Shoreditch
and the creative destruction
of the inner city.
Benedict Seymour, October 2004
1 MILITANT URBANISM
Shoreditch, celebrated as the heart of London’s creative and artistic
scene in the ‘90s, is an ex-industrial, increasingly ex-working class
area in the East End of London now severely gentrified. Located between the
enormous wealth of the financial district in the City of London and the (growing)
poverty of Hackney and Tower Hamlets, its flashmob-like explosion into cultural
and economic life became the apple of urban policy makers’ eyes in the
late ‘90s. Shoreditch’s convergence of culture and commerce evolving
out of a once lively clubbing, music and (YBA) art scene has today reached a
similar condition to that of Berlin Mitte or New York’s Lower East side.
While the area now hosts bluechip art galleries formerly based in the West End,
the initial ‘cultural’ elements that gave the area its charisma
of community and experiment have mostly been killed off, priced out by rising
rents, and supplanted by expensive apartments and culinary distractions –
restaurants and bars – that make good the zone’s new fashionability.
Effectively looting and recycling devalued property, subcultures, resources
and public space for the benefit of an incoming elite, gentrification continues
to take place in a remarkably similar form in ‘world cities’ and
provincial capitals across the globe. In areas like Shoreditch and its peers
around the globe, the cosmetic renewal of a portion of the crumbling urban core
coincides with continued – or intensified – infrastructural decline.
The reactivation of dormant (or low profit sweatshop-occupied) industrial properties
first as artist’s spaces and later as bars, boutiques, apartments etc
has made many landlords even richer, but the area’s large tracts of public
housing, services and transport facilities remain in a deteriorating condition
and/or are sold off to the private sector. Gentrification takes from the poor
and gives to the rich. Anything residually ‘public’ will either
be reclaimed for the middle class or left to rot.[1]
Each wave of colonisers plays out the contradictions of their particular claim
to space, taking sides against the next phase of gentrification in which they
nevertheless conspire. The nightclub owners print huge posters declaring the
area a ‘nighttime economy’ and warning potential residents not to
expect ‘living on the edge’ to take place in silence. Hipsters in
Brooklyn wear ‘Defend Williamsburg’ t-shirts, a slogan accompanied
by a picture of an AK47 and no consciousness whatsoever of the violence of primitive
accumulation in which they are always already mired up to their armpits. Acting
out fantasies of radical chic and social toxicity, the shocktroops of gentrification
have been much taked, in the last ten years, with images of guerilla warfare,
an unconscious, aristocratic reflection of concurrent neoliberal ‘military
urbanism’ in more intensively looted cities from Palestine to Iraq to
Haiti. Gentrification’s vanguard are at their most depoliticised when
at their most radically chic (what Simon Pope described in the late ‘90s
as the Prada Meinhof), and almost seems to dream the preconditions for this
low-level urban civil war through their hypertrophied ‘fashion sense’.
The creation and rapid extinction of cultural ‘incubators’ –
clubs, art spaces etc – by more lucrative investments in areas like Shoreditch
at the same time intensifies bohemian settler’s efforts to maintain that
crucial ‘edginess’ which is the USP of the area’s marketing.
In reaction to the zone’s loss of ‘authenticity’ as their
punky simulcrums are displaced by more economically efficient ones, Hoxton and
Shoreditch, like Williamsburg and the LES, have taken a ‘dirty’
turn in the last couple of years, playing out a fad of stylised abjection and
anarchy while keeping their iPods clean. One physical emblem of this compromise
formation is the Shoreditch bar Jaguar Shoes, where the seedy old shopfront
has been left intact in all its fading plastic glory, its interior scooped out
and embrodiered with belle-lettristic grafitti. A shift from the gleaming sterile
bars of the dotcom era to red-lit pseudo sleaze today obeys the same relentless
logic. A facsimile of bygone bohemian squalor it is at the same time an index
of the limited economic resources for renewal, a sign of straitened circumstances.
As the (unwitting) poet of gentrification Michel De Certeau might say, the current
avant garde of gentrifiers elaborate a sensibility based not on remaking but
on ‘making do’.
