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.

This past weekend saw the annual passing of the Notting Hill Carnival in London’s West end. The carnival has taken place each year since 1966 but this is a special year. The carnival followed the disasterous fire at Grenfell Tower in the same London borough with the procession starting with a commemoration for those who died in that fire. Picking-up the FT at the weekend I always flick to the House and Homes section, this week the feature (Get the Party Started, FT, 26-27 August 2017) was on real estate in the area. Here a graphic informs us that £1m will buy us a 2-bed flat, that £10m will secure a 5-bed penthouse or that a more unfeasible £35m will deliver a grand 8-bed detached home with a car lift. It is worth remembering that the constituency in which these excesses are played-out in the housing market was the site of one of the major upsets of the 2017 general election. Called in a fit of hubris the election produced a reduced majority for the government, but also the first Labour member of parliament ever in the Kensington and Chelsea constituency. Change is afoot and not least because housing issues are at the bleeding-edge of experiences among those damaged by austerity policies and a city economy which delivers homes for investors or those who have already made money in the housing market while neglecting those facing overcrowding, stagnating incomes or the city’s poor.

The terrible events at Grenfell Tower revealed an arrogant and largely dysfunctional local government that was incapable of looking after the safety of its tenants or dealing with the subsequent emergency, which was then placed in the hands of NGOs like the Red Cross. Long an area of wealth and poverty (this is the same area that Wyndham Lewis could describe as Rotting Hill in his novel of 1951, but also the romantic stamping ground of Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant in the film of 1999) Notting Hill and its wider London borough of Kensington and Chelsea still has around a quarter of its residents in public housing (2011 census data), often living adjacent to wealthy streets and terraces that feature in global property supplements. The deeper point not to miss here is that property speculation and investment rides on the cultural heritage and diversity of the area, the community carnival seen as a timely reminder to consider what and where to buy that is exciting and with the prospect of capital gains. Yet such advice surely sits uneasily with the kind of social anger being widely expressed about the inadequacy of the central and local state’s response to the immediate tragedy of Grenfell, and the longer-run crisis in affordable housing provision in the capital. The job of property journalists reveals these faultlines amidst continued screening and scraping for new opportunities and places in which to invest. This logic has been catastrophic to the low-income communities of London and other cities in which capital and its intermediaries has forced the exit of thousands. The spectacle of the carnival, the crisis of Brexit and ongoing commitments to defund public facilities and services remain key events that are entwined with the working of property markets and speculators with the result that anger and division seem set only to widen further in the city.

How does the contemporary home offer a window on the social ruptures and anxieties of our time?

The idea of risk has become so embedded in our thinking that it forms a pervasive and taken-for-granted backdrop to our lives. Yet these lives take place in particular places, our impression of major social change, disruption, division, catastrophe and ecological damage are registered by us from within our homes – through windows, gates, doors and screens. Our interpretive frameworks are created not only by participation in social groups, networks and institutions, but also via the domestic space of the home and its place in shaping a sense of predictability and continuity. Without this sense of refuge from unsettling and accelerating social change becomes difficult to process and accommodate – social subjects are rendered more anxious and unsettled themselves. Yet the home itself is neither a place of stability or security. This is not simply because of pervasive and persistent problems of domestic violence. Diverse household forms change over time and do so in the context of housing systems that produce or withhold opportunities for stable, affordable, appropriate and safe houses. The cries of generation rent are for just such forms of stability and continuity. The anxieties of the middle-classes are split between a desire to maintain their own property rights and wealth and a concern for the ability of their own children to experience similar advantages. The horror of homelessness is of losing our place almost fully in social terms, to have this core site of our self-maintenance stripped-away.

The homes of public housing tenants, long assured, have been sold-off or threatened increasingly by destruction in the name, of all things, of producing more affordable housing. Housing systems more generally are partially mediating or failing to mitigate the risks of our times – precarious labour conditions, changing technologies. Housing stress generated by the lack of available homes renders us insecure by failing to provide a stable territorial core from which private actors can become confident social participants. Home is the centre. Without a decent place to stay it is hard to be.

