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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 frontline
Bob Catterall

To cite this Article Catterall, Bob(2008) 'Is it all coming together? Thoughts on urban studies and the present crisis: (14)

Another city is possible? Reports from the frontline', City, 12: 3, 402 415 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13604810802614821 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604810802614821

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CITY, VOL. 12, NO. 3, DECEMBER 2008

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

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

nother city is necessary? Another is possible? There is perhaps a right to that city. If it is necessary, on what basis is such a claim to be made? If it is possible, what/who is denying it and how, and who/what can deliver it and how? Has a cumulative series of crimes laid the basis for such denial(s)? If there is a right to such a city, is that right to be asserted on the basis of a claim for justice, freedom, happiness, fairness, efficiency, progress, survival, or what? In the light of environmental factors such as a rising sea level, should we be talking of the right to the continued existence of the city? What is the city that is to be surpassed? Is it the neoliberal city, its social and global system? Or has the much-touted neoliberal fix and fixation of its proponents and critics been already undermined, as the transitoriness of neoliberalism, its fragility, its nevertheless destructive, implosive and explosive, fragility is revealed? Was neoliberalism merely a holding operation seeking to obscure and deny much more significant underlying contradictions? As the faade

crumbles, does what is revealed consist of the superimposed structures and processes of capitalism and statism, civilization, empire, racism and patriarchy, and, despite occasional downturns, of unending growth and ecological consumption? Does the election of a black President at the heart of that empire and civilization suggest that a new impetus might be given to movements for ethical renewal and new social and planetary priorities? Is it, then, enough, to confront, contest or square up to neoliberalism, may we also need to lay bare its grossly compromised props so as to reveal, question, encirclecontributing selectively to undermining here and to judicious reaffirmation thereand so surpass them? The answers to such questions, it has been argued in this series of thoughts on urban studies and the urban crisis, involve bringing it all together, seeking to gather together narratives from the full range of media in which we seek to speak to, and of, each other and our situations. Some of these narratives are supplied by socio-spatial science but it is not assumed here that

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

CATTERALL: IS IT ALL COMING TOGETHER? science is the unique source of truth. Sociospatial sciencewhich despite of late invoking imaginaries as an add-on can still seem too pre-packaged, sterilised or positivistichas to be tested against the narratives and truths emerging in other media, including ordinary talk and language(s), as they too have to be tested against science. And they have to be textured through thick description, including that supplied by fiction, so that some sense of their embodimentreal or supposed, that is part of the investigationis given. The veracity of none of these narratives or their texturings can be taken for granted. They take the form of mediations and the nature of each mediation and its specificities has to be considered. For that task it may be that greater openness will suffice, or that another sciencecertainly one that takes more readily to other media, to ordinary talk and narratives, and to dialogue and engagement with othersis necessary, and possible. The narratives selected in this series are from a wide variety of situations, in space and in time. The series took 9/11 and some responses to it, both absurd charades and measured wisdom, as a starting point from which to look critically and concretely at cities/urbanization, within a context of globalization/empire, and the studies/ science that lay(s) claim to record and explain them/it. The previous episode looked at a series of crimesof which 9/11 was 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.2 It is a concept with military contexts at its source: the forward line or zone formed by the most advanced units of a battle in which engagements with the enemy on the other side of the frontline may take place. Beyond that, it applies to any situation of struggle or conflict, particularly to those people in place and seen as a vanguard, elite and/or as contestants, actual or potential. Here groups/masses on the same physical, even

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social, side of the frontline may be identified as the enemy. The frontline, then, has a dimension of power and authority as well as place, one of elites and masses, of legitimacy/diktat and of contestation, and also one of communication, persuasion, deception and violence, potential and actual. This particular reading of the various narratives is undertaken in the context of what the epigraph above calls the real doomsday scenario of financial and economic crisis, partly/symbolically located near or perhaps at Ground Zero and of the glimmer of hope arising from the election of Barack Obama to the Preidency of the USA. In the midst of all this what signs of the right to the city, its denial and absence, necessity and possibility, can we find? Some of these narratives are grim in the extreme yet if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.3 The spacetimes visited here are from contemporary London, with some reference to Somalians, and from the Mexican border. The sources are diverse. In the main they were gathered in the London area in the summer and autumn of 2008. What can we learn from examining and seeking to interweave such differing narratives? There is a largely unrecognized need for the sociospatial investigator as beachcomber rather than high-priest or flaneur. These are perhaps scenes, to some extent, of the neoliberal fix and its consequences. What are its psychosocial costs and imaginaries as well as contestations, implicit and explicit? The first section below, Frontlines and ground zeroes, presents and explores these reports. The second section, Towards a way out of neoliberalism, capitalism, a deformed civilization, or what? provides a preview of some of the material to be included in a sequel, and an interim conclusion.