Gentrification in London, a city now rated among the most expensive in the world,
embodies the drive of a cannibalistic capitalism looking for ways to cut its
costs in a period of declining profit rates and deepening national current account
deficits: The search for new, cheaper use values (primarily space, but also
intangible assets – authenticity, creativity, community) occurs via the
alienating logic of exchange value and its necessary supplement, primitive accumulation
(or, simply, theft). Out of the middle classes’ need for more room, more
time, more congenial cities, emerges simulation, homogenisation, privatisation
and the looting of residual commons. An inherently vampiric process which parasitises
upon and kills its host, gentrification is a physical symptom of neoliberal
economics just as much as generic malls and big box out of town developments
are. Where these extrapolate out from modernist industrial economies of scale,
gentrification (at first) provides a luxury complement to /compensation for
the devastation. Lively, characterful inner city oases, what a relief. The problem
is that, as an equally privatised form of development, gentrification is of
course only the inner city version of the same process and leads from exclusive
art parties to Starbucks and all the rest. The same economic laws force once
‘idiosyncratic’ zones of experimentation and ‘independent
shops’ into increasing conformity as the process matures and prices rise.
There is prosperity for a few but for everyone else the area’s social
capital has been bled dry.
Gentrification does not produce so much as reproduce, rather than creating anew
it recycles, instead of investing in production it expropriates objects and
subjects outside the ‘real economy’ to prop up the ever expanding
bubble of credit substituting for real growth. As America’s balance of
payments deficit deepens the property boom in both the US and UK functions to
defer the evil moment when this deficit has to be repaid. Without going into
this in depth, it should be emphasised that gentrification is very much a sign
of western capitalism’s diminishing ability to make productive investments.
Instead of investing in manufactured and traded goods, the US and UK use other
countries money to borrow against over-valued property which in turn allows
them to buy more foreign made goods, causing yet more money to be poured back
into over-valued real estate. The current account deficit continues to grow.
While factories and apartment blocks’ rents rise and housing prices rocket,
their physical structure is allowed to deteriorate. Some fixed capital is renewed
– hence the ‘vibrant’ look of gentrified zones which one hears
so much about – but even this is cosmetic and, as it were, borrowed against
the looting of infrastructure and labour both within the nation-state and overseas.
Consumer activity in the UK is dependent
as never before on credit secured against mortgages on over-valued property.
But the property bubble itself has to be sustained somehow. In this way the
local process of gentrification is supported by the extraction of surplus value
from the less ‘developed’ world. In the end the military urbanism
going on in Palestine and Fallujah is the extension of the US’s monetary
imperialism of which gentrification is one domestic consequence. Military urbanism
and urban militant chic are indeed connected. The hipsters in AK47 T-shirts
are quite right that their claim to the inner city must be defended by force;
its just that the ones doing the fighting are their displaced latino and black
neighbours and the enemy are Iraqis.
2 BEHIND THE BOOM
By the late ‘90s Shoreditch
and Hoxton were being trumpeted as a model for ‘urban renaissance’
by policy makers. Regeneration industry professionals and proponents of densely
populated inner cities declared their commitment to fostering neighbourhoods
with a mix of residential and commercial buildings, socially and economically
diverse areas with ‘mixed and balanced communities.’ With the dotcom
bubble yet to burst, Shoreditch was held up as an example of how the ‘inner
core’ of the city, allegedly abandoned after the flight of working class
inhabitants to the suburbs in the ‘60s and ‘70s, could ‘come
back to life’ if the areas ‘residual’ population of deadbeats
were supplemented (that is, supplanted) by a lively group of dynamic and entrepreneurial
cultural professionals. From the beginning this notion of new ‘life’
served to obfuscate whose life was being discussed – not that of the areas
economically challenged majority, it would seem.
New Labour claimed that the ‘revival’ of inner cities was good news
not just for the affluent newcomers to the area but that the commercial and
cultural activity they began would bring prosperity and opportunity for all.
Vibrant, ferociously networking creatives would displace the depressing homogeneity
(and the social support networks) of the working class. As we have mentioned,
the dotcom boom soon saw the artists’ studios, clubs and experimental
cinemas that started things off ousted by landlords keen to cash in. When the
surge of new economy related businesses itself proved short lived, the dotcom’s
avant garde loft-style offices became yet more bars and restaurants or just
fell empty once again, a memento of the bubble and a portent of a bigger crash
still to come.[2]
While Shoreditch’s magic circle was in the media spotlight the most massive
and significant changes in the borough of Hackney, and indeed the city as a
whole, were scarcely discussed. The social cleansing of working class communities
across large swathes of London’s inner core, vicious cuts, privatisation,
and Eastern European levels of poverty coincided with the highest number of
housing privatisation ballots in the country. The latter, advanced in the name
of ‘regeneration’ served to hasten the theft of the city from its
true ‘creative class’, reengineering former industrial areas as
a playground for young middle-class consumers of surplus value.