It seems increasingly important to understand the housing crisis as a perpetual feature of of market-oriented housing systems. The home is a point of confluence in which social actors come into being and learn about the risks, dangers and shape of the social world around them. The rise of gated estates and fortress homes indexes social fear by those with the resource to seek an escape route and a means by which feelings of risk can be managed. In a social environment characterised by rising social divisions, political polarisation and the market resolution of social goods and risks the sense of the individual as risk-bearer is surely as never before. The home becomes a bastion outside which we understand life to be intensively competitive and increasingly unsupported.

If the home is a private refuge it is also a place of freedom and personal expression, a place in which ideas of social nurture are paramount. It seems increasingly evident that rising social inequality pushes us towards a recognition of the idea of home as a refuge when our public spaces and institutions are seen as places of disinvestment and danger. To recognise the need for good housing for all is to understand the need for homes that offer a place of security, located in a social universe outside the home characterised by stronger civic spaces and identities.

We’ve come quite some way from images of the young Joe Lampton jockeying to be top-dog in the social realist film of John Braine’s Room at the Top. The vision of ambition and social mobility in post-war Britain became a popular rendition of ideas about moving-up the social ladder and competition.

Today we can look back and reflect on a rather quaint portrayal of a pretty stable and increasingly affluent society of near-full employment and sense of entitlement and direction in the lives of the protagonists. In a series of startling facts and insights revealed by social scientists in recent years we have begun to understand the depth of radical changes to societies in which a sense of career fragmentation, rising social anxieties, material excess and want. In addition to these worrisome changes we can observe a growing sense of conflict and palpable anger over excessive inequalities. We are faced with the view of powerful billionaires commanding historically unprecedented fortunes, as well as political actors, the stressed conditions of declining and desperate post-industrial regions and the significant dismantling and defunding of many aspects of the public realm, hospitals, schools and universities among them. Perhaps not since the Edwardian era have the excesses of those thriving seemed so out of sync with the conditions and prospects of an increasingly anxious population – at least one key difference being the incredibly clear visibility we have of those conditions at the top.

A number of facts and figures can be quickly marshalled to reveal the extent of the extraordinary gulf between those at the top of our society and the rest of us. We might, for example, capture a sense of this globally by considering the research by Oxfam which baldly states that 62 people have the same wealth as literally everyone else in the world combined. That is less than a bus load, not that you are likely to see them electing to get on your local 52 to the town centre any time soon. Alternatively we can consider the fortunes of the top 1%, a group whose fortunes, according to the French economist and sociologist Thomas Piketty, who have seen their wealth expand dramatically over in recent decades at a time when the income and wealth of the rest has stagnated or declined. Finally, we might turn to the work of those locating the homes of the world’s billionaires and ‘ultra high-net worth’ individuals of whom around 80 now live in London.

What these figures reveal little of is the much larger imprint on our daily lives, culture and poltics that the rich now influence. Wealth and excess are now a significant aspect of our fascinating (perhaps also our disgust) with the lives of the rich and famous. Underlying the changes seen in London, a shiny façade of trophy towerblocks and fortress homes for the rich along the Thames, lies two kinds of anxiety. First, that without offering the best possible deal to offshore millionaire and billionaires the city will somehow buckle and shed its pre-eminent position to other global capitals vying for their attentions. Second, for the population at large, that the city has sold its soul, skyline and space to the wealthy with less than scant regard for the everyday citizen competing for housing in the city.

While we are fascinated with what life must be like at the ‘top’ much of this interest is driven less by admiration or envy and more by a sense of the socially and environmentally unsustainable position of those with so much in the face of yawning inequality and widespread social poverty. We know that their travel and homes are excessive and a drain on environmental resources, that they vie for political control, that they avoid or evade paying taxes (in many cases to the countries that house them) and that they are often narcissistic and remote from the concerns and indeed desperation of many living through government austerity measures and cuts. There is little to laud and everything still to understand about how the machineries of our economies, governments, societies and cities are linked-to the demands of the growing ranks of the wealthy. In a time of polarised and often angry and hate-filled political discussions a way forward that celebrates the social, forms of togetherness and moderation are needed in order to make society a place of greater social justice. There is an urgent need to deliberate on these thorny issues further while many dream of an island escape amidst the dog eat dog world of austerity, the gig economy and rising social anxiety about where we are going more broadly.

