Bob Catterall

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Is it all coming together? Thoughts on urban studies and the present crisis:14) Another city is possible? Reports from the frontlineBob Catterall

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CITY, VOL. 12, NO. 3, DECEMBER2008

ISSN 1360-4813 print/ISSN 1470-3629 online/08/030402-14 2008 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/13604810802614821

Is it all coming together?Thoughts on urban studies andthe present crisis:(14) Another city is possible? Reports fromthe frontline

Bob CatterallTaylorandFrancis

While eyes were on the absurd charade of the threat of Islamist terrorism to westerncivilisation, the real doomsday scenario that poses a far greater threat to western civilisa-tion (whatever that is) was gathering pace right next to Ground Zero, in Wall Street.1

nother city is necessary? Another ispossible? There is perhaps a right to

that city. If it is necessary, on whatbasis is such a claim to be made? If it ispossible, what/who is denying it and how,and who/what can deliver it and how? Hasa cumulative series of crimes laid the basisfor such denial(s)? If there is a right to sucha city, is that right to be asserted on thebasis of a claim for justice, freedom, happi-ness, fairness, efficiency, progress, survival,or what? In the light of environmentalfactors such as a rising sea level, should webe talking of the right to the continuedexistence of the city?

What is the city that is to be surpassed? Isit the neoliberal city, its social and globalsystem? Or has the much-touted neoliberalfix and fixation of its proponents and criticsbeen already undermined, as the transitori-ness of neoliberalism, its fragility, its never-theless destructive, implosive and explosive,fragility is revealed? Was neoliberalism

merely a holding operation seeking toobscure and deny much more significantunderlying contradictions? As the faade

crumbles, does what is revealed consist ofthe superimposed structures and processes

of capitalism and statism, civilization,empire, racism and patriarchy, and, despiteoccasional downturns, of unending growthand ecological consumption? Does theelection of a black President at the heart ofthat empire and civilization suggest that anew impetus might be given to movementsfor ethical renewal and new social andplanetary priorities? Is it, then, enough, toconfront, contest or square up to neoliber-alism, may we also need to lay bare itsgrossly compromised props so as to reveal,question, encirclecontributing selectivelyto undermining here and to judicious reaf-firmation thereand so surpass them?

The answers to such questions, it has beenargued in this series of thoughts on urbanstudies and the urban crisis, involve bring-ing it all together, seeking to gathertogether narratives from the full range ofmedia in which we seek to speak to, and of,

each other and our situations. Some of thesenarratives are supplied by socio-spatialscience but it is not assumed here that

A


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CATTERALL: ISITALLCOMINGTOGETHER? 403

science is the unique source of truth.Sociospatial sciencewhich despite of lateinvoking imaginaries as an add-on can stillseem too pre-packaged, sterilised or positiv-istichas to be tested against the narrativesand truths emerging in other media, includ-ing ordinary talk and language(s), as theytoo have to be tested against science. Andthey have to be textured through thickdescription, including that supplied byfiction, so that some sense of their embodi-mentreal or supposed, that is part of theinvestigationis given. The veracity ofnone of these narratives or their texturingscan be taken for granted. They take the form

of mediations and the nature of each medi-ation and its specificities has to be consid-ered. For that task it may be that greateropenness will suffice, or that anothersciencecertainly one that takes morereadily to other media, to ordinary talk andnarratives, and to dialogue and engagementwith othersis necessary, and possible.

The narratives selected in this series arefrom a wide variety of situations, in space

and in time. The series took 9/11 and someresponses to it, both absurd charades andmeasured wisdom, as a starting point fromwhich to look critically and concretely atcities/urbanization, within a context ofglobalization/empire, and the studies/science that lay(s) claim to record andexplain them/it. The previous episodelooked at a series of crimesof which 9/11was only onein order to put cities and

their study in more searching contexts,socio-economic, psycho-social and ethical.The situations selected in this episode are

those of the frontline.2It is a concept withmilitarycontexts at its source: the forwardline or zone formed by the most advancedunits of a battle in which engagementswith the enemy on the other side of thefrontline may take place. Beyond that, itapplies to any situation of struggle orconflict, particularly to those people inplace and seen as a vanguard, elite and/oras contestants, actual or potential. Heregroups/masses on the same physical, even

social, side of the frontline may be identi-fied as the enemy. The frontline, then, has adimension of power and authority as wellas place, one of elites and masses, of legiti-macy/diktat and of contestation, and alsoone of communication, persuasion, decep-tion and violence, potential and actual.This particular reading of the variousnarratives is undertaken in the context ofwhat the epigraph above calls the realdoomsday scenario of financial andeconomic crisis, partly/symbolically locatednear or perhaps at Ground Zero and of theglimmer of hope arising from the electionof Barack Obama to the Preidency of the

USA. In the midst of all this what signs ofthe right to the city, its denial and absence,necessity and possibility, can we find? Someof these narratives are grim in the extremeyet if way to the Better there be, itexacts a full look at the Worst.3

The spacetimes visited here are fromcontemporary London, with some referenceto Somalians, and from the Mexican border.The sources are diverse. In the main they

were gathered in the London area in thesummer and autumn of 2008. What can welearn from examining and seeking to inter-weave such differing narratives? There is alargely unrecognized need for the sociospa-tial investigator as beachcomber rather thanhigh-priest or flaneur.

