A deal with the devil is being made as this blog is written.
The FT has a longform piece on how wealthy donors and business leaders are flocking to the centre left Labour party. Much of this seems to be about backing what is now clearly a winner, rather than some ideological unity. Or is it? In many ways a party that dropped a commitment to wealth taxes is also a party now hugely relaxed about profit as a signal of success and contribution to the economy. It is just a shame that there isn’t more recognition that an economy is also made of people and communities. As we get ready for the promised land, or narrow social vision, of a Labour victory there is much still to consider about how we tackle the question of inequality. Do we ‘need’ a pact with business to assure victory? Does ‘business’ not, in reality, refer to firms that operate as employers who are socially embedded entities as much as some narrowly defined machine for profit? Can we make even modest claims on wealth to fund vital social infrastructure (health, education, policing, social care and so on, and on!) without scaring capital or those who are asset rich?
One of the questions that has been floating around recently relates to whether the very rich will move away if personal and wealth taxation are increased. The critical thing to remember here is that the wealthy are in many was embedded in localities, clubs, with children in (private) schooling, working in office buildings are connecting with business associates, colleagues, friends and family in the social infrastructure of the neighbourhoods they live in. It is not so much that the rich are simply like everyone else, but rather that they are attached to place, emotionally, physically and in terms of the capital investments that they hold. This casts questions of tax contribution in an interesting light because it is the very non-substitutability of cities like London that brings these forms of social and capital investment, and it means that tax rates becomes a much fuzzier question. For the wealthy tax is something to be navigated, avoided, sometimes evaded and ultimately paid as the price of access to the club space that is London.
Just this week we have heard from the developer of One Hyde Park that the smart money is on Dubai. Apparently there is nowhere else like it globally today, everyone is buying-in and the mood is, yes, you’ve guessed it, much as it was when the record setting prices at One Hyde made their debut a decade ago. The smart Marxist geographers will tell you that, on one level, he is right – the bowls of the fountain have filled in London and investors can only make gains in a less ‘developed’ market. But beyond this, credulity quickly ceases. Dubai is one of the least sustainable and, arguably, liveable cities in the world. Almost unending energy is supplied to maintain conditions at a survivable level and private infrastructure projects often feel disconnected. A buck there may be to be made, but the risks are palpable – you are likely to need to take off your shirt to deal with the heat, or lose it in the coming inevitable downturn as investment shuns ecologically fragile locations that are utterly dependant on high carbon footprints to access or to leave.
Despite the devastation wrought by a finance economy and social outfall of a political system that throws continued favours most at those who need them least, London is a great city. It is green, accessible, well served by transport and offers history, culture and experience by turns. What is needed is some modest pluck to advance a basic argument – this and other cities are best when they are fairest. It is not credible to suggest that the rich will leave if they are asked to contribute more. Further, it is not beyond the skills of government to create fair systems of wealth taxation that can operate to produce a more cohesive and better quality public realm which, after all, rich and poor ultimately share. What seems increasingly evident is that it is not the rich themselves that are bleating, but instead those that work for them, invest for them, or who want to associate with them. This party must not risk being ended by silly talk of wealth taxes even if more than half of people believe they are a good idea. In many ways that boat has sailed because it is now Labour’s commitment, though proposals on the ‘non-dom’ system are being pushed ahead with. But at some point the downright brokenness of our housing, public schools, hospitals, social services, prisons, roads, and the need for real investment in a move to a greener economy will force a grown-up conversation.
An interesting story emerged this week as the head of a corporation called for greater investment in policing, favouring social cohesion and safety over the proposed tax cuts being prepared by the UK government.
This story was interesting on two levels. First, this is not the kind of story one generally tends to hear, but which has become more frequent, alongside other calls for greater social investment, a sense of responsibility and the need for additional social contribution by the corporate sector. Some will have seen the stories in the past few weeks of the rich on demos requesting that they be taxed, rather than exempted!
Perhaps the second and even more interesting side of this story was that the boss involved was that of Jaguar Land Rover and that the call for greater policing was due to relatively significant levels of thefts of their most coveted models by organised criminals. At this level the story was actually one of fairly clear self-interest since the group have been spending millions on security at ports to prevent thefts to offshore locations.
The story nevertheless speaks to a deepening concern about the palpable lack of capacity by the state to maintain core functions that include policing, but also others like healthcare, social care, education, the maintenance of the public realm, transportation and so on. In fact the list has become almost endless with key departments and functions like taxation, the regulation of housing and funding schools seen to be almost threadbare. Today the ability of many funding-deprived local authorities to provide almost anything beyond refuse collection, to say nothing of the rising numbers of bankruptcies, heralds an end to the presence of a caring ‘they’ (when are ‘they’ going to fix this road, sort that school…).
The general feeling today, now observed from the social apex to those who rely more directly on public services and provision, is that state capacity is so fatally wounded that a return to arguments for taxation and spending are not so much compelling as simply critical to ensure the basic functioning of society.
Risks and problems are ‘leaking’ from austerity-wracked spaces and groups to those much further up the wealth and income distribution. This has occurred as public value has been siphoned by shareholders, government (passing on the dividends of privatised utilities and services), allowing shoddy work through deregulation, passing on gilded contracts to incapable providers, and feeding the massive growth of landlords drawing unjust rents for poor or dangerous conditions.
A tilt point has occurred where even the first class passengers are now feeling the lurch of the vessel and the risk of going down with her. This relationship of wealthier groups to society had become more elastic as private services and spaces became rivalrous to the public domain, but there is only so far that such forms of escape (private health insurance, dentists, public schools) is possible. It takes the story of the theft of designer Defender’s to really tell us how bad things have become. This case speaks of a much deeper dissolving of the social contract and a kind of lawless and social care-lessness as a result – the rise of contract criminals, the incapacity of formal policing agencies, and the ultimately the need to reinvigorate the state as a means to reinstall the dignity and safety of all.
Homeowners are locked into dramatically escalating mortgage payments, and rented property is tipped into lucrative Airbnb short lets. There is real social pain behind macro-economic headlines, genuine suffering among those paying rent, struggling in work or in positions of disability. Yet such a troubling scene need not impinge on the expanded ranks of the super affluent. While the majority of people face challenges to their daily living, life for the wealthy may seem more like a kind of luxury advent calendar – each day bringing a new surprise whether it be the shower of unearned cash, the vehicle of offshore wealth innovations or the shiny baubles of the prospect of reducing inheritance tax (as well as the abandonment of a wealth tax by the political left).
The keyword in this toxic, hyper-divided social context is denial, the goal? To build a world that makes it easy to forget the desperation and chaos. This includes a new round of 5-star hotel openings in London, a record-breaking year for sales of homes worth more than £5m and a record year in prospect for super yacht builders. Yet who can morally lay claim to enough fuel to send a personal rocket to space, the use of a mega yacht to amble the Mediterranean, or possession of a string of residences that require unending private jet travel to access them? It may not be long before secretly sponsored piracy is used to challenge these excesses.
