ACFM - #ACFM Trip 19: Space

Episode Date: September 12, 2021

Jeremy Gilbert, Nadia Idle and Keir Milburn explore the politics of space. What even is space, and why does it so often seem to be the domain of the political right? How does the built environment have the power to discipline or liberate us? And why do all the billionaires want to get off the […]

Hello and welcome back to ACFM, the home of the Weird Left. This is producer Matt, just popping up to let you know that on the 25th to the 28th of September, that's in about a fortnight from when this episode will go out, ACFM will be at the World Transform Festival down in Brighton. We'll be doing a live show on the Ecology of Solidarities on Tuesday nights, right at the end of the festival. If you've got a ticket, we'll see you there. If you haven't got a ticket yet, there's a few left, so be sure to snap one up before they're

all gone. Myself and Chal, my co-producer, will also be around the festival doing a few things and there's going to be loads and loads of great stuff that you'd expect from our friends over at the World Transform. So get a ticket before they'll run out. Also while I'm here, just a reminder that if you're listening to this show, you're listening on a podcast app where we are beholden to strict licensing laws, meaning we can only play 30 second clips of the music you hear in the show. But if you head on over to the Navarro website, and stream from SoundCloud, you will get a show that is richer, fuller, denser, more hallucinogenic, more psychedelic than you're getting here. It's the full heroic dose of ACFM. But of course,

if you're listening here, you'll still get all the great conversation and acid insights from Nadia Keir and Jeremy. It's your choice. Okay, on with the show. Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the Weird Left. I'm Jeremy Gilbert and I'm joined as usual by my friends Nadia Idle. Hello. And Keir Milburn. Hello. And today we are talking about space.

Space is a word with a lot of different meanings. and we're going to sort of try to cover many of them, aren't we? And we thought we'd start off just by talking for a bit about, well, what do we even mean by the term space? So, Nadia, it was your idea. So what did you even mean when you said we should talk about space? So I've always really been interested in space in the sense of the built environment, the way we move around the landscape, and how that affects how we feel. and organize and meet other people.

And that's why I was really interested in doing that interview with Pooja. But I'm also interested by what's happened and, you know, what's related to that in terms of what's happened after the pandemic and how we relate in smaller spaces in our homes and in our neighborhoods. But I'm also interested with how that intersects with the kind of the space in our head, going back to the therapy edition that we're talking about. Like how do all of these different conceptions of space make us the people who we are and what effect does it have on politics?

And obviously this also leads into talking about, which I think we're going to talk about a bit later, what public space is and how those kind of different forms of built environment are attached to kind of different sets of rights and politics. So that's kind of my spirally summary of why I'm interested in space. And I'm not so interested in outer space, but I've become more interested since we've discussed this podcast. What about you guys? I think you can link thinking about outer space with thinking about earthly space.

So you're right, right, the pandemic and social distancing and all the effects of the pandemic, like working from home and more retail going more and more online, etc. This is all having an effect on our relationship to lived, our lived relationship to space, what we might call earthly space. If we're only out of space and earthly space, and they're linked by, we don't want to just talk about the physical space. We want to talk about our imaginary relationship to our lived experience of space, to put it in an altusarian sort of way. So that's why I think it is related to outer space.

Because one of the reasons we were talking, we might want to think about why talk about space now is partly because COVID's changed our relationship to space. But at the same time as that's going on, you've got people like Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson actually going into outer space. And there's something strange going on with that, right? There's something strange about what is the imaginary role that outer space is playing and how is it related to our experience of earthly space, which is changing at the moment? Yeah, I think that's all right. And of course, I mean, space is historically is a really kind of difficult concept in some ways, philosophically. Yeah, the nature of space is something people have worried about.

And how you distinguish space from time, you know, is space just everything that extends? Is it just extension? Is it even that properly differentiable from time? Or is space time just one single phenomenon? For Kant, space and time are the two, sort of the key transcendental category. which we have to have some concept of to even be able to start thinking. But I think it's interesting. It can be a really abstract concept, but it can also, you know,

it also has very concrete implications. There's been quite a lot of social movements which sort of circulate around who has access to space. So one of the things that's going on in the UK at the moment is that house prices are going absolutely through the roof, astronomical even in the outer space register. And part of what people think is behind that or part of what's driving that is, that people are spending more and more time at home, and they're thinking, we want more space, actually. If I'm going to spend this much time at home, working from home,

I want more space, so I'm going to get a bigger house, and that's one of the things that's been driving it. But there's also lots of social movements around who has access to public space. We had the murder of Sarah Everard in the summer, and then the sort of reclaim the night protest that sparked up around that, which heart back to reclaim the night protests in the 1970s, starting in Lees, actually, around the Yorkshire Ripper murders and the police saying that women should stay in the house to stay safe. And women said, no, why didn't you get men to stay in the house? And there was a resurgence of that movement, and that went into the whole Kill the Bill sort of movement about, well, will we have the right to assembly?

That seems to be being removed from us. that key thing of proximity, the key role of proximity in politics, basically, the ability to come together. And of course, related to that is Black Lives Matter movement, or the movement for Black Lives, which is swept across several countries and several waves. And what's that about? That's also about who has access to space, isn't it? Who is able to walk down the street without getting harassed by the police or, in fact, killed by the police? So you can see, in fact, who has access to space, what space do people need? how do we relate to it? Once you start to get into it, it seems to be a quite a current issue

and an interesting way into a series of debates. I think that's why we want to discuss it. Yeah, totally. And I think it's important to point out with that excellent list that you made there, Kea, is that, you know, when we're talking about these things, we're talking about space, I mean, it's hard to sort of pin down space and say, like, in a literal sense, but also, you know, space is one of those terms that can also be used. in a kind of post-modern sense in the way that violence has been, in my view, bastardized as well. And people say, you know, you saying this or that is violent, when in actual fact, what we're talking about here is actual violence, physical violence, that people are on the receiving end of,

in particular actual physical spaces. And when we say that there are people, different sorts of people, you know, and whether it's women or black people, et cetera, who've not been able to walk down certain streets without being at risk, then, you know, it's a very real thing. So what does that do to populations and what does that do to communities and what does it do for our ability to organise, but also just move around the place and socialise? And I think that question of how people view the street and the square and arguably the circus, I know at time of recording Extinction Rebellion are in Oxford Circus in London at the moment.

So I thought I'd throw circus in there with the squares as well. But how people feel about those spaces and whether they feel that they are something that belong to them places that they can and want to hang out or if they kind of belong to the state or private capital. And I think that's really interesting way that we can discuss freedom to assembly as well. Yeah, because it's also about ownership, isn't it?

