When it was announced last summer that the infamous Torre de David in Caracas, Venezuela, was being emptied of its occupiers, it was seen as the latest offensive in an ongoing war for living space for the urban poor.
Known as the world’s tallest squat, the unadorned skeleton of the 45-storey tower was abandoned in the middle of construction in 1994, and a decade later, occupied by 2,000 families who made it their home – filling in empty door frames and skipping around precarious holes in the floor, decorating bare concrete walls with family photos, constructing improvised systems for water and electricity, and eventually even opening grocery shops in the building. Elevators had not been installed when the construction process halted – but even this didn’t stop the occupiers living in the tower’s highest reaches; or doing weightlifting on the roof.
Nearly 70 per cent of the population of Caracas live in slums, and in the “vertical slum” of Torre de David, urbanists saw a (very large) microcosm of how people have begun to adapt – through a striking mixture of innovation and desperation – when they are excluded from the mainstream of city life.
The crisis of affordability in urban centres is a pattern being played out across the world – leading to acts of high profile resistance by the growing numbers of the homeless and the insecurely housed. Occupations of vacant newbuild luxury apartment blocks are not unique to Caracas. A world away in Seville, traditionally one of the richest cities in Spain, the housing crisis has led to the Corralas movement, where families made homeless by the financial crisis, unemployment and unpayable mortgages have turned to activism and occupation, making their homes in the new ruins of global capitalism.
When I visited the Corrala Utopia tower block in 2013, the slogan spray-painted on the entrance read/translated as “neither people without houses, nor houses without people”. The FLM housing movement in Sao Paulo, Brazil, was formed to tackle the same problem: a city peppered with empty buildings, created by a bloated property market – and with an ever-growing population of homeless, often working families. The FLM claims to have occupied more than 40 empty buildings in the past decade.
As a city, London remains a telling expression of the trends affecting the rest of the world. The original megacity and the fulcrum of the British Empire, its cosmopolitanism – and wealth – grew out of the first wave of globalisation. In the post-industrial era, shorn of the shipping and manufacturing industries that once were its engine, London’s economy has thrived again thanks to a new kind of globalisation, and a new kind of trade: one that replaced boats, crates and cargo with numbers on a computer screen.
In the first decade of the 2000s, London’s new financial centre in Canary Wharf, built on the derelict site of the former docklands, became the global hub for the exploding trade in “financial products”, the futures, derivatives and “instruments” that helped spark the 2008 global financial crisis. In a peculiar twist of fate, the former London docklands look set to express the next phase in global capitalism.
Last year it was announced that a buyer had been found for the Royal Docks, the 35-acre expanse of prime real estate next to Canary Wharf that has been empty ever since the decline of the dockyards. With an eye to the next century of development in international capitalism, the British authorities, at the local, city and national level, have been enthusiastically targeting Chinese buyers – they bought office space in Beijing, commissioned dedicated sales videos and websites in Mandarin, and hosted a stall at the 2010 Shanghai Expo. They got what they wanted, when it was announced in 2013 that the Chinese company Advanced Business Park had bought the site for £1 billion (Dh5.57bn), and promised to build “a mini city for Asian companies”, featuring 280,000 square metres of office space. “This is going to be the very centre of Britain,” said the British government minister Eric Pickles, heralding the deal.
The deal has proved a controversial one, not least because London – the city whose strength has always been that it is, in the words of the ABP marketing literature, “a global hub” – has found itself in the midst of a crisis precisely caused by this status.
In the two millennia since the Romans set up shop on the Thames, founding the new commercial centre of Londinium, the challenges that have faced the city are as great as those that have faced any city in the world; it has witnessed invasions, sackings, revolutions, plagues, all-consuming fires, the aerial blitzkrieg of the Nazis, flooding, protests, smog and – as recently as 2011 – widespread riots. But now, in the European Union’s largest city, the most imminent challenge is less violent, but perhaps even more perplexing: where are its surging number of inhabitants going to live? While prime real estate is sold off to international investors from the Gulf and elsewhere, for commercial use and high-end luxury flats, London’s population is expected to rise above 10 million by 2031, from its current level of 8.4 million.
Politicians, developers and planners are desperately trying to scope out new living space for the city's ballooning size – and they are struggling to find it. One leading property developer, Richard Fagg, the director of development for London for Bouygues, explained the city's current predicament as a clear choice, a fork in the road between building up, or out: "I don't know if you remember the Hunger Games film, but it's a choice between having these huge metropolises, with 60- or 70-storey buildings, and London can continue down the route that people fear it's going to, where it's going to be ever-increasingly dense. Or there's a much more holistic view, that with improving infrastructure, with improving train links, the expansion of the [London Underground], that density can be increased in the outer suburbs."
The Hunger Games option has certainly been causing a stir. For Fagg and his company Bouygues, itself a huge multinational property development firm, the centre of the capital is already "gone": beyond the reach of anyone but the international super-rich, reserved for the most exorbitantly priced luxury flats and high-end commercial developments like ABP. "Our view is, let the foreign money go to the trophy sites, and pay over the odds for it, and good luck to them."