The toxicity of inequality today is now played-out in national politics as a series of diversions or refusals that persist until there is no way out from the truth. Something deeper and more destabilising appears to be at work as the parameters of political life, the fog of social media and the sharp work of legal teams fuels an industry of obfuscation working to deny the extent of tax evasion, to defend tax avoidance, to suggest that economic crime is somehow appalling but cannot be challenged. Grand lies, like the idea that the rich will go elsewhere if tax rates rise, are perpetuated most often by those working for them. Underlying this labour to defend inequality and corruption is a deep malaise in social life, while public fatalism has become widespread as a result of its endemic nature. As one elite after another tumbles in public esteem the idea of a common future and work to prepare for it by a more or less cohesive society is undermined at a time when it is most needed.
One of the best antidotes to denial is the dogged pursuit of tax justice – seeking fair contribution from across a, usually nationally defined, community. This may sound somewhat abstract but we must remember that tax receipts (or their absence) determine whether people are able to access core health, education and other public services. This year the Tax Justice Network wrote on this issue to King Charles asking that he set the tone for debates on fair taxation which would ultimately mean the difference between a well-staffed NHS or the parlous state it is currently in. Meanwhile it seems that the British government cares little about fairness or tax avoidance and finds only weasel words to avoid anything approaching action. The idea of the state itself has been so far denigrated by those who lead and manage it that it is no surprise that those with considerable money would prefer to put their money elsewhere. Why give money to a system that offers further tax breaks to the rich while presiding over the collapse of social conditions? But even here things are more complex, with ‘patriotic millionaires’ clamouring to step up and help out.
Naming the system and its functionaries for what they are is critical. But the political right are on to this, proclaiming communist plots for public wifi or social housing, or of a deep state run by leftist elites. It is hard to swallow this kind of provocative analysis at the best of times. But it is again a form of intentional fogging of the lenses we need to see with clarity the kind of country we have become – a country that sees the premature deaths of tenants, stress and anxiety locked into the housing pathways of millions, lack of action on affordable housing and the callous shadow play of immigration policy. A government formed of the rich and those connected to property interests continues to throw favours at those that don’t need them while those desperately trying to stay afloat are left to drown. We will see what 2024 brings, but it would seem naïve to think that things can only get better.
In 1968 Martin Nicolaus1 gave a searing address to the American Sociological Association in which he condemned sociologists for looking down on the poor, acting effectively as an arm of the state’s surveillance of the marginal, while looking up, hands outstretched, to government funders in order to conduct work to advance their own careers. The image is striking and still resonates – where do we stand today on the role of the social sciences in understanding the position of the better-off and their relationship to social problems more broadly? My discussion here takes in questions both the deeper politics and ethos of researchers who do or not study the wealthy alongside questions of the kinds of ethical practices or processes raised by doing research on the wealthy. In this brief note I want to discuss the question of how far researchers should be prompted to think about the ethical questions of researching ‘upwards’ and what potential institutional or disciplinary impediments and issues may get in the way of doing such work. My thoughts are shaped by my experience of proposing, being funded to, and conducting research on the super-rich in London over the past decade.
On the ethical framing of considering elites
The idea of an elite broadly refers to social groups which sit at the apex of a social hierarchy, whether this be defined in terms of wealth, power, education and so on. We now talk of media elites, metropolitan elites, an intelligentsia and, most recently, the emergence of a distinctive group (rather than a class as such) of the international super-wealthy who also wield enormous economic power, either through the corporations they own or in their own right. Ten years ago we knew very little about this group. This lack of social scientific understanding of the who, how, where and why of this group raises what might be thought of as an ethical question, regarding the blindness of the social sciences to key social groups.
To neglect wealth elites is to ignore questions of power, responsibility and the means by which social life may be improved. This is because, as we have been made increasingly aware, the very wealthy generate material consequences that are social in their foundation. While many governments frame questions of poverty or exclusion as questions of personal deficiency, or unfortunate side-effects of economic change, others are keen to understand how processes of austerity, state exit from provision of housing, health and education alongside financialisation of many aspects of social life are strongly related to the actions or positions of the wealthy. This may seem a crude point but there are many other, more subtle, ways in which wealth has generated ethical questions for society more broadly – tax evasion and avoidance, money laundering, political lobbying, funding of university research centres and buildings, the funding of think tanks, purchasing of large swathes of urban built environments and so on. Perhaps more subtly we also need to understand how the desire to attract investment from the super-rich generates a kind of second-guessing game (sometimes described as cognitive capture) in which politicians, finance and banking institutions, real estate agencies, and even researchers try to second guess their needs and interests.
Writing in 1982 John Scott argued that sociologists had overwhelmingly focused on the working-classes. As an urbanist interested in social problems I recognize that much of my own work has focused on the poor and the excluded, but that it has also sought to connect the problems of the poor with those of the middle-classes and, increasingly, of the rich. If you want to know why someone is poor, traumatized, excluded and so on, the likely root of their troubles, beyond the superficialities of their immediate context, lies in the operation of deeper social, political and economic forces that generate poverty and inequality. The wealthy and middle-classes are both passive recipients and active operators in such systems, either taking their rewards, bolstering the existing advantages of their offspring and network associates or, in the case of the very wealthy and powerful, acting to manipulate and effect changes to enlarge these benefits still further. Such advantages may run the course from active tax evasion (even changing tax rules), through to challenges to planning rules and corporate law. As writers like Piketty and Harvey have told us, capital, and those with it, does not stand still – it seeks constant augmentation, as do those who hold it.
Presenting a proposal to do work on the rich to a social science funder presents issues. The rich may superficially appear not to be a problem, they live in peaceable areas, act with courtesy and restraint in their public life. They are replete with a habitus of obligation and civility. Yet, as Laura Nader (1972) argued, social scientists:
‘have a great deal to contribute to our understanding of the processes whereby power and responsibility are exercised… Moreover, there is a certain urgency to the kind of [social science] that is concerned with power for the quality of life and our lives themselves may depend upon the extent to which citizens understand those who shape attitudes and actually control institutional structures’ (Nader, 1972: 284).
For C. Wright Mills (1956) the elite were a neglected group, but one whose power, influence and networks required surveying by the social sciences. For Mills, Nader and others, researchers effectively self-censored or delimited the scope of their studies in order not to challenge the assumed pre-eminence and respectable domain of policymaking corporate and other social elites. The good news is that this picture is changing, rapidly. We increasingly understand that where social problems can be found is not the same thing as why we find social problems. In a similar way, to understand the roots of such problems we may need to understand more about how wealth is produced and condensed and avoid unnecessary attention to the wealthy themselves. Ultimately, to return to critical social scientific research has become…critical. Indeed, we neglect the poor, the marginalized, those victimized by violence in unequal nations and cities by not bringing wealth and power into the remit of our work.
Ethical issues related to doing work on wealth elites
One of the single most difficult challenges of doing work on elites is gaining access to them. Doors, gates, guards and secretaries bar the way in many cases and I think there is increasing suspicion directed at anyone claiming to want to know about lives and lifestyles, to say nothing of questions of wealth (like income, one of the questions to be avoided by researchers and respondents). In asking how do we get ‘at’ the elites we are confronted with some ethical questions, but I believe these to present methodological, rather than distinctive ethical, problematics. Inaccessibility raises challenges, but it is also the mother of invention in thinking creatively about how to engage and involve the wealthy. How we present ourselves becomes critical, and critical work is unlikely to be received well if it is poorly articulated to those concerned. Here are 3 thoughts on these issues:
Gaining approval – Journalism faces far fewer hurdles than social science researchers and has produced enormously useful, influential and critical accounts of wealth, its impact and the wealthy themselves. This work has dug into accounts, revealed dodgy tax practices and investigated the effects of the rich on issues like housing in New York and London. But do university sector ethical processes hinder our work? I am not sure that they do, in strictly ethical terms there seems little reason to be suspicious of such work, but there is a question that may be raised and this regards whether universities are connected to the interests of the wealthy themselves (a question of conflicts of interest and patrimony). There may also be a concern about whether research on the rich may be considered to represent a risk to the institution in legal or reputational terms (you might ask whether this is a cynical position to adopt). Such questions ask that we follow standard processes of care and caution about naming respondents. The answer is to be direct and identify what the concerns are, but without being sensationalist. Wealthy respondents are as likely as anyone else to have something constructive to say about political lobbying and tax avoidance, for example.
