ACFM - #ACFM Trip 8: Acid Urbanism

Episode Date: February 16, 2020

Nadia Idle, Jeremy Gilbert and Keir Milburn discuss Acid Urbanism, including, The Right to the City, Communist Follies and Reclaiming the Streets. Edited and produced by Olivia Humphreys, Matt Huxley and Matt Phull. PRS LICENCE NUMBER: LE-0016481 Tracklist: D-Shake – Techno Trance/ The Lovin’ Spoonful – Summer in the City/ David Bowie – London Bye, […]

Everyone move on the street. When those few students in Paris took his ideas, turned them into a reality, made the streets and virtually brought down the government de Gaulle, excited us all over here no end. It's not what, you know, people tend to follow the kind of flow dynamics of the crowd. And that plays very much into the hands of developers who want to screen places off. They want to not only negate art, but as the way DeBoer put it, also realize it, which is to say, make of daily life a creative, continuously original, delirious, ecstatic experience.

Hello and welcome to ACFM. My name's Keir Milburn, and I'm joined once again by Nadia Idle. Hello. And Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. Today we're discussing acid urbanism, which means we want to discuss ideas such as the right to the city, not just the ideas, but also the actions and slogans through which this idea of the right to the city is put into practice. So we'll also be discussing things such as reclaimless streets,

situationist derives, all that sort of good stuff. So the right to the city is probably useful if I introduced that just very briefly. The right to the city is associated with Honorille Fabre, who wrote a book called Right to the City in 1968. You know, in various ways that have sparked this whole series of discussions about what cities are for and what cities are for. they should be for. At the minute we'd probably say that cities are dominated by a particular logic, right? And that logic is a logic of extraction. How do we extract the maximum amount of

rents of various kinds from the people who live in the cities or the people who visit the cities as well? You know, that's all just another way of saying that cities are dominated by the logic of finance or finance capital. The way that actually works is municipal authorities sort of see their role as facilitating whatever the large developers want to do. They call it like developer-led development. The problem is that model of the city is definitely in crisis. It's in crisis firstly because of the whole climate crisis, right?

But also it's just in crisis on its own terms, as in. The cities are increasingly difficult to live in, or they're increasingly difficult to live well in. So the right to the city is about asserting our right to live in a city, to live well in a city, but also our right to collectively determine how cities develop. So to collectively answer the question, what cities are for? All right, who wants to chip in? Nadia? So when we talk about right to the city or reclaim the streets, I think it's important to have a think about what are we reclaiming the city for and why do we need to reclaim the city and what right do we want that we don't have already?

So I think one of the key things to note is the affect or like rather the emotional kind of landscape of how a citizen or a non-citizen or someone who exists in the space of the city, along with other people, feels about occupying that space. And what I mean by that is experientially, when you leave the door to go to your workplace or to a social event or you try and move around the space, how does the space actually make you feel? and do you feel a sense of constriction

of wanting to pass through that space as quickly as possible because it's really crowded, people are getting in the way, it's really loud, you have all of this noise around you, visual and audio noise, like all of those different things,

or is it a space which maybe is the other extreme, which is it's barren, there's no one around, it's really depressing, it's all tumbleweed, etc., Or some of the positive ways that you could experience it is you feel like your city is really well designed. Or you not even if you think, you don't necessarily need to know that or think about that consciously. But you might be able to move through the space in a way where there's lots of places to sit, where you don't have to pay money, you don't feel like you're under surveillance.

And there's all of these different aspects to being able to go and come from it that don't cost you money. and don't cost your head a lot of stress. And that experience of what it's like to be in a city has changed dramatically under neoliberalism. Now, that doesn't mean that all cities were perfect beforehand and there weren't like serious antagonisms in people's experiences. But the key thing under neoliberalism is this kind of shiny, commercialized pollution,

especially visual and auditory pollution that we experience. So, for example, in London, on the London Underground, which is paid for by public funds, because of this, I think it's the public private initiative or whatever. Somebody can correct me if I'm wrong. The tube is absolutely covered with advertising, and not only is it covered with advertising, It's advertising that is now video advertising that's talking to you.

So it's very, very difficult to kind of have an experience of being on the underground, on transport that isn't expensive, isn't crowded and where you're not bombarded with sounds and images. So therefore, if we're thinking about reclaiming transport in a city, what would that look like? I mean, that point about branded space, I think is really important, actually, Because we had, I mean, in the past sort of 10 years in London, we had the introduction of these, you know, network of publicly owned bicycles that, like, anyone can borrow from a kind of, you know, location

and then use a really small fee and then put them back. And, you know, they're called, you know, their nickname Boris Bikes, because Boris Johnson was mayor of London when they were brought in or that I don't think it was his initiative. But they're totally, they're all kind of brand. I mean, the thing is that, I mean, to me, I was amazed when that was first.

started because that it's sort of part of you know anarchist folklore the kind of free bicycle scheme that was set up was sort of initiated by so basically the anarchist group on the municipal council in the Amsterdam to the late 60s or early 70s called

the white bicycles and it was just like it was just like the idea was there was just a load of bicycles paid for all by the city and anybody could ride them and just just leave them anywhere and then whoever needed one would pick one up and ride it and I remember being told about this by my dad there's this like piece of sort of utopian as I say

folklore I mean the you know the Boris bikes are basically the same idea but then they completely ruined it by totally by just branding it they've all got the names of banks on them but also it's not free sponsorship logos it's not free

that's the key thing is that's really interesting as you were saying that I was like wow that really sounds utopic and that's not at all my experience of how how I relate to the Boris bikes or whatever because it's like oh that's going to