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1. Frontlines and ground zeroes

While everybody tries to pass the toxic parcel on to somebody else, the system has to

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find the money. So will compensation for the near valueless contracts and thus now uninsured debt ultimately be madeand by whom? And because nobody knowsnot the regulators, banks or governmentswho owns the swaps and whether they are creditworthy, nobody can answer the question.4 accompanies the nuns of Tyburn as they pray for the souls of Londoners.

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The spacetimes visited here are from contemporary London, with some reference to Somalians, and from two Latin American cities, Rio, and Juarez on the US/Mexican border. These are scenes, to some extent, of the neoliberal fix and its consequences, of its psychosocial costs and imaginaries as well as contestations, implicit and explicit. To what extent was neoliberalism a carefully partitioned enclave on a precipice whose walls fall only to reveal, perhaps momentarily while new facades are erected, the extensive chasm, stretching far beyond the ground zeroes of money markets, that was there all the time. 1.1 Londons frontline?
Its rare nowadays to hear anyone talk about night time in London. The city in recent years has witnessed a bevy of real estate moguls, foreign investors and film directors trading in a slicked-up form of commodity urbanism; the London night has morphed into, and been rebranded as London nightlife. Now that most of its factories and workshops have shut down the capital has embraced its status as a postindustrial hub in which leisure and tourism are sovereign.5

This, with the important introductory chapter from which the epigraph to this section is taken, covers eight of the twelve chapters of the book. The four remaining chapters are on sleep technicians (investigating insomnia), cleaners, mini-cab drivers, and a Thames barger. But are these the people who largely drive its pulse? Do they in the main provide a form of counter-pulse? Where is the frontline? Sandhu, who echoes Rebecca Solnits case for the reflective powers of walking, makes two claims for the nature of his approach. He sees it first as an attempt to
hear what the people who inhabit London at night make of this accelerated, deregulated city, and not just in terms of hardship and brutalising work, but in terms of joy, beauty, ghosts, religion. A lexicon they know but are rarely encouraged to deploy. (p.15)

The reference to this lexicon, unacknowledged and in fact invisible to most sociospatial scientists, is perhaps the most profound statement in the book (though Sandhu makes it explicit only in this one sentence). His second claim is that his approach seeks to share the company and the significance of a work by the beat journo, a hacks hack, H.V.Morton, particularly his once best-selling metrologue, The Nights of London (1926). Sandhu characterizes Mortons approach as follows:
He marries journalistic precision to dreamy speculation. Not for him the self-obsessed maunderings of psychogeographic writing; he is happy and eager to talk to working Londoners who furnish him with grounded insights that it would be impossible for him to glean on his own. (p.16)7

Sukhdev Sandhus Night haunts: a journey through the London night presents a fine investigative portrait6 of the heyday (make hay while the sun shines) of New Labours neoliberal London as a slicked-up, postindustrial form of commodity urbanism. Its overall coverage is summed up by the blurb writer as
forays [that] see him prospecting with the people who drive its pulse, from the avian police to security guards, urban fox-hunters and exorcists. He wades through the sewers, hangs out with fugitive graffiti writers, and

Sandhus writing displays both of these overlapping sets of qualities. There is journalistic precision as well as dreamy speculation, the hard-earned sense of a lexicon responsive to immediate materialities as well as contributing to long-term cultural overtones. Sociospatial

CATTERALL: IS IT ALL COMING TOGETHER? science fights shy of such concerns but without them there can be no satisfactory account of life within and beyond neoliberalism, within and beyond the world that dominant financial and economic forces and the war on terror shape. Nevertheless, there is a missing factor, a sense of struggle. Take the cleaners. Their criticism of what they see in the offices and streets is brought out. Its implications are occasionally touched on. One cleaner comments: I think London would collapse if the cleaners would go on strike for just one day (p.34). Sandhu gives us vivid and necessary snapshots but there is little sense of movement, of action, of obstacles and opportunities, of timeand no sense of the toxic parcels poised to poison that postindustrial hub. Paul Masons short section, in his Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global 8another crucial book somewhat in the tradition that Sandhu is seeking to identify and developon cleaners at Canary Wharf, brings out the missing dimension. Mason features three individuals: Benedita Goncalves, a Portuguese cleaning supervisor at a major bank, Juan Rodriguez, a cleaner at News International, and Martin Wright, a black British cleaner at the Royal London Hospital. Each of them is engaged in struggles for, as Juan puts it, respect and money. Martin Wright has managed, after three years of organizing, to get the hourly pay raised from 5.50 to 7.50. Benedita reports on the attitude of the management:
They showed lack of respect to the employees. Everything you did was wrong. They sent people home for no reason just because they didnt need them. Another thing is the shouting, calling names, saying, You are crap; you are no one. Something like that happened with me and so I started my battle against them. (p. 107)

