The Erosion of Politics in the Urban Sphere: The Plutocratic Ground and the Neoliberal City

2021

This thesis will examine the de-politicisation of the neoliberal city and its mutation into a new urban condition of uneven development, both globally and locally, escalating crises of housing affordability and social displacement.

THE EROSION OF POLITICS IN THE URBAN SPHERE THE PLUTOCRATIC GROUND AND THE NEOLIBERAL CITY Featuring the Cauldron as intervention. The Cauldron is a theoretical architectural project which builds on Arendtian ideas of limit and boundary, proposing a strategy for resistance to free-market urban housing development through monopolising mass-housing provision in a generic bordered form.

CALUM RAMSAY

UNIVERSITY OF DUNDEE 1

MASTER’S THESIS

Calum Ramsay 150006335 Earth Studio Andy Stoane AR50005 Word Count: 5008 + Captions: 355

ABSTRACT

This thesis will examine the de-politicisation of the neoliberal city and its mutation into a new urban condition of uneven development, both globally and locally, escalating crises of housing affordability and social displacement.

Beginning with what political theorist Hannah Arendt considers the politically free model of the Athenian Polis of Ancient Greece, I will discuss the transition from the “political” age where the democratic ideal was sacrosanct, to what Arendt calls the “social” age where the right to “appear” in public gradually declined, using the industrial city as an example. I will then examine how the remnants of politics as a collective force resided within the social age through various state-funded architectural projects.

Today, we now find ourselves in an age where even those last remnants of “collective” have disintegrated: the neoliberal, where the citizen has less of what urban sociologist, Henri Lefebvre called ‘The Right to the City,’ than ever before. I will argue that changes to the city are no longer related to democratic political ideals, with markets replacing governments in the construction and ruling of our public spaces and built environment.

Finally, through an architectural proposal, the Cauldron, I will explore how architecture might play a part in resisting this.

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CONTENTS Introduction

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The Political

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Freedom in the Polis

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What is the Social?

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The Industrial Revolution and the Modern City

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Exchanges

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The Role of the Digital World in Atomisation

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Gentrification and London as a Case Study

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Conclusion

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Introduction Urban development has been uncoupled from politics as the neoliberal era has intensified the already-occurring atomisation of society (Kornhauser, 1960, Gjorgjioska and Tomicic, 2019). This has driven what is often referred to as uneven spatial development, not only on a planetary level, where we see divides in equity between global north and south, east and west, but within individual global cities as well in the form of housing crises and gentrification (Lees et al, 2016). Due to the plutocrification of the hyper-commodified ground, living in global city centres around the world is now an unviable option for much of the population. As professor of human geography, Loretta Lees pointed out, Gentrification has played a central role in this through the constant replacing of economic groups with richer ones. Alongside this inequity, sits the lesser recognised, but just as malicious, truth that cities are being developed in an unstable manner through prioritisation of capital generation over quality of life within them.

The neoliberal project has adopted these processes and configured them as global conditions, affecting urban spaces, not only in the Global North, but increasingly in the South as well where we see escalating housing unaffordability and forced exodus of population as side effects of a system that sees urban land as little more than a tool for investment. The divides have been redrawn around the distribution of wealth to the point that even middle-class professionals can’t afford to live in the urban core of cities where many of the most desirable properties (assets) sit empty, gathering dust and increasing in monetary value.

Throughout the course of this thesis I will outline how the replacement of the Political Realm by the Social Realm has contributed to this plutocrification of the ground in the neoliberal, global city, playing a role in both the degradation of public space and what Henri Lefebvre called “The Right to the City,” leaving the city an inaccessible and unstable mode of territorial organisation. This right is “far more than a right of individual access to the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city more after our heart’s desire. It is, moreover, a collective rather than an individual right since changing the city inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power over the processes of urbanization” (Harvey, 2003). I will explore how society has become atomised and, through the introduction of a new architectural intervention, “The Cauldron”, we might begin to understand what an alternative might look like.

The Cauldron as a design project builds on Arendtian ideas of limit and boundary, proposing a strategy for resistance to free-market urban housing development through monopolising mass-housing provision and supply of social programme in a generic bordered form. Using London as a case study, it explores how we might ensure future 8

Sourced from https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/city-of-london

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cities have a stable core both in terms of social programme and a workforce, who have a stake in their environment.