The accusation of being an ivory tower academic is a painful one, yet ‘getting out’ can also mean we look like we are seeing the lives or places of the poor and excluded as somehow different, wrong, abnormal even. Doing research on poor Scottish housing estates the strong sense that I often came away with was how keen people were to present life as very ordinary, despite what the crime, education and health statistics told me. Should I accept this insider’s view or impose some other designation – that the area had deep problems? If I didn’t use the language of exclusion or poverty how would those with power over resources know that these were areas and people that desperately needed the investment of public resource? Alternatively, were the people of these places going to be further stigmatised and included by precisely these labels? The moral bind seemed impossible to break through.

The last thing that any university sociologist can bear is the charge that they don’t know how ‘it’ is out there, that they are out of touch. Certainly the abstractions of statistical models, surveys and the promise of ‘big data’ continue to push us away from real-world experience. So how can we better see the world around us, understand how it works, who lives there and the problems it holds? To understand social problems, to really work in such a way that we might change the world for the better, we need to get into it, watch how people act in practice and talk to them. But doing this also presents a problem – whether we stay in our offices or get out into communities it is easy to see what social researchers do as a kind of voyeurism. The spectacle of poverty, if we might call it that, is something that generates huge interest from those not immersed in its hard reality. Similar things can be said of dangerous places where we see organised poverty tours alongside the forays of researchers, only for both to return to the safety of life in included or mainstream society.

Is this a fair assessment? What would happen if we voted with our feet and joined as activist neighbours in such communities? More provocatively – would we be helping or taking advantage of low-cost housing as middle-class gentrifiers? I have been on numerous tours of public housing across the world, often organised as part of a conference and as much as I felt enriched and educated by these experiences it was sometimes hard to shake the feeling that these visits presented places as human zoos where residents were unable to decline access in the way that professionals can via secretaries or closed doors. The question this raises is how are we to know the world and its problems in order to do something about them without exploiting or degrading those we are trying to help? We need to avoid the naïve position that if we can relay the voices of the excluded to the powerful we will improve the conditions or resources of the excluded. While things have got better to some extent over the past five decades since the Community Development Programme the problems of poverty and exclusion remain with us. The more I reflect on the nature of research the more I see that that its real promise is less about the potential for change and more about the need to present problems as an unpleasant intrusion in the conscience of the powerful. There is something to be said for all politicians having to visit the kind of places and talk to people that would rarely figure on their own social circuits. The trick for researchers, it seems to me, is in finding the ways and means by which their encounters can be made to show the contradictions of poverty in a nation of plenty so that it is seen as morally untenable. To do this we still need to get out and about, but we need to think carefully about how and why we do this.

This piece was part of an edited collection on engaged learning, Facing Outwards, edited by Brendan Stone at the University of Sheffield.

There is a rare pokemon in my garden and it is luring the public into my personal, domestic space.

This was the apparently unlikely complaint recently brought by Jeffrey Marder of West Orange, New Jersey. The prospect that benign hunters of rare Magnemites, Snorlaxs and Bulbasaurs might be better construed as criminal mass trespassers facilitated by Nintendo’s hit game raises interesting questions about the interaction of networked social/ game media and the boundaries of the private realm of the home.

From numerous media stories it has become clear that the search for the small monsters has become concerted – stories of kids lost in caves, dangerous drivers, the invasion of private buildings and other places becoming an almost daily event. The apparently random or selective placement of the monsters using algorhithms and socio-demographic data was perhaps always likely to generate boundary problems between public and private spaces populated with the monsters. Marder’s claim might generate some sympathy, though it is unclear what form the intrusion took and Niantic, the developer of the game, have already argued that users must ‘adhere to the rules of the human world’, including avoiding trespassing on private property. The future possibilities of augmented reality gaming may yet be dictated by the 200 or so cases likely to be brought against Niantic’s game in which players can see the monsters in the ‘human world’ via the screens on their smartphones (in case I need to tell you!).