take my data. Oh, it's really complicated. I have to sign up to it. I mean, maybe it's not, but I've not tried them, to be honest. And that's partly assisted, of course, by our wonderful communist-style bike hire system that we have in London, which is funded by Barcliffe, bank, I'm delighted to say. I mean, the relationship between the idea of reclaiming the city and, you know, pushing back against, you know, branding is related to sort of anti-gentrification campaigns, isn't it? And it was part of the sort of rhetoric of reclaim the city. streets in the 90s. I mean, reclaimed the streets became associated with the kind of anti-corporate movement that, you know, Naomi Klein made a reputation writing about, you know, which was, which was

about this, I mean, it was seen as, you know, part of the politics of reclaiming the streets in the 90s was this sense that the sort of capture of the streets by, really by cars, which was this sort inherently alienating and alienated devices, was continuous with the sort of capture of public space and people's imaginations by brands. And it all had to be sort of pushed back against. Yeah. I mean, Reclaim the streets are an interesting example, actually, of like an activist form,

which was really, was based around like reimagining or trying to break with the contemporary way which we think about cities and try to reimagine what they'd be like if we just changed a few things. So that Reclaim the streets were street parties where a particular road would be occupied. And then we, and so that would be denied to the, to traffic, which is what is normally, you know, normally, so it's such a huge part of the city is devoted to the free flow of traffic, perhaps less so now, but certainly certainly still true.

So it'd be blocked off from that use and then you'd have to reinvent a new use because reclaim the streets came out of the rave scene, basically, via the Criminal Justice Act, which banned repetitive beats, etc. you know, basically what people mainly did was have street parties. And that street parties, you know, that basically there'd be sound systems blasting out, usually techno. And that would bring the numbers. But there were also attempts to do other stuff by reclaim the streets. They'd bring sofas in. They'd bring sand pits in to try and think, right, if we didn't have cars.

Yeah, we tariffed up Parliament Square in the year 2000 and May Day. Yes, that's true. Covered the whole of Parliament Square, all the streets round it with green and... I remember. Yes, I remember Winston Churchill wearing a Green Mohican from the sort of like the exemplar of the reclaiming the streets, the best, you know, the most famous incidents was when they reclaimed the M41 in 1994, which I wasn't at. But that's like the classic example of like, this is what this action is about. So there was a big street party like 6,000, 7,000 ravers brought onto this motorway, blocked the motorway. then it had all, they had mechanisms for blocking it, you know, these tripods of people on them,

et cetera. But like the myth, or not the myth, the truth about that was that amongst the ravers, there were these people on sort of stilts, wheel stilts, the people dancing on these weed stilts, so, you know, probably like 10 foot in the air. And over those stilts were sort of wire netted dresses, basically. And beneath those dresses were people with power tools who were digging up the M4 Then they planted trees in the holes, basically, that they dug up. Amazing.

Of course, the sound of the power tools was covered by the tech now, so it was a perfect thing. It was, let's dig up these motorways and we can recreate it as a forest. You know what I mean? It's a beautiful example of direct action to change things, you know, to change things in the immediate now. But like with that very utopian sort of dimension to it, there's a big tension, right? One of the reasons we have to reimagine the city is because, you know, they are now based around unsustainable infrastructures, right? We have to green the cities, right? That's one of the urges to green the cities.

But the mentality of the problem of climate change tends to lead you to a sort of like managerialist utilitarian mindset, do you know what I mean? So it's like, let's get the most efficient use of everything, do you know what I mean? Let's get all the systems to be as efficient as possible. You know, but there are big traditions in the left about trying to reimagine cities which depart in a completely different way. Do you know what I mean? And so, well, instead of just like this, you know, the most utilitarian use of the city, let's imagine it in a completely different way. Do you know what I'm saying? So one of the things we have to talk about is like we have to talk about the situationist, basically, and this practice of the deriv, etc.

Right. Because that's all about, like, this city could be completely and utterly different. Do you know what I mean? It could be different in ways we can't. imagine at the moment. And, you know, there's this huge utopian sort of element to sort of redeveloping cities. I think that's a really, it's an interesting sort of, it's an interesting tension or dynamic at the moment. So explain, you better explain who situationists were and what the derive was. Okay. Well, the situation is...

Dereve meaning drift, remember. Drift, yeah. So the situations were a sort of a political group that came out of the sort of avant-garde are of the post-war period and so you know they were concerned with you know establishing workers councils and all these sorts of things but they went one of their they got real they had a real obsession with urbanism and in fact it's it's like a pre-situationist text or the classic text of for sort of like it's if you it's probably the text the earth text if you wanted an acid communist urbanism it's by it's called a formulae of a new urbanism

by Ivan Chechglove. And so I came across this because it plays a big part in Graham Marcus' book about the Sex Pistols, Lipstick Traces. Basically, it's a fantastic book, and everyone should read it. And it's just this sort of like this half delirious

sort of rant about what the city, that the city could be completely different. Do you know what I mean? And it's got these, it's got a really classic, classic lines in it. So there's one line in it. It's which it's seed in my head about, you know, given the choice between love and a garbage disposer, young people all around the world have chosen the garbage disposer.

But it also carries the line, the hacienda must be built, right? And that's why the hacienda club in Manchester was called the hacienda. That was this Tony Wilson, who was the man, you know, this sort of, we'll talk about Tony Wilson perhaps a bit later, but, you know, this sort of incredible character from Manchester who was like, you know, a figure on the local news and the manager of like lots of very influential Manchester bands

but very influenced by sort of like the situationist theory and art theory, you know, so he, yeah. But like so in this, in this sort of this formulary for a new urbanism, like it sort of talks about, it talks about, you know, the need to reimagine everything basically. And it says, you know, we could, what we need to have is, like, you know, we need to have different cities, different quarters in the city devoted to different feelings. So there should be a noble quarter, a tragic quarter, a sinister quarter, a useful quarter, which should have all the sort of hostpals in it, a bizarre quarter. I need to read this text.