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with no papers can be blackmailed by the management. And, Wright says, there are constant tensions between workers from Nigeria, Ghana and Somalia. Smaller but consequential frontlines within larger ones. Perspectives on the Somalis are provided by a play, by a series of talks, discussions and documentary showings at a documentary film club, and a preview of a social science report. These events were scattered across London in the summer and autumn of 2008. Can they be brought together? The London theatre enterprise, Shakespeares Globe, commissioned and performed a play by Che Walker, The Frontline, that sought to represent and enact some of these tensions. Walkers frontline was set near a tube station. He explains:
Im fascinated by what happens around stations. There is usually skulduggery, drug trafficking, 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 is ethnic: from Irish, Greek, and Italian communities to more Africans, Bangladeshis, Sudanese, Somalis and Ethiopians. The programme includes eleven pages of comment (including the interview with him from which I quote above) and largely historical rather than contemporary background, with a page each for Somalis and Ethiopians in London. The play presents the major ethnic tension as between an Ethiopian and a Somali:
Miruts You best be movin from this here vicinity or me and my soldiers gonna roll right through your ribcage jus like we do to your mother in Mogadishu. You wanna bring up Mogadishu. I was keeping a lid on things and you wanna bring up what you stinkin Ethiopian bastards are doin in Mogadishu! Oh, what, struck a nerve, fassyhole?

Salim

Juan, Martin and Benedita, then, have taken up their position on an economic front line. However, there are also internal divisions within the workforce to overcome. Workers

Miruts

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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.

Salim

Im gonna be feedin you your heart by the end of this night, you stinkin Ethiopian communist bastards, you aint even got the stamina to run your own country, you gotta pull in the Russians and Cubans and hide behind they skirts juss so you can see off the mighty Somalian forces, but we comin for you, little man, we comin for you, don you worry bout dat!9

Yet of the dozen or so London reviews only Michael Billington in the Guardian picked up on this: On the political front, Miruts, a defiant Ethiopian refugee, finds his footsteps dogged by an equally angry Somali (Figure 1). Though there were gestures towards Empire, this frontline, then, was more a zone of varied tensions and largely individual conflict rather than of fundamental struggle. At what point does

the right to a life in the city become the right to the city? Reports on and discussion of the nature and larger context of the interacting domestic and international dimensions of Somali life, in London and in Mogadishu, were presented in a Somalia screening season, by chance just as The Frontline completed its run, at Londons Frontline Club, a centre for journalists, photographers, filmmakers and cameramen. Included in the season was the documentary Lost Boys (director Paul Sapin) which investigated the stories of three recent Somali gang murders in the city in order to try to understand why this new generation is frustrated and underachievingand why Somalis are now the largest ethnic group incarcerated in the young offenders institution in Feltham. A social scientist researching the Somalis, Dr Caroline Paskell, was present in the audience at the showing of Lost Boys. Her report, Understanding and addressing intergeneraFigure 1 Beru Tessema (Miruts) and Kurt Egyiawan (Salim) in The Frontline by Che Walker, at Shakespeares Glober (2008). Photograph by Manuel Harlan. Reproduced by permission of Shakespeares Globe Press Office.

CATTERALL: IS IT ALL COMING TOGETHER? tional tensions within Camdens Somalis community,10 has not yet been published but

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she has prepared a preliminary overview for City.