The Political This text, as an exploration of societal conditions and the democracy they offer in the built environment, will begin in the polis (city-state) of Ancient Greece. In the Human Condition, Hannah Arendt claims freedom is “participation in public affairs or admission to the public realm.” She states that a life lived privately is “idiotic” and that by being unable to participate in the public realm we are deprived of something, as it was viewed in Ancient Greece where this non-participation tended to fall to slaves or barbarians. This sort of freedom played out in the Greek polis but has since been distorted, “transposing it from its original field, the realm of politics and human affairs in general, to an inward domain, the will” (Arendt, 1958).

We interact with freedom, and thereby politics, through what Arendt describes as action.

Action is one of Arendt’s three fundamental human activities, the other two being labour and work. Labour constitutes the necessary processes of living such as eating, drinking, sleeping – anything which contributes to the biological process of the body. Products of labour are short lived and cyclical, labour occurs, and then consumption, and then labour.

Work gives the world meaning. It is the creation of things, the leaving behind of artificial artefacts. The making of Architecture is work, as is art, poetry and the written word.

Work nourishes the world the way labour nourishes us. Thirdly, and, the most important of the three in the context of this thesis, action is the direct activity which occurs between humans without intermediary or objects. It is the very essence of the collective as without the ability to communicate, to debate and to agree a set of preconditions upon which we operate, politics cannot occur. Without access to the political realm and the ability to have our voice heard and opinions considered, we cannot be free (Arendt, 1958).

Freedom in the Polis The Greek polis is perhaps the last historical example of a politically free society for the average citizen, at least in the Aredntian sense. To state explicitly that it was free for all classes would be a misinterpretation of Athenian life. Whilst acknowledging the ownership of slaves and the elitism that existed amongst the educated class, it would not serve to examine the polis through the lens of the present where we know and perceive equal value in people irrespective of heritage or class. Whilst these discriminations are recognised today, they were very much ingrained in Greek culture. Slaves, for example, found themselves unable to engage in the political, something which, according to the ancient Greeks, denoted them as less than human (Tsarkirgis, 2005).Each polis, of which 10

there are over 1500 recorded, was a unique entity, however, many of them shared core ethos in terms of political organisation (Hansen, 2010). For the sake of this paper when I use the word, ‘polis,’ I will be referring to the Athenian Polis model which valued a separation between the public and private spheres (Arendt, 1958). The public realm was the political realm where citizens were given freedom to live as they wanted so long as it was within the confines of the law, including the right to appear and engage in free expression within the assembly and on the streets. For this political realm to exist, the private realm was restricted to the household. Other city-states operated differently to this, Sparta for example offered no separation between state and society and has been described as “life in a barracks,” the culture was a military one and the state tightly controlled everything from production to marriage. This culture was viewed in Athens as “incompatible with the democratic ideal” (Hansen, 2010).

Poleis within the same region may have shared languages, culture, history and religion, “their sense of political identity was centred on the polis itself and separated any polis from all its neighbours” (Hansen, 2010). This is what makes the Greek polis important to us in the context of this paper, each city-state was governed by its people through action, the condition of political life. In fact, if we trace the etymology of ‘politics’ we end up with the Greek ‘polites,’ citizen and ‘polis,’ the city – the political is an engagement between the two. This true democracy of the city-state is something we have seen abandoned over the past centuries.

Figure 1: Ancient Greek Polis Sourced from https://cdn.britannica.com/66/102266-050-FBDEFCA1/acropolis-citystate-Greece-Athens.jpg

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What is the Social?

According to Ardent, the political realm has been gradually replaced with the social realm since the days of the polis. But what does Arendt mean when she speaks of the social?

She defines this as a collective which has a single objective or is guided by an underlying ideology. Arendt makes the case that there was, historically, a very distinct difference between the public realm and private life, with private life being something which should be, as it was in Ancient Greece, limited to the household realm. In Arendt’s mind, the problem with today’s society is that the lines between the public and private have dissolved to the point that the world operates as one big household. (Arendt, 1958). All collective life is then predicated on matters of housekeeping and administered centrally through a group of elected ‘experts’ who we assume serve the interest of society (Pitkin, 1998). This gives rise to issues similar to those found in a despotic society where the population is oppressed and the public realm is not allowed to form, but rather leaves people confined to the home – by turning society into one big home, the public realm has ceased to exist (ibid). This has come to be the status-quo with democracy emerging out of mistrust for public officials rather than a demand for political engagement in society, such disinterest in the political leads to people electing leaders to make their decisions for them: the willing abandonment of freedom (Arendt, 2006). Arendt writes that the social age began with the rise of imperial Rome and the mercantile and medieval eras, exacerbated by the surfacing of the modern city.

