May 9, 2018
Big Capital: Who’s London For?, Anna Minton (M, 30s, grey backpack on the floor, black jeans and raincoat, Picadilly line)
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Big Capital: Who’s London For?, Anna Minton (M, 30s, grey backpack on the floor, black jeans and raincoat, Picadilly line)
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Step by Step 5
An interdisciplinary seminar with a focus on walking, hosted by Clare Qualman at the University of East London
Monday 24th April 2017, 6 to 8pm. Book here
"The world is not intolerable until the possibility of transforming it exists but is denied."
Two snippets from Capture the Flag, 2014-15:
Canary Wharf
The Docklands is a space that is never challenged. Almost never challenged. I took part in a game of Capture The Flag at Canary Wharf on a cold December Friday night. The game is played roughly monthly, in public-private spaces across London, an ideological provocation. The standard smooth, lubricated stream of bankers was disrupted by a scene of various incongruous types, students or just adults not wearing the local uniform (unsuited, you could say, in every way.) When we arrived, the security-dressed-as-police were expecting us and were waiting in great numbers, standing in clusters. It was intimidating. They came over to us, looking for the organisers. Maps of the area, for use in the game, were lying conspicuously in a pile next to us. We responded with unconvincing bafflement, “What game of Capture The Flag? No idea sorry.”
The game began though, and they could do nothing. Intimidation was all they had – their importance was self-appointed. We ran amok through the streets, in front of cars, whooping wildly. We poured across the taxi-filled roads and clambered boldly through the pristine bushes. Bankers reacted: with bafflement and with anger and with amusement and with eagerness to join in, suddenly liberated from homogeneity. I ran through the airport-esque shopping centre and a security guard gave chase - “What are you doing?” Emboldened I replied “playing a game” and that, somehow, assuaged him, and I was free to continue. My certainty my passport, my assurance the beginning and end of the debate.
Kings Cross.
King's Cross in the Summer 2015: the new space here has been given prizes. Stroll around on a weekend morning and there are people queuing out of more than one door for different kinds of similar brunch. The space ticks all the boxes of new London space in the twenty first century – it is private masquerading as public and all the seating is seating that is associated with spaces of consumption and it is patrolled by security guards. Of course it is not new, there were things here before, but all that remains are some of the bricks, their meaning changed, the old used only as a password to proceed to some upper level of the monetary achievement game.
Capitalism endures for many reasons and one is because its outputs are measurable - numbers are absolute and some people like this. More generally though, human beings are distractable and persuadable: Attracted moulded melded becoming unbecoming loving hating violent peaceful bound by rules breakers of rules, bones and muscles and atoms and molecules and human beings and so on (cf: all art)
There is an outdoor swimming pool at the new redevelopment at Kings Cross, surrounded by a fence. The fence also formed the edge of the prison that my team were guarding, which lay outside of the swimming pool area. Someone from the other team climbed through the area around the pool, and over the fence, and landed in our base, and shouted “jailbreak” which according to the rules means that everyone could run away from prison and they did. In the chaos of a dozen or so fugitives, the liberator was immediately captured and placed into the jail (Capture The Flag is full of selflessness for the greater good like this.)
At this point two security guards approached. They had spied the liberator and wanted to apprehend them or banish them or punish them or otherwise admonish them for illicit entry and use of the swimming pool space, which they pointed out was closed off to all people at this time. There was reluctance amongst all participators in Capture The Flag to agree with these security guards. At this point or thereabouts some kind of boss of the security guards arrived. One of our team seized the narrative, explaining words to the effect of 'your security guards failed to apprehend them, so we did. Don't worry, we have put them in prison.'
Thus, as capitalism so frequently does the other way round, tools and language were re-appropriated and used against those who wished to use them for the opposite purpose.