Since the early 2000s, violent clashes between clusters of young London Somalis have become increasingly 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 identify no fewer than ten named, Somali-led gangs across London. Formalised gangs are broadly territorial and have some markers of identity but they are more fluid than the common notion of a (US-style) gang may suggest. Gang-membership often overlaps with the leadership and operation of local drug markets, but most members and looser affiliates identify with a gangs territorial basis rather than with its drug-dealing. Behind the headline incidents of gang attacks and the specific issue of drug-dealing lie broader, intersecting problems of young Somalis involvement in anti-social behaviour, their above-average levels of truancy and under-performance in school. Efforts to tackle these issues are showing progress, with markedly improved educational attainment since the early 2000s and indications that truancy and exclusion rates have stabilised. Yet it is clear that young Somalis, predominantly young men, are disproportionately involved in anti-social behaviour and crime. A study, jointly commissioned by the London Borough of Camden and Somali community groups, found that young Somalis gang-membership, anti-social behaviour and drug-dealing have been fostered by intergenerational tensions, household friction and socio-economic disadvantage within the Somali community. Interviews with over forty Somalis found that many young Somalis, as in other migrant communities, feel between two worlds, in the home and in society as a young woman expressed it. The wider urban context is defined by older and young Somalis as a realm in which young people tend to have the cultural and linguistic advantage but are also readily exposed to anti-social behaviour, drugs, crime, territorial and ethnic disputes. In attempting to 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 external realm is typically complicated by practical constraints, not least by problems of overcrowding and difficulties with English. Families fractured by war, years in transit and refugee status have added further complexity, 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 household tensions with younger Somalis expressing lower levels of respect in particular for older men who do not work. Issues of clan allegiance are not widely thought to be relevant to younger Somalis, 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 usefully supplements and suggests frameworks for other accounts. Looking beyond the frontline on display outside the tube station, Dr Paskell turns towards the nature of the gangs, their territories as well as their drug-related bases, and at underperformance and truancy at school. There are perhaps panglossian possibilities of improvement here but balanced against these are negative features in the familial and global situation. Appeals by older generations to heritage are undermined by the fact that many of them lose respect because they do not work. There are also the

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A vicious turf war has claimed 2,700 lives in Mexico this year. Its front line runs through Tijuana, the gateway to San Diego and the vast US drugs market where 15 people were murdered in the space of 72 hours last week.15

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deep disturbances of war, years in transit, and refugee status that linger on. The war itself in Mogadishu continues.11 These global factors should not be seen as purely external to London, they are, as Doreen Massey has argued,12 part of the world that London and other global cities have made. There are glimmerings of such an understanding in Ches play. But that world is rarely allowed to intrude on the somewhat sanitized discussions in socio-spatial science of relative civic order in particular cities of the global North as if they were the norm through which we can characterize that abstracted object, the city. We shall have to turn to the challenge of other frontlines, other situations and sources, to gain further insight into the global Norths externalities, On this occasion the challenge to our understanding and consciences is provided by two cities embedded in the world that neoliberalism/capitalism/a particular 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 the American homeland at and beyond our borders. We protect the American public against terrorists and the instruments of terror.13

These are the words of Gilbert Gaza, El Paso Border Control, with which Alex Tweddles documentary Juarez: City of Dreams14 opens. They are, as Gaza says, from his Customs and Borders Protection mission statement. The US public may suppose that this is the frontline behind which Al Quaeda-type terrorists are poised for infiltration into the innocent homeland of the global North. There are other ways of chacterizing this borderas given, for example, by the distinguished journalist Ed Vulliamy:

The MexicanUS border, 2,100 miles of it, is, Vulliamy points out, the worlds busiest frontier. It is also the front line in the narco-war that drug cartels are waging between each other and with the authorities. The specific timeframe he chooses for the war begins in December 2006 with Mexican President Felipe Calderons major offensive against the cartels who have traded for decades under a measure of government protection. The government initiative deployed a new federal police force of thousands of troops as part of the anti-drug trafficking drive. The response from the cartels seems to be a major escalation of violence.16 But the escalation is also the result of a struggle between the cartels themselves. They are largely territorially 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 a fourth central western cartel, the Alianza de Sangre (Alliance of Blood) or Sinoa cartel, named after the Pacific state of that name far south of the border where most of the other big traffickers originate. This fourth cartel is led by Joaquin el Chapo Guzman, a prison escapee of almost legendary status, who has used the 2006 government offensive to lay claim to the whole border. The cartels are fighting the war with the utmost brutality. As the body count increases, Vulliamy reports, so has the horrific nature of the killings: Corpses have been found severely tortured or decapitated, castrated, dipped in sulphuric acid or with their tongues cut out. The corpses are often dumped in public positions. This is not just a war for control between cartels but a terroristic bid for wider social power. Vulliamy quotes the leading

CATTERALL: IS IT ALL COMING TOGETHER? campaigner against the drug cartels in Tijuana, Victor Clark Alfaro, who talks of
a war against society itself, at every level of life, school and community, with violence on the streets and even more sinister movements behind that violence, to create psychosis in society, and criminalise the economy.