The Industrial Revolution and the Instability of the Modern City This process of exacerbation began with the industrial revolution as the starting point for the conception of the modern city. Lefebvre outlines the process of industrialisation in Le Droit à la Ville. Typically, emerging industry establishes itself outside of cities nearer to natural resources and the poorer rural communities which allow for cheaper labour.

When it becomes possible, these industries move closer to urban centres, or new cities are formed around the industry. Cities then become the workshop which “allows the concentration over a limited space of the means of production: raw materials and labour” (Lefebvre, 1973). As the industry moves to the city, so do people from rural communities in hopes of gaining employment. These processes end in the dissolving of centrality and urban character within historic cities, leading to inevitable sprawl and suburbanisation.

Industry also creates the necessity for offices to manage the industrial processes which once again, replace traditional urban functions as is stated by Lefebvre (1973):

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“The architectural and urbanistic resurgence of the commercial centre only gives a dull and mutilated version of what was the core of the old city, at one and the same time commercial, religious, intellectual, political and economic” Lefebvre believed the ‘old city’ was more successful than the modern city as it made space for functions besides commerce. A sentiment carried by Neil Brenner in his book ‘New Urban Spaces,’ where he expatiates on Lefebvre’s writings about the modern city, asserting that constructing urban spaces with the sole aspiration of generating capital is unstable.

He suggests that this causes a disparity in the core principles of city design and summarises the theory of the fixity/motion contradiction as “the process of capital accumulation is necessarily dependent upon territorial organisation (fixity); yet capital’s relentless pursuit of surplus value perpetually destabilases and supersedes its own territorial preconditions (motion),” (Brenner, 2019). Certainly in the hyper-fast economy of today, where the means of capital generation are changing more quickly than architecture will allow them to be recognised spatially, we are seeing the negative side effects even more so than with deindustrialisation processes where centres of towns and communities were left economically unproductive when factories closed with no viable alternative implemented.

Figure 2: Industrial city Sourced from https://www.history.com/.image

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Exchanges Since this period we have seen the creation of social space in cities centred around the modern office - one lacking in industry - and accompanying work patterns which has led to the other aforementioned functions of the ‘Old City,’ religious, intellectual, political and economic, slowly being transferred from the physical world into the digital world, or erased altogether. When Nietzsche famously proclaimed, “God is dead. (…) And we have killed him,” he was celebrating a victory of man, having freed himself from the tyranny of an omniscient master, but also predicting an emerging nihilism. Simultaneously, came Nietzsche’s foresight of the emergence of the superhuman, man who had overcome the previously identified nihilism (Nietzche, 1882). But to Lefebvre’s mind “this ‘new man’ emerging from industrial production and planning rationality has been disappointing.

“There is still another way, that of urban society and the human as oeuvre in this society which would be an oeuvre and not a product.” (Lefebvre, 1973) Lefebvre used ‘oeuvre’ in this context as “an opportunity for inhabitation, festival and play and not merely as a functional habitat impelled by the needs of power and capital,” (Zieleniec, 2018) and goes on to suggest that whilst the possibility of reverting back to the old city is impossible, but instead the future needs places where “exchange would not go through exchange value, commerce and profit.”

This is where I will introduce my conceptual architectural proposal, the Cauldron.

Revanchist in nature, the Cauldron acts as a stronghold within the global city, keeping market forces at bay, both physically, through the symbolism of its form, and economically through the monopoly on housing it would allow world governments to acquire. The wall of the Cauldron will be where the housing is contained whilst in the centre there will be an amalgamation of varying public spaces and programmes, connected by a public ramp.

Within this space exchanges may take place so that man may fulfil his Lefebvrian role as an ‘oeuvre.’ I have defined these exchanges with six categories: play, nature, views, fiction, arrival and commerce, with most functions of the Cauldron fitting into one of these categories.

Figures 3-5: The Cauldron in Various Global Cities; Bangkok, Istanbul, Cairo (top to bottom)

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Figures 6-12: Exchanges within the Cauldron 1. Commerce: Small-scale commercial transactions through markets or small restaurants.

