who will not agree to conditions designed to make the plant more competitive, the other with a future because its workforce is more amenable to change. The prevalent theme: a European country trying to save its industrial base in the face of global economic forces that necessitate massive increases in efficiency (car sales in Europe are the lowest in 20 years) and flexible workers; an objective at odds with a labor force used to the generous conditions of the welfare state. In the context of the theory we have been reading, this story feels like a clash of centuries: the union workers symbolising mid-20th fordism, the restructuring factory acknowledging the reality of 21st century neoliberalism and the global market. I enjoy the juxtaposition of this sad tale of the economic reality of globalisation with an advertisement for a luxury hotel in Miami, the page as a whole symbolising the inequalities created by capitalism on a global scale.

Segregation, Disinvestment and Decline

Now that we are in a century of unprecedented urbanization, much of the literature related to cities, makes use of the phrase "if present trends continue". For example, "if present trends continue, sometime early next century more than half of the world's population will be classified as urban rather than rural" (David Harvey, writing in 1997). This prediction proved to be accurate. Hollander and Nemeth discuss the forces behind population decline, which variously include globalisation, suburbanization and the natural economic cycle. I’m particularly interested in the cyclical idea. Though there is little doubt that Detroit is a shrinking city, it has been a shrinking city for over half a century now. Though the future certainly does look bleak if present trends continue, there are many examples of cities that have turned around despite similarly bleak predictions, such as Seattle thanks to a whim of Bill Gates. If we had a crystal ball to look into future of rust belt cities, I wonder whether the first nature advantages that became redundant in the 20th Century might prove to be drawcards once more, as climate change threatens powerful coastal cities such as New York. It is important to remember that whilst Detroit may be shrinking, it is also persisting.

Megacities and Cities of Slums

Mike Davis argues that, in many parts of the world, the absence of large-scale infrastructure projects, suburbia, or powerful manufacturing sectors has forced large swathes of the population into poverty. With the American frontier long closed and postwar waves of migration a relic of the 1950s, in the 21st Century the job of absorbing the excess labor of capitalism has fallen to largely peripheral informal settlements. Furthermore, as Davis points out, “today[’s] surplus labor … faces unprecedented barriers - a literal ‘great wall of high tech border enforcement - blocking large-scale migration to the rich countries.” As the UN’s 2003 report Slums concludes, the insurmountable problems of the Third World have largely been created by the First, through SAP policies that ground economies and public services to a halt. Now, despite a context of drastically decreased worldwide labor mobility, even those who are able to travel to the world’s global cities find the doors to work increasingly closed. Those who manage to defy border controls must eke out a living in the informal economy and live in fear of deportation. Reality TV shows in the UK, US and Australia trivialise the encounters between border control staff and people attempting to enter illegally, where the implied hero is the border control officer and the villain the refugee. Considering the history of First World economic policies that have created this situation, a more truthful representation would see these roles reversed.