6 - Engels and the city: the philosophy and practice of urban hypocrisy

Summary

From ‘gated communities’ to high-walled ‘urban villages’ to down-town Central Business Districts, it is now a truism of urban analysis that social relations of production dictate the spatial function of the city. Be it the security-guarded, ex-urban estates of middle-class America, the ‘inner-city’ compounds nestling in the heart of London and Mumbai, or the fortified suburban laagers which ring northern Johannesburg (modelled, it is said, on the style of Tuscan hill towns), civic space is becoming a more obviously codified commodity. Meanwhile, those urban arenas which remain open are arguably subject to an ever-more insidious process of privatisation (even militarisation) as retail districts and developers collude with councils and police authorities to lock down open parks and public squares. In Western cities, urban space has increasingly become a sotto voce battleground between private property interests, security functionaries and regeneration advocates. ‘The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors [has] found that the ownership and control of public realm is shifting from the public to the private sector, replicating patterns not seen since the early Victorian era – when private landlords owned and managed vast swaths of cities’, The Guardian recently announced. Even Trafalgar Square, London's symbolic space for protest and display, is now a highly controlled zone patrolled by uniformed marshals with public drinking, feeding the pigeons and splashing in the fountains strictly outlawed.