Bubbles under Culture and Capitalism
Urban Regeneration in the name of Gentrification
In the first semester, for Evaluating SLC, I wrote a paper on ‘bubbles’ under urban sprawl, and connections to racial segregation. Each person lives in a bubble – not perfectly spherical, but long and winding, tracing paths of travel and social activity. These bubbles have, I outlined, different dimensions – bubbles of opportunity for social movement, bubbles of career progression possibilities, bubbles that, through health, extend temporally and set limits on longevity. And all these bubbles could trace their existence to geography/urban setting/the location pin on the map that shows where you were born. Because, more likely than not – at least in the States – where you were born begins to dictate where you will spend the rest of your life. And where you spend the rest of your life shapes how you live it, thanks to the teeming inequalities of both opportunities and outcomes, in the ‘world we live in’.
(Personally, kind of an uncomfortable little sandpit to sink into. The world we live in, shaped by how we live in the world, shaped by the world we live in. But there are different ‘we’s. There’s always someone in power setting down those shaping policies. And then there’s masses following the policies. Was that someone in power one of the masses once? Or what that someone in power always brackets above, making policies just for themselves and those like them, without care for ‘others’? Why is it that whatever the case may be nowadays, ‘we the people’ always get screwed? Is this even a system worth being the cogs in anymore? Was it ever? Perhaps a bit too existential, but it’s already close to 1AM as I’m writing this. Expected time for those thoughts, I guess.)
That was a concept we covered this semester, in Exclusion and Inequality – equality of opportunities, and equality of outcomes. There was a short debate/discussion on what could be better. Urban sprawl and its ensuing racial segregation works pretty efficiently on both fronts, though. Aided by ‘white flight’, where better suburbs are built farther away from the city cores, taking businesses and work opportunities with them, lesser privileged people (more often than not, people of color) are left behind in those cores, and made to travel longer distances to get to work than their white counterparts. That specific movement, of commuting to and from work, is a specific bubble. The length of commute, both in distance and time, is due to their area of living. That length usually gets longer and longer as suburbs and businesses develop farther and farther away, always stretching over to that ‘new’ horizon that cities keep frenetically developing. The longer the commute, the less energy these people will have checking into work. The bubble sets a limit on work productivity and opportunities to get up that career ladder, which then limits social movement.
There’s another way to limit social movement – the way social class and urban districts work, studies show that people are comfortable sticking to areas in the city that fit in with their own class. So the geographic origin bubble also dictates their movements around the city, outside of work. Where you live, where you work, how you work, where you go to study, how you do at studying (there’s another study for that), where you go to for new clothes or grocery shopping or seeing your relatives – that’s all bubble-work. But so far, I’d only really seen it in terms of sprawl and racial segregation. Academically speaking, that is. I have seen it play it out in real life, observing the progress of the city I live in myself.
Now, in the course Exclusion and Inequality, one of the papers I was assigned to reading for my chosen subtopic of Built Infrastructure, was about Palestinian refugees in Denmark, the limits on integration they experience, and the dynamics of that integration through the lens of urban regeneration. As a concept, urban regeneration is something I’m all for – my undergraduate research work was on urban regeneration, through adaptive reuse. But the kind of adaptive reuse I was talking about, was reusing abandoned lots and structures. Existing skeletons that nobody wanted anything to do with, and that could be fleshed out differently, to breathe life back into the districts. What Denmark was doing, though, was a sort of gentrification. A biopolitically-motivated, as the paper put it, gentrification: Danish citizens allowed to continue on where they were, how they were, doing what they wanted, since they were already on the ‘inside’ of ‘Danish cohesion’; Palestinian refugees on the other hand, ousted from their dilapidated homes, and made, through policy, policing, and social work, to make different choices in order to make those ‘right’ decisions that an ‘autonomous’ citizen of Danish society would deign and deserve to make.
Now, what is that? One could say the Palestinian originated bubble has three outcomes:
- death by Israeli bomb, bullet or policy,
- traumatic survival and bravery to stay and rebuild, in order to either (1), or,
- eventually flee past the border somehow, with that intent to return should Israel at some point be made to leave by those who chose (2).
Even Bella Hadid’s father, doing pretty well for himself, is (3). My childhood best friend, whose house in Palestine burned down when she was 4 years old and her sister was 1, who is currently doing groundbreaking cancer research in Malaysia, is (3). My dear friend who, like me, is an architectural engineer who believes in sustainability, whose entire side of the family are activists who get jailed over and over, who is currently planning her sister’s wedding in this city we live in, away from Palestine, is (3). Lama, that beloved 9 year old journalist who captured our hearts on the internet last year, who escaped to Egypt, is (3).