Was that the one, it was either in that one or in some later situationist tract, they said that after the revolution, when of course, all religion would become superfluous, churches. would be preserved as places in which to experience fear, which would, yeah, because fear would not be a part of anybody's everyday life anymore in, in, after the revolution. So it becomes this archaic thing that you, you, like, I mean, it's like archaic emotion, which you have to go and experience to remember what you've, yeah, yeah, I've always liked that idea.

Also sounds a bit Maoist, but as a practice, but okay. But in this, in this text as well, it lists all of these sorts of things and then it says, you know, you know, for the main act, in this, in this utopian city, the main activity would be like drifting, a continuous drifting for between these like changing landscapes,

do you know what I mean? And so that's this idea of the drift or the derive is that like, you know, it was actually a practice that they put into, you know, they used to do these derives and make reports out of them. And you'd be, it'd be about drifting,

drifting through a city to try to break, from, you know, seeing the city through the logic of capital, right? So it's this idea that, like, normally when we move through a city, when we walk through a city, you know, we're doing it for a purpose, but that purpose is not necessarily freely chosen by us, right, if you step back a moment. So perhaps you're on your way to work, perhaps you're on your way to go shopping, etc. You know, that's not you freely choosing these things.

This is you, at least partly being formed by the needs of capital to grow. Do you know what I mean? And so their idea would be, would be you try to drift through a city in order to sort of break from those and try to discover the, you know, other lines of desire or whatever. So you could sort of think about it. They're trying to, they're trying to sort of like do some sort of time travel thing where they're trying to find different like desires that are nascent in a city because the cities aren't just built by capital. They're also inhabited by people and people turn them to their own forms, et cetera. So, I mean, I think it's an important point. It's worth more than making the idea of the city as an alienated and it.

individualising space doesn't begin with neoliberalism at all. So there's a whole, all the literature on the city and on the aesthetics of the city from the 19th century onwards is about its alienating quality. And some people kind of get off on its alienating quality. Some people, you know,

some people find the anonymity of the city to be liberating. I mean, I'm going to say, I mean, this is always my way of looking at things really, but there's two sort of axes through which the city is thought about experience. It's the place of the crowd or the mob, you know, or the you know the people the collective you know and it's the place where our collectivities are formed

it is it in heart and negri's words it is the birthplace of the multitude um and you know and therefore the home of democracy and like the great historic like eruption of that of that possibility is that you know it's the paris you know the paris or mob in the french revolution and the paris commune in 1870 and on the other hand it's also the space of absolute atomization and alienation it's the It's the place where, for the first time, human beings experience being in a space on a daily basis, not just exceptionally, they don't know most of the people they see around them. And it's sort of both those things at the same time, and it's always both those things at the same time, and it always has the potential to be both.

I mean, it's clear actually, even going back to ancient times, look at how people talk about the difference in city life and rural life. It has the potential to be both. It has the potential to be the place where democracy becomes really possible, because people get together and discuss stuff, instead of just. having stuff done to them or doing stuff the way it's always been done. But it's also the space of like, you know, possible just atomisation because you don't know your neighbours and you don't know who the people you are passing in the street. And it's always got the potential to be both.

And to some extent, the political struggle is always over, you know, which of those it's going to be. And then, I mean, in the middle ages, I think it's sort of mentioned this earlier, so in the middle ages is, you know, because the cities do become the place where people escape from, you know, served them to there's that fantastic you know traditional that german phrase i mean i don't speak german i can't remember what is in german but it but it translates as the city air makes you free and that was the a reference to you know the actual legal position that if us if serfs you know people who were you know who are legally um obliged to um you know they weren't quite slaves chattel slaves but they were legally obliged to you know farm a particular bit of land and hand over most

the product to the person who owned it or controlled it for life. If they escaped and went to live in a city in a free city and lived there for a year in a day, then they were legally free and were allowed to be part of the city community. So the cities became and the cities became places where people who didn't want to participate in feudalism sort of joined together and bound it together and that's where the kind of bourgeoisie come from. That's where

capitalism comes from but it's also where socialism and the possibility of socialism comes from at the same time. But that freedom is, it's like, that freedom or even that alienation is sort of ambiguous, isn't it? Right. I think that gets back to what I was sort of trying to say earlier about this tension between, you know, the hyper-efficient city of a green city and like the city with like spaces for the new to emerge or whatever. Because, you know, that, the alienated experience of it being the first time where you don't, most of the people you meet you don't know, that is also a condition for a certain type of freedom, right?

the freedom to reinvent yourself, do you know what I mean? 100%. If you compare it to like rural life where everybody's in your business all the time, do you know what I mean? Just rural life. I mean, you know, I mean, that's the thing that I found that I always found incredibly liberating about London, you know, as a woman coming from Egypt, having left Egypt, one of the main reasons because of sexual harassment, like, I found that suddenly I was in London and most people like didn't care what you looked like and who you were.

like whether you're a woman or not, and I was not constantly being treated in this very specific way. And London, I think, is very liberating like that, in that you've got that anonymity. And if you're trying to figure out, like, who you are or what you want or what you want to do, it does have that.