These are perhaps scenes, to some extent, ofthe neoliberal fix and its consequences. Whatare its psychosocial costs and imaginaries as

well as contestations, implicit and explicit?The first section below, Frontlines andground zeroes, presents and explores thesereports. The second section, Towards a wayout of neoliberalism, capitalism, adeformed civilization, or what? provides apreview of some of the material to be includedin a sequel, and an interim conclusion.

1. Frontlines and ground zeroesWhile everybody tries to pass the toxicparcel on to somebody else, the system has to


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404 CITYVOL. 12, NO. 3

find the money. So will compensation for thenear valueless contracts and thus nowuninsured debt ultimately be madeand bywhom? And because nobody knowsnotthe regulators, banks or governmentswho

owns the swaps and whether they are credit-worthy, nobody can answer the question.4

The spacetimes visited here are fromcontemporary London, with some referenceto Somalians, and from two Latin Americancities, Rio, and Juarez on the US/Mexicanborder. These are scenes, to some extent, ofthe neoliberal fix and its consequences, of itspsychosocial costs and imaginaries as well ascontestations, implicit and explicit. To whatextent was neoliberalism a carefully parti-tioned enclave on a precipice whose walls fallonly to reveal, perhaps momentarily whilenew facades are erected, the extensive chasm,stretching far beyond the ground zeroes ofmoney markets, that was there all the time.

1.1 Londons frontline?

Its rare nowadays to hear anyone talk aboutnight time in London. The city in recentyears has witnessed a bevy of real estatemoguls, foreign investors and film directorstrading in a slicked-up form of commodityurbanism; the London night hasmorphed into, and been rebranded asLondon nightlife. Now that most of itsfactories and workshops have shut down the capital has embraced its status as apostindustrial hub in which leisure andtourism are sovereign.5

Sukhdev Sandhus Night haunts: a journeythrough the London night presents a fineinvestigative portrait6 of the heyday (makehay while the sun shines) of New Laboursneoliberal London as a slicked-up, postindus-trial form of commodity urbanism. Its overallcoverage is summed up by the blurb writer as

forays [that] see him prospecting with the

people who drive its pulse, from the avianpolice to security guards, urban fox-huntersand exorcists. He wades through the sewers,hangs out with fugitive graffiti writers, and

accompanies the nuns of Tyburn as they prayfor the souls of Londoners.

This, with the important introductory chapterfrom which the epigraph to this section is

taken, covers eight of the twelve chapters ofthe book. The four remaining chapters are onsleep technicians (investigating insomnia),cleaners, mini-cab drivers, and a Thamesbarger. But are these the people who largelydrive its pulse? Do they in the main provide aform of counter-pulse? Where is the frontline?

Sandhu, who echoes Rebecca Solnits casefor the reflective powers of walking, makestwo claims for the nature of his approach. He

sees it first as an attempt to

hear what the people who inhabit London atnight make of this accelerated, deregulatedcity, and not just in terms of hardship andbrutalising work, but in terms of joy, beauty,ghosts, religion. A lexicon they know but arerarely encouraged to deploy. (p.15)

The reference to this lexicon, unacknowl-edged and in fact invisible to most sociospatial

scientists, is perhaps the most profound state-ment in the book (though Sandhu makes itexplicit only in this one sentence).

His second claim is that his approach seeksto share the company and the significance of awork by the beat journo, a hacks hack,H.V.Morton, particularly his once best-sellingmetrologue, The Nights of London (1926).Sandhu characterizes Mortons approach asfollows:

He marries journalistic precision to dreamyspeculation. Not for him the self-obsessedmaunderings of psychogeographic writing;he is happy and eager to talk to workingLondoners who furnish him with groundedinsights that it would be impossible for himto glean on his own. (p.16)7

Sandhus writing displays both of these over-lapping sets of qualities. There is journalisticprecision as well as dreamy speculation, thehard-earned sense of a lexicon responsive toimmediate materialities as well as contributingto long-term cultural overtones. Sociospatial


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science fights shy of such concerns but with-out them there can be no satisfactory accountof life within and beyond neoliberalism,within and beyond the world that dominantfinancial and economic forces and the war onterror shape.

Nevertheless, there is a missing factor, a senseof struggle. Take the cleaners. Their criticismof what they see in the offices and streets isbrought out. Its implications are occasionallytouched on. One cleaner comments: I thinkLondon would collapse if the cleaners wouldgo on strike for just one day (p.34). Sandhugives us vivid and necessary snapshots but

there is little sense of movement, of action, ofobstacles and opportunities, of timeand nosense of the toxic parcels poised to poisonthat postindustrial hub.