It's like there are imaginary relationships to space. They overlap with like legal rights to space, to land, etc. So we can also talk about things such as the idea of public ownership, public land, perhaps common ownership, commons, the commons as a form of land, and of course private ownership and private land. So I think we should bring all of those in and discuss all of them. but we should do it in a nice, neat way that makes sense.

So over to you, Jeremy. Well, maybe we should first start with the problem that you, I think you posed before an idea about, whether historically the political left has had a problem with even thinking about space. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I wanted to pose that question. Yeah, you're right. And I think it trickles down to even the way that a lot of the time

the left organise here, you know, in the 21st century. And Keir's right to point out that, you know, it's a really kind of, it's a, it's a sharp, hot campaign issue and movement issue at the moment like housing, but in a way, it seems like the discourse around it isn't about, we want good spaces, we are demanding, you know, good, beautiful, empowering, aesthetically pleasing spaces, whether it's in our homes and in the public. So even though people might like these things. I don't think it's part of the left discourse. So that was the question that interested me. But yeah, please talk a little bit more about it in terms of the history,

please. Well, I think that's an interesting example of the one you just gave. So, I mean, some people might say, I'm not saying I would really go along with this in such simplistic terms, but some people would argue that indeed historically, it's kind of left thought, it's kind of preoccupied with time. I mean, partly because, you know, it comes out of the enlightenment. It's interested in the future. It's interested in modernity. The labor theory of value, the whole kind of Marxist theory of exploitation is really about the exploitation of time. It's about, you know, people having to buy and sell their time and people having access to other people's time. And it's not really, and in some ways, the argument would say the left

has historically not been that good at thinking about space. And that, I mean, the rent issue is really interesting there, actually, because it's true. So at least in this country, you know, renter's rights are really tend to be kind of bundled up with a set of issues, which are to do with, for example, you know, the fact that people, people don't want to have to give loads of money to landlords because they want to be able to keep more of their money or save it up. People want to be able to buy a house because it gives them a sense of permanence and it gives them a way, a sense that their own money is then being invested in their future. And you can make an argument. These are all ways of thinking about those issues more in terms of time than in terms of space, in in terms of the question of actually just having somewhere to live. I mean, it's sort of true. It's kind of interesting. But then I think if you try to put it in those terms, I would say, I think things quickly break down a bit.

I mean, I think, for example, it's quite clear that renters politics in Britain now is partly about questions for space. It's about the city. It's about who gets to be there, who gets to live there, and do you have to go somewhere else? And I think this debate over sort of spatial, you know, thinking in spatial terms, thinking in temporal terms, it goes back at least. to Henri Lefebvre, you know, the great French thinker, philosopher, historian and his book

The Production of Space. And Lafave, for example, sort of argues that the left hasn't really thought enough about space. I guess what's got, there's a lot of this going on. There's a lot of this going on in the 60s and 70s, there isn't there? There's people like Foucault writing about prisons and there's a general kind of concern with, you know, the way in which power is exercised in the, you know, in the urban context or in buildings in a kind of spatial way. And there's the psychogeographers and the situationists and all of those, all of that stuff's going on. And the drifts and the stuff. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah, there's already been all that stuff. I think it's partly it's seen as being an issue that's been a bit neglected in philosophy. Though I think in some strands of French thoughts that didn't become that famous in an English-speaking world, I think in the mid-20th century, there were some, there were people like Conguiem and Bachelar, I think, were interested in space. as well, actually. So I'm not sure how well this argument that it's sort of neglected ever really stands up, because it comes up again with the sort of radicalisation of geography from the sort of 80s onwards. So you have figures like David Harvey, who sort of starts off life as a critical geographer and just ends up becoming probably the most famous kind of Marxist

scholar of his generation after Frederick Jameson in the English-speaking world. And then in the early 2000s, the great British radical geographer and political theorist Doreen Massey published her book For Space, which is kind of again sort of an argument for taking space seriously against a certain claim that people haven't really taken it seriously. I guess what they're reacting to is, for example, people like Ernesto LeClo, I know at some point in his work, talks about the spatialisation of politics. And it's sort of seen as being in some ways, always a retreat from a, you know, a politics that makes a claim on the future. And I mean, it was a concept I used actually in sort of really early work in the early 90s

when I was sort of thinking about the way in which a certain kind of resignation had kind of characterised the politics of my generation, sort of after the great defeats of the left in the 80s and after the sort of end of the long wave of punk and that stuff. And I thought, well, now, what are we doing? We're defending squats. We're trying to stop roads being built. We're having raves. And it seemed to be a sort of politics of space, which in some ways was kind of exciting.

But in other ways was, you know, a reaction to the fact that we'd precisely given up on any sense that we could actually affect the future in any meaningful way. So it was just a sort of politics of the present or a politics of defense in some ways. so there's there is a sort of back and forth historically between seeing largely talking about the whole concept of space in sort of negative terms you can think of delours and guittari as well actually like territory is like bad basically in really vulgar terms I mean that's not really what they mean but it's easy to read them that way and that's how they've often been read like territorialisation is the name they give to almost any process by which a set of power relationships gets fixed and then de-territorialisation is, you know, what happens when those power relationships get dislocated, mobilised. And obviously, as their work develops, it becomes completely impossible to really sustain those as just a sort of good, bad binary. But nonetheless, you know, that is sort of there in the language.

So that's also another example in some ways of, you know, somehow, you know, space is bad. It's associated with, you know, stasis, as opposed to being associated with, you know, change. And then there's a sort of parallel tradition going back to philosophers like Henri Bergson. His word for the experience of time is duration. And duration is always characterised by change and change is good. It's going to what we sort of want. And again, that would be a kind of gross simplification of Bergson, but that's kind of how some people have taken it. But what's interesting about that is that time is, I think, in those terms that you've just defined, Jeremy, like time is a lot more abstract, like going back to the territorial point or language, you know,

it's much easy to think about defending space than it is about defending time, much easier in terms of, you know, in terms of both the arguments that are made and in reality of how people move around the world, right? Well, I completely agree. And I just, I don't really think there ever has been anyone who's actually thought, oh, well, it should be all about time and not space, or it should be all about space and not time. But if you want to understand, why some people have sort of thought, some other people have thought about it that way. Well, think about this. You're right. Of course, it's easy to think of defending space rather than defending time. But in the 19th and 20th centuries, you know, who defends space? Well, it's

nationalist. Nationalism is a politics about defending space. Who defends time? It's the labor movement. It's the workers movement trying to raise wages and lower the working, you know, shorten the working week. So it's the fact that it's really simple and easy to understand the idea of defending space, and it's not so easy to understand the concept of defending time, which is one of the things which always gives the sort of nationalism an advantage over socialism, but socialism is always trying to get people to think in terms of defending time, rather than just defending space, if you see what I mean. Yeah, totally. That makes sense.