What is also interesting about this case is the way in which private property rights are invoked as a means of challenging the architecture by which players throw their poke-balls at Squirtles in innumerable gardens across cities globally. Perhaps more worrying is the possibility is that the aggressive defence of the private domestic realm will not yield some human tragedy at the hands of an anxious or gun-toting homeowner given past such events. The pokemon stories being relayed also suggest that the domain of the private home is being eroded or renegotiated in previously unforeseen ways. Despite the sense of the home as an inviolable space the rise of Pokemon Go and future games like it raise the possibility of massed forms of trespass and surveillance by goal-directed users. Like dumpster hunters for personal details in confidential waste, or computer viruses and internet predators, the precise form of future threats to the domestic home from new technologies are hard to fathom until they arrive in the front garden.

Last week saw the inaugural meeting of the British Society of Criminology’s new Critical Criminology group. This is an important event for all kinds of reasons, not least the need to develop a criminological sensibility informed by and responding to the problems we see around us in this complex social moment. These problems need little rehearsal – traditional concerns with crime and victimisation, the apparent reversal or changes in the long-run decline in crime observed in official data, profiles of the most economically depressed regions and neighbourhoods that offer insights into internalised social pain, depression and violence and national economic and political settings that both exacerbate and deny the depths of many our problems. This is only the local context however and it was good to see concerns with ecological limits, international political economic and humanitarian problems foregrounded alongside a new confidence to assessments of the roots and complexities of crimes of the powerful. Where to next?

All of these issues show that a critical criminology is required that identifies with and locates forms of human damage and violence within the systemic roots and social structures that give momentum to these problems. A sociology, in the widest sense of that term, of how these complex problems arise and what we might do to offer a blueprint for social relations and structures that would either diminish or do-away with such problems forms the basis of such a critical position. The danger at this stage seems to be long-standing in my view – how to avoid some internecine battle over definitions or scope of such a project. For my own part it seems to me that an inter-disciplinary project focusing on crime and harm that brings light to the deeper sources of alienation, violence and exclusion offers one of the most important and exciting pathways forward for criminology as an intersecting point for those desperate to counter the excesses, depths and inequalities associated with our growth/market/capitalist societies. Criminology wins to the extent that it offers an accessible, grounded and intelligent response to these challenges. It must offer vocabularies and conceptual tools that can be relayed to society to help it and its members interpret and access the roots of their problems and worries.

This is essentially an ongoing and positive project that connects with a much longer tradition of free-thinking, social justice-oriented and ‘radical’ positions within academic enquiry that go beyond conventions and conservative (with a small ‘c’) interpretations – what does a field of inquiry that says things are either ok or the best we can achieve do for us today? The next step is to carry on doing what we are doing and to ensure that systems-level thinking is combined with close empirical and theoretical analyses of the leading problems of our time. As one keynote, Anne Pettifor, offered, we will have to attend to this bigger picture if we are to understand the kinds of crime and harm that will be generated by the economic and social structures changing in front of us. The rise of the popular political right, a hyper mediatised and voyeuristic society, the dependency of desires for baubles and gadgets on exhaustible and exhausted materials and the backdrop of climate change and approaching planetary finality will be important grounds on which critical criminology and social science should be located.

This past weekend saw the annual passing of the Notting Hill Carnival in London’s West end. The carnival has taken place each year since 1966 but this is a special year. The carnival followed the disasterous fire at Grenfell Tower in the same London borough with the procession starting with a commemoration for those who died in that fire. Picking-up the FT at the weekend I always flick to the House and Homes section, this week the feature (Get the Party Started, FT, 26-27 August 2017) was on real estate in the area. Here a graphic informs us that £1m will buy us a 2-bed flat, that £10m will secure a 5-bed penthouse or that a more unfeasible £35m will deliver a grand 8-bed detached home with a car lift. It is worth remembering that the constituency in which these excesses are played-out in the housing market was the site of one of the major upsets of the 2017 general election. Called in a fit of hubris the election produced a reduced majority for the government, but also the first Labour member of parliament ever in the Kensington and Chelsea constituency. Change is afoot and not least because housing issues are at the bleeding-edge of experiences among those damaged by austerity policies and a city economy which delivers homes for investors or those who have already made money in the housing market while neglecting those facing overcrowding, stagnating incomes or the city’s poor.