Paul Masons short section, in his LiveWorking or Die Fighting: How the WorkingClass Went Global8another crucial booksomewhat in the tradition that Sandhu isseeking to identify and developon cleanersat Canary Wharf, brings out the missing

dimension. Mason features three individuals:Benedita Goncalves, a Portuguese cleaningsupervisor at a major bank, Juan Rodriguez, acleaner at News International, and MartinWright, a black British cleaner at the RoyalLondon Hospital. Each of them is engaged instruggles for, as Juan puts it, respect andmoney. Martin Wright has managed, afterthree years of organizing, to get the hourlypay raised from 5.50 to 7.50. Benedita

reports on the attitude of the management:They showed lack of respect to theemployees. Everything you did was wrong.They sent people home for no reason justbecause they didnt need them. Another thingis the shouting, calling names, saying, Youare crap; you are no one. Something like thathappened with me and so I started my battleagainst them. (p. 107)

Juan, Martin and Benedita, then, have takenup their position on an economic front line.

However, there are also internal divisionswithin the workforce to overcome. Workers

with no papers can be blackmailed by themanagement. And, Wright says, there areconstant tensions between workers fromNigeria, Ghana and Somalia. Smaller butconsequential frontlines within larger ones.Perspectives on the Somalis are provided by aplay, by a series of talks, discussions anddocumentary showings at a documentaryfilm club, and a preview of a social sciencereport. These events were scattered acrossLondon in the summer and autumn of 2008.Can they be brought together?

The London theatre enterprise, Shakes-peares Globe, commissioned and performeda play by Che Walker, The Frontline, that

sought to represent and enact some of thesetensions. Walkers frontline was set near atube station. He explains:

Im fascinated by what happens aroundstations. There is usually skulduggery, drugtrafficking, prostitution, lost people arriving,drifting in their way somewhere.

His chosen patch is Camden. He grew up and

still lives there. One of the changes he notes isethnic: from Irish, Greek, and Italian commu-nities to more Africans, Bangladeshis,Sudanese, Somalis and Ethiopians. Theprogramme includes eleven pages ofcomment (including the interview with himfrom which I quote above) and largely histor-ical rather than contemporary background,with a page each for Somalis and Ethiopiansin London. The play presents the majorethnic tension as between an Ethiopian and aSomali:

Miruts You best be movin from this herevicinity or me and my soldiersgonna roll right through yourribcage jus like we do to yourmother in Mogadishu.

Salim You wanna bring up Mogadishu. Iwas keeping a lid on things andyou wanna bring up what youstinkin Ethiopian bastards aredoin in Mogadishu!

Miruts Oh, what, struck a nerve,fassyhole?


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Salim Im gonna be feedin you yourheart by the end of this night, youstinkin Ethiopian communistbastards, you aint even got thestamina to run your own country,you gotta pull in the Russians andCubans and hide behind theyskirts juss so you can see off themighty Somalian forces, but wecomin for you, little man, wecomin for you, don you worrybout dat!9

Yet of the dozen or so London reviewsonly Michael Billington in the Guardianpicked up on this: On the political front,Miruts, a defiant Ethiopian refugee, findshis footsteps dogged by an equally angrySomali (Figure 1). Though there weregestures towards Empire, this frontline,then, was more a zone of varied tensionsand largely individual conflict rather than offundamental struggle. At what point does

the right to a life in the city become theright to the city?Figure1 BeruTessema(Miruts)andKurtEgyiawan(Salim)inThe Frontlineby CheWalker,atShakespearesGlober(2008).Photographby ManuelHarlan.ReproducedbypermissionofShakespearesGlobePressOffice.

Reports on and discussion of the natureand larger context of the interacting domes-tic and international dimensions of Somalilife, in London and in Mogadishu, werepresented in a Somalia screening season, bychance just as The Frontline completed itsrun, at Londons Frontline Club, a centre for

journalists, photographers, filmmakers andcameramen. Included in the season was thedocumentary Lost Boys(director Paul Sapin)which investigated the stories of three recentSomali gang murders in the city in order totry to understand why this new generation isfrustrated and underachievingand whySomalis are now the largest ethnic groupincarcerated in the young offenders institu-tion in Feltham.

A social scientist researching the Somalis,Dr Caroline Paskell, was present in the audi-ence at the showing of Lost Boys. Her report,Understanding and addressing intergenera-

Figure 1 Beru Tessema (Miruts) and Kurt Egyiawan (Salim) in The Frontline by Che Walker, at Shakespeares Globe(2008). Photograph by Manuel Harlan. Reproduced by permission of Shakespeares Globe Press Office.


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tional tensions within Camdens Somaliscommunity,10has not yet been published but

she has prepared a preliminary overview forCity.

Since the early 2000s, violent clashes between clusters of young London Somalis have becomeincreasingly frequent and serious. In the worst instances, these have led to fatal stabbings as

groups take revenge for earlier attacks. Press coverage of these and related incidents identifyno fewer than ten named, Somali-led gangs across London. Formalised gangs are broadlyterritorial and have some markers of identity but they are more fluid than the commonnotion of a (US-style) gang may suggest. Gang-membership often overlaps with the leader-ship and operation of local drug markets, but most members and looser affiliates identify witha gangs territorial basis rather than with its drug-dealing.