The head of the security was persuaded by the chutzpah or charm or something like that and entered into the spirit of the game. He jokingly told off the security for failing to capture the liberator. There was laughter: The security and the players laughed together. Then, once Capture The Flag had been explained a bit more, the head security guard took a bandana, marking his participation in the game and membership of the opposite team. Everyone was unsure as to his sincerity – was he really getting involved? Was this the beginning of an extremely slow bandana-by-bandana confiscation of the only material required to play the game? Was it evidence gathering? But shortly afterwards, when he entered the jail and said jailbreak and everyone was freed, his participation in the game was undeniable. And so I chased and caught the head security guard and this (and all that had gone before) produced a moment where I (but of course it could have been anyone on my team,) took this man by the arm, the head of the security of this private land, and frogmarched him into a chalk circle drawn on the floor by those who had only minutes earlier been threatened by the same security guards he was in charge of, a chalk circle which then served to imprison him as per the rules of the game, rules which for these moments superseded the rules of the private land.
[Landlords’ response to housing activism] tends towards suggesting that the activists against estate regeneration/demolition are ‘outside agitators’ and as such are unrepresentative of estate residents.… This commonplace defensive trope about any political resistance (‘they’re all outside agitators’) cannot account for the fact that many of the recent crop of housing activists in London are not the ‘usual suspects’, that is, established leftists.… ‘[O]lder’ tenant-based campaigns, notably Defend Council Housing, have played a role in current anti-demolition campaigns in certain parts of London whilst, at the same time, many of the most ardent current campaigners are estate residents themselves who have had no previous interest in housing or urban policy. Not interested, that is, until they begin to experience the confusing presentations of ever-shifting plans; the loss of existing support networks and community facilities; years of noise, dust and disruption; and new unaffordable homes not for the ‘likes of them’. Indeed, residents living in London’s so-called ‘failed’ but now ‘renewing’ estates enter an existential black hole— … a ‘limbo-land’—of endless insecurity, anxiety and frustration. Many residents not only have to deal with this level of disruption to their everyday lives, but at the same time devote countless hours to attending meetings, door knocking and leafletting on their estates. That sometimes residents take heart, as well as assistance, from nomadic posses of squatters—as happened at the Aylesbury estate occupation in 2015—is hardly surprising and also reflects the potential for co-operation between traditionally differentiated housing movements.
Paul Watt and Anna Minton, “London’s Housing Crisis and Its Activisms,” City 20:2 (2016), p. 217.
The overall size and trajectory of the social rental sector is crucial for understanding gentrification in a city like London. Unlike other global cities which are subject to intense gentrification pressures, such as New York City and Berlin, London has a highly deregulated [private rental sector (PRS)]. The existence and functioning of rent controls means that gentrification can be stalled and muted; their weakening can accelerate gentrification as in the case of Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin. But in a city with very limited PRS controls, such as London, the only de facto buffer against gentrification is social rental (especially council) housing … Thus, the post-1981 reversal of London’s rental structure from social renting back towards the PRS is a major trend which facilitates and encourages gentrification.
Paul Watt and Anna Minton, “London’s Housing Crisis and Its Activisms,” City 20:2 (2016), p. 211.
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Pathfinder showed how policies driven by a desire to boost housing markets can be a disaster for communities. So it is staggering to see that exactly the same policies are being carried out all over London, albeit not under the aegis of a named government programme. In 2012, while he was seeking re-election, London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, criticised local authorities for moving housing benefit claimants out of the capital, saying that he would not have “Kosovo-style social cleansing” of the poor in London. But as London witnesses the demolition of at least a dozen council estates, housing tens of thousands of people on low incomes, this is exactly what many residents claim is happening.
It has taken the Turner prize to highlight that there is an alternative to replacing low-income housing with expensive flats
City rankings offer only a partial view, showing cities as places where super-prime property is celebrated, while the segregation and polarisation which also defines the global city is glossed over.
How Private Wealth is Transforming Real Estate in Global Cities
"The fear of crime correlates with levels of trust in the society rather than the actual crime figures."
Inevitably, the creation of atomised and polorised communities, which harbour mutual suspicions of each other, are particularly damaging to levels of trust and safety, no matter how much security is employed to keep these fears at bay.
-Anna Minton