But the extent at which the forces of neoliberalism, the kind of alienating of neoliberalism that we're seeing now, I think, has started to push it in the other direction, where it's almost impossible to form bonds because of the practicality of day-to-day life, because of housing and transport and costs, etc. So going back to your point, Keir, which I think is a really interesting one, I would almost put that as efficiency versus luxuriating. And I would see luxuriating as like a really important acid concept,

both in terms of spice, spice, not spice. Spice smoking. Not spice, definitely not spice. but space and time is what I wanted to say as in yes there there is definitely you could you could see yourself going down this mentality of like in order to be green one must be as efficient as possible and that ends up creating a certain experiential dynamic which is which is not one where you have all of this time to sit down in space and and be bored and get to know people randomly or like walk around or fall. into new parts of the city, etc., which I think is really important. And maybe we'll come up and when we talk about some of the proposals

that came up in our workshop and the world transformed. Yeah, we should get to that in a minute. I think I would say the best book I've read recently about the sort of the connection between urbanism and ecology is Ashley Dawson's book, Extreme Cities, a friend of the show, Ashley Dawson.

I know he listens. Shout out to Ashley. His book, Extreme Cities, a New York-based academic. And he makes a very solid case that actually, you can't solve the climate crisis without completely reinventing the city, which you can't do without challenging the power of capital over the city and everything else, and that you really couldn't create. I think he makes a pretty good case implicitly,

and in some places explicitly, you could not create the sort of technocratic green city, which no doubt sort of the Silicon Valley and the sort of, allies in the sort of, you know, remnants of third way neoliberalism do dream or that it just, that it couldn't do that. It wouldn't work. It's that not, isn't it pushing this. You could only, you could only, that the only city that will really function properly and, and result in sufficient levels of, you know, decarbonisation would be one that would have to slow down to some extent in certain ways. It would have to be, it wouldn't, it would just necessarily provide those spaces of conviviality because, you know, there just, there would have to be loads of green space in it. There

would have to interrupt the flows of traffic, et cetera. Now, I'm completely losing track of what I'm, I'm thinking, what I got from the book, and what I'm just interpolating in through now. But, I mean, this is what the book made me think about, whether it's because it said it or because I thought it. You know, you just couldn't. You couldn't, you wouldn't get that.

We have to have green cities or we're all debt. And we're not going to get green cities without shorter working weeks, you know, completely different kinds of transport networks, loads more green space, you know, in ways that just, wouldn't, you know, that kind of green sheen efficiency just wouldn't actually be able to function in that way. So that is, and it sort of does, it's another version of Kears, you know, remark he keeps making, the climate change present us with a situation where it's just, it is

like, it is revolution or death now. You know, there isn't really a kind of moderate, there is no third way now for us to take, you know, it's too late for that, to be honest. They should have, you know, if they wanted to, if they wanted, if they wanted a kind of moderate, you know, incremental reform, they should have started sorting out decarbonisation in the early 90s instead of just fucking, you know, imposing massive deregulation on the whole global economy. You know, it's too late for that now. Now we're either going to get, the hacienda is going to be built. Our way or the highway. The hacienda is going to be built with fucked, we're dead. And we should say what the hacienda, what does it even mean? It's

like, it's, was it a Spanish word? I think hacienda is just like a big house. Isn't a Hacienda big house? Yeah, it is, yeah. No, I think the Hacienda is much more to do with like a sense of luxury and like, you know, you being on the veranda of your hacienda. It's the estate, in it? Yeah, it's like the estate. Yeah, it's like your country estate. Yeah. But, but, you know, for us. Yeah. Which obviously we want. The country estate for everyone. It might just be that country houses, you know, country manners for all sort of thing, but in the city, that sort of idea. But that does bring us, like, it brings us onto this, because you mentioned like, luxuriating.

Yeah, some of my favourite words to repeat. Yeah, but, and so, like, when we're talking about, like, the Hasseander must be built or, or, or, you know, we have, you know, has the ender or death, whatever's on the T-shirt. Like, that's not, you know, we are not pushing against a closed door, right?

You know, in the Commonwealth, released the report, so this new think tank called Commonwealth, release a report about, how to get to a green new deal. And actually it's got like a map of a green New Deal city from 2013. You can go and click on all these things. One of the things it says, it says, you know, what we must have is communal luxury.

And in fact, they do say that we have to have spaces for collective joy. You need space of collective joy. We need communal luxury and private sufficiency is the idea. You can't have private luxury. Private luxury is killing us. We can't all have the luxury, you know, on a private level. but we could have communal luxury. And so that sort of brings us to this question again,

of like, well, what does luxury mean? Does it mean, you know, I've got the best coffee pot. I've got the best watch. My watch really tells the time, well, well, that's not really what luxury is. It's not that super utilitarian thing. It's much more ostentatious. And, you know, I've got it in my head like follies.

Do you know what I mean? Where in Victorian times, people built these follies, these utterly useless artifacts, basically, these buildings which mock. mock sort of castles etc do you know what I mean and it was these things of I like the idea of follies we need communist follies do you know what I mean

these things which are just built because they look beautiful and they may you know and people may find uses for them do you know what I mean that doesn't fit into this sort of technocratic efficiency sort of city no it no it doesn't but also because the key

thing that I would that I want policy policy past to create is time and space for people because I don't want to spend any more of my time. In fact, I've actually given this up and I talk about it quite directly to people. I don't want to catch up for a coffee with anyone anymore. It's such a crock of shit. I want to sit down with people for five, six, seven hours and hang out. I'm not interested in this kind of like minute city neoliberal forced way of interacting with other people in some kind of like transaction where you

catch up with people who you've not seen for like eight weeks because everything's so expensive and you don't have any time. So what I want policy to do in cities is to facilitate the physical space and the space in time for people to be able to relate to each other as human beings, which of course has revolutionary potential, which is why it's dangerous. Yeah, that's a really good point. I mean, that relates to kind of Lefebvre's idea of politics of space. And of course, it's, you know, the tradition within the socialist tradition, within Marxism, the tradition is to be focused on time. Because basically that is what the struggle, the class struggle over the value of labor,

it always is. It's how much is your time worth. You know, that is what you sell when you say your labor power. And the point made by people like Lefevre is, well, actually, we also need to talk about space, about who gets access to space. And in fact, a point I've never really thought of it, in exactly these terms before. But historically, that's one of the strengths of the right,

is the right has something to say about space with its nations of territory and home and nation. I have been saying this for about six months. Whereas the left usually, I mean, it wants to appeal to kind of imaginary universal space of the imaginary universal space of, you know, the globe, the international working class, whatever. But I think we also, and the city,