I'd never really quite thought in those terms before. So that is a reason why space ends up being a sort of a negatively marked term in certain strands of the radical tradition, but then periodically, people like on real affair, of people like Doreen Massey, they have to sort of pop up and remind us, actually, you know, we have to think about space and we have to recognize that space is political and politicized and power relations operate in a spatial dynamic all the time. And if we, we can't just allow, we can't just let conservatives think about that. And that, you know, you've said to me before, you know, it's a problem. I think we might have said on the show, we might have just said when

we were talking about these issues, well, you know, and it's a bit of a cliche in some circles that, you know, the left is not good at thinking about place. You know, the left doesn't get people to think in terms of the identities and attachments that they form in relation to particular places. Well, I mean, I just think that people, I don't really have a over-sophisticated conception beyond that really, but just the fact that the terms in which, you know, like even Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party, etc., didn't seem to have the terms to deal with the fact that people live in actual spaces

and they have attachment to those places and the vast majority of people actually don't move very far from where they were born in the UK, despite all of the immigration and migration, etc. There's a shitload of people who don't actually. They want to remain close to other people who they know who grew up in that area. And that's a phenomenon. A lot of people are forced to move

because of work or because of displacement, et cetera, but people, I don't think it correlates, I guess this is my argument, I don't think it correlates with parochialism and nimbism and small-mindedness that people feel the need to want to protect or be around a specific area. So when that area is, or when those spaces are under attack in various different forms or perceived to be under attack, they have certain reactions, which I think the right is much better on capitalising on than the left. It is interesting, though, that the municipal level, a municipalism, it's quite a big thing on the left. There's this lot of like new municipalism, particularly in southern Europe, in Spain and then in France.

And then recently, actually, it's moved across a municipal project that has just taken over the city council of Zagreb. So it's going into sort of Eastern Europe as well. to be fair i was speaking about the uk this course is in the UK you are right you know but i think it's i think it's also true in the UK as well if you think about like the preston model community wealth building there is something there about like the city is is the right level for politics

and it's to do with this idea that like you need proximity for for democratic politics to work in a way and so it's not sexy though is it i mean it's not though this is the thing and I don't and I don't mean I don't mean that to like talk down at it I just think there just is a disjoint between the people's emotions around space and the whole chat about municipalism I'm not saying that stuff isn't good and really important but I don't I just don't think those two things are are are being linked up politically I don't know I mean it gets me off but then I'm a very strange man Perhaps one way to think about it was just to extend Jeremy's argument earlier about like linking space to stasis and that it would be more of a sort of leading it to be open to right wing arguments is that the other reason that the left is concerned with temporality or has got like temporal aspects to its to its politics sort of built in is because because we want to move from the way the world is now to some to a different form of. organisation in the future. So there's this problem of transition, right? We want to move from how things are to a different sort of future. And so a lot of left politics is around that orientation

towards the future and the need to bring an anticipation of a different kind of future into our action in the present, right? There's a temporal dimension built into the left. But I don't think that that should be opposed to like spatial considerations. But totally. When people are saying, I want a better future, they're not necessarily saying, I want to get out of here. They're saying, I want here to be better. That's my argument. Well, yeah, but here can be spatial or temporal, but yeah. So I'm saying that when we're talking about, like, so I get that, I get that talking about change and, you know, the kind of capital pre-P progress, which the left identified with in the 20th century, definitely, before. you know climate change and all of these things hit all of those big issues kind of that change the way we

we look at politics it was that kind of thinking about the future but I'm not but I'm not sure how it was linked to the place we're in like how that works now I think and I think you know and I tried to touch on this when I spoke to

Pooja in the in the microdose of there was a lot of like you know the the government had funded all of these kind of big thinking projects in Europe and definitely the UK in terms of how spaces could be designed and how cities could be reimagined. There's a lot of that 20th century kind of like big imaginary thinking that, you know,

led to some amazing like built environments in the UK. But I'm trying to think of how that spatial aspect links up with how people are doing activism. SunRar, Space is the Place is the Afro Futurist Anthem. the great evocation of the idea of outer space as a place of imaginative possibility at a pace of imagined emancipation and liberation. I think it's an extraordinary piece of music

from an extraordinary artist. It's very, very acid. And I think most of the music we're talking about today is going to have a sort of outer space theme. Space is the place This place is the place Outer space It's a pleasant place

A place that's really Free leave There's no limit To the things that you can do Basically my day job is involved in this sort of stuff these days And part of the part of the thing I've been doing is me and a couple of friends, Bertie Russell and Kai Heron, we've been working with this idea of public common partnerships,

which is a reverse engineer of public-private partnerships, of which PFIs are, our one version, etc. And so public-private partnerships are those where the state basically gives private enterprises, lots of money and contracts for these things to run sort of public services, etc, and it's really, it's been pretty disastrous. You know, they basically, it's a way of like,

offloading public procurement and building infrastructure onto future taxpayers. Ah, a temporal thing, you say. So public common partnerships is sort of a reverse engineer of that where you've got a public, the public body is working with what we call a commons association. So that might be like a workers co-op or a project to bring sort of land into common ownership. That's what we've been working on recently. And we've been sort of developing models where, where people can develop or try to bring more and more areas of life

into sort of the common sector, the sort of cooperative sector and out of the public sector. You'll probably talk a little bit in a moment about how we distinguish those things. Anyway, my point is with the work I've been doing with Bert and Kai, is that that's not reliant on control over local government. This can take place just by people, getting together and deciding they want to do something

and they want to form a sort of cooperative or common project to do it. So one of the places we've been working with is the Latin Village market in Tottenham so the Save Latin Village campaign is like really it's quite well known I think and the really great thing is quite recently Tottenham in London we should say.

Tottenham in London, yeah. Yes, Tottenham in London for our non-UK listeners. So Save Latin Village has been this campaign to stop this urban development, a really classic urban development where the private developers are going to knock down a load of things that people use, like a market,

and they're going to build like private housing with no affordable housing, all of that, basically we all know that model of development, urban development. Basically, the market traders and their allies have basically fought this for 17 years

and they've basically won last week. The gentrifying developers have pulled out and yeah, it's a really great victory. And even the council said, oh, we're going to back The common plans, they've had a community plan that they've developed, and that's got a public common partnership thing in it. A part of what we developed in that is it's sort of like this thing about where you can use

space and you can add a temporal dimension to it. How about that? So basically the surplus from the operation of the market, the market will be brought into common ownership, and the surplus from that, the running of that market, were going to start in new common projects or new public common partnerships, and then the surplus from those will come back, and they'll be used to start new public common partnerships.