Behind the headline incidents of gang attacks and the specific issue of drug-dealing liebroader, intersecting problems of young Somalis involvement in anti-social behaviour, theirabove-average levels of truancy and under-performance in school. Efforts to tackle these

issues are showing progress, with markedly improved educational attainment since the early2000s and indications that truancy and exclusion rates have stabilised. Yet it is clear that

young Somalis, predominantly young men, are disproportionately involved in anti-socialbehaviour and crime. A study, jointly commissioned by the London Borough of Camden andSomali community groups, found that young Somalis gang-membership, anti-social behav-iour and drug-dealing have been fostered by intergenerational tensions, household frictionand socio-economic disadvantage within the Somali community.

Interviews with over forty Somalis found that many young Somalis, as in other migrantcommunities, feel between two worlds, in the home and in society as a young womanexpressed it. The wider urban context is defined by older and young Somalis as a realm inwhich young people tend to have the cultural and linguistic advantage but are also readilyexposed to anti-social behaviour, drugs, crime, territorial and ethnic disputes. In attemptingto assert their authority, many parents respond with stronger reference to their heritage. For

younger people, however, relating this domestic context to their wider life can be difficult:theres a different world outside the door. Parents find maintaining control over this exter-nal realm is typically complicated by practical constraints, not least by problems of over-crowding and difficulties with English.

Families fractured by war, years in transit and refugee status have added further complex-ity, and many fathers are physically absent or effectively disengaged from the family. Low

employment rates among both men and women are also cited as contributing to householdtensions with younger Somalis expressing lower levels of respect in particular for older menwho do not work. Issues of clan allegiance are not widely thought to be relevant to youngerSomalis, and do not appear to be a factor in the intergenerational tensions or street disputes.

Dr Caroline Paskell

Here is a social science report that usefullysupplements and suggests frameworks forother accounts. Looking beyond the frontlineon display outside the tube station, Dr Paskellturns towards the nature of the gangs, theirterritories as well as their drug-related bases,and at underperformance and truancy at

school. There are perhaps panglossian possi-bilities of improvement here but balancedagainst these are negative features in thefamilial and global situation. Appeals by oldergenerations to heritage are undermined bythe fact that many of them lose respectbecause they do not work. There are also the


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deep disturbances of war, years in transit,and refugee status that linger on. The waritself in Mogadishu continues.11

These global factors should not be seen aspurely external to London, they are, asDoreen Massey has argued,12 part of theworld that London and other global citieshave made. There are glimmerings of such anunderstanding in Ches play. But that worldis rarely allowed to intrude on the somewhatsanitized discussions in socio-spatial science ofrelative civic order in particular cities of the

global North as if they were the normthrough which we can characterize thatabstracted object, the city.

We shall have to turn to the challenge ofother frontlines, other situations and sources,to gain further insight into the global Northsexternalities, On this occasion the challengeto our understanding and consciences isprovided by two cities embedded in theworld that neoliberalism/capitalism/a partic-ular civilization have made in Latin America,represented here by some remarkable

journalism and film (documentary).

1.2 On the border

We are guardians of our nations borders,we are Americas frontline. We safeguard theAmerican homeland at and beyond ourborders. We protect the American publicagainst terrorists and the instruments ofterror.13

These are the words of Gilbert Gaza, ElPaso Border Control, with which AlexTweddles documentary Juarez: City ofDreams14 opens. They are, as Gaza says,from his Customs and Borders Protectionmission statement. The US public maysuppose that this is the frontline behindwhich Al Quaeda-type terrorists are poisedfor infiltration into the innocent homelandof the global North.

There are other ways of chacterizing thisborderas given, for example, by the distin-guished journalist Ed Vulliamy:

A vicious turf war has claimed 2,700 lives inMexico this year. Its front line runs throughTijuana, the gateway to San Diego and thevast US drugs market where 15 people weremurdered in the space of 72 hours last

week.15

The MexicanUS border, 2,100 miles of it, is,Vulliamy points out, the worlds busiestfrontier. It is also the front line in thenarco-war that drug cartels are wagingbetween each other and with the authorities.The specific timeframe he chooses for thewar begins in December 2006 with MexicanPresident Felipe Calderons major offensive

against the cartels who have traded fordecades under a measure of governmentprotection. The government initiativedeployed a new federal police force of thou-sands of troops as part of the anti-drugtrafficking drive.

The response from the cartels seems to be amajor escalation of violence.16But the escala-tion is also the result of a struggle between thecartels themselves. They are largely territori-

ally based: three operating along the border:from east to west, around Texas and the Gulf,around Juarez/El Paso, and around Tijuana,close to San Diego in California. There is afourth central western cartel, the Alianza deSangre (Alliance of Blood) or Sinoa cartel,named after the Pacific state of that name farsouth of the border where most of the otherbig traffickers originate. This fourth cartel isled by Joaquin el Chapo Guzman, a prisonescapee of almost legendary status, who hasused the 2006 government offensive to layclaim to the whole border.