2. Arrival: Spaces for social exchange can be found at the key arrival points; ramp, train station and public square.

3. Nature: Can be enjoyed at various points in the park.

4. Play: Many of the functions in the Cauldron are designed to instigate play whether through sport or leisure.

5. Fiction: Various of the Cauldron’s programmes are aimed at taking you out of the real world to enjoy art, theatre or literature, things not often associated with social housing 6. View: People can enjoy views over London together from various platforms and positions along the ramp.

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In order to understand how a concept like the Cauldron might be realised we look to the mid-twentieth century where we see there was, for however brief a period, a reemergence of the Political. Andrew Stoane (2020) makes the argument in his paper “Mass Housing in the Social and the Post-Social Worlds: Reading Hannah Arendt’s “Mass Society,” that through various avant-garde projects such as Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation and The Barbican by Chamberlain, Powell and Bon, the political realm could re-emerge, albeit in a truncated form. The former, conceived very much within the industrial era, was described as “an unprecedented experiment in “mass” housing, constructed by the state with public money” (Stoane, 2020). The latter was the result of a period of middle-class exodus from city centres due to de-industrialisation; commissioned and largely constructed under a system of Keynesian economics, the Barbican was part of a drive to return a middle-class working population back to The City of London (ibid). Both create a blend of public and private life within the confines of a limited entity in a similar manner to the polis, forcing reassociation of a society to a particular limited territory, a notion which greatly influenced the generic form of the Cauldron. Political activity is restricted to public space within the entity, which, is to a degree governed by this activity despite the laws of the nation-state still applying. There is something to be said for this kind of limited enclave within the urban sphere. Afterall, Arendt did state that one “could only achieve freedom in the polis by restricting its numbers”(Arendt, 1958). Without enforcing such limits in population, Arendt explains that there is an ‘almost irresistible inclination toward despotism.’

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Figure 13: Unité d’Habitation by Le Corbusier Sourced from https://c2.staticflickr. com/8/7396/9652975846_ba66100d84_b.jpg Figure 14: Barbican by Chamberlain, Powell and Bon Photo by author

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The Role of the Digital World in Atomisation Since the writing of ‘The Human Condition,’ the atomisation of society has become ever more apparent. Arendt would have been referring to mid-twentieth century capitalism, not the hyper-intensified version we see played out through neoliberal ideology today.

The engulfing of the planet by the neoliberal wave is nearing completion and the ideals it brings are playing out incessantly. It brought what Arendt called ‘the social’ to a head, and, coupled with the dawn of the third industrial revolution (the digital) we find an era which is both post-political and post social, in which atomisation is near canon. UK Prime Minister and foot solider of neoliberalism, Margaret Thatcher, perhaps most succinctly exemplified the paradox within neoliberal ideology when she stated: “there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.” (National Review, 2021) The belief that the government was not responsible for meeting the needs of the citizen is one that was probably common with the occupants of the Greek polis where they engaged in a direct democracy. However, the problem is that neoliberalism does not inherently offer the individual the right to democratically engage with the public realm in the way the Greek polis did, it turns fulfilment of man’s needs over to the market. In the days of Ancient Greece, one fulfilled their duties in both labour and work so that they may partake in an active life, it was an objective in itself. Enlightenment thinkers inverted the way society was structured so that economics is no longer a means to a political end, but politics is a means to an economic end, a sentiment at the core of the neoliberal ideology and one has proven damaging to our built environment (West, 2019). Arendt would argue that under the current system we have ‘liberties,’ but no real freedom (Pitkin, 1988). We can choose which phone to buy, which clothes to wear, where to buy them, what car we drive – these are liberties. But we have no real freedom to partake in the debate about how we should live. You have no freedom to alter or contribute to the systems which run your life. Our advanced capitalist society had become a society which prioritises labour, and abandoned action as virtue (Arendt, 1958).

Technological advancements have also played a role in the transfer of political power away from the people and to global markets. That which traditionally took place in the marketplace of the medieval and archaic cities, the Roman Forum or the Greek Agora, are now acted out in the digital realm, one often controlled and manipulated by private interests.