So it's a sort of designing in a sort of self-expansive dynamic of self-governance, if you want, right? But isn't everything hedged against these projects? Like, don't councils actually, aren't they incentivised because of their material conditions and the way that they're structured and way relationships are built internal to councils? I mean, am I just really cynical? I just can't see councils supporting this sort of stuff in general. Well, I mean, if you wanted to give, to be fair to councils, and it'd be probably over fair to councils, they've not really had a choice but to work with like these private, big, huge, massive private developers, because who else are they going to do it with? They've got a problem, which is things are set up to disincentivise public building, or there's a trend towards building like new council houses, etc.

But things are sort of set up against that, such as people having the right to buy a council house. So this sort of like community-led or people-led development is sort of, we're going to see, basically, whether councils are going to go for it. But it seems to be that people are interested in it at the moment because the urban model of development, which is based on rising real estate prices, basically you're building shopping centres and office space, right? That's not really going to work, right, if people are buying, are doing online retail on their office space is shrinking and rents for office or commercial rents are really dropping

because people are tended to work from home more. And so businesses are thinking, great, great, I can save a bit of money here by shrinking the office and have people come in just part-time, etc., etc. So basically, there's this complete crisis around high streets and town centres. Why are people going to come into high streets? Why are people going to come into town centres if they're not going to do shopping, etc. To meet each other. Yeah, well, in that case, you're going to need some.

sort of reconfiguration of space, basically, in order to facilitate that. And so that's what these, this sort of like this model of development we've been sort of working on. So one of the other projects we're working on is this land banking project where it's a street in Plymouth where people want to buy the whole street, bring it into common ownership. And their problem is this. If they buy the whole street or they start to do community activism, property prices will rise.

And the people who basically sat on these land bank, these sat on these assets, sets and not, and to develop them, they're the ones who are going to get the benefits. So basically, there's an idea that you use a sort of public common partnership to basically produce a land bank and then that land bank is attached to this commons, which is like a democratic forum in which you can democratically decide what you're going to use these buildings for and how the street's going to develop. It's this problem, right? If you're not going to decide the use of resources and assets through the market, then what

you're going to do. There's only one way to do that, and that's democratic planning, right? That's that sort of model, basically, and the sort of wager, the sort of roll of the dice is, if you put a lot of things at stake, i.e., you know, join this Commons Association and you will have control over all of these buildings on the street, that will put enough at stake that people will suddenly think participation in these sort of democratic structures is worth it, because immediately they can control what's going on in their neighbourhood. Anyway, that's what I've been doing. Public Commons partnerships are a really interesting idea from my point of

view, partly because they're trying to overcome, well, not overcome, but play creatively with the sort of conceptual distinction between the public and the Commons, which comes out of Hart and Noghry, you know, Michael Hart and Antonio Negri's work. I mean, they're interesting figures for this discussion. I was thinking about them earlier. One of the most provocative things they ever said in their book, I think it's in the book, Multitude, they said, well, we should really, you know, radical forces should valorize, you know, migrancy. We should see, we should see the migrant as a kind of precisely in their kind of, you know, entrepreneurial creativity. It's a kind of figure of change and as somebody we should sort of valorize. And that is, you know, meaning what we should value them. And it's a kind of reaction against the kind of thinking that I was referring to earlier that sees migrants. as a sort of capitalist phenomenon. And, you know, and it's kind of interesting.

I mean, obviously these days, you know, migration, the vast majority of migration is experienced, I think, by the people who engage in it as sort of at least semi-forced. You know, it's very ambivalent. You know, people experience it as something they have to do, but also something they might want to do. And either way, you know, solidarity with migrants is really central to any kind of contemporary radical politics.

but they're, Hart and Negri have really interesting ways of thinking about those things. So they, their sort of challenge to that notion that the migrant is just a sort of capitalist entrepreneur is quite interesting. It's a bizarre concept, I think, pushing it that far. But yeah, I remember that from the multitude. Well, I mean, when I taught it to students, like nobody liked it because like including, because basically most of the, lots of students in the room when I was teaching it when it first came out was people whose parents had been migrants. It sounds crass. And I would have to say in all

honesty, not one of them had a story according to which their migrancy was completely freely chosen and sort of heroically entrepreneurial. Like it was just not, you know, it wasn't, they hadn't, they felt forced to do it and they were sort of, even people who'd been economically really successful. Yeah, you're always, yeah, people tend to move in, in those kind of ways under, you know, from, it's a, it's a stick. There will be a stick as much as there is a, a carrot. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's, so anyway, I've sort of gone off with them a bit, but also another kind of, you know, contentious claim of theirs. I mean, this really comes to Antonia in Egri's work is this idea that will, I mean, he does say at some point that the

commons is completely opposed to the public. And the public is like the domain of the state. And, you know, whereas the commons is kind of always outside the state. It's something that, the state-like capital is sort of parasitic upon the commons or sort of suppressing the commons. And I was always really critical of that because I think, you know, at the end of the day, you know, apart from anything else, you know, Negri's politics come from the very specific experience of the Italian left and the sort of very high levels of corruption in the public sector, the massive disillusion with both the socialist and communist parties. You know, and it was and it always seemed like a kind of a useless distinction in Britain

where we're just sort of trying to defend the public. Yeah, isn't it mostly semantics? I mean, when it comes to talking about the context that we've just been talking about. Yeah. In Britain, I mean, that's how I feel. I'd extend that, actually. I know a lot of people disagree with this. We'll extend it to, you know, left critiques of the point of when people bring up citizens,

try and get people to think about citizens, not consumers. Then there's as citizens rather than consumers, then there's this very, very strong critique of the concept of the citizen because it doesn't include migrants. Like, we're not thinking about it in that kind of crass form because I think the concept of citizen can also be really useful when talking about public or commons. Well, to me, well, I got widely accused by a far leftist

as being a stagist after the interview I did on politics theory other recently. A stages is somebody who thinks that, you know, political struggle moves in stages rather than just happening whenever you want it. So in that sense, I am a stagist. And I think there are, yeah, there are different sort of stages. There are different political moments and historical moments.

There are historical moments. If you're in Russia in 1917 and you're, you know, and the Bolsheviks are like the most powerful force, you know, especially amongst the youth and the soldiers, then maybe you're at the point where you can say, oh, we don't even, we don't need to be citizens in the kind of bourgeois sense. We're workers, you know, we're members of the Soviet and part of the workers international. But if you're in a situation where most people can't even think of themselves as ordinary just participants in civic life, they can only think of themselves either as subjects of an aristocracy or as consumers of services, then citizenship is a significant advance on that. Isn't stagism, though, that all struggles have to go through a certain development of stage, which is why you're not a stages, actually.