In spite of the £9.63bn spent on the 2012 London Olympics, and the general impression that the capital is the striking exception to the rule of British economic stagnation, the statistics tell another story. Research into levels of poverty in London consistently indicate one significant new trend: they are rising in the periphery and falling in the centre. Child poverty in inner London fell from 51 per cent to 45 per cent in the decade to 2013, but rose from 28 per cent to 33 per cent in outer London. This process of “hollowing out” or “banlieuisation” – referring to the poor suburbs in Paris – is crucial to understanding the dynamics of supply and demand in the global cities of the present and near future. In the inner boroughs of the British capital, large-scale social housing projects built in the post-war decades to house the city’s low-paid workers are being destroyed and replaced by luxury flats.
The process of replacing affordable or (government-owned, low-rent) social housing with high-end new developments is seeing London’s poorest families being pushed farther and farther out. This “hollowing out” process is seeing families placed up to two hours away from their schools, jobs and support networks, and struggling accordingly. “The emphasis is different now,” a housing charity worker in Westminster explained to me last autumn, in between counselling dismayed, tired mothers and fathers on how to adapt to the capital’s new reality. “We have to tell them, if you can’t afford the accommodation, you’ve got to move.”
The crisis of affordability in urban centres is a pattern being played out across the world and, according to a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the problem is beyond the power of central government to solve.
"Driven by ideology or economic incapacity, the ability of the national state to intervene in the contemporary city seems to recede everywhere," observe the authors of Uneven Growth, Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities, the book that accompanies the exhibition.
A major 14-month project, which unites researchers, architects and urbanists, Uneven Growth has set about tackling the looming catastrophe facing global cities such as Mumbai, New York and Rio de Janeiro – cities that are simultaneously exploding in size and inequality. The answer, according to the exhibition’s curators, lies in “tactical urbanism”, a more activist approach to designing and redesigning cities around people’s lives and needs that can prevent “the dystopian outcomes that can be expected of the progression of current urban trends”.
In New York, home to MoMA and the “uneven growth” of the project title, rapid gentrification of traditionally poor and mixed neighbourhoods across Manhattan and Brooklyn has created a worrying social divide and precipitated a crisis of affordable housing, intensified by deregulation of the private rental market, wage stagnation, soaring rents and disinvestment in affordable and public sector housing. The consequence for poorer communities is a combination of social cleansing and less stable housing, illegal and quasi-legal arrangements, overcrowding and increased impunity for malevolent landlords.
On display at Uneven Growth are two proposals to help ameliorate New York's housing crisis; namely, that land and buildings are owned collectively by not-for-profits, the community, tenants and city authorities to ensure affordability; and a system of "air rights" to allow access to underutilised outdoor spaces including backyards and rooftops and to free up one of New York's most scarce resources – land.
In Istanbul, Turkey's economic boom has brought an emergent middle class and the promise of owning keys to a flat in one of the gated housing estates built by the Housing Development Agency of Turkey, known as TOKI. These towers are typically clustered on open land away from city centres and have bought high levels of debt as well as long commutes for their owners. A new, more community based future for these developments has been imagined by a local architecture practice for the Uneven Growth project. Through retrofitting TOKI blocks and creating shared facilities, residents are invited to turn themselves into producers of goods, services, knowledge and skills.
Often represented, not least in movies, as a city of slums sitting cheek-by-jowl with high-rise apartment blocks, Mumbai has a peculiarly diverse urban landscape, according to the creators of Uneven Growth: "Within the complex city fabric, unplanned settlements have grown incrementally, and now absorb over half of the metropolis's 12 million residents, most typically in thousands of tiny 'tool-houses' squeezed into a disproportionately small share of the city's land." These tool-houses, common in different forms across Asia, allow people to live and work in one space. The development of apartment blocks at the expense of myriad live/work units is what's taken to task in the Mumbai section of the MoMA exhibition. The answer, perhaps? Pressure on the land is eased by platforms built in layers over existing structures to allow for neighbourhoods to develop according to usage over time.
"This is global capitalism and we have to find a way around it," one London MP, Joan Ruddock, announced in response to the revelations about the number of foreign-owned flats in The Guardian newspaper last month. Ruddock went on to call for a greater balance between luxury housing and affordable housing for poorer families: "The capital will not be sustainable unless people in the public services can afford to live here. We are pricing them out." Where her wording is slightly off the mark, perhaps, is that whatever happens, the capital will be sustained – but the people who are being "priced out" will stay, and suffer. People desperately need the jobs that concentrate in cities like London, and are flocking to urban agglomerations around the world in vast numbers for precisely this reason.
What seems far more likely than an exodus from the cities by lower paid workers, and a consequent shortfall in the working population, is that they will stay – and they will be forced to live farther away from the jobs in the centre, in more cramped and poorer quality accommodation. They will also have to spend more of their wages on rent and travel, and commute for longer hours, and their finances, their social and personal lives, and their physical and mental health will all suffer accordingly. In the intense clamour for urban space, something has got to give, and here as elsewhere, it looks set to give at the bottom.
Dan Hancox is a regular contributor to The Review. His work can be found in The Guardian, Prospect and New Statesman.
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