I mean, that's partly why I mean, people have been saying for decades in different times that thinking about the city, you know, as a locus of political activity and the right to the city is important for the left because that's partly one of the ways in which the left get to open a politics of space

by valorizing, by valuing the cosmopolitanism of the city instead of being sort of afraid of it. Up to London, no doubt. Go to London. I guarantee you'll either be much more. or not appreciated. Catch the train to London, stopping at rejection, disappointment, backstabbing central and shattered dreams parkway. In terms of British political culture,

the left only does well when the general mood of the country is quite positive towards London and towards urban life generally. So in the 60s, I mean, the high point of kind of Labour's vote in the 60s is 66 is the year of swinging London. like London is the place everyone wants to be and everyone kind of looks to and during periods when everybody hates London and just thinks of it's somewhere they want to get away from

they want to resent, they want to punish, they want to leave if they have to live there. You know, when the imaginary of the country becomes sort of faux pastoral or suburban, that's always better for the Tories, that's always better for the Conservatives. So even for people who don't live in London, I think, you know, there's something about the idea,

or don't live in a city, there's something about urbanity, about the idea that, well, basically, it is nice to live in a cosmopolitan environment and to live in a culture where you're in relatively close proximity to lots of other people and you can all kind of move around and do stuff together that is part of the left sort of imaginary kind of necessarily always that's part of the sort of geographic split of Brexit as well isn't it it it's like the urban areas are left basically well they did but the point the point made by and denny barnet is for example that's true in england it's the cities that voted

leave and everywhere else the vote to remain and everywhere else voted leave but That's not true, say, in Scotland, in Scotland, even people in little villages voted to remain. And one of the things that happened in Scotland over the past 10 years is kind of broad, kind of moderately social democratic, but sort of, you know, confidently cosmopolitans or imaginary that kind of radiates out from Glasgow, you know, has really sort of become a shared national imaginary. The Glasgow, that Scotland, even though it isn't particularly urban, isn't particularly urban, sort of place or thinks of it to, you know, people in Scotland who don't live in the big cities are happy to participate, to some extent, in this kind of, you know, what we would think of as a kind of urban

mountainary. And it's through that that the left has actually become completely hegemonic in Scotland. So I think there is something important there. I mean, Scotland's got two cities, though, isn't it? To, you know, Glasgow and Edinburgh, like, that, you know, London is those two rolled together times 10 or something. Do you know what I mean? As it like, yeah, that's what makes the youth, what's what makes England so unbalanced? I mean, I think it does point to the really interesting question and thinking about the right to the city, which is like, what does, well, what, what does it mean for people who don't live here? I mean, what sense do we, do we want to claim the right to the city for people who don't live here? And I always

think it's important to say that, well, like, I think, you know, on the one hand, yeah, we all know that Britain is in desperate need of regional rebalancing, that we just need loads of resources pulled out of London and put to every other part of the country. But also, it's never going to cease to be the fact that London is, you know, the only, it's the only world city on its scale in Western Europe. I mean, it's the only one this side of Istanbul. So, and, you know, it is always going to have a particular status. And we also should say that, but I think, you know, as a Londoner,

I want to say, well, actually, London should be much easier for everyone else in the country to get in and out of and just use as a resort in any way they want to. And again, there is a sort of historic precedent. for that because the Labour government, the 40s Labour government, when they created the Festival of Britain as this kind of national year-long festival of socialist modernisation, a part of the project was getting people from all over the country to come and come to the festival site on the South Bank and participate. Can you imagine something like that happening now? No, no, no, no, exactly. That's yet another example. I mean, there was, just to interrupt you,

sorry on that, the exhibition about the Festival of Britain that was done in the South. Bank last year was just incredible, just looking at the pictures of it and going, look, look at this as an event, just the imagination of it. It is incredible. I would say anyone sort of visiting London, and even though to people who don't visit London, because hardly anybody who doesn't have kids even knows this, you should go and visit the South Bank Centre, which was created for all the festival, but was created as this great kind of monument to a kind of mid-century social democratic paternalist, you know, still quite hierarchical idea of public culture. It is kind of extraordinary

arts complex, but it was built on that way. But then, the greater London Council, the kind of radical new left council under Ken Livingston, they implemented a policy of making it much more of a kind of community space. And they implemented a practice which is still in place to this day

whereby actually the whole centre is treated as a sort of community space. So you can just rock up with kids and they're just allowed to play in any of the corridors. As long as there's not something specific going on there. So that is an absolute instantiation of what happens when the kind of politics of, you know, stateist social democracy is then further radicalised by a wave of democratisation in the early 80s. And it's the most utopian sort of experience for me. One of the most utopian

experience you can have in London is just go with some little kids, the South Bank, and just centre and realise that, oh, it's not just a kind of stuffy art centre. Like you're allowed, the kids are allowed to just run all over the place and playing it. And we're allowed to run it over the place and play with it as well, which is why so many people have had, like, book club meetings and, you know, political meetings there. And I just want to echo what you've said because I love the South Bank Centre. And it's so great. And it's called the People's Palace for a reason.