Informed consent – This is a trickier area, largely because it is hard to be sure that the effects of research do not blow back onto its subjects when they are profoundly wealthy. Here of course there is some difference between a series of interviews with some of the wealthiest and access to land registry data on sales that does not focus on particular people. Methodology matters in this sense. But it also raises questions about whether a researcher can guarantee control over the impact of their work on those helping a researcher. My response to this is that I believe wealth elites are among the most adept at understanding issues of reputation management and the potential ramifications of working with social researchers and that we should not be unduly concerned.
On our responsibilities to elites and the powerful – What responsibilities and ethical relationship do we have to those we examine who are among the wealthiest and most powerful social actors? Social science cannot be allowed to ignore, proclaim or idly praise the wealthy. It should not leave untroubled those who are in direct and circuitous ways linked to the conditions of the poorest and others who are in some sense victims of social conditions overseen by the wealthy and powerful. Yet social scientists must act diligently to provide clear findings based in robust research that allows critique, analysis and policy to follow from it, without a concern that it is tainted by shoddy investigative processes or needless invasiveness. This suggests that there are limits to observational approaches and the suggestion by some for bin/skip searching, for example, are unlikely to receive credit or attention. Acknowledging this we must however recognize that careful, incisive and investigative social research on those who protect their identities and lives may well sit in an uneasy or problematic relationship to wider society and to the construction of what constitutes social problems and the answers to those problems.
Conclusion
In this short piece I have tried to emphasise that the moral, ethical basis of work on elites requires continued monitoring and defence. Rising social anger around wealth polarization and its links to a wide range of social problems will not disappear soon. Nevertheless, distinctions should be made between wealthy and private individuals and how systems are productive of the inequalities upon which they sit at the apex. It is important to note that many of the powerful do not believe that they wield any particular influence and indeed that their lives are either benign or beneficial to those of others (think of Boris Johnson’s lauding of the wealthy as ‘tax heroes’). Here it is obvious that the high tax contribution of the wealthy is a significant source of personal and structural legitimation that enables wealth elites to assume a position of being a public good. Such arguments require persistent examination and refutation for social benefit.
Useful sources
Nader, L. (1972). Up the anthropologist: perspectives gained from studying up, Chapter in Hymes, D. (Ed.) Reinventing Anthropology, New York: Pantheon Books.
Mills, C. W. (1956) The power elite, New York: Norton.
Sayer, A. (2015) Why we can’t afford the rich, Bristol: Policy Press
Scott, J. (1982) The upper classes: Property and privilege in Britain, London: Macmillan.
Notes
Among other critical comments he asked: ‘What if the habits, problems, secrets, and unconscious motivations of the wealthy and powerful were daily scrutinized by a thousand systematic researchers, were hourly pried into, analyzed and cross-referenced; were tabulated and published in a hundred inexpensive mass-circulation journals and written so that even the fifteen-year-old high-school drop-out could understand them and predict the actions of his landlord to manipulate and control him?’
I wrote this summary of the concept of domicide some years ago, on the idea of how and why home may be ‘killed’. In the context of the appalling loss of innocent life in Gaza and continued destruction of the possibility of home there I am uploading a pdf of that document.
The social sciences often have a hard time being heard. Making arguments for social investment, reducing inequalities of various kinds and addressing structural divides across regions and communities require significant public investment. But we do, at least, have the money to do the job. Even a light tax regime on the estimated $35tn of monies held in offshore tax havens could pay for the entire cost of the COVID-19 pandemic. The property wealth of homeowners is among the most significant elements of national wealth and, of course, the key to the wealth of these households. Today, most young people have grown-up in these same wealthy households, or have looked-on bemused and angry at the unending flows of luck flowing to those have been able to afford their own homes. Those same young people are more likely to emerge as renters as house prices rise out of reach.
The past decade has been a period marked by a politics that has consistently rejected the possibility that the state tax and invest, whether this be corporations, land, property or other forms of wealth. Austerity was the very core of this project, an attempt at cutting public costs while leaving private and corporate wealth untouched. Despite this, the public are in fact very supportive of attempts at finding fair methods for taxing unearned income. In the same decade there has been a massive enlargement of the public’s awareness that fiddling with income inequalities is a concern with small fry, property wealth and personal wealth more broadly is where the big fish lie.
Yet even a hint of a suggestion of increasing taxes mobilises a thousand responses in the comments sections of articles in the FT, sees the big guns wielded out by lobbyists paid for by big money, only to be relayed by tabloid newspapers and more or less absorbed by sections of the public who see any form of tax proposals as an attack on liberty and personal hard work. But these gains need to be set in context. Fair and quite modest proposals have been proposed and these are based on a position that we are in this altogether, despite tax evasion, avoidance and inherited wealth.
If we exist in some kind of national community then the inevitable question its members may legitimately ask is what contribution each of us makes. The very deep pain and trauma of life in poverty, in left behind communities and of looked-after children, the sick and disabled, the homeless and a catalogue of further social horrors is not a place well-known to many who have benefitted from the economic and housing policies that have lifted the boats of investors, landlords and homeowners. There is both a spatial and social gulf between the circuits of those on high incomes who have seen their portfolio of assets rising due to quantitative easing, low interest rates and an attack on the cost of public services rather than challenging unearned gains of house values and other forms of wealth.
As many commentators are increasingly saying, looking at the intergenerational consequences of a politics of housing, class and assets – I could have less and can contribute more to help others to have the kind of opportunities that all should have. Many who are wealthy want to help more, many in business are moving from ideas of simple shareholder value to an understanding of the place of commerce in social and community life. Right now, the crunching of public sector finances is also pushing a more progressive tax agenda, even among many on the right of centre.
The UK has not had an effective spatial policy agenda for some years (at least since around 2010). New labour’s dozens of spatial programs and emphasis on education can be looked back on as the almost last gasp of active intervention in the way that capitalism has a series of spatial consequences – regions left behind, communities starved of health and education services and the decline of urban spaces in physical terms. We can characterise the existing arrangement of policymaking as a kind of smiling revanchism. The smiles comes in the public defences of why there is no money to spend on important social investments. The revenge comes in the broader formation of interests and ideas that are persistently mobilised to attack the poor and to denigrate and leave behind the many spaces languishing beyond the horizons of sunny Somerset gardens or from Oxfordshire kitchen windows.