The cartels are fighting the war with theutmost brutality. As the body countincreases, Vulliamy reports, so has thehorrific nature of the killings: Corpses havebeen found severely tortured or decapitated,castrated, dipped in sulphuric acid or withtheir tongues cut out. The corpses are oftendumped in public positions.

This is not just a war for control betweencartels but a terroristic bid for wider socialpower. Vulliamy quotes the leading


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campaigner against the drug cartels inTijuana, Victor Clark Alfaro, who talks of

a war against society itself, at every level oflife, school and community, with violence on

the streets and even more sinistermovements behind that violence, to createpsychosis in society, and criminalise theeconomy.

Tweddle centres his even more disturbingreport, his documentary, on Juarez, furtherto the east, and across the border from theUS city of El Paso. His time frame goesback to the implementation of the North

American Free Trade Agreement in 1994and the relocation of many US factoriessouth of the Border, the macquila. This hascontributed significantly to undermining ElPasos economy and to the development of aform of growth in Juarez that is vastlydisruptive and exploitative for establishedresidents and incomers from the interior(Figures 2 and 3).Figure2Figure3

Accounts of the social disruption are givenby workers at Casa Amiga, the only organi-zation in Juarez to offer help to the citysabused women and children. They see theviolence against women as the result of acombination of factors. The men in the facto-ries are employed only until they are fortyyears old. They then become unemployed orat best become itinerant salesmen with risingalcoholism as a factor in their lives and thoseof their families. This situation accentuatesand further distorts aspects of machismo in a

traditional patriarchal setting. Esther Chaves,the founder of Casa Amiga points to themens intense frustration: they cannot fulfiltheir patriarchal roles by sustaining thefamily. Carmen Vaquez, the coordinator ofthe psychology department, adds:

The maquila phenomenon has led touncontrolled growth of the city withoutproper infrastructure and services. I believe

this affects family life. There arent enoughservices for women at risk. This presents avolatile situation for women when violencepresents itself in the home.

Further accentuating all this is the drugstrade. A young man working in the maquilaswill earn forty dollars per week whereas, asEsther Chaves points out, he could earn fivehundred dollars running one drug packageacross the border. Associated with the drugtrade is total ethical collapse. Bodies, directorAlex Tweddle reports, started appearing inthe wasteland in 1993. They are mainly veryyoung, thin, dark-skinned girls. Many havetheir right breasts hacked off and bite marksand bruising to their left breast. It has cometo light that many of the girls are victims ofdrug cartel initiations or of celebrations of amajor new deal.

The situation deteriorated further in 2001when the bodies of eight young girls weredeposited in front of the MaquiladorasAssociation. Subsequent examinationrevealed that they had been killed at differenttimes ranging from weeks to at least a yearpreviously. I believe the murderers made funof us, Esther Chaves comments by deposit-ing the bodies at the same time I wonderwhat their message is.

The police, in the course of their investi-gations add to the violence.17 Two scape-goats were found, tortured and forced toconfess to the murders. The background tothis is given by Oscar Maynez, formerlyforensic chief of the Chihuahua state police,and now based in Juarez:

The police trained in the 1970s under arepressive and authoritarian regime. All theyknow is torture and fabrication of thetruth

Added to this, Juarez has in a sense become acompany town. Maynez claims: Ciudad

Juarez is held by the main Mexican cartel.The Juarez cartel runs the city, lets face it.He notes that drugs are staying more andmore on the Mexican side of the border forlocal consumption. But there is less moneyspent in Juarez than in the US.

The economic and political trails leadback to the US. Vulliamy summarizes arecent book by Professor Tony Payan of


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Figures 2 and 3 Stills from Juarez: City of Dreams (Alex Tweddle)


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the University of Texas in El Paso: thisfrontier is too often defined not by thepeople who live, flock to and work there,but by whatever is polemically useful toWashington. But this frontier is also, ofcourse, defined by economic forces.

Towards a way out of neoliberalism,capitalism, a deformed civilisation, orwhat?

NonDeRe-regulation: limits exclusionsclaims (caption to the INURA Athensposter)

What approach can we use as we seek toanimate the serries of stills presented above?The image of a Godzilla-like figure crashingthrough the city (Figure 4) has an addedresonance in the light of the links betweenthe global South and North. Such a figure has

long been crashing through economies andcities beyond the walls of the North.Suddenly it has become visible as a form ofGround Zero inWall Street, New York andWashington, in London and othercommanding global cities, and on into theeconomies and societies they claim to serve.But what is this rampaging figure? Is it

neoliberalism, capitalism, or the deformedfigure of a civilization? Some of the patriar-chal features, for instance, of that civilizationare clearly visible in Juarez in domestic abuseand the cartels savage and calculated degra-dation of women in Juarez. These areextreme instances, but instances of what?And what can we do? Some possibilities thatwill be followed up in the sequel to thisendpiece are touched on now.Figure4 NonDeRegulation.Posterfor18th INURAConference,310October2008,Athens,Greece.PosterbyPanagiotisToubanis-Vovos.