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Tweddle centres his even more disturbing report, his documentary, on Juarez, further to the east, and across the border from the US city of El Paso. His time frame goes back to the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and the relocation of many US factories south of the Border, the macquila . This has contributed significantly to undermining El Pasos economy and to the development of a form of growth in Juarez that is vastly disruptive and exploitative for established residents and incomers from the interior (Figures 2 and 3). Accounts of the social disruption are given by workers at Casa Amiga, the only organization in Juarez to offer help to the citys abused women and children. They see the violence against women as the result of a combination of factors. The men in the factories are employed only until they are forty years old. They then become unemployed or at best become itinerant salesmen with rising alcoholism as a factor in their lives and those of their families. This situation accentuates and further distorts aspects of machismo in a traditional patriarchal setting. Esther Chaves, the founder of Casa Amiga points to the mens intense frustration: they cannot fulfil their patriarchal roles by sustaining the family. Carmen Vaquez, the coordinator of the psychology department, adds:
Figure 3 2

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Further accentuating all this is the drugs trade. A young man working in the maquilas will earn forty dollars per week whereas, as Esther Chaves points out, he could earn five hundred dollars running one drug package across the border. Associated with the drug trade is total ethical collapse. Bodies, director Alex Tweddle reports, started appearing in the wasteland in 1993. They are mainly very young, thin, dark-skinned girls. Many have their right breasts hacked off and bite marks and bruising to their left breast. It has come to light that many of the girls are victims of drug cartel initiations or of celebrations of a major new deal. The situation deteriorated further in 2001 when the bodies of eight young girls were deposited in front of the Maquiladoras Association. Subsequent examination revealed that they had been killed at different times ranging from weeks to at least a year previously. I believe the murderers made fun of us, Esther Chaves comments by depositing the bodies at the same time I wonder what their message is. The police, in the course of their investigations add to the violence.17 Two scapegoats were found, tortured and forced to confess to the murders. The background to this is given by Oscar Maynez, formerly forensic chief of the Chihuahua state police, and now based in Juarez:
The police trained in the 1970s under a repressive and authoritarian regime. All they know is torture and fabrication of the truth

The maquila phenomenon has led to uncontrolled growth of the city without proper infrastructure and services. I believe this affects family life. There arent enough services for women at risk. This presents a volatile situation for women when violence presents itself in the home.

Added to this, Juarez has in a sense become a company 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 and more on the Mexican side of the border for local consumption. But there is less money spent in Juarez than in the US. The economic and political trails lead back to the US. Vulliamy summarizes a recent 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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Figure 4 NonDeRegulation. Poster for 18th INURA Conference, 310 October 2008, Athens, Greece. Poster by Panagiotis Toubanis-Vovos.

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

Towards a way out of neoliberalism, capitalism, a deformed civilisation, or what?

NonDeRe-regulation: limits exclusions claims (caption to the INURA Athens poster)

What approach can we use as we seek to animate the serries of stills presented above? The image of a Godzilla-like figure crashing through the city (Figure 4) has an added resonance in the light of the links between the global South and North. Such a figure has

long been crashing through economies and cities beyond the walls of the North. Suddenly it has become visible as a form of Ground Zero in Wall Street, New York and Washington, in London and other commanding global cities, and on into the economies and societies they claim to serve. But what is this rampaging figure? Is it neoliberalism, capitalism, or the deformed figure of a civilization? Some of the patriarchal features, for instance, of that civilization are clearly visible in Juarez in domestic abuse and the cartels savage and calculated degradation of women in Juarez. These are extreme instances, but instances of what? And what can we do? Some possibilities that will be followed up in the sequel to this endpiece are touched on now. Insofar as this lumbering, destructive figure represents neoliberalism and late capitalism, INURAs caption (NonDeRe-regulation: limits exclusions claims) refers to what needs
Figure 4 NonDeRegulation. Poster for 18th INURA Conference, 310 October 2008, Athens, Greece. Poster by Panagiotis Toubanis-Vovos.