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The acceleration in advancement of the digital world is resultant of market driven competition, meaning the values of the system which built it are often reflected in its operation. The digital world plays a massive role in how the physical world is shaped; in many ways the physical has become servant to the digital. In his essay, The Magic and Metaphysics of Shit, David Capener described how digital artefacts as external memory devices influence our perception and therefore reality of the spaces we inhabit in relation to Lefebvre’s production of space. Capener depicts how this happens; “As technology changes so too perception changes and, as perception changes new spaces are produced.

Thus, the epochal shift to the third industrial (digital) revolution is not simply a historical event, it is a philosophical event that has created a phenomenological revolution. (…) Not only is it a way of accessing the world – a lens through which a priori phenomenon is mediated to us – accessing a world of phenomenon but rather technology itself generates phenomenality; it is productive: Technology produces space.” We no longer remember spaces we visit through memory alone, but through photographs, reviews and social media posts. We no longer remember the authentic experience but a curated and finely crafted version of that experience (Capener, 2020).

Capener then goes on to say: “This kind of urban realm is not managed from some central command position. Rather the digital turn of the spatial has resulted in a dispersal of authority into hyper granular interfacial fields where each individual is cast as a sort of cellular automaton.” We believe we take on a creator role in order to construct meaning in our reality, albeit digital reality, and to some degree we do. The majority of this reality however is created by AI which constantly analyses and records and listens to our every typed (or spoken) word and constructs a reality of advertisements and targeted commercial propaganda, our subconscious is under constant assault on which products to buy and how we ought to live, keeping the markets afloat (The Social Dilema, 2020). The corporations in control of these manipulations are often the same ones who are responsible for the erosion of democracy in the city and act in opposition to the Lefebvrian right to the city.

Through the acquisition of a digital monopoly, they gain the financial means to create a physical one too. The Cauldron utilises the Aredntian idea of ‘limits’ through its physical form to act in resistance to this whilst using state-owned market monopolies to oppose it economically.

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Existing

Resisting

public space which infiltrates the cauldron neoliberal city

Reciprocating

Figure 15: Existing Neoliberal City Figure 16: Cauldron Resisting the Neoliberal City A ring of housing surrounding public programme and park, whilst resisting the city around it.

Figure 17: Public Spaces which Reciprocate with the CauldronOn ground level, public spaces will flow between the city and the cauldron, creating a reciprocity between the two.

Gentrification and London as a Case Study To see this playing out, I examined London as a case study. A city which has taken many of these processes to new levels, London has been subjected to mass gentrification processes since becoming de-industrialised.

The term gentrification was coined by Ruth Glass in the 1960s and originally referred to “snobbish pretentions of affluent middle-class households who wanted a rural, traditional way of life.” Given the complexity of the processes, this definition has changed several times. Neil Smith (1996) said in The New Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City: “gentrification is the process by which poor and working-class neighbourhoods in the inner city are refurbished via an influx of private capital and middle-class home-buyers and renters.” (Lees et al, 2016) The neoliberal era has once again caused need for redefinition, since inequalities have intensified. The dividing line now sits somewhere between those with inherited wealth and wealth gained through investment and those who rely on labour, for it is more equitable to invest in property within a city rather than invest in productive programmes (ibid). In the opinion of Lees, Shin and Lopez-Morales (2016), gentrification is currently best defined by Eric Clark who described it as; “a process involving a change in the population of land-users such that the new users are of a higher socio-economic status than the previous users, together with an associated change in the built environment through the investment in fixed capital” (Clark, 2005., Lees, et al, 2016).

Where it once took the form of the wealthy displacing the poor, in the global city, the hyper wealthy replace the wealthy. The billionaires displace the multi-millionaires, the multi-millionaires displace the millionaires, the millionaires replace the upper middle class.

This process repeats until the millionaires move to another city where they can once again afford prime location real-estate and the process begins anew (Minton, 2017).

Gentrification processes have already torn apart communities throughout central London as a result of the lack of restriction on its market, high levels of privatisation and relatively low tax rates on profits. These developments are wholly undemocratic. In her investigative book “Big Capital,” Anna Minton describes her attendance of the London Real Estate Forum, a networking event for developers, investors and local councils to meet and discuss future developments across the city. The discussion of the erasure of various working and middle-class communities took place with Council representatives from various London 24

Burroughs, 15 out of 18 of which were Labour representatives. Outside the event there were demonstrations which were largely ignored, something Minton claims “exposes the lack of democratic oversight of the regeneration process, as communities from many estates facing demolition protested that they had been stripped of any say in their future” (Minton 2017). As predicted by Arendt over half a century prior to these events; the transition from the Political era to the Social and a population’s willingness to revoke their political power and allocate it to elected individuals, has come to affect their stake in their built environment, as this disavowal of power has contributed to the dismantling of politics and the state, and the transfer of power to private corporations.