Although it is notoriously difficult to get precise figures, I would guess that
as much as 40% of Hackney’s working class population have been pushed
out of the area through the combined effect of rising rents, evictions, demolition
and transfer of council housing into the hands of housing associations. In the
last ten years council estates have been demolished or sold off to be replaced
by so-called ‘affordable housing’ – which, given house price
inflation, no one can afford. Major and Blair alike have honoured Margaret Thatcher’s
mission to privatise the remains of the welfare state commons and impose ‘consumer
choice’ on an increasingly impoverished majority too poor to exercise
the inalienable ‘right to buy’ when it comes to their basic need
for shelter.
The local authorities in gentrifying
areas connive with developers by letting social housing crumble, forcing residents
to either accept a lifetime of shitty accomodation and rising crime or transfer
to housing association landlords who promise (but by no means always deliver)
repairs and maintenance which was once provided by the government. While in
Shoreditch and the borough of Hackney this has seen a few estates ‘regenerated’,
many more remain in an appalling condition. Where there are improvements in
the physical state of the buildings this comes at the cost of the definitive
loss of the (relative) security of tenure offered by state owned and run housing,
and the beginning of what promise to be exponential rent rises. Privatisation
of services in Hackney has converged with the privatisation of space such that
where services work at all the workers enjoy lower wages and more precarious
contracts, and the consumers, in the case of companies like Pinnacle (social
housing maintenance) and ITNet (housing benefit) worse or non existent services.
The level of private policing and the number of CCTV cameras rises as the local
police and council workers grow ever less keen to visit the estates (unless
of course they are wearing their newly issued bullet proof vests!).
But didn’t Shoreditch also
offer new chances to those whose homes were being sold off and traditional hang
outs (the rapidly closing or gentrifying pubs and caffs) shut down or reocccupied?
While some new businesses did spring up, these did not cater to or even employ
the working class population of the area. Again, the rhetoric of diversity and
opportunity (new jobs, training, participatory local democracy and community
based initiatives) served only to cover over the evictions and expropriations,
devolving responsibility for these onto the population they attacked. The increasing
use of local community groups and referendums to integrate local people into
the process has functioned to give it a veneer of legitimacy rather than effecting
a real transfer of power. Those that participate in ‘Neighbourhood Renewal’
projects like Shoreditch New Deal (now rebranded as Shoreditch Our Way) have
been known to describe the process as ‘not consultation but dictation’.
3 CREATIVE DESTRUCTION
After all the talk of ‘inner
city renaissance’, the government this year finally admitted in a white
paper on the area that Shoreditch was not the succcess story that they had claimed.
No, it was an example of ‘failed cultural regeneration’. Finally
acknowledging the displacement of less affluent local people and the reality
that the different social and economic groups in the area do not mix but rather
pursue existences of segregated proximity, the report noted the ‘failure’
of the gentrification process to deliver improved services or housing for the
poor. It is interesting that the official discourse, which took a long time
to start selling the idea of Shoreditch as a model of 'creative regeneration',
is now so quickly having to reposition its flagship as a failure. Yet in the
absence of other models, the old story of rebirth through the clustering of
creative smalls businesses is still being rolled out. Despite all proof to the
contrary, Shoreditch is still being cited as a model.
According to Creative London, the
London Development Agency’s new 10-year action plan for culture-driven
urban renewal, the Shoreditch effect, harnessed and made more efficient, is
to be repeated across the city’s ‘run down’ areas. Presumably
they hadn’t heard the news about Shoreditch when they put this latest
parcel of guff together, or maybe they know very well what ‘creative regeneration’
really means and are more inspired by Shoreditch than ever. Far from indifferent
to the problem of gentrification, the regeneration elite now see that the re-valorising
‘creative class’ they admire tend to be displaced by their own success
in making areas fashionable. Creative London tries to 'address' this by seeking
to help small creative businesses remain in the city and attracting them to
areas targeted for 'renewal' in the hope of reproducing and harnessing a Shoreditch
type buzz.
According to its website Creative
London, aims to ‘Galvanize London’s creative sector, and bring businesses
and people together to make more combined noise.’ This punk rock definition
of instrumentalised culture continues to favour the development of ‘cultural
hubs’ as catalysts for the intensified privatisation and productivisation
of remaining pockets of cheap living in the city. The difference is that now
the government’s intervention in gentrification is even more direct, more
conscious and, as ever, more smoothly presented. Rather than an unfortunate
side effect of the real estate market, gentrification is an openly pursued policy
objective. Like all the other facts of life under the naturalised neoliberal
order, the government will help the privileged negotiate the necessarily precarious
nature of unmitigated capitalism but only in a ‘dynamic’ way.