Like Thatcher tried to shut it down effectively at one point. But interestingly, there's two things that has happened at the South Bank Center, which, I mean, they've made me incredibly sad. And whenever I think about me, this, it really worries me because I see it going down the same route as, you know, all the privatization of everything, which is one, they've taken away all the plug so nobody can plug in their laptops anymore, which used to be the general thing that anyone could plug in their laptop and, you know, use it. And you'd get loads of people who don't have access to all sorts of stuff being able to work and or socialize from there via the laptops. And the second thing is, I don't know if this still exists, but there's definitely the case last year and I had a confrontation with someone, they've got these kind of like blue-shirted security people who try and stop anyone who looks like they're not middle class from basically hanging around. That's the exact sort of stuff that I think we need policy to be dealing with. Because that creep, that creep is coming in everywhere, whether it's a club or a public space or whatever. No, I completely agree.

London by Tata, strange young town London by Tata brought me down Don't like a new face That's not nice Got to go far far London right Tata Okay So at the World Transformed

Which is a festival Which happens every year it's in its fourth year now, alongside Labour Party Conference in the UK. Every year, a group of us who record this podcast, but also a wider crew, put on

an acid, so we have an acid-corbinist kind of slot, it's called, on the Monday night. And this year, we started at about 730s on the third day of the world transformed and conference, so

expected people to be pretty tired. But we started our event with basically this proposal that we wanted people to get into small groups and imagine that they lived in a medium-sized city and that their local municipality or council or whatever had passed policy to try and maximize joy in their city. And therefore, at this point in time, we wanted to imagine them to be joy consultants and come up with three proposals. Oh, my God, were people excited? People were really enthusiastic and came up with some fantastic and also hilarious proposals. I can see three different themes come up. One is a lot of people wanting to enable communal eating and other people, talking about communal play and rest and creches for adults and kids. So there's a lot of

talking about those spaces as well. And then quite a lot of people talking about transport. Those were the, let me say, the more traditional kind of. I don't want to say traditional, because that sounds really bad. But those are the main themes that I sort of gleaned from that. There were also seemed to be really randomly a thread of people talking about water-based activities such as spas, hot tubs and peach ice tea fountains, amongst other things. So should we talk about this theme of the spaces for eating, play, rest and maybe transport as well? I remember like communal feasting was something that came up a lot. I mean, communal eating, the idea that there should be more communal eating is an idea. it's one of those ideas that has come from kind of utopian urbanism and it's been adopted as

quite an easy, quite an easy win by just kind of mainstream, quite mainstream kind of liberal discourse. So there's that there's that thing that happens every year, like, you know, where you're supposed to like basically have a street party or a big, with your neighbours that various kind of liberal guardian economists like to promote. There's that. And then I noticed just the other day, and, you know, the big, um, that at the edge of the housing development, um, in the Olympic Park in Stratford, they've got these kind of free kind of barbecue areas, you know, where people can just, you know, anybody can just rock and have barbecues. And it is all really nice.

I mean, it is, it is good, but it is also interesting that it's been kind of adopted. I mean, my worry is it's been adopted as in a classic kind of third way, you know, Blair-Eight, neoliberal sort of move or something. Well, it's very easy. It's basically cost-free to just say, yeah, yeah, it's a good idea. Everybody should have street parties occasionally. People should have barbecues in the street. And I think, I'm totally for it, but I also think, well, in some ways I would say, actually, you've got to think, well, you've got to see that stuff as symptomatic. And you've got to say, well, if that isn't happening spontaneously, there's something, there's deeper stuff with the society you've got to fix. I'm not sure just giving people barbecue areas is.

We could compare that with, there was this proposal for a national food service. Yeah. And so this is going around social media the other day. And people were saying that, like, you know, in the post-war period, there were a series of nationally run restaurants where you could get a meal for the equivalent of a pound a day. So whatever, that would be, you know, a healthy meal for the equivalent of, so that's like the idea of that's sort of like people's kitchens or something like that. Or, you know, somewhere you could go and get your food if you were in a real rush, but it would be, so that's not feasting. You know, that's not that celebratory feasting. It's more of a sort of utilitarian. But both, but both are, I mean, I would see that as, again, revolutionary in London now and in other cities as well.

The idea that you could have, you know, like how many calves have closed down, for example, like you could have long tables or you could just have any tables in every few streets that would be this place and it would be, you know, subsidized by the government. I'm hugely support that. I mean, the one that, the one you were talking about, Jeremy, is it was started by the Eden project. It's called the Big Lunch. And I mean, I don't know how I feel about that, actually, because I ordered the pack for this year because I actually wanted to do the big lunch in my street. Because in the 1980s, you know, we used to have street parties all the time in my area. I remember them from when I was a kid, but that doesn't happen anymore. And from an organizing perspective, I'm happy to use any to, you know, like jump on the bandwagon of like any national thing, you know, even like stuff like McMillan, coffee.

mornings or whatever to in a way that I can get in touch with my neighbours and people living in my area like I find that I find these really useful I'm while also having a critique for the fact that of course the reason why we can't just do this is there needs to be an event for everything is symptomatic of course 100% yeah I agree well it's a but also it's just a persistent problem from a lot of things we're interested in isn't it that well how do you there's a very fine line between something just become a becoming a way of treating a symptom or becoming a a mode of temporary escape from capitalist alienation and it becoming an actually, you know,

implicitly revolutionary means of challenging it. And I think, you know, you don't know in advance a lot of the time which way it's going to go and it depends on the politics. So, yeah, I mean, the big lunch is something that could easily be politicised rather than just dismissed out of hand by cynics. But perhaps it's like universality of access is the key, do you know what I mean? And not just formal access, but like, you know, the means to actually. access this. Because that's the problem with all of these sort of like, you could even call them big

society type things. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Based on certain types of areas with people with certain amounts of resources and they probably don't want certain types of people to turn up. I mean, it's different for, you know, maybe I'm thinking about it from a suburban perspective, but I think it would work in cities as well. Like, it's also important if there's an excuse for literally everyone on that street to come out and meet other people, it just breaks, it just does break down barriers. I know it's a cliche, but it, but it, but it's, It does. That's why the Royal Weddings of the 1980s was so marvellous.