The terrible events at Grenfell Tower revealed an arrogant and largely dysfunctional local government that was incapable of looking after the safety of its tenants or dealing with the subsequent emergency, which was then placed in the hands of NGOs like the Red Cross. Long an area of wealth and poverty (this is the same area that Wyndham Lewis could describe as Rotting Hill in his novel of 1951, but also the romantic stamping ground of Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant in the film of 1999) Notting Hill and its wider London borough of Kensington and Chelsea still has around a quarter of its residents in public housing (2011 census data), often living adjacent to wealthy streets and terraces that feature in global property supplements. The deeper point not to miss here is that property speculation and investment rides on the cultural heritage and diversity of the area, the community carnival seen as a timely reminder to consider what and where to buy that is exciting and with the prospect of capital gains. Yet such advice surely sits uneasily with the kind of social anger being widely expressed about the inadequacy of the central and local state’s response to the immediate tragedy of Grenfell, and the longer-run crisis in affordable housing provision in the capital. The job of property journalists reveals these faultlines amidst continued screening and scraping for new opportunities and places in which to invest. This logic has been catastrophic to the low-income communities of London and other cities in which capital and its intermediaries has forced the exit of thousands. The spectacle of the carnival, the crisis of Brexit and ongoing commitments to defund public facilities and services remain key events that are entwined with the working of property markets and speculators with the result that anger and division seem set only to widen further in the city.

The furore over tax avoidance, both by our national and international elites, reveals new social fault lines while highlighting a crisis of legitimacy to calls for togetherness and common purpose.

Mayfair, hedge funds and capital’s heartland

The word plutocracy combines two elements to its meaning – that of wealth and power. To live in a plutocracy, many argue, is to see the warping of the political process by those with the resources to do so – representation for all is eroded by a seizure of control by the few.

The impact of such control is evident in financial support for political campaigns, as well as the massive infrastructure of lobbyists, the subtle closing-down of political debate and the voting patterns of ‘bought’ politicians. Yet in many ways simply understanding control by the wealthy as the capture of political institutions and actors by the rich is a rather limited reading of what we might mean by plutocracy. A broader understanding of a plutocratic society is one where our social and economic world is run to, and for, those with increasing levels of personal wealth. While these processes are often difficult to substantiate they amount to a corruption on a grand scale which pervades much of daily social and economic life, particularly given the scale exposed by the recent leak of the Panama Papers.

A society organised in this way is one in which material wealth and privilege is identified as the mark of aspiration and success, but also has the right to be passed-on to those who are members of this class. For those in such a position it is deemed natural, right and socially useful to retain and expand such privileges.

Following the revelations of huge and systematic tax avoidance by the global affluent have arisen defences by those who argue that offshore investment is nothing to concern ourselves with – this response has been rapid and aggressive, a grand denial of wrongdoing and an assertion of the freedoms of individuals to take rational decisions in the search to bolster their private wealth. The indignation of those charged with avoiding their tax dues has been impressive to watch, a form of denial of harm or wrongdoing that criminologists will recognise as strategies of avoiding the charge of illegality. In the world of the elite in this, more extensive, notion of a plutocracy, in which making money is the primary function of individuals, moving money offshore is seen as legal and rational. Indeed, it is seen as the logical choice of those with the resources to pursue tax efficient vehicles which are supplied by a cadre of operators who help those with money to maintain anonymous offshore accounts.

There are at least two problems with this position and reasons to believe that real and effective pressure will come to bear on the Amazons, Googles and Camerons of this world. First, those institutions and individuals using apparently legal forms of investment are increasingly being challenged as normative readings of what is morally problematic and consequential on their choices changes – increasing numbers of people think it is reprehensible to avoid tax and more are now aware of the scale of these issues through leaks like the Panama Papers. Second, a key problem for those seeking to defend offshore investment is the impression we now have of the stellar wealth of our elites (such as stories of £200,000 ‘gifts’). The scale of such wealth is problematic because we also know material inequality, particularly that measured by wealth, is increasing. In addition many people have been deeply touched by forms of social and economic pain following cuts to the public realm that this and the former coalition government espoused were necessary for us as a community. Clearly this was rather a partial reading of the term community, or at least one predicated on an idea of noblesse oblige and patrician responsibility that operated in tandem with a hotline to a Panama broker.