Exemplifying this tender mercy for
the favoured class, Creative London includes a Property Advice Service to help
the cultural vanguard find and develop new spaces when their existing ones becoming
insupportably expensive. Soliciting creatives to take on and realise the potential
of crumbling industrial hulks and potentially dangerous bits of un-reproduced
fixed capital, behind the scheme’s ‘honest broker’ rhetoric,
the economic imperative is plain: Be our caretakers, reconstruct and make trendy
our knackered infrastructure, take the risks involved in repairing dangerous
buildings, and when you’re done, fuck off. Of course the homeless, squatters
and other malcontents who once enjoyed the opportunity to explore such places’
‘potential’ will now find themselves in competition with government-assisted
culturepreneurs, but that is the dynamic, Darwinian nature of creative urbanism.
May the most excellent man win (the right to a defered eviction).
Ethical qualms aside, Creative London
and the general ideology of culture-driven regeneration remains committed to
the unlikely notion that a dense cluster of web designers and style magazines
can be a substitute for the mass concentration of capital and labour that provides
the motor for genuinely productive industries. Stressing the importance of Ideas
and the old knowledge economy schtick that networked creative communities produce
a qualitative leap in ‘value’ generation (as opposed to a pooling
of value hoovers sucking up surplus value from across the world), the ideologues
of this process elaborate a frighteningly self-assured action plan which positions
themselves as ‘the stewards of our communities’, and identifies
as targets for removal a series of synonyms for the informalised working class:
‘Remove barriers to tolerance such as mediocrity, intolerance [sic], disconnectedness,
sprawl, poverty, bad schools, exclusivity, and social and environmental degradation.’[3]
When they say ‘remove’ there is nothing to suggest they mean ‘ameliorate’
– such ideological wish lists are a combination of make believe and a
ruthless intent to rectify the community in the image of a commercial utopia
in which all perform free labour under the euphemism of ‘creativity’.
The recognition that ‘Creativity can happen at anytime, anywhere, and
it’s happening in your community right now’, is simply the familiar
assertion that all life is available for work and that a complete mobilisation
of the social process is necessary to squeeze a profit out of the ‘economically
inactive’.
‘Everyone is a part of the
value chain of creativity’, but only those at the top are getting remunerated.
The contemporary equivalent of feudalism’s great chain of being, the value
chain of creativity imagines a metastable dis-orderly universe of Excellence
based on well-policed chaos in which the soi-disant creative class serve king
capital as instruments of his divine will and ambassadors of the new work ethic.
The underlying imperatives of an
era in which productive investment is increasingly impossible for knackered
old capitals like Britain or the US mean that even those who demand a less cosmetic
solution to the problems of the inner cities are invoking a chimera. The vision
of ideologues like Richard Florida and the self-styled ‘Creative 100’
quoted above, is at once feeble and terrifying, since, in the absence of productive
investment in the real economy (and its structural impossibility for countries
like the UK), the extraction of the dregs of surplus value from those outside
the magic circle will be as brutal as it is euphemised. Identifying new sources
of labour, whether in the third world or at home, involves policing, coercion
and cooptation, the theft of people’s imagination and ideas and the redirection
of opposition into manageable forms.
If one abandons the quaint notion that regeneration's real aim is to produce
a mixed and balanced community with 'social housing' and ('good') jobs etc,
then it doesn’t seem so perverse and ineffectual after all. Viewed in
the light of the international experience of gentrification, culture-lead regeneration
can be seen as the expanded, private-public consummation of the process of revalorisation
and looting described above. Increased social polarisation and the (re)imposition
of work through intensified economic pressure combine with private capital’s
pillaging of former public resources (as well as existing communities, bodies,
knowledges, etc) in a desperate scramble to suck up every last drop of surplus
value from increasingly unproductive 1st world cities. Regeneration is not so
much the rebirth of the dormant industrial city but its undeath, bled dry by
a vampiric regime of inflation and austerity.
4 (UN)REGENERATE ART?
Whether overtly declared as the ultimate
motivation for financial support to the arts (‘cultural tourism’
as economic motor), or as a ‘side-effect’ of the work of visibility
and valorisation performed when artists colonise and gentrify an area, the subsumption
of art under regeneration is so advanced that to look at art without looking
at the project for ‘urban renewal’ in which it is inscribed is to
miss half, or perhaps more than half, of its social (or rather, economic) function.