To wilfully neglect those without opportunity and to ensure the reproduction of wealth and advantage is, in reality, a terrible form of violence. Such aggression must be enacted with real effort to actively ignore the consequences of cuts for a decade and now the de facto cuts and insecurities generated by COVID. In this kind of environment the persistent denial of contribution by those with most must be called-out for the kind of naked class project that it represents and tackled with evidence and vigour. Continued proposals for tax reform and social investment are urgently needed, particularly as the social determinants of health are so clearly being eroded, while wealthier homeowners and landlords lead carbon hungry lifestyles implicated in climate change.
There is no prospect of escape from the coming combination of climate devastation, faltering public finances, lack of social investment and the ongoing damage to our social cohesion generated by highly visible inequalities. From all political positions these are issues that cannot be ignored because ultimately they touch all, even if many among the wealthy are morally sheltered in their outlooks. If our togetherness and common purpose could be restored, in lieu of social media spats, deepening social polarisation and rising inequalities, we might hope to see more careful and thoughtful deliberations on what to do next and how to do this fairly, recognising the need for all to contribute.
I thought it would be useful to create a summary of my book Alpha City: How the super-rich captured London. This is a plan language summary of the key ideas and arguments, alongside a set of concrete proposals for how to address the challenges of a city that works against low and middle-income residents in favour of capital investment and the wealthy.
In reading Marshall Berman’s essays on Marxism and his New York life it is possible to think we may indeed lead duller lives in a more sterile world. His vivid prose evokes the sense of personal biography, mixed with theories in search of less alienated lifestyles, to the backdrop of a changing but exciting city. Berman’s New York is a place of revelations, excitement, love and community, just as it is one of hard work, sudden unemployment and other traumas. He makes knowing references to literature that help to make sense of personal fate and, in one such essay, he moves from his close knowledge of Miller’s Death of a Salesman to the recognition that in his own father’s loss of work could be seen a similar evolution of personal alienation and obsolescence. But what is brilliant here is also the offer of a deeper search and realisation that in the work of the early Marx he could understand the rack on which his father had been stretched and ultimately broken. It was, and is, important for us to understand how deeper forces, systems and structures generate personal tragedies and traumas.
Berman’s New York is a place of delight and Sesame Street-like encounters, with good people, a sense of community and a world of fun. It is a place with patina, not the sterile, post-revanchist city of gentrification and zero-tolerance policing (even though this was Trump’s nascent arena). And it is certainly not the world that came later to be scarred by global terrorism or the realisation of new environmental horizons. In this sense it appears a place both passingly familiar but also achingly nostalgic, combined with the sense that we could might never recover or revisit such a city. What Berman highlights is that such a city was both good and bad, a place of winners and losers, community and alienation, change and continuity.
Just the night before reading Berman I watched Alan Pakula’s 1971 film Klute. The film is ground-breaking for all kinds of reasons, not least its bold and apparently liberated central female character. But this New York is also a city of gender terror, silent callers, stalkers and cold corporate life. The brownstone homes that were to be cleaned-up and gentrified from the mid 1990s are shown with broken windows, central city streets are messy, filled with different kinds of bodies, clothes, styles and community life. The physiognomy of the street is uneven, not the more or less featureless ensemble of office workers and the wealthy in more or less matching clothes we find today.
The world of Klute is a colder, harder city than Berman’s recollections, but it also asserts the truth of what runs through his writings – that city life is always in tension, a place of contradictions. Urban life operates as part of an economic system that can produce enlivened, excited and striving social subjects, just as it may also offer a world that destroys, alienates and denudes those same people. But city life should not be seen as just some rich tapestry that displays inevitable horror and beauty, like a Grayson Perry’s rug for the super-rich featuring a homeless man laid out. Instead we need to take up Berman’s challenge to look deeper and work out the operation of the loom that keeps producing these outputs.
The word façade carries two key meanings, it is both the face of a building and the social appearance presented to the world. The Chambers’ English dictionary extends this latter meaning to include the sense of being ‘showy’, the sense of a social face with little of substance behind it. One of the signal changes in a landscape of distinct and distinguished facades has been the creation of a significant number of new developments that use subtle facades and architectures in restrained ways, requiring in the viewer a tacit knowledge of the function, and cost, of these developments. Much of the historical and recent architecture of London’s West End arguably fit both meanings of the term façade quite well, offering both the impression of new and expensive frontages but also their deployment as a sign of position behind which little of substance or social life takes place.
Clarges Mayfair, more or less anonymous when seen from southern aspect onto Piccadilly, the boulevard adjacent to it, seems to say very little about its function or social position. If we were not aware of the stratospheric value of real estate in this district we might think very little of its subtle frontage. But this is rather the point – one needs to be in the club, in the know, to comprehend that immense money-power and the barely present lives of its super-rich residents that go on behind it. The West’s extensive scape of mansions and stately addresses, built by the almost historically unparalleled wealth of the city’s global nouveaux riches of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, are also still here of course. Those pre-eminent positional goods are still regularly snapped-up by staggeringly wealthy individuals from around the world. Yet many of those immense homes were lost, either because the wealth of subsequent elites was insufficient to maintain them (with many lost to demolition) or sub-divided over time. Clarges is something slightly different, offering convenience, security and a chaperoned place in the city, part of what we might think of an ‘ultraland’ of new, super-prime apartment blocks scattered around the city’s most expensive central property markets.
The ultraland
Where the robber barons and patrician super-rich of the 19th and 20th century city often sought to construct their own ‘pile’ to show their arrival and profound wealth, aspirations today tend to be mediated by developers building for multiple occupancy. This fact does little to detract from the way that such developments are still used to soak-up enormous amounts of surplus capital by the world’s super-rich as they look for a safe investment and a safe city capable of accommodating the need for places of work, but, more often, one of play and investment. Clarges’ façade presents an almost humble, understated presence – an almost blank face behind which the visiting, partying world’s rich can sojourn while in London. Perhaps even more importantly this and similar residences play the role of enabling an almost anonymous presence and comfort for its residents. Its interior dwellings are better thought of, not as homes, but as resting places for the wealthy winners of the global class-war of rentier capitalism. It is a mediating and sorting nodal space, one that sifts the winners from the many losers and keeps them tucked-up and securely looked-after, as do similar blocks in other cities around the world that adopt a similar style guide and pattern book – fortress pied a terre. Clarges does not present a showy face, yet it does offer a heavily secured veneer, a thin but very tough carapace to protect those passing through behind.
Completed in 2019, Clarges Mayfair overlooks Piccadilly – the core route that runs from London’s centre to Hyde Park Corner, Buckingham Palace and onwards to Knightsbridge. The building’s unassuming nine storeys offer open views through the plane and lime tree canopy to The Green Park and beyond. This vista encompasses the Shard to the south-east, to the London ‘Eye’ ferris wheel and then glimpses of Westminster Palace to the south. Despite the lively clamour of traffic, pedestrian flows and inescapable pollution of the major boulevard below the impression of centrality and access to the jewels of London’s vibrant leisure district are here in abundance. Clarges is a short stroll from the Ritz hotel, only a block further to Fortnum and Masons for provisions, the elite clubs of St James’, to Bond street for its fashion houses and jewellers and to a huge array of discrete elite eateries and bespoke private services across Mayfair itself. As its real estate agents will say, Clarges isn’t about location, it is THE location. Yet such blustering sales pitches need to be stripped away to reveal the deeper functions and role of these kinds of new development.
