On the shitfication of cities

Some preliminary ideas

An art piece by Raphael Vangelis, on Stoke Newington Church Street, N16.

1. The city is dead, long live the city.

2. The terminal disease begins with the spatial turn of capitalism: the accumulation of urban space (Lefebvre).

3. Urban capital accumulation favours smooth space (Deleuze). Urban capital detests the striated spaces that make throwntogetherness possible (Massey). Urban capital accumulation abhors social space as a site of possibilities. Urban capital accumulation ultimately abhors social space as a possible site of resistance.

3. The spatial turn of capitalism imposes its logic over the city through its enforcers: commercial landlords, the buy-to-let mafia, and complicit local governments. Usurious rents result both in the chainification of cities and the expulsion of the workforce¹. Every high street now looks like a simulacrum of the same high street; every citizen is a simulacrum of the same takeaway coffee-carrying tenant — exploited for labour, exploited for rent, exploited for shit coffee (a boring productivity-enhancing drug).

4. The logic of urban capital accumulation demands that every square centimetre is streamlined for the re/production of wealth. Nothing is left to waste, value shall be extracted from every corner and from every being occupying space.

5. The contemporary city as a members’ club. The commons shall be paved over and turned into luxury flats. The right to the city gives way to the right to be a paying customer. Pay-as-you-use space is born.

6. But urban capital accumulation is self-destructive:

a. It erases the cultural capital that makes urban space desirable to those willing to pay for the right to the (privatised) city.

b. It expels the workforce that’s supposed to help it reproduce itself.

c. It expels the paying customers that the privatised city needs to sustain itself.

7. Urban capital accumulation results in the cyclical processes of gentrification and ghettofication. Urban capital accumulation is by nature a Ponzi scheme and the pyramid will collapse sooner than later.

8. As urban capital expands to every corner, so does our alienation. The natural state of the paying citizen is separation from others (and from ourselves, thanks to the Spectacle’s new weapon: social media and the illusion of connectivity).

9. The only solution to the shitfication of cities is the re-socialisation of space. Either through natural wastage (the reformist answer) or forcefully, through expropriation (the revolutionary answer).

10. Individual flight (to the countryside, to digital spaces, the interior flight, etc) is a form of surrender. The answer to our problems remains collective and lodged in concrete space.

1. The poor haven’t had a right to the city since the 19th century.