With London’s more ‘socially engaged’ art scene continuing
to burgeon, artists find funding by assuming the role of surrogate and simulacral
service providers delivering cheap but cosmetic substitutes for welfare provision.
While cultural agencies pour millions into flagship projects that almost immediately
sink, artists are a low risk investment. From the task of ‘beautifying’
the inner city with anodyne public art to the social work and community-oriented
projects favored by its ‘New Genre Public Art’ successors, artists
are paragons of regenerate citizenship, not least in their capacity to work
for free while generating that marketable ‘buzz’.
In world cities like London and the
slums of the third world alike, labour, waged and unwaged, is ever more responsible
for its own reproduction. The ‘creative entrepreneurialism’ identified
by Creative London as the key to revived inner cities is the upscale reflection
of a survivalist condition in which insecurity drives the underpaid into overwork.
Participation in the valorisation of life/labour – whether helping run
your block of flats or talking to a concerned artist about your memories of
displacement – is not so much solicited as compulsory. Consequently, in
a regeneration regime it becomes easier to get your experience of urban blight
plotted on a psychogeographic map of your area than to obtain hospital treatment,
housing or a day off work.
In a similarly perverted piece of
logic, the UK’s New Labour government now hails ‘complex art’
as a way to challenge the ‘poverty of aspiration’ and ‘low
expectations’ allegedly afflicting the lower class. The ongoing increase
in simple poverty is ignored.[4] Although social engagement on the part of artists
is viewed as a beneficial and moral expansion of their activities into the community,
artists’ role is primarily to provide stimulus to and communitarian credibility
for the process of privatisation and gentrification which the term ‘regeneration’
figures as progress and renewal.
If politicised, will socially engaged art practices one day spark unforeseen alliances against the dominant regeneration agenda? Perhaps the imminent collapse of the property market bubble will trigger a new, more creatively destructive attitude to the regeneration-art symbiosis on the part of the regeneration industry’s favourite people.
FOOTNOTES
[1] However, the ‘urban pioneers’
and their successors who live in gentrifying areas are not guaranteed immunity
from the overall devalorisation of fixed capital in which gentrification’s
localised valorisation take place. Witness the case of the 30-year-old New York
professional recently electrocuted by a Lower East Side manhole cover that,
as a result of million dollar cuts in maintenance by utilities provider Con
Edison, had become live. A neat image of the kind of pay back that all this
non-reproduction of infrastructure and economic polarisation is no doubt storing
up for the privileged class, but only a more extreme instance of the low-level
violence daily visited on the working class within areas of localised renewal.
Property prices and rents may be rocketing but in gentrification zones life
is of necessity cheap and citizenship precarious or, indeed, cancelled. The
rich are simply those with better insurance and security guards to protect their
fundamentally insecure investments.
[2] At the same time many new large-scale,
flagship PFI projects were begun further into the borough of Hackney of which
Shoreditch was very much a model of transformation. These included an Olympic
size swimming pool, a library, and a major music venue. Of these, five years
later, almost all have closed, their economic and/or physical infrastructures
proving feeble and badly constructed. Most of these projects came in millions
over budget, and, while hundreds of other services (including very functional
swimming baths, schools, playing fields, etc) were simultaneously being scrapped
as part of the local council’s efforts to impose economic austerity, they
seem to combine unproductive expenditure on a Bataillean scale with the most
miserly and reductive conception of culture imaginable. In the name of competition
and efficiency the bigger scale regeneration process has wasted millions and
made local people’s lives more difficult, expensive and precarious. What
have the Romans ever done for us? as Tony Blair asked, waggishly paraphrasing
The Life of Brian. Well, the Romans aquaducts are still standing; Tony’s
domes and amphitheatres collapse on completion.
[3] From The Memphis Manifesto, A
Map to the Future by the Creative 100. http://www.memphismanifesto.com/themanifesto/
The same kind of mephitic cheerleading can be found on the LDA website for Creative
London: http://www.creativelondon.org.uk/
[4] See ‘From Hard Edged Compassion
to Instrumentalism Light’ in Variant 20, Summer 2004.
Bibliography
You Can't Live On a Web Site - Privatisation and Gentrification, Reaction and
Resistance in Hackney's 'Regeneration State'
http://www.ainfos.ca/02/dec/ainfos00200.html
Flogging Hackney, by Andy Robertson. A report on council sell-offs and cuts
in East London http://www.squall.co.uk/
London Housing magazine – on
the truth about ‘affordable housing’ and ‘mixed and balanced
communities’
http://www.londonhousing.gov.uk/