Another key problem for our elites following the Panama Papers revelations relates to the increasingly clear impression we have of a class of people who are defined by their finances and whose allegiances are built around these interests. This is a class or group for whom identity is increasingly structured by however, and wherever, fast money can be made and enlarged, rather than through any sense of being part of a national or local community. What is revealed is a newfound robber-baron logic of plunder and secede that sees the wealthy secreting their money where it can grow and avoiding their national tax regime. In a political context in which an entire political project has been built upon the idea that there are limited resources to run essential public services (and new resources need to be found) the entwined sense of wealth and avoidance feels like nothing less than grand betrayal.

Because of these problems, of inequality and a rather profound breakdown in social cohesion, there is now a deep legitimacy crisis at work. This will not be explained away by an appeal to a legal/criminal distinction or the idea that the wealthy are like the majority of us. Instead it is much more likely that judgment will be formed on the basis of a belief by many that the structures of our economy work to privilege those who seek to avoid, work around and undermine forms of collective purpose and provision. Linked to this is the growing recognition that what we have seen thus far is only a glimpse of the trillion dollar economy of offshore finance placed by individuals looking to make more money for themselves than they can within their own tax jurisdictions.

So the key question ultimately generated by this mess is – if we are not in fact in this together, whose side are we on?

Buy to ruin: Abandoned or neglected mansion on gated road, north London

Where politicians and corporations apply the ‘not illegal’ defence then counter-arguments are only likely to be bolstered amidst the sense of social outrage. Criminologists have long observed how socially harmful practices (in this case tax avoidance) can move to become recognised as a form of social deviance that generates shame among those engaging in such behaviour (slavery, smoking, domestic violence can be given as examples of such transitions). Another possibility seems even more likely – that we are seeing the prelude of more concerted attempts at legal prohibition that are founded on this moral outrage as well as plausible economic evidence regarding the damage of avoidance. Here the difference between evasion and avoidance may yet be the winning or losing of the next election, rather than the well-worn anecdote about it being the thickness of a prison wall.

It seems a distinct possibility that much tax avoidance will become defined as tax evasion because the majority population feels that it is morally right to frame such behaviour in this way. Moves to prohibit anonymous ownership of offshore investments seem to be a precursor to this. A synoptic world, in which the many closely watch the few, is fuelled by social media and instant leaks of millions of documents that also drive moves in this direction. Strange as it may seem, the weakness of a plutocracy today is that it emerges into conditions of counter-surveillance that may challenge its ascendency. In a world run to the rhythms of money and little else the legitimacy of plans to raze public housing, reform public health systems, cut essential social care while protecting those with profound wealth seem at worst extraordinarily callous, at best plain wrong.

The case for alternatives to austerity and a deeper form of collective endeavour is made all the stronger by the Panama Papers and, no doubt, other revelations to come about the secret life of our elites.

Life is full of clichés, no less perhaps than in the area of crime cinema. Yet the influence of crime and mystery cinema on daily cultural life is hard to underestimate, from the daily darkness of Scandinavian noir imbibed by millions, to the banal reality of crime presented in The Wire or the Scarface-quoting real gangsters that underpin the film of Saviano’s Gomorrah (see his interview in the DVD extras). So far, so obvious. Crime and violence is pervasive and its more subtle effects remain under-examined. Where then to start with films that offer authentic insights, useable frames of reference for understanding harm or an attempot to grapple with some of the mainstays of contemporary cultural reference points that, somehow, we should have watched? Here is a list of some of the more obvious examples, with a less obvious and perhaps more exciting alternative. This list will (hopefully) grow over time…

 The Wire

Watch it because you must, all five series and all all 60 hours or so. I am no fan of episodic boxed sets and The Wire wins-out because it achieves strong narrative development alongside naturalistic writing and some of the most insightful analysis of urban problems, inequality, racial divides and the fuzziness of moral boundaries. Plus you get one of the finest urban folk heroes in the form of Omar.

Alternative – Red Riding

This is tough and hard to stand-up to the resources and combined team-writing power of American television. Red Riding runs across three film-length treatments of police corruption, serial killing and the backdrop of the soon to be post-industrial wastelands of northern England. By turns a realist cop drama and realist fantasy it at least tries to achieve a sense of monumentality that is lost in the confusion of trying to work between real events and an overblown script.