What happens during that time as a refugee somewhere else, though? Once you’ve entered 3 and are in the middle of 3 and are trying to keep going until 3 also ends and you can just go back home to that world and home and land you love – what happens when you’re in the middle?
The Danish government managed to systemically rack the odds up against Palestinian families – rending them apart to answer ‘fiscal urgency’ requirements through the National Dispersal Act, then ensuring they have no jobs to help them reach self-reliance, then diminishing their opportunities for education, then increasing policing and allowing Danish citizens to voluntarily offer neighborhood surveillance and social housing responsibility where Palestinians live, further backing them into physical, social, and economical corners. The result: a refugee ghetto where none of the Palestinian residents have a real choice in the direction their lives can go, depending solely on the welfare state, and facing more crime, aggression, lockups, and emotional trauma by the day. A G2 – generation 2 with violent, sometimes criminal, tendencies.
The paper brought up a parallel of the refugees ghettos to the African American neighborhoods in the United States – and failed to follow that parallel thoroughly. African American neighborhoods that are ghettos are the way they are because of systemic violence and injustice meted out to the residents there, effectively cutting out their chances at being anything else than what the outside is shaping them up to be. We all know this. Right? So why are the Palestinian refugees, facing these similar systemic injustices, in the name of ‘Danish cohesion’, treated as if they are at somewhat fault for their ‘reaction’, in the paper?
But back to the bubble; with a governmental shift towards the right, anti-ghettoization steps start to get taken. Real estate developers target these neighborhoods for ‘urban regeneration’. But what they really do is drive out the refugees in order to up the value of the real estate when redeveloped/’regenerated’. And this urban regeneration is not sustainable development, not adaptive reuse – it’s actively evicting human beings out of their government-given subpar homes, for greater profit. Those human beings then have to seek out another social housing situation in another neighborhood. They’re discouraged from coming back, because it’s hurt the property values. The people who’re going to move in wouldn’t want to see them there.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s gentrification.
The bubbles take that into account, as well. Alright, gentrification. The bubbles shrink – one more district they’re supposed to skirt around instead of be able to walk right through. One more district to avoid because it’ll hurt the culture that other bubbles are trying to propagate. Isn’t that right? Culture, discourse materialized – discourse: practice/thought patterns/behaviors/beliefs/opinions, that are materialized, distilled into culture, and which, inevitably, give rise to racialized landscapes, that shape neighborhoods, parks, and other (all) spaces with ‘racist practices’, that turn into ‘norms’.
Culture primed to bring in profit – at the cost of exploitation, gentrification. Culture, machinated by capitalism, lurching forwards without thought or care of who it destroys… what culture is this, and what is it worth? Culture, prevalent everywhere else in the city already, snuffing out the light of whatever small tribute the refugees had managed to make to their own homeland, in search of more money. Bubble overpowering bubble, taking up extra space at the cost of another’s right to space, more direct access so that another’s access may have to wind in subservience around our own. Isn’t that a global phenomenon? Global culture usurping local culture – upper class wants around the world morphing into typeset lists of the same brands, the same experiences, the same clothes, perfumes, trope-heavy entertainment. And then what? Corporate solutions rising to those wants, because that’s where the money is. Corporate solutions wiping out local solutions to lower classes, because there’s more money to be had.
I have yet to study the concept of ‘neoliberalism’ or even ‘capitalism’ to a depth that satisfies me adequately to throw those terms around in conversation, or this blogpost. But isn’t this capitalism? Isn’t this part of the culture that shapes capitalism that shapes culture? Mirror to the policy that shapes the world that shapes the policy? Who is the ‘we’ letting this happen, and the ‘we’ making it happen, and is there an intersection in that ‘we’, and if so are we part of it, and if we are, then where are we? Fleeing to better horizons? Letting cultural evictions pass? Letting lives get backed into corners, out of sight, out of mind?
This post has not been as centered around sustainable development as I intended. Maybe another post. The next one will be related to our changing the climate, and with it, of course, the lives of the animals we share this planet with. A sort of cross-species bubble theory. Don’t mind me. A bit too fond of thinking in ‘bubbles’ for the time being. (Hey! Thought bubble!) It’s fully 2.40AM now.