Figures 18 -19: Gentrification in London.

Photos by Andrew Stoane

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The site at Elephant and Castle on which I have chosen to test The Cauldron is one which has fallen victim to gentrification of this kind already. The Heygate Estate, once home to over 3,000 people has been demolished to be replaced with high end apartment blocks.

A report by the London assembly concluded “that the buildings were structurally sound, but in need of complete refurbishment,” and that crime statistics within the estate were much lower than the average for the Southwark borough with 80% of residents stating they would prefer to stay in the estate (London Assembly, 2015). There are currently over 50 estates in London undergoing this type of gentrification with tens of thousands of council house tenants being displaced, sometimes miles out of the city (Lees et al, 2016).

A sampling transect through London overlaid with several deprivation indexes showed that Elephant and Castle is a site which is both lacking in public facilities and access to affordable housing, showing that through the ‘regeneration’ process, a sustainable community has not been created (see figure 20), making it the ideal site to test the Cauldron.

The promise for 25% affordable housing has, as in many cases been whittled down through bargaining and corrupt planning decisions (Minton,2017). For housing to be considered affordable it can sell for as much as 80% of average market cost, meaning an ‘affordable’ starter home in London can go for as much as £450,000, an amount which would require a salary of over £100,000 annually to qualify for a mortgage according to Barkley’s mortgage calculator. This is far above the average salary of even trained professionals, such as a nurse, which sits at roughly £31,000 (Jobted, 2021). One way this might be resisted is through governmental monopoly on housing and stricter cost controls.

Figure 20: Sampling Transect: Data sourced from https://www. gov.uk/government/collections/english-indices-of-deprivation

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Figure 21: Map showing average property costs in London and displacement of residents from Heygate Estate. Sourced from http://heygatewashome.org/img/ HeygateEstateLeaseholderDisplacement.png

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Figures 22 & 26: Elephant & Castle in 1950 Figure 23 & 27: Elephant & Castle in 1974: Heygate Estate - 1214 homes: population: 3,000. 1,194 apartments available for social rent.

Figure 24 & 28: Elephant & Castle in 2021: New ‘Regeneration’ Project - 2,500 homes. Maximum 25% ‘affordable,’ starting at £430,000. With just 75 apartments available for social rent Figure 25 & 29: Elephant & Castle in Near Future: Alternative Cauldron Intervention - Population 3,520.

1,760 apartment units for social rent alongside a variety of not-for-profit public programmes

Figure 30: Development Phase 1 The first thing the area needs is affordable housing. Housing can be constructed in stages until the full ring is completed.

The train station should also be constructed in this phase so that adequate transport links are available to the residents.

Figure 31: Development Phase 2 Once the ring of housing is completed, the park should be completed so that residents have green space to enjoy.

Ramps linking the city and public square on the train station roof will also be built in this phase.

Figure 32: Development Phase 3 In phase 3, the public programmes will be constructed.

Upon the completion of the programmes, the public ramp will also be built to allow a slow infrastructure around the inside of the Cauldron.

At the heart of the Elephant and Castle development is Elepant Park, a privately owned public space (POPS). Far from being an isolated case, a study by the Guardian Newspaper in 2017 revealed over 50 developments of POPS either completed or under construction in London (Shenker 2017). A recent admission that this process is expected to continue by the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, came in the form of a small document called ‘The London Public Charter.’ Consisting of eight points, the charter operates on an ‘opt-in’ basis, whereby it sets out conditions which should be met in POPS so that they might remain inclusive to all (Mayor of London, 2021).

Figure 33: Protesters at Elephant and Castle Sourced from https://www.southwarknews.co.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2020/09/Elephant-and-castle-shoppingcentre-04808-1-840x560.jpg Figure 34: Public London Charter Figure 35: Private Security

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To understand how the new privately owned public space at Elephant Park might operate we can examine a similar development; the 67-acre regeneration of King’s Cross. The UK government sold off the huge area of the city to private interest groups, such as Google, who collectively employ a private security force to police and regulate it (Shenker 2017).