Yeah, no, it is really, yeah. We're getting down a completely different track here. You know, I do, I am on some level. I am a statist, and I think there are hard limits on socialism before capitalism is kind of industrialization has reached certain levels around the world, but that's a different debate. It's a really interesting way of thinking about it that you guys have come up with. Instead of saying the public is bad, the commons is good,

and they're as opposed, it's like the public. in the private are, the commons and the private, are you saying, well, they do, the terms do refer to sort of different domains, you know, the commons is the sort of the domain of free association and free collaboration, you know, outside, you know, that isn't dependent upon state structures or capital. And then the public is the sort of the domain of, you know, the state to some extent. But it does depend on who the agent is that we're talking about that we're trying to move here. If we're at the level of like theory and even public policy and, you know, municipalism, then we can be making those distinctions. But if you're at the point of thinking about

the average person or, you know, like group of people now in 2021, where you haven't even, we've got such a rudimentary issue with people conceptualizing the way they exist in public, let alone whether the space is public or private and whether they have a right to it or not. Like we're talking about a really kind of basic, like being stuck inside the capitalist realist bubble here. That's what we're talking about. So then on that level, like, I don't care whether you call it public or commons or, you know, a citizen or not. We're trying to open that space as opposed to private, I mean. I think one way to think through that bit, though, is like if you're going to define the public, there probably is the state at some level it is involved.

But like, if you think about public ownership, right, that means that, like, you know, the public own that and the public is basically everybody who is in that particular level of the state at which the public is, so everybody in the city of London, for instance, we'd own whatever it's public. The commons is something like, it's not just common ownership, it has to be common governance as well. So public services can be democratized, but they don't have to be. Common ownership sort of does have to be. democratized. And it's also the thing of like, how do you create the public? What is the public? How do you create that as an active sort of force? There's lots of debates around that. I know. It's all around populism and all these sorts of things. But with a commons, like a commons is not something that exists outside the community of commoners who do the work of commoning, if you know what I mean. So you have to actively form this group of commoners, basically.

another word we could use is community and that's a really loosely used word that's thrown about everywhere but with a commons you know that community starts to have some boundaries around it but they're not predetermined boundaries so whoever does the work of the common whoever joins in the governance do you know what I mean

yeah but until you pin it down to a physical space I kind of doesn't necessarily make any sense to me yeah but okay so with the commons it's not a physical space it's some sort of resource or asset right That's what you common, you know, it's a common governance of some sort of resource or asset. So that could be a, that could be a workers' co-op. So the Latin village is really interesting about your discussion about migration, Jeremy, because the majority of the reason it's called the Latin Village is because it's a real centre of the Latin American community in London.

And because people are bringing their own traditions and they bring their own traditions of struggle and because this group have had to struggle against developers for 17 years, you'd say they've got a really highly developed, cohesive idea of what they want to do, you know, and some of the other projects we've worked with haven't quite got that. They're having to do more work in order to form these sort of democratic structures, if you know what I mean. In fact, some of the people involved in the Latin village, they trace back there the forms of how they organize to like Mayan forms, the traditional Mayan forms of community organizing that go back sort of thousands of years, basically. So that's a distinction between the commons and the public, perhaps.

But the point is that there's, what we're trying to say is that there's a circulation between those things. You can't put everything into the commons, right? And so the public role in this public common partnership is to bring in all of the things that exist outside this community. Say, look, you've got to follow, you've got to follow these other interests that aren't included in the people in your co-op, right? You've got to, you know, who's going to sort of bring in concerns around resource limitation, etc. At the moment, it's the public. The public doesn't do a very good job of that. It needs reforming and democratising as well.

But yeah, but we start with the commons in that. I think we should definitely play a song from my favorite decade, the 90s, Babylon Zoo Space Man, because it is such a weird song and I love it. And yeah, not a lot of people listen to the lyrics, but it does have the lyrics in it. Images of fascist votes beam me up because I can't breathe, which I think is related to what we've been talking about. I can't get on the carousel I can't get on this world

I'm sick and taste homophobic jokes I'm watching the fascist boats be me and guess I can't breathe Space plan I always wanted you to go I wanted to say some things just in response to your point, Nadia, about how people in neoliberal, capitalist, realist,

Britain, lots of people anyway, finding it very difficult to think of themselves even as members of the public, never mind as, you know, participant in a commons. Although, you know, on an abstract level, some might say that, you know, that in some ways people find it easier to think of themselves as a commons because they're on social media all the time. They're in this kind of abstract space of interrelation, and it's, in some ways, you might even say it's harder. I'm actually speculating one reason you're kind of understandably. So reacting quite negatively against that idea of different intending public and commons is you could take the argument even further and say it's the public that's

really been attached. Like new forms of commons have emerged over the past 30 years because they've had to, because capital has had to sort of enable them so that it can exploit them and in the forms of things like social media. And it's the fact that they don't, their sort of social media platforms, I think, are sort of commons, but they're not really public or they don't really, they don't behave in the way we think public spaces should behave. There's street fights that you can't close down. It's like a brawl outside a pub that never ends. Like, that's what it's like on Twitter. The problem we've got is that I think you're pointing to is indeed the problem of the public. And I think, you know, the issue of public space is

obviously kind of central to how we think about just what it means to have a public, what it means to be in the public. And how people react to defending things like really fantastic public buildings being under threat of demolition or the Latin village or whatever. It's really, like, you know, it's central to whether people are going to act on that, right? Yeah, I think you're right. Well, I think you can, we've talked about Kill the Bill on the show and, you know, kill the bill is really addressing a massive attack on the freedom of assembly. And it's something that came up when we were talking about and making preparations for

this show that there's a really weak tradition of defending freedom of, assembly in this country, I think. You know, it's just, it's really important to understand that in most countries with a liberal democratic constitutional government, which we don't even have, there is an enshrined constitutional right to some form of freedom of assembly. It's just, it's just considered normal that there has to be some basic legal protection and some basic limit on how far government or state authorities can say people cannot gather there.

And in this country, we have, and this is, this pre-day. neo-liberalism, in my view. In my view, this goes back to the fact that a sort of Hobbesian form of liberalism is sort of normative in English political culture for centuries, really. We have such a kind of privatised,

individualised idea of what freedom means, that people do find this difficult to conceptualise. People can understand the idea that the cops and anyone else shouldn't be allowed to come in your house, but the idea that actually one of your rights should be to gather with other people in public spaces.

Like, people just don't, you know, people find this quite hard. I think even a lot of, I think people find this quite hard to sort of get it to really. So we don't have the language for it. It's not part, it's not one of, it's not one of the phraseologies that's kind of like wielded out along with other things, like even on the left. Like, I think you're completely right. I think even the phrase, like freedom of assembly, it's not really talked about in those terms.