Or try:

Spiral – sprawling (super) tough and often harrowing Parisian cop drama, an attempt to suggest and interrogate the machineries of law, policing and drug gangs.

Robocop (the first version)

Cop becomes cyborg cop to what was then thrilling effect, the effect feels clunky now and yet this is surely a prescient vision as public policing becomes a playground of corporate invaders hawking their dreams of total dominance over criminal scum using armed robots that cant tell the difference between good guys and bad, sounds familiar?

The alternative – Chappie

The follow-up piece to District 9 (essential) and Elysium, the themes are back again, a fracturing metropolis, criminal gangs operating in a society of haves and have-nots. What might happen if a law enforcement robot were re-coded as an attempt at human intelligence and development that is then captured by a violent gang? Can the vulnerable child-drone be taught to be bad? By turns funny and incredibly moving this is a must-see for the issues it raises about morality, drift and personal development in a world of mad programmers with good and ill intentions. Jaw-dropping special effects in daylight urban environments yet again prove Blomkamp can produce a winning formula.

Oceans 11

Plan a heist, have fun, we are on the side of the not so good guys, who cares?

The alternative – Pickpocket

Bresson’s beautiful and closely observed study of an anomic male deserves attention. His pickpocket is a man adrift in the masses of Parisian society, a pretence at conformity and respectability while cultivating his skills as a pickpocket addicted to the easy wins of pilfering from the punters and street inhabitants around him. Watch it because it is both beautiful and has much to make us think about where we can and cannot find excitement in a complex world that casts some of us adrift.

Training day

Not such a mainstream film perhaps, Denzil Washington acts as the morally corroded inductor of rookie cop Ethan Hawke. Washington’s presence is magnetic, with Hawke struggling to maintain the respect he craves from his mentor while trying to avoid being dragged into a world of easy wins, brutality and plain bad methods at winning.

The alternative – Beast cops

This Hong Kong variant is a charming study of life in the city, humorous plays at the old hand/rookie conventions while trying at a serious attempt at a realist crime drama. Best Film at the HK film awards this is a great introduction to the world of Hong Kong cop drama.

Die hard

Watch it because you must, because it is fun and still has some of the best one-liners from Willis and Rickman, a period piece that still works in its own terms.

The alternative – The Raid

A cult hit, The Raid features Iko Uwais, awesome martial artist from Indonesia. It is hard not to be impressed by the energy while wincing at the brutality of what is on show here. The plot revolves around an attempt to retake a tower block occupied by gangsters and the poorer residents of the city (perhaps the alternative to this film is the newer Judge Dredd but it is so one-dimensional and dreadful it cannot be recommended). It might be pushing it to suggest this is a dystopian vision of urban life and violent policing tactics but those elements are certainly here. What we only glean is any sense of how the poverty and violence of the city produces heroes and anti-heroes of this kind.

Additional – Grand Theft Auto 5

An alternative to the glut of wargames and organised crime games that are the ubiquitous mainstay of gaming culture today, this is hardly a sleeper hit or subcultural phenomenon – this IS our popular culture today. The is also likely to be the game that your young son or daughter is likely to be playing because their older brother or sister has a copy, or because their friends have an older brother or sister with a copy. It rates certificate 18 for its immersive world of freaks, villains and charismatic sociopathy. Treat it as a play-space for your latent desire to maim and slaughter without consequence, while worrying about its corrosive effect on vulnerable others that really shouldn’t be exposed to this. Undoubtedly impressive, but what are we ultimately to do with cultural products like this and their permeation into popular culture?

Last Sunday the Observer newspaper ran with a story covering our research on London’s alpha territories – the places in which the wealthiest live. The story was pitched around a series of working papers that we have been writing, increasingly focusing on how urban arenas like London work for those with most resources. We have been trying to say, both subtly and forecefully, that the UK is not a plutocracy in the sense that money is used simply to buy the voices of politicians or voters (though some would certainly make that argument!). Rather what we see is the way that the city, its economy and and politics, works for those with money. It produces fine and gauche homes (in quantity and vertically), it offers spaces to play and to buy and networks of contacts that provide seamless service to wrap the wealthy-up and make them feel at home. As I have written elsewhere, this cosseted lifestyle is important politically because it allows (and is desired by) the rich to feel distant from much of the distress around them.