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CITY VOL. 12, NO. 3 sufficient. We need to ask what lies behind and beyond the faade of neoliberalism. Is it in part a matter of, to take the second half of INURAs caption a little futher, limits exclusions claims? Is it the long-term phenomenon of the money fetish and associated statist phenomena of capitalism? Is it empire, patriarchy, racism and enslavement? Is it a socioeconomic ethic of unlimited growth and consumption and of the marginalisation in and exclusion from the city of those denied/ deprived of their political, economic and social rights? Do these four phenomena capitalism and the money fetish; empire, patriarchy, racism and enslavement; psycho-social as well as physical marginalization and exclusion; and unlimited growth and consumptiongive 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 grappled with such questions. The same cultural London summer and autumn of 2008 I have drawn on above also included two such dramas. The Globe revived Shakespeares rarely performed late play, Timon of Athens. In this bitter play, Shakespeare and his co-author Thomas Middleton explored a frontline defined by the emerging money fetish and of a counterposed but patriarchal idealism and ultimate misanthropy in seventeenth century London. The play presents a microcosm that casts light on contemporary greed, debt and alternatives in the city20or would cast light if dominant forms of mediation were to engage with such disturbing possibilities. A second play, Aeschylus trilogy, the Oresteia, leads us back to what Madeleine Bunting refers to as Western civilization (whatever that is). Or could/should lead us backand forwards. In this case, a travelling South African company presented a contemporary South African play. Yael Farbers Molora drew explicitly on the Oresteia to illuminate the post-independence struggles towards Truth and Reconciliation and the Wests Godzilla-like response to 9/11. Aeschylus millennial play, dating back two-

to be done in Athens and elsewhere now or very soon. A preliminary, informal interpretation of the caption, with particular reference to the dialectically-related elements of NonDeRe-regulation has been suggested by Michael Edwards, a member of INURA present at the Athens conference:
a lot of issues in Greece are viewed in terms of regulation partly the kind of regulation they never had enough of (rights for pedestrians, children to play, light to reach the ground floor)
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partly the regulation they had too much of (the military of course, but also the endless power of The Minister in Athens to decide every single thingworse than England) partly the wish of progressive Greeks to have their capitalism restrained (but their fear that the rules might be worse than the problem).18

Another response to the crisis is by Richard Sennett who suggests that the government bail-outs can be seen as financial socialism and therefore, it may be presumed, as possible harbingers of a revival of socialism. But as Edwards19 pointed out in a letter to the FT:
The events of recent weeks on both sides of the Atlantic are clear examples of what sociologists call the capitalist state at work: the state coming to the aid of capital in a crisis. All the signs are that governments hope to get back to normal, even though normal has lost its credibility. There are no signs of a shift towards a fairer or more emancipatory or even a more stable society.

Sennett is Centennial Professor of Sociology at LSE. Perhaps in the light of Edwards reference to what is missing and of the line touched on here that there is a civilizational dimension to the problem, we shall need a Millennial Professorship. These are potentially millennial times. Statist stopgaps are necessary but certainly not

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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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CITY VOL. 12, NO. 3 graphs from his overall project can speak to us. The photographs are of a surviving Thames Barger and of a defiant social claimant, one of the cleaners from Canary Wharf (Figures 5 and 6). The words are those of Alan Jenner, skipper of the barge Gabrielle, has been working the river for a half a century:
Figure 6 5 Ursula Alan Jenner: Lacbao: Bargeman. Cleaner. Photograph by Sebastian Godwin Godwin.

and-a-half millennia, deals with the attempt to embody and thereby surpass violent social tensions within the constitutive framework of ancient Athens, thereby affirming a shared right to the city. Was the Athens settlement an evolutionary stage in Western civilization, the established view, or was it a fragile moment, actual and potential, of social reconciliation and truth that we need to revisit, rework, reclaim.21 What stands against such a project? Economic collapse is a greater threat than Islamist terrorism but are they connected? The barbarism without matching the barbarism within in a grim battle towards extermination? These insights are barely present now. How did they get lost? Who is reclaiming them and how? I shall return to these conflicts and their contexts. There is, nevertheless, hope. Of the struggles across a variety of frontlines in our cities, some articulate vital social claims. Sometimes these are articulated in various forms of reporting scattered across a city (as I have illustrated here from Londons summer and early autumn in 2008), from film and theatre to journalism and academic research. But can we bring it all together? Can the high priests and flaneurs of our cities be committed to beachcombing or to acknowledging the usefulness of those who are so committed. To what extent are they prepared to listen rather than pontificate and flannel? Despite all the horrors of the situation in Tijuana, Juarez and along the Mexican border, both Vulliamy and Tweddle point out that many residents, rather than seeking escape, still have a dream for their cities. Peter Marcuse, in a reference to Barack Obamas electoral victory, sees in the moment of euphoria, possibilities for the search for the right to the city that can and must be articulated and acted upon now . The task is to Listen, Expose, Propose, Politicize.22 Amid the accumulation of reports on current frontlines, one glimpse of the reworking and reclaiming of the city can be put together in contemporary London. Sandhus investigation comes to no conclusion. But some words from his book and two photo-