I mean, I always remember this. I remember the debates around the hunting, the banning of Foxhound. in the 90s and thinking about this and this is not a popular thing to say at all but I was always I've always been very uncomfortable with how people on the left just you know just all got on board with banning fox hunting because from an animal protection point of view it's completely trivial you know you care about animals suffering ban factory farms that shut down all chicken batteries you shut them down tomorrow but people were really happy to ban it because because basically most people in Britain just thought it was a bunch of

Toffs doing something they disapproved of. And I thought, and that just came a couple of years after the Criminal Justice Act. And that, again, that was just, oh, it's a bunch of kids, you know, doing something we don't really want to do or approve of, ban it. For me, that really, you know, was the greatest example of what you're talking about. Because in most countries, like in France, for example, France is always a really good contrast because they've got such strong freedom of assembly laws. And the freedom of assembly laws in France are why they couldn't ban raves.

a lot of people involved in the 90s free party scene ended up moving to France. A lot of them are still there, putting on raves and annoying farmers in, you know, South West France. And why are we not doing an ACFM from there right now? I did not know this. They're all that.

Well, the music, you not like the sound system. You wouldn't like the music. How do you know? I don't think... Is it jazz? No, it's just very, very hard. It's super hard. It's the opposite of jazz.

It's very, very hard. How do you know what I like? a lot of techno man you haven't played any you say how do I know I might be wrong but it's not like I've got no basis for knowing we've been talking about music for a while now we're going to have to play some technoval music

you want us to play hardcore technical I think it'll be good The point is, should people be allowed to, like, whether it's Frolic, Rome, whatever, in wide open spaces and in cities, yes. Oh, yeah, we're pro-frolic on this podcast, there's no doubt about it. And in derelict buildings, and maybe in occupied buildings as well. But all of that comes down to, like, who controls this land, right? Who owns this land, which is like a huge problem in the UK?

A huge parts of cities, yeah, go on. Because it's because it's massively centralized, like, you know, especially when you get outside of cities. Yeah, it's massively centralized who owns it. Centralized as in, you know, very few people own most of the, most of the land. Do they have privatized squares in other countries like they do in the UK? That's a very good question. Because, you know, you think about, you think about a square as,

a public space or at least I think about it as a public space, you know. Well, it was the movement of the squares, wasn't it, the whole the pseudo-occupy movement. The movement of the squares is because that would be the natural place for politics to happen.

Yeah, yeah. Whereas if you try to do that, outside King's Cross, the new place that they've built in London, Kings Cross, I mean, you'll get a whole bunch of private, I said bunch there, that sounds very American, a whole group of private security guards coming towards you because it looks like a public space but it's not. I think that's really insidious and also really interesting about how people, whether that makes any difference to

people walking through it. London still does have a symbolic centre, a public centre, which is the public square of Trafalgar Square. But basically after that became a really, you know, that became the site of various kind of fierce contestations between protesters and police from the 80s onwards. I mean, they've never been able to actually sort of close off access to Trafalgar Square, but there's been a real proliferation of these highly corporate, you know, sort of faux, I would say sort of postmodern folk, sort of vaguely neo-Georgian squares in different parts of London in places like, you know, all around the expanding border of the financial districts, really. And they connect to a tradition in London where

there are still, there are a few that have been for hundreds of years, like, private square. So there are a few places where you're just walking around a neighbourhood and you come across a little square, like there's a little park inside it, and it's got a gate and it's got a lock and only residents of that area who are, who, you know, will basically all be millionaires, are allowed to have a key to the lock. So that, I mean, that is something that goes back in London, actually, and it's something that's always been kind of weird and alienating in London, the presence of those private squares. But Granary Square behind Kings Cross is not, is not, does not have a lock or a key. You can go

and sit in the restaurants and spend money. Yeah. And it's very nice on a sunny day. But then, you know, if you, it's right next to the Euristar. And if you suddenly started, if there was a demo or anything outside of other companies, and people behave very differently. There was a series of protests in the 70s, wasn't there? Where people would take down the fencing. I can't remember where that was now. It was in London somewhere. Around one of the squares, the private squares. Yeah, and I like to turn it into a play area. It's not one of the things I've always found fascinating was the British sort of equivalent of the Red Army fractions,

the Angry Brigade, who did some bombings in the 1970s, so they didn't kill anybody. But they did some bombings and got arrested for it. One of the things they were really, really militantly doing at the same time as doing these bombings was setting up, play groups and play areas for kids for some reason it seemed to one rolled onto another I think it's quite a good model actually armed playgroups is probably the way

forward bombs and play well like the adventure the adventure playground movement was associated with the left it was as seen as a symbol of the municipal left the building of the so-called adventure

playgrounds like big playgrounds like lots of stuff for kids to climb over I remember my mum had a job where they had this big double-decker called the play bus and she'd drive round the valleys set up and so kids could come on and play and it was seen as part of a left allowing kids to play facilitating kids to play

was seen as part of a left struggle. The great period for kind of outer space themed songs, you know, rock and pop songs is obviously the early 70s is the period following the moon landings. One we should really mention would be well Hawkwind the great progenitors British progenitors of an entire

subgenre referred to as space rock and there aren't many other there weren't really many other bands who ever got labelled that way the Hawkewind are a sort of institution in themselves that the nearest British equivalent to the Grateful Dead institutionally and culturally if not sonically

and my favourite track from their classic album In Search of Space is a track called You Shouldn't Do That which is just a kind of heavy rock space trip. Another aspect that's really important to talk about when we talk about physical space and the built environment and, you know, streets and commuting and where we go and come back from in our daily lives is not just whether people see those spaces as public when they move through them or whether they feel like they belong to someone else, but also the very literal safety, like whether people are safe in those spaces or not. and whether those spaces are built in a specific way that people are able to feel safe or not.

And obviously a big part of this is, you know, how spaces affect 50% of the population, i.e. women, especially women at night, because as I'm sure most of our listeners are aware, you know, the vast majority of women are constantly making, you know, every one of us are making calculations of like where we're going to go and how we're going to go and how we come back

and whether it's going to be safe to step out of our door and at this time of night and not depending on what spaces are actually stepping into. So I think we wanted to talk a little bit about reclaim the night here as well, which as I understand it,

is a movement to say, no, actually women are not going to stay at home for our safety. Like we want to be able to be on the streets as, you know, arguably like citizens or people of these cities and spaces and claim them for our own? That just makes me think actually about the discussion we were having earlier

about how is the public formed. That's partly how it's formed, isn't it, basically? Who is allowed to access public spaces and when and whose interests are taken into account over others? So that's where the reclaim the night developed in Leeds as a reaction to this bungal police investigation into the Yorkshire Ripper murders. And so the police said women shouldn't go out at night.

or should only be accompanied by a man or something like that when they go out. And it does beg the question, well, hang on, if you're going to ban women from going out at night, women are not the ones who are doing the attacking. Why don't you ban men, was the argument. Yeah, quite right. But I think it's because of what it symbolize it. It's because of what that, you know,

whether it was the police in the Yorkshire Ripper case or whether the Sarah Everard case having that reaction, all that did was epitomized the conversations that we as women are having all of the time, you know, when your mom or your female friend says, oh, don't go out at night or like maybe take a taxi or like, you know, we're constantly, constantly in a situation where our friends are saying, text me when you get home. Like, I rare men probably don't have that experience where I think most women, your friends will say text me when I get home. But once an authority says that, then it kind of brings it to fall that even though

it's not illegal. So this is not the same as a public space actually being private and you're not allowed to be there or there being a lock on the door. It's the invisible boundaries of day and night that stop women being able to move around it in a certain way because of how some men behave. Or also is the case with, you know, postcode wars and gang warfare as well. It's not just about women. There are other groups in society as well where there aren't actual laws, but there are boundaries which affect how people move around those spaces and how they feel about their lives and how what the boundaries are, the non-literal boundaries in terms of how they can live their lives and what they can do.