I have little doubt that many, indeed all, of those with eye eatering somes of money to burn have no ill intent towards their fellow citizens, indeed many of them feel that the world around them is richly dverse and full of good folk from all walks of life (and our interviews often bear this view out). The point of course is that this money is mediated and channeled through various systems of accumlation, hidden when possible from the demands of the state to find necessary services for all (tax evasion and avoidance) and, critically, produces a city that is alien to many who have lived there for generations. It is also a city that is alienating and dispossessing as we see public housing demolished, plans for the eradication of ‘sink’ estates (old chestnuts, lies and myths have come around again about the links between design and crime without looking at their social context), more welfare cuts, the layering of stress onto communities by cash-strapped or co-opted local governments and the rise of a sense that within this dogfight of contemporary urban existence – why should the poor think they should be reserved or offered some kind of free place?

The evacuation of the public realm is an ongoing mission of the current government, in the name of economic prudence. Yet the real limits to this logic are increasingly visible. As the middle-classes are priced-out and even the upper classes (if we should call them that) feel displaced by the changes in their neighbourhoods and the political class act in the name of money rather than loyalty to their cities and constituents. In this sense the government do indeed appear to be ‘at it’ – on the one hand saying that all of this pain is necessary (or denying that any injury has even taken place) while appearing to gleefully attack forms of municipal and public provision because somehow such systems are outdated, outmoded or do not help inflate the balance sheets of those paying for their suppers. Such views don’t seem too cynical, nor are they hard to develop or access as the media increasingly focus on social and political elites and the lives of the wealthy. The rich are more and more visible and when institutions like Oxfam get angry (yes, they don’t just care about the poor elsewhere in the world, in fact they see the plight of the poor as being generated by many of ‘us’) we should take note because the nature of this debate is changing and the real contradictions of a political system that sells the majority down the river in their own name while selling assets and opportunities to the monied cannot last without being challenged or faced down electorally – we can surely expect these debates to become ever more heated.

This is simply a list of links to cumulative blog outputs from the ESRC funded Alpha Territory that I have written to date and others with colleagues (Roger Burrows, Hang Kei Ho, Simon Parker, David Rhodes) project by myself and in conjunction with colleagues. I will add to this as future outputs emerge.

The spatial consequences of Piketty’s understanding of Capital: A response to Piketty & Savage, Theory, Culture and Society blog

http://theoryculturesociety.org/rowland-atkinson-on-the-spatial-consequences-of-pikettys-understanding-of-capital-a-response-to-piketty-savage/

The super-rich in London: they live amongst us, but you won’t run into them (if they can help it), British Politics and Policy, LSE

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/a-seamless-floating-space-mobility-the-super-rich-and-london/

The Power of Raw Money, Le Monde Diplomatique

http://mondediplo.com/2015/05/14london

London: where only the wealth of a global elite can find a home, Guardian

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/22/london-wealth-global-elite-home

Cities for the Rich, Le Monde Diplomatique

http://mondediplo.com/2010/12/22housing

Wealth, Housing Need and Austerity, Autotomically blog

https://autotomically.wordpress.com/2015/01/23/the-plan-wealth-housing-need-and-austerity/

The random neighbourhood, Autotomically blog

https://autotomically.wordpress.com/2014/10/17/the-random-neighbourhood-bringing-concentrated-wealth-into-the-concentrated-poverty-debate/

A city in thrall to capital? London, money-power and elites, Discover Society

http://discoversociety.org/2014/12/01/a-city-in-thrall-to-capital-london-money-power-and-elites/

On the Frontline: Domestic Sovereigns, Wealth and Public Space, Discover Society

http://discoversociety.org/2013/12/03/on-the-frontline-domestic-sovereigns-wealth-and-public-space/

A City Both Full and Empty: London and the Super-Rich, Critical Urbanists blog

https://criticalurbanists.wordpress.com/2014/11/20/a-city-both-full-and-empty-london-and-the-super-rich-by-rowland-atkinson-university-of-sheffield/