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

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As the waters rise to engulf parts of London and other cities, as the social tensions rise within the city and beyond, we shall need combinations of such voices and related actions (Listen, Expose, Propose, Politicise). On that basis, the city can claim a right to continued existence and to emancipation and social justice. Another city is necessary. On such a basis, it could be possible Notes
1

1 Bunting, M., Faith. Belief. Trust. This economic orthodoxy was built on superstition, Guardian, 6 October 2008. 2 I build here on work on frontiers in Contesting Neoliberalism: Urban Frontiers. My debt to as well disagreements with this important edited collection are both occasional text as well as subtext in recent episodes in this series (see also the Editorial to this issue). 3 Thomas Hardy, In Tenebris II. 4 Hutton,W., Without real leadership, we face disaster, Observer, 12 October 2008. 5 Sandhu, S. Night haunts: A journey through the London night London:Verso 2008, p. 12. 6 We published three substantial extracts , under the heading Aborigenes and unfortunates: Life and labour across nocturnal Londonfrom what was originally a collaborative project, commissioned by Artangel, on a website, and subsequently became the above bookwithin a feature How Should We Write about London? in City 19 (2). The extracts were selected by Sandhu from what in the book are the first three chapters entitled: An Appetite for Stories: Introduction, The Panoptic Sublime: Avian Police, and Aborigines and Unfortunates: Cleaners. 7 This quality was also evident in more critical work by the great Studs Terkel who died on 6 November, 2008.

CATTERALL: IS IT ALL COMING TOGETHER?

8 Mason, P. Live Working or Die Fightting: How the Working Class Went Global, London: Harvill Secker, 2007. 9 Walker, C. The Frontline London: Faber and Faber, 2008, pp. 1415. 10 Paskell, C. with Bailey, D. and Abdullah, A. (forthcoming) Understanding and addressing intergenerational tensions within Camden Somalis community: A research report. London: London Borough of Camden/One World Solutions (EU) Ltd. Firm figures on crime etc are difficult to gather as Somali is not an ethnic category commonly used, certainly not by police. 11 We take this up in our next issue. In mid November 2008 Somalia has again come into the news but this time because of those involved in a successful piracy business. Less attention is devoted to the social and economic factors that make piracy an attractive proposition (for one account that looks at the larger perspective, see Simon Tisdall, Somalia, state of anarchy in The Guardian 17 November, 2008. 12 Massey, D. World City Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. (reviewed under the heading On not taking London for granted by Andrew Davey in City 12(2), pp. 261265. 13 Gilbert Gaza, El Paso Border Control, in Juarez, City of Dreams. 14 The film is not in general distribution but can be obtained through alex@angrymanpictures.co.uk The website is www.angrymanpictures.co.uk. Once again I owe my first viewing of this film to the Frontline Club. 15 Tijuana streets flow with the blood of rival drug cartels, The Observer 2 Novemeber, 2008. 16 This struggle forms part of the background to Cormac McCarthys novel and the Coen brothers film based on it, No Country for Old Men. I discussed the film and the book (and Yael Farbers Molora, referred to below) in Is it all coming together? Thoughts on urban studies and the present crisis: (13) No Country for Old Men or Women? in City 12(2), pp.266278. 17 For reasons of space I have left out a discussion of the Brazilian film Tropa de Elite/Elite Guard which deals with police corruption and violence. Marcelo Lopes de Souza has dealt with this and a whole set of books/papers/movies/statements/ etc. etc. which share a similar approach/ spirit in his book, Fobpole: O medo generalizado e a militarizao da questo urbana (the title translates perhaps as Phobopolis: From the Widespread Fear to the Militarization of the Urban Question), which was published in Brazil in May this year. We are dicussing with him a paper Social movements in the face of criminal power: the socio-political fragmentation of space and micro-level warlords
8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