I just never really thought about it before that. It is actually just a negotiation about who counts as the public, isn't it? Your access to public space is like that, that's the absolute critical one. And that negotiation, that sounds like a nice thing. Obviously, that negotiation is riddled with violence, basically, and decisions about whose interest counts. Because, of course, there's things you can do to public space to increase safety. You could prioritize that by through lighting, et cetera, et cetera, and these sorts of things.

It then changes how you live your life, and it changes your subjectivity, and it changes your ability to live because of those boundaries. But it also makes me think about why neo-Nazis and fascists are so, like the most common, right back through history, the most common Nazi tactic is to march through a migrant area or an area or perhaps a leftist area. It's about that claiming of space. And the whole point of that, of course, is the threat of violence to be conducted against those who they don't want to belong to the public or to have access to public space. No, it is. It's really important. And I think that, you know, and the, you know, I mean, definitely Plan C and other groups on the left, you know, points when we were involved were saying we shouldn't be doing A to B marches in central London. We should be in communities because what it does is it's a show of strength. And if it's a show of strength by the right, that can have a huge psychological effect. If it's a show of strength by the left, it can also have a strong psychological effect, but hopefully with a different outcome. Yeah, to extend, to extend who's counted into the public. Yeah, rather than co-cotele.

Yeah, exactly. Let's talk about outer space. What do we think about outer space? I mean, it's back in the news, isn't it? After quite a long time, without it really being a kind of issue that got talked about very much because nobody was going there. The standard account of why millionaires are fascinated with going into space is because they're thinking about,

they're dreaming of just escaping planet Earth rather than save planet Earth from climate catastrophe. They're dreaming of just escaping from it. So it's really in our minds at the moment because Jeff Bezos went up in a penis-shaped rocket. Are there any rockets that are not penis-shaped? Well, it was very penis-shaped.

It was more penis-shaped than most rockets. Honestly, we'll put a picture of it up on the... On the show notes. Okay. Richard Branson went up in a rocket. And there's obviously, there is some sort of willy-waving competition about, you know, basically, these billionaires have got too much money. Do you know what I mean?

But when Jeff Bezos come back, he said, look, this is how we solve climate change. We can put all of our polluting industries into space, he says, and that will solve the problem of climate change. Like, that's just not going to happen. That's absolutely no way that that is going to happen. It's just not going to happen. It's just absolutely impossible. And Jeff Bezos does not believe it's going to happen.

So what's going on? And there's something going on about, it's like a fantasy, you know, that imaginary connection to space, the way we think about space is sort of changed over the years. And at the moment, it's absolutely connected to these two massive crises, climate change and huge, huge inequality. Those two crises are obviously linked in our heads. There's some sort of thing going on where space is now seen as this place where we can sort of put our waste, or perhaps it's like, you know, perhaps it's a second chance we can go

and, we can go and colonise Mars, etc. I think it's both things. It's a fantasy and it's poised as a fantasy and a solution. And I think it sits in the brain as both things at the same time. Like, well, maybe, well, maybe there can be hope here. Yeah, but I just don't think anyone believes it. But, but yeah, there's something odd going on anyway, basically. But it's also, I think it's interesting to think about the role that outer space has played in people's imaginary in the past and what an absolutely impoverished version of the space race we've got going on now. There's a big tradition of like left-wing people thinking about space, or socialists and communists thinking about space. There was a big sort of Russian cosmism movement around the time of the Russian Revolution just after the Russian Revolution.

a guy called Bogdanov wrote this, Bogdanov, isn't it? Bogdanov wrote this book called Red Star, which imagines a communist civilization on Mars, basically. We do like our star symbols on the left. The whole concept of early 20th century, late 19th century, it would make sense that space was kind of on the horizon very literally in terms of people thinking, well, where is socialism going to take us?

next. You're thinking that this is actually a left project and then the Cold War happened and then it kind of switched forces, didn't it? I don't know. It's an interesting one actually. David Graber's got this great argument when he says that the moon landings were the greatest achievement of the Soviet Union. And it's a nice argument because basically what he's saying is that that that model of a project, obviously you're right, the space race, early space race is tied up with the Cold War and they're basically wanting to develop ballistic missiles. to carry nuclear weapons and going into space is sort of a byproduct of that. But going to the moon is something else.

That's going beyond that. That's sort of like a project which is not based around, you know, economic production or the profit motive in any way, really. There's some spin-off effects, spin-off projects that come about, you know, a non-stick frying pans, etc. But that's a very expensive way to get non-stick frying pans going to the moon. So David Graber argues that basically the USA gets infected by that sort of, nonprofit-based, big, big, big projects that are actually more characteristics of the things

that were driving the Soviet Union and the US gets sort inflected by that in a way. That's a good argument to use against Mariana Mazzucatu, who Pujer mentioned actually in the microdose, and she talked about Marianna Muzikato's later's book. She talks about the moonshot as like the model that we should follow. That's how we should reorientate economics, basically. the capitalist economic should be reorientated around that era. But of course, what was driving that era was something else. It was like this Cold War, this sort of Soviet Union as this comparable, threatening economic system,

which seemed to be delivering quite a lot, you know, up until the late 1960s, seemed to be a competitor to the US. And in fact, it seemed to be doing things better than the US. And the symbol of that was Sputnik going around the first satellite, etc. you can't just pluck this out of thin air. The reason that capitalism does these things, which are not the normal way in which capitalism relates to technology, which is like small efficiencies, etc.

These really big, big projects, you know, there are very, very specific social forces driving that. So where are the social forces coming from now? I mean, for me as well, I mean, I've got a harder political economy reading of what the whole space, the capitalist new space race is about, really, which it is literally just a way. of burning up capital rather than reinvesting it in infrastructure or in wages or

historically it's a problem for capitalists at certain stages of development or certain points in the economic cycles that they've got a yeah capital has to be destroyed has to be liquidated or has to be expended otherwise you end up you know you end up inadvertently you're doing something that will empower it will empower workers and consumers and I think it is you they have all this profit and rather than invest it in anything that might risk empowering those other groups, they're just shitting it into space.