Clarges offers a commodity within what we might describe as an economy of facades. Here quiet distinction is the order of the day, not brash statements built from grand porticos. We might say that its capacity to seduce prospective buyers comes through being closer attention to its constituent parts. These details can be located if we look closely at the references to nature in the subtle tessellated shapes of its brass gateways (remotely controlled from the guardhouse), to its fine craft metalwork balconies and the nod here towards flattened classic columns in white stone. But if you want to see the penthouses you will be disappointed, these are staggered back from the top layers on the 10th and 11th floors in order to avoid street-level surveillance. Such intrusion may seem unlikely at a development that appears almost entirely unremarkable at ground level. Here still empty commercial space yields blank windows, offering the feeling perhaps of an empty central city office block. It seems likely that only those who know what they are looking at would likely be interested.
Clarges has the feel of a protective shell, apartment frontages that enclose, secure and hide their occupants. Such a metaphor also works to allude to the offshore world of companies registered in beachfront offices in the Caiman or British Virgin Islands often used to purchase and conceal ownership of properties in blocks like these (an estimated 36,000 properties worth around £50bn pounds in London alone). In this sense the façade is also a discrete cover, a means by which a para-criminal and indeed illicit world of offshore finance is concealed and enabled by many residential facades like Clarges. Like much of prime real estate in central London one can be forgiven for believing that such developments have been constructed simply to absorb vast amounts of liquid surplus, often criminal, capital looking for a place to call home, to grow or to be carefully stashed away. Given its almost equilateral square frontage the impression that the building generates is of a, very large, money box. At £12m (€14m) for a 2-bedroom apartment, and £18m for a 3-bed and much more for a penthouse, the prices are, even for central London, help to reaffirm this feeling.
In many ways the West End property market is a circuit of capital flows built on ‘front’, a place for investment by the more or less immodest winners in the global economy that helps to line the pockets of other hangers on and those whose own wealth comes from that of the super-rich including estate agents, lawyers and developers. The West End is a place built on a trade in facades, addresses that can be wielded like social trophies over cocktails, dinners or business lunches as marques of social and economic prowess. Of course, the money looking to secure a place in Mayfair, one of the most expensive in one of the priciest cities in the world, does not need to shout about its presence. One of the very remarkable things about the ultraland developments, splinters of capital subtly emerging in London’s most affluent territories, is their very lack of overt ostentation.
Clarges Mayfair replaced a somewhat anonymous, now-demolished 1950s office block with arguably a similarly insignificant construction. The first impression of Clarges is its impressive inconspicuousness. If Clarges was placed in a smaller regional, central urban setting it would not look out of place. It takes location to animate the site and excite its prospective residents, to confer the sense that this is a place of quiet opulence capable of conferring lofty status. Barely recessed window casements appear without usable balconies, no doubt partly for security and because of the high pollution levels from the street below. Looking up from Piccadilly towards the ‘rump’ of Clarges one sees almost no signs of life. Its apparent ‘front’ (actually its back in terms of access for residents) the development presents only a blank face.
The real life of Clarges Mayfair is to be found in its numerous basement levels (de rigueur for developments in the capital looking to make maximum use of small footprints), driveway (which can be secured if required) and of course the luxurious interiors of its marble, chrome and silk decorated interiors. The development presents itself as a more-or-less hard and featureless eggshell. But this external wrapping conceals a softer, nurturing yolk-like space inside. The list of its services and facilities is undoubtedly impressive enough to generate the possibility of never needing to leave. These include a business suite, dining room, English spa, treatment rooms, stairs sporting detailing apparently referencing wrist watches, a 25m subterranean swimming pool, gym and 18-seater cinema, also underground. In the enormously spacious interior reception hall a large cantilevered spiral staircase features low-level underlighting, supplemented by natural light from a large glass dome in the lofty ceiling. The dome itself features a light sculpture designed to allude to the designs of aristocratic houses and utilising dynamic lighting that changes over the course of the day. The sensory embrace of the development is further heightened by its incredible quietness and the subtle hallway fragrances, changed over the weeks and seasons by the development’s commissioned perfumier.
Curiously the internal privacy of residents is also carefully designed into the building’s operation. There are two saunas and another two steam rooms, the cinema and dining rooms can be booked, and even the gym can be partitioned for personal privacy. Service and ‘help’ for the owners can be accommodated in adjacent secure units. The sense of a resting community of world travellers is not perhaps apparent – instead internal segregation seems to be an important part of the offer, not the ability to form friendships with new neighbours. The building’s ‘real’ front is the functional space of the carriageway-style drop-off point for residents, visitors and staff. Access is controlled to this semi-public space by rising bollards and mechanised, concertina gates – either to control flows of traffic or prevent unwanted access. It is also looked-over by resident security staff, ensure access only to residents to the building, challenge passers-by or curious social scientists seeking to take pictures of its frontage. A car lift allows resident’s vehicles to be disappeared from (private) street level to the cavernous parking bay below.
Clarges is one of several notable contenders on a relatively new circuit of super-excessive, discrete buildings within central London’s super-prime property market. These are the spaces to which international capital is drawn come rain or shine – capital knows that this is a safe bet of a location, a place to give cash a holiday and watch it grow, only to be brought back into action when the time is right. Most residents will not simply live here, this will be one of a string of international addresses located in the key neighbourhoods of cities and choice leisure zones around the world to which rapid and often brief access is required on occasion. This development and many others are also intensely wasteful spaces. Not only could more, and more affordable, homes easily be accommodated within the footprint of each interior floor, the sense of disposability and crass excess is evident as soon as one connects the building to the hyper-mobile and international jet setting of its residents. The block is designed to act rather as a kind of transportation plug-in to the mobility systems of the global super-rich, a drive-through pad when access to a weekend in central London is needed. British Land, its developer, paid £130m in 2012 for the site – but the contribution to affordable housing stemming from the development was £1.85 million, less than a tenth of one of the price of a single one of its apartments. Despite, or indeed because, of such low contributions the developer, has made more than £1bn profit.
CONCLUSION
Clarges was the name given to the city featured in Jack Vance’s novel To Live Forever (1956), a kind of urban utopia in a barbaric world. Its residents have gained knowledge of the technology required to achieve immortality, but to avoid over population this is only granted to those who have made notable contributions. It seems unlikely that the super-wealthy resident’s of the real-world enclave of Clarges Mayfair have managed to defy the laws of nature in this way, and we might debate their achievements, but it is also clear that such residential space is used as a kind of spatial protective, its leisure rooms, gyms, swimming pool and treatment rooms speak of a desire to extend and secure the body through the use of fortress architectures, pampering personal services and adherence to strict, life-enhancing regimes. The façade leaves everything to the imagination, but it is nevertheless situated within a social politics that is increasingly aware of the illicit flows, gross excesses and extraordinary material waste of the super-rich. While Clarges and other developments are used to gain entry to the social and economic circuits of London’s elites the legitimacy of these lives and lifestyles is being placed under increasing scrutiny, however subtle or concealing their facades.
London’s ultralands and its super-prime fortress homes create a subtle inlay of super-affluence in an already historically affluent area that has, for more than a hundred years, offered a place for the world’s rich. The main difference from that time is the more subdued presence of wealth and its subdivision, residence in apartments rather than mansion houses. It is possible to witness Clarges up-close by accessing the sweep driveway and square to its rear, but be prepared to be challenged by its gatekeepers. This is an understated site whose luxury is only revealed to those with the staggering resources required to gain access, a private space whose mistrustful residents and staff are keen to keep it quiet.