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as challenges for emancipative urban struggles, in which he deals with different kinds of challenges which are an increasing problem from Mexico City to So Paulo to Rio de Janeiro to Buenos Aires to Johannesburg (with huge differences in terms of quality and intensity and actors according to the country): 1) polices brutality and corruption (as usual), 2) ordinary criminals (above all drug trafficking) and 3) paramilitary groups. Email from Michael Edwards. My thanks to Michael Edwards who featured the poster and discussed the notion propounded by Richard Sennett), that the current financial rescue packages are forms of financial socialism, on his blog, under the heading What Next? (for capitalism), http://michaeledwards.org.uk Shakespeare, to an extent that many may find unbelievable, anticipated Marx, Mauss and Derrida, in Timonor so I shall argue in the sequel to this episode. I have already argued earlier in the series for his remarkable contemporaneity and his contribution to a tradition of social interpretation that can be seen as a potential ally in the reformation of sociospatial science. See Surborg, B. (2007) Reclaim the City! a review of the special session at the 2007 Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting in City 11(3), pp.422427. The last three words of the formula, Expose, Propose, Politicise are Peter Marcuses as set out in his opening address to the conference on The Right to the City: Prospects for Critical Urban Theory and Practice, Berlin, November 68. (This was organized by Margit Meyer, Neil Brenner, and Peter Marcuse in cooperation with the Center for Metropolitan Studies, TU Berlin. Details can be found on the CMS website www.metropolitanstudies.de. We shall return to aspects of this conference in a forthcoming issue.) I have prefaced Peter Marcuses three words with one other: Listen. This loses the euphony of the original. Sometimes small sacrifices in aesthetics have to be made in the cause of truth! (In fact, Listen should be preceded by: Get involved. The full implications of this are included, and its relation to Niget Thrifts case for eavesdropping, in a section, From Normal to Weird: a methodological interlude (pp.259262) inIs it all coming together? Thoughts on urban studies and the present crisis: (11) From Neoliberalism towards a paradigm for a New International in City, 11.2 , pp.245272)

Bob Catterall is Editor of City. Email address: bob.catterall@gmail.com

City
July 1360-4813 Original Taylor 2008 0 2 12 00000 2008 & Article Francis (print)/1470-3629 (online) City: 10.1080/ CCIT_A_GN89301.sgm Analysis and Francis of Urban Trends

CONTENTS
VOLUME 12 NUMBER 3 DECEMBER 2008
BOB CATTERALL KEN HILLIS ROBERT G. HOLLANDS

279 283 303

EDITORIAL BUILDING THE CARTESIAN ENLIGHTENMENT: LOS ANGELES, HOMELESSNESS AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE WILL THE REAL SMART CITY PLEASE STAND UP? INTELLIGENT,
PROGRESSIVE OR ENTREPRENEURIAL?

Going for gold: two perspectives on the Olympic Games 321

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GLOBALIZATION, CITIES AND THE SUMMER OLYMPICS MAPPING THE OLYMPIC GROWTH MACHINE: TRANSNATIONAL
URBANISM AND THE GROWTH MACHINE DIASPORA

JOHN R. SHORT BJRN SURBORG, ROB VANWYNSBERGHE AND ELVIN WYLY PHIL JONES

341

356 372

CONTEMPORARY REGENERATION IN

DIFFERENT BUT THE SAME? POST-WAR SLUM CLEARANCE AND BIRMINGHAM, UK

THE POST-CITY BEING PREPARED ON THE SITE OF THE EX-CITY: RE-ALIGNING THE PROVINCIAL CITY ALONG THE M62 IN THE NORTH OF ENGLAND DARYL MARTIN Scenes and Sounds

383 384

INTRODUCTION PHOTOGRAPHING PEOPLE IS WRONG: WITH A CAMERA IN KOLKATA Reviews CHANGING URBAN FORM, WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS Remaking Chinese Urban Form: Modernity, Scarcity and Space, by Duanfang Lu THINKING NEOLIBERALISM, THINKING GEOGRAPHY Contesting Neoliberalism: Urban Frontiers, edited by Helga Leitner, Jamie Peck and Eric S. Sheppard CAN URBANISM HEAL THE SCARS OF CONFLICT? Cities, Nationalism, and Democratization, by Scott A. Bollens ENDPIECE IS IT ALL COMING TOGETHER? THOUGHTS ON URBAN STUDIES AND THE PRESENT CRISIS: (14) ANOTHER CITY IS POSSIBLE? REPORTS FROM THE FRONTLINE

PAULA LKMAN ARIADNE VAN DE VEN

391

LAURENCE J.C. MA

394

SARASWATI RAJU

398

NASSER YASSIN BOB CATTERALL

402

416

INDEX, VOLUME 12 2008