Exactly. Exactly. I remember the Royal Wedding party when I was like. Hit on me after that. But what, but that's really important to look at. And I think it totally is that when we do an episode in the future about the far right,

etc., which I would love us to do in terms of like the emotional affect and the language that's used. And we touched on that earlier, I think it was Jeremy when you were talking about how come it's that the right has this thing about place and, you know, the left has always talked about time. And I think that's really, really interesting. But, you know, it's this memory. Like, I have really fond memories of being a kid at, you know, like royal street parties

because those were the street parties. You know, that's what I remember. But it's not about the royal wedding and the same way that it's also not about Corbyn in terms of like when we see the collection of people coming together, like the stories that are told about the things that happen and how people connect with each other and the relationships that are built, and nothing to do with this national event or this national figure. It's just an excuse, really. Yeah, that's true. It's a good point, but also, I mean, the counter to that is always to say, but the very fact that the desire for

communality gets captured by images of royalty, nationality, sovereignty is also a problem. Of course. I was also thinking as well, with reference to the big society and sort of, you know, the danger of sort of sticking parts of state policies that, well, it does matter to people and it affects people's sense of well-being and empowerment if they're living in a really shitty environment, if there's broken glass everywhere, if there's rubbish everywhere. But there's a kind of right-wing version of that position, which is that the so-called theory of broken glass, broken windows policing, which became really influential in New York, for example, in the 90s, which is, you know, the idea that literally you'll change, you'll, the way

to deal with kind of, you know, a situation where you've got quite high, very high crime rates of so-called anti-social behaviour is that you tidy it up, you clean the streets, you fix the windows, and that will affect the mood and will affect the vibe and affect everyone's behaviour. And then real, real sort of, you know, real crime will also decline. And there's a sort of, I mean, it's generally associated with really reactionary policies, which really like really sort of try to clean up the streets and try to and try to, you know, get rough sleepers off the streets, for example, so that people aren't kind of stressed out by them, but also don't do anything to really provide some substantial opportunity

for young people or, you know, homes for people. And I think it is, again, you know, there's obviously kind of, there's a kind of weird affinity in some ways between the kind of politics of urban aesthetics that we would want to promote and that kind of idea, but I suppose we also want to differentiate ourselves from it. say, well, you know, we also, you know, we want, you know, I think, I mean, what is the difference? I mean, we, we, I suppose we do want to, like here with saying, partly it is about making sure you're actually addressing the underlying causes of, you know, urban decay or dislocation

or so-called antisocial behaviour. And, but also, it is also about, I think, it's a different aesthetic as well that ultimately we would want to promote. It's a different aesthetic. It's an aesthetic, which isn't just the aesthetic of sort of tidy streets. And it's really interesting that it's something is always really interesting to me that there's a certain kind of urban aesthetic which is sort of exemplified in places like Barcelona, you know, sort of San Francisco

before Google destroyed it. And it's this, you know, and it tends to be cities with, you know, quite, you know, lots of sort of, you know, lots of mixed-use streets, you know, lots of public space, lots of parks, lots of squares, there's, you know, lots of, a certain kind of flown a city. And it's not just that some people like it.

It's actually, you know, almost anyone who's had lots of experience of different cities will talk about these cities as being the ideal. I mean, Barcelona, the idea of Barcelona is the ideal city. It's not something to sort of anarcho's got into in the past five years. It's been just a sort of given of sort of mainstream architecture and sort of, you know, urbanism for decades. And I think there is this sort of urban aesthetic, this aesthetic, you know, these situations in which, you know, the democratic and,

collective and kind of the joyful possibilities of urban life become manifest. It's interesting to think this. It's quite easy to recognize. Like it is pretty universal, the extent to which people acknowledge it and kind of they recognize it when they see it. People know a good city when they see it. They know what it feels like and people sort of love it. Because they experience it because they experience it in such a like physical way.

Like when you go somewhere and the architecture and the design is so bad, you've experienced that as well. And that's why Barcelona and in a way, Berlin and other places, you're just like, wow, there's just something. There's something here that I don't have in my city. Oh, you can feel it. Yeah, yeah. Berlin's a really good example. I mean, it's boring how much people go on about it.

But like, no one goes to Berlin and just hates it. And I've never met anyone who goes to Berlin and said, oh, it's just, it's just rubbish. There's too many people milling about. There's too many cafes. Like, it's just, I mean, there must be, are there people? I mean, are they like just armies of suburban Tories who would never go there? And if they did, they would just hate it. Yeah.

No, it's a good question. It's a good, no, it is a good question because we don't know, I suppose. We don't have the data on how conditioned we are by our, how our aesthetic experiences is conditioned by our politics. I'd like to think it's not. I'm going to say we have some data and I'm going to say, actually, I think they do. I'm going to say, just anecdotally, those suburban Tories, they don't go to Berlin, but they go to Barcelona in droves and they fucking love it. They fucking love it. I think they would love Berlin if they went there.