My thanks to Stefan Fuchs for giving permission for this draft version of a chapter that will appear as part of a collection updating the themes of Walter Benjamin’s Passegenwerks in a volume focused on the rise of the facade: Fuchs, S. / Dillhof, R. (Eds.) (forthcoming) Fassadenwerks (working title), Hamburg.on my blog
Thomas Piketty’s eagerly awaited Capital and Ideology opens almost poetically, with real force – ‘Every society must justify its inequalities’ (p.1). In all nations and at all times societies require some sets of ideas and beliefs capable of defending the disparities that exist within them. Over the course of time societies have achieved this in their own distinctive ways, much of this more than 1,000 page work delves into the long history of such arrangements. Piketty calls these narratives and systems of thinking inequality regimes. There is power at work in these narratives, ideas and legitimising frameworks, deployed by elites, enshrined in laws and regulations, and which are often shared more broadly within society as a whole. Yet, like the story of a leisured, narcissistic and complacent bourgeois party at the centre of Jean Renoir’s film La Regle du Jeu (Rules of the Game, 1939), the patrolling of legitimating codes and ideology may be subtle, but it is also a kind of violence. Hierarchies are defended without question, internalised in ways of being, outsiders or threats are deftly repelled or, worse, humiliated. Arrogant, ruling and wilfully ignorant elites often remain left untroubled by potential challengers.
As Piketty highlights, there is nothing natural or necessarily desirable about the choices we make about how to live, for choices they are. Defences of the established order can be challenged, and such challenges may become emphasised. This may occur due to the feeling that inequality has become too excessive to remain unquestioned, or because the plight of the system’s losers becomes evident and untenable. Alternatively breakdown or change may be presaged by shifts in the (inequality) regime itself, a querying of the narrative and appeals to modes of social organisation. Here we might think today of the significant redirection of corporate mandates away from shareholder primacy to a wider recognition of stakeholders that has seen around 200 CEOs signing up. Of course we might also believe such effort themselves to be efforts at shoring-up a defence of privileges! Nevertheless, as Piketty reminds us, social organisation is always made-up of choices, we have the power to put in place arrangements other than the ones we may see around us.
Today the social sciences have sharpened their tools and strengthened the measures they use to investigate the operation of our own inequality regime. Piketty refers to this as a neo-proprietarian society in which property and finance have generated profound returns to those with wealth, leaving others languishing in ways not seen since the belle epoque of the roughly 1880-1920 period. The work of Piketty’s earlier Capital in the 21st Century and those of his various ‘comrades in data’ (Saez, Zucman in the US, Shaxson, Christensen and others in Europe) offered, through painstaking analysis, a new narrative that callanged the inevitableness or desirability of where we are today. This body of work offers a challenge to the order and its elite defenders. But its targets are, to take up the question of ideology, the many others brought under the influence of the narcotic quality of the kind of inequality regime we find outself in today – ‘populist’ governments and leaders, and the many defenders of the neoliberal or hypercapital order of today’s global north and beyond (in banking and finance, business, government and elsewhere).
Once we move beyond the ‘simple’ question of the extent of inequality to the ‘whys’ of that inequality (why particular groups win and lose over time, why such inequality is defended in circulating systems of thought and discourse), things may change as a result of the sudden redirection of social science in its focus ‘upwards’, allied to the work of numerous investigative journalists, online leads and cases brought. For those on the left (crudely speaking, the ones who would seek to challenge the inevitability or desirability of the extent of inequality) shattered by recent electoral losses the chink in the edifice of the current regime is the potential for new social scientific work to challenge or expose such a grossly unfair system. Many governments, corporate leaders, parties and those in civic society have become particularly interested in how to re-organise the world around them, perhaps sparked by realisations of the long-term redundancy of a business as usual model in which environmental concerns pose an existential threat.
Piketty’s practical responses to wealth inequality (forget about income if you want to see how big this thing is) are compelling. The first is to understand how important education is to circuits of opportunities, and its closure to many others (among other things the book highlights the break between the working class and parties of the left on the back of these educational shifts). But this cannot work without a much fairer playing field and this field is, of course, profoundly shaped by capital – wealth would have to be redistributed for an education system to be properly funded and for all to ‘start’ from a similar position. The second set of proposals are focused on the need for tax, and for these efforts to be focused on annual taxes on overall wealth (getting rid of unpopular and widely avoided death duties). No longer would billionaires pay rates lower than their cleaners, all wealth (shares, property and other assets) would be taxed annually as an effective means of bringing it into wider circulation, benefitting those without a stake and challenging the place of dynastic and rentier fortunes.
City, capital, inequality
Cities lie at the hear of the ideological conditions detailed by Piketty, though they inevitably play almost no part in an account built from national data over, in some cases, centuries. Yet urban life is central to the inequality regime of today’s hypercapitalism and property-based rules. It seems particularly productive to think of how the governance, economy and society of cities might be instrumental in helping us to flesh out the concept of inequality regime, to place that regime, so to speak, and to understand how space inflects, shapes and might even deepen ideological defences and narratives.
In a financialised world property assumes a central place with the creation and trade in homes and other real estate central to such an economy. The obvious point to make here relates to the location of those physical assets, clustered (particularly in the case of the most valuable forms of property) in cities, and in the dominant ‘world’ cities in particular. The property-based regime is, for the most part, a distinctly urban regime, an order that shapes social divisions, but also an environment in which we as bodies experience those inequalities. It is in the city that we see the system’s winners and co-ordinating elites, here we find residential landscapes circulating or built for capital investment and it is again in the urban realm that the finance systems, regulatory agencies and other key components of a capitalist property-based economy are settled. If one could pan out to see this regime at work we could also see how it is predicated on the flows of many billions of coins flowing from the pockets of the global mass, the stagnant bottom fifty percent, via their phone contracts, private rents, uber payments and so on. We could then imagine these coins sliding into the pockets of corporations, investment funds, banks and rentier capitalist superheroes and their combined use to purchase fine homes, football clubs, clothes, investments and multiple other purchases (we might also examine efforts at political influence). These purchases by the rich and by those sectors and operatives who have become immensely on the back of this system are instrumental to our understanding of how this regime dislodges the low-paid, raises the cost of living for whose who work and who lack access to the wealth and property increasingly hoarded by the relative few.
We might say that none of this new, but its intensification appears qualitatively different, and its capacity to obfuscate the sources of exploitation and marginalisation are powerful. Grappling with this is important if we are to understand the continued legitimacy of the system, and it is here that we are again back to Piketty’s challenge to understand the functions of ideas and narratives underpinning urban and national life today. One might also add that it is in many cities that that compact between capital and labour is most evidently unravelling, it is here that we see rioting and protest, and it is here that voting has produced a more variegated pattern of allegiances under populist mantras around national sovereignty in various contexts. Here again the relationship between the city and this particular kind of inequality regime seems important to consider in more detail.