Insofar as this lumbering, destructive figurerepresents neoliberalism and late capitalism,INURAs caption (NonDeRe-regulation:limits exclusions claims)refers to what needs

Figure 4 NonDeRegulation. Poster for 18thINURA Conference, 310 October 2008, Athens, Greece. Poster byPanagiotis Toubanis-Vovos.


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to be done in Athens and elsewhere now orvery soon. A preliminary, informal interpre-tation of the caption, with particular referenceto the dialectically-related elements ofNonDeRe-regulationhas been suggested byMichael Edwards, a member of INURApresent at the Athens conference:

a lot of issues in Greece are viewed in termsof regulation

partly the kind of regulation they neverhad enough of (rights for pedestrians,children to play, light to reach theground floor)

partly the regulation they had too much of(the military of course, but also the endlesspower of The Minister in Athens todecide every single thingworse thanEngland)

partly the wish of progressive Greeks to havetheir capitalism restrained (but their fear thatthe rules might be worse than theproblem).18

Another response to the crisis is by RichardSennett who suggests that the governmentbail-outs can be seen as financial socialismand therefore, it may be presumed, as possibleharbingers of a revival of socialism. But asEdwards19pointed out in a letter to the FT:

The events of recent weeks on both sidesof the Atlantic are clear examples of whatsociologists call the capitalist stateat work:the state coming to the aid of capital in a crisis.

All the signs are that governments hope to getback to normal, even though normal haslost its credibility. There are no signs of a shifttowards a fairer or more emancipatory or evena more stable society.

Sennett is Centennial Professor of Sociologyat LSE. Perhaps in the light of Edwardsreference to what is missing and of the linetouched on here that there is a civilizationaldimension to the problem, we shall need aMillennial Professorship.

These are potentially millennial times. Stat-ist stopgaps are necessary but certainly not

sufficient. We need to ask what lies behind andbeyond the faade of neoliberalism. Is it inpart a matter of, to take the second half ofINURAs caption a little futher, limits exclu-sions claims?Is it the long-term phenomenonof the money fetish and associated statistphenomena of capitalism? Is it empire, patri-archy, racism and enslavement? Is it a socio-economic ethic of unlimited growth andconsumption and of the marginalisation inand exclusion from the city of those denied/deprived of their political, economic andsocial rights? Do these four phenomenacapitalism and the money fetish; empire, patri-archy, racism and enslavement; psycho-social

as well as physical marginalization and exclu-sion; and unlimited growth and consump-tiongive us the full context for the struggle

for the right to the city?Some of the greatest dramas of (and also

against?) Western civilization have grappledwith such questions. The same culturalLondon summer and autumn of 2008 I havedrawn on above also included two suchdramas.

The Globe revived Shakespeares rarelyperformed late play, Timon of Athens. In thisbitter play, Shakespeare and his co-authorThomas Middleton explored a frontlinedefined by the emerging money fetish and ofa counterposed but patriarchal idealism andultimate misanthropy in seventeenth centuryLondon. The play presents a microcosm thatcasts light on contemporary greed, debt andalternatives in the city20or would cast

light if dominant forms of mediation were toengage with such disturbing possibilities.A second play, Aeschylus trilogy, the

Oresteia, leads us back to what MadeleineBunting refers to as Western civilization(whatever that is). Or could/should lead usbackand forwards. In this case, a travellingSouth African company presented a contem-porary South African play. Yael FarbersMolora drew explicitly on the Oresteia toilluminate the post-independence strugglestowards Truth and Reconciliation and theWests Godzilla-like response to 9/11.Aeschylus millennial play, dating back two-


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Figure 5 Alan Jenner: Bargeman. Photograph by Sebastian Godwin.

Figure 6 Ursula Lacbao: Cleaner. Photograph by Sebastian Godwin.


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and-a-half millennia, deals with the attemptto embody and thereby surpass violent socialtensions within the constitutive framework ofancient Athens, thereby affirming a sharedright to the city. Was the Athens settlement anevolutionary stage in Western civilization, theestablished view, or was it a fragile moment,actual and potential, of social reconciliationand truth that we need to revisit, rework,reclaim.21What stands against such a project?Economic collapse is a greater threat thanIslamist terrorism but are they connected?The barbarism withoutmatching the barbar-ism withinin a grim battle towards extermi-nation? These insights are barely present

now. How did they get lost? Who is reclaim-ing them and how? I shall return to theseconflicts and their contexts.

There is, nevertheless, hope. Of the strug-gles across a variety of frontlines in our cities,some articulate vital social claims. Sometimesthese are articulated in various forms ofreporting scattered across a city (as I haveillustrated here from Londons summer andearly autumn in 2008), from film and theatre

to journalism and academic research. But canwe bring it all together? Can the high priestsand flaneurs of our cities be committed tobeachcombing or to acknowledging theusefulness of those who are so committed.To what extent are they prepared to listenrather than pontificate and flannel?