I mean, they want, I mean, those suburban Tories want nice little cafes and not too much traffic, you know, and they just think the only way they can imagine actually getting it is, you know, is in the sort of English suburbs rather than the natural urban centre. I think it is about what you've been exposed to and kind of what I think it is about what you've been exposed to. And that's partly why it's sort of links to what I was saying earlier about sort of, you know, different sort of political imaginaries that I had this phrase once sort of metrophobia, like the fear of the city. it is definitely part of the discourse, of the historic kind of discourse and culture of the right in England, in particular, I think. England is one of the most urbanised

countries in the world. It is just on every measure. It's one of the most urbanised countries in the world. And up until the late 19th century, that was its global reputation and its self-image. The self-image of England was the workshop of the world, the home of the Industrial Revolution, the home of liberal modernity.

And there's this massive cultural project from the 1890s onwards to change that to actually convince people that no, no, what defines Englishness is its pastoral, or it's rural villages. Green and pleasant land. Yeah, exactly. Green and class,

of which it has fewer than practically any country in the world. But experientially, is that true? Because, so how is it the most urbanised? Maybe more people live in large conurbations than anywhere else on the planet, practically apart from places like Singapore. As in the big cities or just in any...

Cities or medium-sized towns. I mean, there's fewer people living in the countryside. But also, I mean, British people are more separated from the countryside than any other country in the world. And that's because you had, yeah, because you had the, that's why British food is so shit. Because basically, we were the industrial, we were industrialized proletariat or the urbanized proletariat before anyone else. So we have much, so there's no organic link to the, to the, to the countryside, which is like why Italian and French food is so. valued is because they've got links back to the countryside and so the food that that is valued is peasant food.

I mean, let me just, the point I was making politically before is that that in reinvention of British, Britain, England as a pastoral place, it was totally part of the project of popularising imperialism. And it was totally part of the, an attempt to reject, you know, the idea that what defined Englishness was a kind of urban modernity, because everyone on the right and the left thought that the logical conclusion of that would be England becoming, as Marx had predicted, like the first socialist country. And so they didn't want that to happen.

So they had to project this new form of popular conservatism that was totally, you know, as I would say, metrophobic, kind of rejected the city and the idea of the city. But, yeah, now that point about food is really important, is that the English, because the English peasantry got, the British peasantry got completely annihilated in the way that the French peasant communes never did. they never did get completely annihilated.

And indeed, everything we now think of as kind of national cuisines was basically a sort of middle-class and aristocratic, like, reinvention of peasant cuisines in the late 19th century. And by the time that was going on, we had no peasant cuisine there.

Because the peasants had all, we had no peasantry. Yeah, which is why you've got fish and chips and that, you know, the food of the food to feed the urban proletariat. Yeah, well, that's right, yeah. Sugar, see our previous episode. Yes.

Yeah, yeah. I still think we should say a little bit more, actually just about, I mean, partly with reference to those, the event that we did and the stuff we talked about, but also just generally, like, well, what is it we want in terms of a policy agenda? Like, in terms of, like, what is it we want to see happen? Like, yeah, we want to see communal spaces. We want to see a serious kind of, you know, cultural policy program, which, which takes seriously the closure of venues in towns and cities, the closure of art spaces, which recognizes the value of people having access to kind of public space and urban space.

But I also think, I mean, one of my particular, you know, one of my kind of hobby horses is I think we need, and it still isn't really part of kind of a labor policy program at all. Like one of the ways of addressing the housing crisis is we have to get back to the sort of radical idea of like cooperative housing, the democratically administered public housing, because we're still basically in a place where we're either saying ultimately we want to make easier for people to buy houses and become homeowners, or we want to create loads more council houses, you know, and I think, you know, part of the problem with that is that one of the reasons Thatcher was able to popularise her project by basically giving

a ways of council houses to, you know, the more, the slightly more affluent members of the working class in the early 80s was because, you know, renting from the council was never a very popular option for people, even though loads of people did it, because they didn't really feel in control of it. They felt like, you know, they were being administered by sort of a paternal this bureaucracy. And I think, you know, the radical position, you know, the sort of acid position has got to be, say, we've got to make it possible if people want to, to live more communally, to live more collectively. And there is, you know, there was a, I mean, in the 70s, there was a move for that. I mean, there was a move under the Labor government in the 70s to create funds

to support people setting up housing co-ops. And most of the kind of functioning housing co-ops in Britain still, you know, I mean, places like Coim Street on the South Bank, they were, they came out of that moment. They came out at that at the moment. There was a deliberate government, you know, project to encourage cooperative housing. I really think we need to get back to that. Yeah, I think another way to think about that is, you know,

the sale of council houses and, you know, the neoliberal projects altogether was sort of wrapped up in a story of freedom, wasn't it? And, you know, it was the classic story was, look, you lived in a council house, you couldn't even choose what Kalea front door was, do you know what I mean? And so that it's obviously a false version of freedom, right? because the sale of council houses now has now massively restricted our just about everybody's freedom

because we just pay so much more proportion of our incomes on housing. Do you know, it's just up through the roof? It's the biggest privatisation that's happened in the UK history as well, like privatisation of housing through that right-to-buy scheme. Yeah, but the way you do it though, the way you solve that is my point is that you have to mix that collective ownership with collective control as a, as the way. the standing for freedom, do you know what I mean? Which does lead to things such as housing co-ops and, you know, the communalisation of

housing. Because so you get control on, you know, on a very practical level, you know, on a street-by-street level, you know, where you have to negotiate, you know, what goes on in your street. You know, that seems to be the only answer, basically, rather than just build more council houses. Oh, what a beautiful city. What a beautiful city Oh

What a beautiful city Dwell against to the city Alleluia Alleluia