A focus on wealth takes us to the city, not just because of the overwhelming concentration of the rich in their largest and most economically powerful examples, but also because the physical assets and real estate of the city is itself a critical component of wealth storage and accumulation. We can also see how investment in property has become a central method of taking value out of the city (often through offshore funds used by the wealthy) and para-criminal enterprise as billions are used to buy and later sell homes and estates to hide ill-gotten capital (here again the state’s silence, in statistical or policing terms, is notable). In Piketty’s terms the use, accumulation and storage of property are particularly important to the kind of economy that we inhabit because it is to a proprietarian inequality regime that we are now subject.
We need to understand how such unfair conditions continue to stand up, despite their evident inequalities. It seems important to again consider the role of the city in this context. It is the city that is the very theatre in which these narratives are identifiably played-out, not least in the fray of political discussions and media narratives lauding a capitalist property economy. We can also see how the city is the site in which conversations, plans, investments and markets operate and which are identified as the lifeblood of its economy. Any political or social challenges to such activities and narratives are easily dismissed, not least by the derisive snorts of those who appear to wield knowledge of how this world works (the Treasury view and so on).
In another key sense the city helps to bind adherents to its unwritten codes by galvanising into action the many who rely on or who are linked to the operations of the economy and to its wealth elites. This comes in the form of so-called dark money in politics, the more overt social networking and schmoozing between wealth, political and corporate elites, the chasing of international investment capital and buyers by developers and in the sale of public and other assets. More subtly still the physical environment of the city provides an elaborate labyrinth space constituted of private clubs, fine homes, restaurants and other sites of informal interaction. These spaces offer a particularly comfortable but also physically shielding environment that enables the economic order’s casualties and losers to be rendered more or less visible. The city in its physical form helps to hardwire the legitimation of the inequality regime at work around it. Numerous historical examples of suburbanisation, gating and other forms of elite escape support this idea.
In these various examples it seems productive to think of an inequality regime not simply in terms of economic, social and political codes and systems of thinking and justification. It would also be useful to supplement these important ideas and proposals with greater recognition of how space might shape and inflect these systems and how the institutional and spatial form of cities is at work in the modes of justification used to defend or naturalise contemporary forms of inequality.
7th February 2020
Looking towards St Paul’s catherdral and, to the right, the City of London.
The image says ‘London’. My editor responds to my meekly expressed concern that the proposed cover of my new book, with its focus on Canary Wharf and Docklands, is not really the heart of the ‘alpha’ city. Grudgingly at first, I begin to absorb his point – if you are not a Londoner, if you are only faintly aware of what that city is about, if you might struggle to ‘place’ the city in some way, then this is indeed its heart to all intents and purposes. It helps that the U-shaped loop of the Thames offers an aesthetically pleasing enfolding of this space – the otherwise straight-line flow of the Thames repelled by the citadels of corporate HQs and finance houses. The effect is an attractive, symmetrical focal point to the cover.
Where is London’s centre of power, and what do we consider that power to consist of? If I were forced to put a thumb tack on a wall map of the city to indicate its heart I might hesitate, before plumping for the intersection of roads in front of One Hyde Park, Harrods and Harvey Nichols. This, as much as any other seat of city, City or national government, or transnational company’s office block, speaks of what the city has become in the past decade – a place for money and the moneyed. In this sense power feels like it is comprised of finance on the one hand, an international visiting, resident or investing wealth elite on the other, and with public service and government relegated to a backroom role of engineer, operating to maintain the machine and its component characters, institutions and flows of bodies, cash and bricks.
Picking a cover image is an attempt at distillation, just as the book itself is an attempt at distilling, viewing and summarising enormous forces and processes. By pointing to visible examples we can begin to glean the force of capital as it continues to shape the city.
As London and the UK begin a formal of severance of links to the EU today, the broader, more abstract empire defined by capital will be more assertively embraced, the saviour of the City, if not many of its citizens who endure a place of austerity, poverty and dislocation.
This short blog discussed the genesis and themes of our book Urban Criminology, published by Routledge in 2019.
Our frequently discussed globalised urban condition has sparked much discussion among urbanists – where and how will people live in dignity? How will they be governed? How will such living be sustainable in economic and environmental terms? We might equally ask – how will this condition generate new rounds of victimisation and why? How will questions of crime, safety and control be resolved in new and existing urban arenas?
We came to these issues as urban sociologists with a strong interest in the question of crime and harm, but also with the realisation that we could fruitfully engage a more formal dialogue between urban studies and criminology. Criminology of course is in many ways an ‘urban’ discipline – who did not know their Chicago school and its concentric rings, who had not been exposed to the maps of Mayhew? Moving beyond this we tried to think about why would we not also want to engage more deeply with the often unacknowledged links between the city, political economy and the development of a critical approach to urban life today. We were particularly keen to explore how urban conditions, characterised by intensifying inequalities in wealth, around housing and access to core services were immensely relevant to criminological thinking. What kind of shared canon, ideas and cities themselves might be foregrounded in a more explicit dialogue of relevance to scholars of the city, as well as those interested in crime and harm?
Urban Criminology starts with an observation, that there is much going on in urban studies that is neither recognised nor considered in criminology, but also that reverse is true. This problematic led us to consider a range of domains in which the conceptual armoury and studies of both disciplines might be engaged in a rewarding exchange of ideas. We organised these areas in terms of questions about more traditional forms of crime and harm, such as those clustered in deprived neighbourhoods or in forms of explicit interpersonal violence, on the one hand, while also thinking about new, emerging or less recognised forms of harm that have become of more widespread concern in recent years. Here we might consider the move from white collar to grander crimes within finance, the use of new technologies and aggressive methods for control in cities, the operation of housing systems that produce new social geographies and stresses or the adoption of new tactics for terrorism in urban arenas around the world.
While these various issues seem immediately relevant to thinking within and across urban and criminological studies arguably none are emphatically new. Our contribution lay in trying to offer a fresh synthesis that highlighted the need for a clearer dialogue between urbanists and criminologists. At the back of these concerns was a challenge to the reader – that to understand many forms of crime today we need to understand how the city itself ‘works’ and indeed, does not work. Such operations include of course a wide range of social, political and economic structures that themselves vary according to national and urban contexts but which are also influenced by global economic forces that generate new and mutating forms of harm.
To offer some sense of how these new combinations of factors and outcomes are coming into view we examine such issues as the relationship between neoliberal governance regimes and the deregulation of safety implicated in the Grenfell tower disaster and creation of more precariously employed city labour forces more generally. Global capital is now also more entwined with the unhousing and trauma associated with demolition, housing displacement and continued mobility of many around the world as capital looks for new spaces to gentrify and appropriate. New forms of boundary making, around gated communities and affluent enclaves with private modes of policing, also appear as a kind of security ‘foam’, complex physical and urban governance structures that raise new questions about how inequality, crime and (in)security are distributed and related through the contemporary city.
We might ask, what is ‘urban’ about crime? We suggest in the book that what binds much of the varied concerns of criminology and urban studies today is the need for a deepened critical perspective. Such a perspective should recognise the primacy of the urban condition and its manifold form. It should also avoid naivety in understanding that, at root, power and inequality produce more aggressive responses to the question of crime (while sidelining others forms of harm), but also that these same conditions are themselves generative of harm in cities around the world today. In addition, the relationship between national and global political management of economies can be linked to new forms of risk, value extraction (from labour and nature) and the expansion of financial services. All of this generates significant questions for how we should understand to the question of how urban systems are producing new and different forms of crime and harm. Fraud, manipulation and laundering among global and urban elites seem particularly important areas for further investigation.