Despite all the horrors of the situation inTijuana, Juarez and along the Mexicanborder, both Vulliamy and Tweddle point

out that many residents, rather than seekingescape, still have a dream for their cities. PeterMarcuse, in a reference to Barack Obamaselectoral victory, sees in the moment ofeuphoria, possibilities for the search for theright to the city that can and must be articu-lated and acted upon now . The task is toListen, Expose, Propose, Politicize.22

Amid the accumulation of reports oncurrent frontlines, one glimpse of the rework-ing and reclaiming of the city can be puttogether in contemporary London. Sandhusinvestigation comes to no conclusion. Butsome words from his book and two photo-

graphs from his overall project can speak tous. The photographs are of a survivingThames Barger and of a defiant social claim-ant, one of the cleaners from Canary Wharf(Figures 5 and 6).Figure5 AlanJenner:Bargeman.PhotographbySebastianGodwinFigure6 UrsulaLacbao:Cleaner.PhotographbySebastianGodwin.

The words are those of Alan Jenner, skip-per of the barge Gabrielle, has been workingthe river for a half a century:

Its part of me. Its running through myveins. I dream, live and work for the Thames.I hope it is a life sentence, I really do.

As the waters rise to engulf parts ofLondon and other cities, as the social tensionsrise within the city and beyond, we shallneed combinations of such voices and relatedactions (Listen, Expose, Propose, Politicise).On that basis, the city can claim a right tocontinued existence andto emancipation andsocial justice. Another city is necessary. Onsuch a basis, it couldbe possible

Notes

1

1 Bunting, M., Faith. Belief. Trust. This economicorthodoxy was built on superstition, Guardian, 6October 2008.

2 2 I build here on work on frontiers in ContestingNeoliberalism: Urban Frontiers.My debt to as welldisagreements with this important edited collectionare both occasional text as well as subtext in recentepisodes in this series (see also the Editorial to thisissue).

3 3 Thomas Hardy, In Tenebris II.4 4 Hutton,W., Without real leadership, we face

disaster, Observer, 12 October 2008.5 5 Sandhu, S. Night haunts: A journey through the

London nightLondon:Verso 2008, p. 12.6 6 We published three substantial extracts , under the

heading Aborigenes and unfortunates: Life andlabour across nocturnal Londonfrom what wasoriginally a collaborative project, commissioned byArtangel, on a website, and subsequently becamethe above bookwithin a feature How Should WeWrite about London? in City19 (2). The extractswere selected by Sandhu from what in the book arethe first three chapters entitled: An Appetite forStories: Introduction, The Panoptic Sublime: AvianPolice, and Aborigines and Unfortunates:

Cleaners.7 7 This quality was also evident in more critical work

by the great Studs Terkel who died on 6November, 2008.


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8 8 Mason, P. Live Working or Die Fightting: How theWorking Class Went Global,London: HarvillSecker, 2007.

9 9 Walker, C. The FrontlineLondon: Faber and Faber,2008, pp. 1415.

1010 Paskell, C. with Bailey, D. and Abdullah, A.(forthcoming) Understanding and addressingintergenerational tensions within Camden Somaliscommunity: A research report.London: LondonBorough of Camden/One World Solutions (EU)Ltd. Firm figures on crime etc are difficult to gatheras Somali is not an ethnic category commonlyused, certainly not by police.

1111 We take this up in our next issue. In mid November2008 Somalia has again come into the news butthis time because of those involved in a successfulpiracy business. Less attention is devoted to thesocial and economic factors that make piracy an

attractive proposition (for one account that looks atthe larger perspective, see Simon Tisdall, Somalia,state of anarchy in The Guardian17 November,2008.

1212 Massey, D. World CityCambridge: Polity Press,2007. (reviewed under the heading On not takingLondon for granted by Andrew Davey in City12(2), pp. 261265.

1313 Gilbert Gaza, El Paso Border Control, inJuarez,City of Dreams.

1414 The film is not in general distribution but can beobtained through [email protected]

The website is www.angrymanpictures.co.uk. Onceagain I owe my first viewing of this film to theFrontline Club.

1515 Tijuana streets flow with the blood of rival drugcartels, The Observer2 Novemeber, 2008.

1616 This struggle forms part of the background toCormac McCarthys novel and the Coen brothersfilm based on it, No Country for Old Men. Idiscussed the film and the book (and Yael FarbersMolora, referred to below) in Is it all comingtogether? Thoughts on urban studies and thepresent crisis: (13) No Country for Old Men orWomen? in City12(2), pp.266278.

1717 For reasons of space I have left out a discussionof the Brazilian film Tropa de Elite/Elite Guardwhich deals with police corruption and violence.Marcelo Lopes de Souza has dealt with this anda whole set of books/papers/movies/statements/etc. etc. which share a similar approach/spirit in his book, Fobpole: O medogeneralizado e a militarizao da questourbana(the title translates perhaps asPhobopolis: From the Widespread Fear to theMilitarization of the Urban Question), which waspublished in Brazil in May this year. We are

dicussing with him a paper Social movements inthe face of criminal power: the socio-politicalfragmentation of space and micro-level warlords

as challenges for emancipative urban struggles,in which he deals with different kinds ofchallenges which are an increasing problemfrom Mexico City to So Paulo to Rio de Janeiroto Buenos Aires to Johannesburg (with hugedifferences in terms of quality and intensity andactors according to the country): 1) policesbrutality and corruption (as usual), 2) ordinarycriminals (above all drug trafficking) and 3)paramilitary groups.