Yeah, I agree. Yeah, because what's the normal way which capital gets destroyed? Not the normal way, but yeah. War, yeah. So perhaps having a load of billionaires spunking their cash up

by a massive penis-shaped rockets, perhaps that's preferable. What about the song Don't Fence Me In by a lot of people but I suppose the most famous version is by Roy Roberts Rogers

So that's, in fact Roy Rogers is the singing Cowboy Isn't it? It's like a cowboy song And so it's that Give me land, lots of land Don't Fence Me In It's sort of like the imaginative

It speaks to the imaginative role That the Western Frontier has played in the US's conception of space really There's this empty space It's been emptied people It's been emptied by genocide but let's skip over that.

There's this wide empty space that you can go to. And of course, like that, in some ways, that plays into this idea of outer space as the frontier. That's why perhaps we have the billionaires going into outer space who see themselves as some sort of like rugged frontiers men. I don't know. It's a nice song anyway. Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above.

Don't fence me in. Let me ride through the wide. open country that I love don't fence me in let me be by myself in the evening breeze listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees send me off

forever but I ask you please don't fence me in it's a particular moment when the cowboy is being conceptualized as a sort of antidote to the excessive kind of conformity conformity of an increasingly bureaucratic type of industrial society.

So it's sort of completely imaginary. It's the cowboy not as a kind of entrepreneurial ranch or a colonial, you know, death dealer, but just as a kind of Delorsian nomad. The song that most relates to our present moment of space exploration where we have the billionaires in space is the song, well, actually probably like a poem, the song by Gil Scott Heron called Whitey's on the Moon,

It starts with this A rat done bit my sister But Whitey's on the moon I can't pay no doctor bill But Whitey's on the moon And it's so it's this idea That all of this money's been wasted On this moon shot

On space When there's all these problems That haven't been That haven't been addressed on earth A rat done bit my sister Nell With Whitey on the moon Her face and arms Began to swell

And Whitey's on the moon I can't pay no doctor bills But Whitey's on the moon. on the moon 10 years from now I'll be paying still while white is on the moon you know the man just off my rent last night because white is on the moon no hot water no toilets no lights but white is on the moon now that's really relevant obviously right that's really relevant uh to the situation we're in now where we've got all of these problems on earth climate change all these resources that need to be that need to be put into those and where those resources going they're going into space on these

sort of vanity missions, etc. In fact, I think the song is more relevant now than when Gil Scott Herron first wrote it, because I've got a very big soft spot for the moon landings, even though you may not be able to justify it in terms of those resources, should have gone somewhere else

as probably a good argument, but like you still have this expansive, you know, that human can could be bigger. Promethean. Promethean, yeah, but that's just not the case with Jeff Bezos us wanking off in space and this giant penis rocket.

So, and what about the, what is the future of public space do we think after, especially COVID? Because it's really, obviously COVID has really changed our relationship to space massively. I mean, it's been all about not traveling, not moving. What, not getting into the same space

as other people, basically, isn't it? I can't wait to party. I know I say this every thing. I can't wait for a rave. I know I say this every single episode. But, you know, I mean, I still think that's going to happen. I think people, and I said this on the Pooja microdose, I think it's fundamental to human

existence, okay, maybe it isn't fundamental. I would argue, no, that actually is fundamental to 21st century life that human beings congregate and have conversations with people who are not of your household or your family. Like it's so important. You have to have those discussions. Or even the thing that we're missing is spaces where you can discuss with people you don't know and people who aren't like you. Yeah, absolutely.

That's the most important element of like politics, basically. And that's what we've been missing. That's what that's been separate. That's what the high street was. One of the one example of the public, you know, the pubs aren't really public, aren't it. It's sort of privately owned public spaces. But then becoming commons is this phenomenon of local. communities buying their own pubs, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a big question. Do we think, I mean, do we think the high street is coming back? And this really came up in the interview with Pooja. Is the high street going to come back and do we want it to? Well, the high street is, as we've known it, is probably dead, I think, because I think, you know, that a high street is primarily thought of as a place of retail. And I think that's probably not going to come back, not to the same extent.

There's a huge debate at the moment about what you do with high streets and what you can, you know, give people a reason to go to them, to go into sound centres, etc. Like the only real solution, if it's not going to be about commerce, it's about creating public spaces. Congregation. Yeah. It's got to be. About spaces for conviviality, basically. So it'll be all of the bits that we, that Nadia just said, high streets are, yeah, high streets used to be about, you know, or shops used to be about places where you could meet people, etc. it's going to be all of that without the retail.

So then you have to work out, well, how does this get paid for? But there's also other things. Like even if there's not retail, there's still services, right? So we're like pro post office, pro the banks. You need high street banks. And there are some things that people are still going to buy there. But of course, like 50, 60% of retail is going to go. But, you know, there's all sorts of different ways that you can arrange those kind of units

so that people can have meeting spaces. That's the thing that we need. What about libraries? All the libraries that have been shut, bring back libraries, you know, even mini ones. Yeah, party spaces, clubs. Party spaces, little DJ booths, mini, mini bars and pubs. Come on, people can do it. Just listeners to the show alone could come up with enough ideas to just like make it work.

We just need Keir's municipalism, whatever it is, public commons. Common's partnerships. Yeah, no, I agree. We need some acid public common partnerships. There's no doubt about it. We are saying once again, reclaim the city. Yeah, but also the small towns, right? And the village is to say it's like, you know, high streets, everywhere.

High Street, the high street in a village is really important. It's a strange moment, though, in it? Because basically, we've been forced by COVID into our domesticated, Edipal spaces, these homes which sort of isolate us off. We've been interacting virtually. But of course, that tends to be with people. What you tend to miss with that are those interactions that you didn't expect or interactions where you bump into somebody or interactions with people that you don't know already,

although you do have those on Twitter, I suppose. They're not very pleasant quite often. So we've been forcing to our homes and then, you know, at the same time, the places where, which were sort of those private public spaces are in a state of collapse. So, you know, there's this desperate need to get out of our houses and create, you know, to get, to get that conviviality, the spaces of conviviality again. So I think this is a great moment to try to do that, basically.

I mean, loads of people are still going to the pound shop, I'm going to say that, including myself. So, you know, I think there's, it also, like, dovetails with questions around the economy as well. And in terms of, like, people's economic pockets and where people buy their stuff. So until the pound shop closes down, you know, I still think there's going to be retail.

And on that bombshell. This is asking. Thank you.