Where to from here? We hope that Urban Criminology offers the means of galvanising critical criminology in attempts at seeing the city as a site in which harm may be produced and indeed mitigated. Urban life is replete with examples of violence, harm and aggressive political actions towards vulnerable populations. But it is also a site of hope, social action and movements that are increasingly conscious of and antagonistic toward question of inequality, power and unfair modes of social control. Cities may be key sites of harm as we move forward, but they may also offer the crucibles within which fairer and more just social conditions may be formed. We hope that the book may offer some contribution to such discussions, between urbanists and criminologists in the future.
The unchecked lifestyle choices of the globe’s super-rich, and its affluent more broadly, are a curse on our planet. As COP27 produces yet more anger and fatalism, Oxfam has reported that each billionaire emits a million times more carbon than the average person. What prospect for a combined response and recognition that we are all in this together?
In 1958 Shirley Jackson wrote about the retreat of an affluent family into their palatial home. Preparing for the end of the world she describes how the world outside ‘was to be plundered ruthlessly for objects of beauty to go in and around the house; infinite were the delights to be prepared for its inhabitants.’ (P. 8 Jackson, S. (1958) The Sundial, London: Penguin). Post-war North American affluence pales into insignificance beside the excesses and gross consumption of today’s consumer societies and the habits of its wealthiest. In 2010 Oxfam reported that 388 people owned as much as half of the planetary population. By 2014 the figure was 85, by 2016 it was 62 and, in the latest revision, the organization found that a mere 8 people commanded wealth unparalleled since pre-Biblical times.
There is rising concern not only at the level of power and influence that such riches command, and how such power is used in the pursuit of further wealth, the erosion of support for the poor and massive over-consumption of fossil and other resources. Worse still, opulent lifestyles, privileged social networks and secluded homes feed a mechanism described by a US sociologist as the ‘toilet assumption’: our damaging human effects and the increasingly denuded world outside are rendered invisible. What prospect for reform and healing if the harms we do remain unseen?
The expansion of the world’s super rich and the concentration of global wealth has come at a bad time for the planet. The popular political formations, themselves forged of these conditions, are offer images of continued economic growth, public denial of harm and denigration of the conscious. Those with achieve a disproportionate take on resources and lead profligate lifestyles – multiple residences, private jets, extensive cohorts of staff, gourmet delights alongside endless rounds of newly accumulated clothes, precious metals and jewels. The world’s rich are not cannot be sustained. This is not simply because of what they themselves do and own but because of their lead and influence within a culture fixed upon fashionable rounds of consumption, disposability and the signaling of success through monetary worth and acquisition of status goods. The revelation that SUV drivers globally form the equivalent of a seventh nation in terms of pollution in their own right is likely to lead to a morally inflected discussion among communities and calls to shame those making personal choices with public and planetary consequences. The hyperactive flightpaths of celebrities, the rich and also academics have come under scrutiny. Yet the rich are not only a problem because many would like what they have. What many now understand to be needed to face-down multiple climate crises and injustices, in social and environmental terms, will not be achieved unless excess is more firmly regulated, or their lives become more firmly embedded in the communities that increasingly censure them.
Rising inequality, as many now agree, is bad for us all. One reason for this is that the wealthy are able to outbid and out-consume others on merely mortal incomes. London’s skyline is now puffed-up with more than 500 skyscrapers at some stage of construction. Many of these apartments are bought purely for investment and lie empty for much of the year. The most recent estimate is that half of homes in London’s ‘prime’ property areas are under-used according to their extremely low use of utilities. Reality television shows regularly highlight the excessive consumption of the bunkers and fortress homes of the super-rich, but in my own research I have seen homes with ten bedrooms, personal cinemas, underground pools and even car lifts to sunken parking. In many cases beds and indeed houses lie empty for much of the year, visits timed to coincide with key cultural events and arts openings. More remarkable still is the creative destruction that accompanies more extreme cases – the demolition of extensive and often prized residences. The next step is often construction of a much larger home, capable of supporting grander parties and with expanded wall space for prized modern art canvases and sculptures bought more for investment than aesthetic reasons. Everything, including kitchen sinks, are regularly thrown out and reinstalled to maintain a look that is of the times. These lifestyles and homes offer standards now gawped at by many – considered the glittering potential prize of social escape and total luxury. Yet the cost is clearly huge. The excessive consumption habits of the rich show that luxury is untenable at a time of profound necessity and our increasing realization of ecological limits.
Two millenia ago Cicero suggested that to have a library and a garden is to have everything we need. For the global super-rich such ecological groundedness and erudition is twisted into the massive extensions of multiple homes and extensive lawns patrolled by private security guards. The costs of hyper-consumption are plain to see – unending air miles in private or chartered jets, diamond encrusted baubles, edible gold leaf cocktails designed to coax money from the wealthy. Consider that even a 70 metre super-yacht consumes around 130 gallons of fuel an hour simply with the engine idling.
What damaging mindset is generated by societies that have allowed or encouraged the growing ranks of the wealthy? Such attitudes matter because they infect our public life and damage our grossly unequal societies. Think tanks and complicit politicians defend excessive wealth and the inequality that goes alongside it. But in ecological terms we know that affluence is costing us the earth and those with less are affected worst and first. For the rich the dream is of escape, from taxes, from social obligation and even from nations. The latest news on the rich is their purchase of estates in New Zealand as bolt-holes come environmental or political apocalypse and attempts by billionaires to create cities in the sea free of tax and social burdens.
Working toward a celebration of connection to environments, to society and meaning are values that require emphasis in our public culture. Yet the expansion of the ranks of the wealthy militate against this. Indeed the actions of many millions among the affluent middle classes are also part of this story. Attempts at bringing harmony, happiness and an ethic of sustainability become rather like comedian Sean Lock’s suggestion that personal environmental efforts often feel like bringing a dustpan to clean up a volcano. Strenuous efforts at valuing that which is finite around us is increasingly common. Yet we know that rising living standards and private incomes unleash countless forms of waste and over-consumption on a fragmenting and damaged world. In this sense our consciousness must be aware of the need to engage and challenge excess as moral issues that bind us together, despite the rhetoric of personal wins and choice. The one percent are not with us on these issues.
Released by Verso in June 2020, Alpha City will offer a panoptic of London, focusing on how the city works for its richest residents and what their wealth means for the city more broadly. A competing subtitle was ‘How London works for the super-rich’ but this was dropped in favour of ‘How London was captured by the super-rich’. I have been writing segments, chapters, notes and observations for some years now, the book brings this together in a coherent analysis. The chapters are as follows:
Introduction
1: Capital City
2: The Archipelago of Power
3: Accommodating Wealth
4: Crime, Capital
5: Cars, Jets and Personal Cruise Liners
6: My Own Private Stronghold
7: Life Below
8: Too Much
Afterword. A Capital City
The 2019 general election result is likely only to re-emphasise the role of private capital in the city, disparities in wealth and opportunity and the role of the urban context as a strategic operating system through which elites maintain their position. Come crisis or complacency London’s role as a core attractor of the global rich appears assured.
I will be posting a series of short pieces in the run-up to the release of the book, culled from roughly another book’s worth of notes and cuts that didn’t make the final edit.
Alpha City 