This is now completely outside the democratic control of the population as they have no electoral say in who these private interest groups are. On the matter of the King’s Cross development, “the Guardian was told by security officials that a list of private regulations governing users of the site did exist, but that the landowner did not wish to reveal them,” (ibid). In perhaps a final act of dismemberment of the city from the political realm, not only does the average citizen no longer have a say in the governance of the public realm, but they aren’t allowed to know the rules under which they are expected to live, opening the possibility for whimsical removal from such spaces by private security.

Although I have developed the proposal in the context of London it is important that is considered a global concept. As urbanisation has become global, so too have gentrification processes. Whilst these used to be predominantly seen as a condition of the Global North, governments in the South are following suit as they try to force growth in their economy to propel their cities onto the world stage. Whether that be through slum ‘regeneration’ or various megaprojects based around global sporting events such as the Olympics or the World Cup, which make groups of their populations disposable in order to increase global standing, or by allowing the kind of foreign investment we have seen in London. That is why the social space in The Cauldron must be a new kind. One which no government or corporation can appropriate for financial gain.

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CONCLUSION In Orwell’s 1984, “Newspeak” operates by removing vocabulary from the language to the point where revolution is not only impossible to organise, but impossible to conceive as an idea. In much the same way, global neoliberal markets make it very difficult to conceive of anything outside of the system. As Fredric Jameson wrote, “it is easier to imaging the end of the world than the end of capitalism.“ Every architectural proposal we conceive of will be subject to scrutiny as to how it might be realised in relation to markets and profit. The commodification and resultant plutocrification of the ground are pressing issues faced by the world today, leading to housing crisis around the globe, displacement of populations and the erasure the last traces of democracy from the urban realm.

The transferral of emphasis from action as a core part of the progression of civilisation to one which uses action only as a means of serving economy has left people susceptible to exploitation at the hands of both governments and private businesses. Wherever we have seen action prioritised or glimmers of its re-emergence through state-funded architectural projects, we find that the idea of “limit” is a common denominator, something often lacking in the neoliberal city. Perhaps through re-establishing the notions of limit and state-monopoly in architecture, as explored in the Cauldron, we can begin to restore the right to the city.

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Figure 36: Section through the Cauldron

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bibliography | images Figure 0 London Sourced from: https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/city-of-london-skyline-pictureid535525378?k=6&m=535525378&s=170667a&w=0&h=bmzVjpk6-BUZ5QbyZVo49i kKq5_7j4kiTIXVi93Dwzc= Figure 1: The Ancient Greek Polis Sourced from https://cdn.britannica.com/66/102266-050-FBDEFCA1/acropolis-city-stateGreece-Athens.jpg Figure 2: The Industrial City Sourced from https://www.history.com/.image Figures 3-5: The Cauldron in Various Global Cities.

Figures 6- 12: Exchanges within the Cauldron.

Figure 13: Unité d’Habitation by Le Corbusier Sourced from https://c2.staticflickr.com/8/7396/9652975846_ba66100d84_b.jpg Figure 14: Barbican by Chamberlain, Powell and Bon Photo by author Figures 15-17: Neoliberal Diagrams.

Figures 18-19: Gentrification in London, photos by Andrew Stoane Figure 20: Sampling Transect: Data sourced from https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/ english-indices-of-deprivation Figure 21: Map showing average property costs in London and displacement of residents from Heygate Estate.

Sourced from http://heygatewashome.org/img/HeygateEstateLeaseholderDisplacement.png Figures 22 & 26: Elephant & Castle in 1950 Sourced from https://www.skyscrapercity.com/threads/elephant-castle-historic-plans.683146/ Figure 23 & 27 Elephant & Castle in 1974: Heygate Estate Sourced from https://www.skyscrapercity.com/threads/elephant-castle-historic-plans.683146/ 38

Figure 24 & 28: Elephant & Castle in 2021: New ‘Regeneration’ Project Sourced from https://www.elephantandcastle.org.uk/ Figure 25 & 29: Elephant & Castle in Near Future: Alternative Cauldron Intervention Figure 30 - 32: Cauldron Development Phases Figure 33: Protesters at Elephant and Castle Sourced from https://www.southwarknews.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Elephantand-castle-shopping-centre-04808-1-840x560.jpg Figure 34: Public London Charter Figure 35: Private Security Figure 36: Section through the Cauldron

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