1818 Email from Michael Edwards.1919 My thanks to Michael Edwards who featured the

poster and discussed the notion propounded byRichard Sennett), that the current financial rescuepackages are forms of financial socialism, on hisblog, under the heading What Next? (forcapitalism), http://michaeledwards.org.uk

2020 Shakespeare, to an extent that many may find

unbelievable, anticipated Marx, Mauss andDerrida, in Timonor so I shall argue in the sequelto this episode. I have already argued earlier in theseries for his remarkable contemporaneity and hiscontribution to a tradition of social interpretationthat can be seen as a potential ally in thereformation of sociospatial science.

2121 See Surborg, B. (2007) Reclaim the City! areview of the special session at the 2007Association of American Geographers AnnualMeeting in City11(3), pp.422427.

2222 The last three words of the formula, Expose,

Propose, Politicise are Peter Marcuses as set outin his opening address to the conference on TheRight to the City: Prospects for Critical UrbanTheory and Practice, Berlin, November 68. (Thiswas organized by Margit Meyer, Neil Brenner,and Peter Marcuse in cooperation with the Centerfor Metropolitan Studies, TU Berlin. Details can befound on the CMS websitewww.metropolitanstudies.de. We shall return toaspects of this conference in a forthcoming issue.)I have prefaced Peter Marcuses three words withone other: Listen. This loses the euphony of theoriginal. Sometimes small sacrifices in aestheticshave to be made in the cause of truth! (In fact,Listen should be preceded by: Get involved. Thefull implications of this are included, and itsrelation to Niget Thrifts case for eavesdropping,in a section, From Normal to Weird: amethodological interlude (pp.259262) inIs it allcoming together? Thoughts on urban studies andthe present crisis: (11) From Neoliberalismtowards a paradigm for a New International inCity,11.2 , pp.245272)

Bob Catterall is Editor of City.Email address: [email protected]


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CityTaylorandFrancisCCIT_A_GN89301.sgm10.1080/City:AnalysisofUrbanTrends1360-4813 (print)/1470-3629 (online)OriginalArticle2008Taylor&Francis122000000July2008 CONTENTS

VOLUME12 NUMBER3 DECEMBER2008

279 EDITORIAL BOBCATTERALL

283 BUILDINGTHECARTESIANENLIGHTENMENT: LOSANGELES,HOMELESSNESSANDTHEPUBLICSPHERE KENHILLIS

303 WILLTHEREALSMARTCITYPLEASESTANDUP? INTELLIGENT,PROGRESSIVEORENTREPRENEURIAL? ROBERTG. HOLLANDS

Going for gold: two perspectives on the Olympic Games

321 GLOBALIZATION, CITIESANDTHESUMMEROLYMPICS JOHNR. SHORT

341 MAPPINGTHEOLYMPICGROWTHMACHINE: TRANSNATIONALURBANISMANDTHEGROWTHMACHINEDIASPORA BJRNSURBORG, ROB

VANWYNSBERGHEANDELVINWYLY

356 DIFFERENTBUTTHESAME? POST-WARSLUMCLEARANCEANDCONTEMPORARYREGENERATIONINBIRMINGHAM, UK PHILJONES

372 THEPOST-CITYBEINGPREPAREDONTHESITEOFTHEEX-CITY:RE-ALIGNINGTHEPROVINCIALCITYALONGTHEM62 INTHENORTHOFENGLAND DARYLMARTIN

Scenes and Sounds

383 INTRODUCTION PAULALKMAN

384 PHOTOGRAPHINGPEOPLEISWRONG: WITHACAMERAINKOLKATA ARIADNEVANDEVEN

Reviews

391 CHANGINGURBANFORM, WITHCHINESECHARACTERISTICSRemaking Chinese Urban Form: Modernity, Scarcityand Space, by Duanfang Lu LAURENCEJ.C. MA

394 THINKINGNEOLIBERALISM, THINKINGGEOGRAPHYContesting Neoliberalism: Urban Frontiers, edited byHelga Leitner, Jamie Peck and Eric S. Sheppard SARASWATIRAJU

398 CANURBANISMHEALTHESCARSOFCONFLICT?Cities, Nationalism, and Democratization,by Scott A. Bollens NASSERYASSIN

402 ENDPIECE BOBCATTERALL

ISITALLCOMINGTOGETHER? THOUGHTSONURBANSTUDIES

ANDTHEPRESENTCRISIS: (14) ANOTHERCITYISPOSSIBLE?REPORTSFROMTHEFRONTLINE

416 INDEX, VOLUME12 2008

Documents

Bob Catterall