Two - Power, Consumption, Disorder and Protest in Inner-City Centres

Summary

Introduction

This chapter focuses on power dynamics shaping how neoliberal inner-city space is regulated, experienced and lived by people, including by protesters – and eco-justice demonstrators among them. It is not by chance that this chapter focuses particularly on inner-city areas among other zones in the city. Inner-city space is, indeed, a ‘special place’ within the urban, at least in terms of the social construction of deviance and of social control. Over the past 40 years, in the UK and many European cities, such areas (or often sections of them) have frequently been subject to redevelopment or regeneration programmes, which have succeeded in revamping their look and image. Architectural and design changes have contributed to moulding or, in some cases, merely consolidating the consumption ethos that often governs these spaces. In other words, innercity spaces have increasingly become what Keith Hayward (2004) called ‘spaces of consumption and pleasure’: spaces that offer various shopping, consumption and entertainment opportunities to people, tourists, party-goers and various other ‘sensation-gatherers’ (Bauman, 1997).

As this chapter will illustrate, an ingrained emphasis on consumption has had an effect on how inner-city areas are governed and, in turn, experienced and lived in by people. In its first part, this chapter focuses on how space has actively been implicated in the shaping of individual behaviour, including through engineered subconscious clues and nudges that push people into consuming more than what they had originally intended or into behaving in ways that do not discourage others from consuming as much as they wish to.

Inner-city spaces have been regulated through subconscious sensory and affective cues, as well as through more explicit means, for example, policies and practices that penalize certain ‘unwanted’ behaviour and bodies, while safeguarding these spaces’ consumption ethos and commercial values. Prescriptive and narrow understandings of space are, however, not always unconditionally accepted by everyone in the city. As the second part of the chapter will illustrate, inner-city spaces often become a battleground where different constructions of space come into conflict – a conflict that often results in the criminalization of the less powerful, as critical and cultural criminological scholarship has cogently demonstrated.