Is London fucking the world?
Jul. 4th, 2007 12:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusNightwaves on Monday began with an interesting talk with Professor Doreen Massey about her new book, World City, which casts a critical eye on the place that London has become.
According to Massey, who's basically a "geographer of inequality" with the Open University -- someone who's applying a topographical model to inequalities usually thought of as purely financial -- London is one of the three big "world cities" which co-ordinate the neo-global economy. The other two are New York and Tokyo. These are the key places from which global neo-liberalism is organized. But in a sense they're not so much places in themselves as machines for transforming -- and displacing -- other places.
Decisions taken in London's skyscrapers -- those centres of finance, law, accounting, and global business service industries -- have major effects all over the world. Decisions of investment and dis-investment have real repercussions in the dislocations of lives, the making and breaking of whole sectors of economies around the world.
One of the things you can't do in London, says Massey, is imagine yourself as the victim of global forces. When you're talking about the relationship between the local and global, it's tempting to think of the local as the victim of the global. The global arrives, a deux ex machina, and wreaks havoc on the local place. That's the victim model. But if every place thinks that then globalization isn't really anywhere, it's just somewhere up in the ether. It's placeless, disembodied completely from any location.
But when you're in London you can't feel like that sort of victim. Because you're right at the centre of that very process. You're in the place that devours other places. Globalization was made here, produced and disseminated here. Londoners can feel that, even if they can't necessarily see the effect their city is having -- a profoundly dislocating effect -- in other parts of the world.
First of all, there's the huge bringing of goods to London every single day, the lopsided consumption of resources. Then there's the leeching of talent, of skills and training, of human labour and enterprise from other places.
London's multiculturalism is one of its triumphs. Nonetheless, people have left other places all over the planet to be part of that "rich ethnic tapestry", and that's had effects in the places those people left. The import of skilled labour comes not just from other parts of the UK but from the global south. Many of these people will use, in London, training that's been paid for elsewhere. London, in this sense, "steals" that education, that talent. It impoverishes the places that paid for it by cherry-picking.
This, then, is the process of geographical inequality caught in action. It's a relatively recent process. For most of the 20th century London was in decline, as the sun set on its vast 19th century empire. London manufacturing wilted, its water traffic and docks collapsed. At the same time, there was a certain kind of social justice in London up until the 1980s. During the 1980s, says Massey, the post-war social democratic settlement, the period of the welfare state, of Keynesianism, of egalitarianism, all of that was falling apart. You see the change in Thatcher's determination to crush the left-wing local council, the GLC, abolished in 1986.
London has since risen from the ashes to become a new imperial city, a centre of the neo-liberal global economy. But this re-invention isn't a "triumphal march towards modernity". It's something rather sad and sinister: the birth of a mega-leech. If you want to get technical about Massey's ideas, they're based on an application of Marxist ideas to geography: the spatial division of labour.
I'm interested in this not only because I lived through -- and wrote albums about, culminating in 1989's disgusted and disillusioned Don't Stop the Night -- London's transformation from a decaying post-imperialist place softened by Keynesian socialism to the neo-imperial hub it now is, but also because I'm fascinated by the idea of places which aren't places, but are better defined as effects on other places. This might be a strange insight, but I think London has something in common with the inside of a jet engine -- a place that, on ignition, becomes a process which radically transforms position -- or... or... a vagina.
A vagina -- or perhaps I mean a womb -- is a small place in the human body. But, with the visit of a penis, it's capable of becoming much more than a place. It can become a person, which is, in one way of looking at it, a living process which alters places, then replaces itself and dies. I'm currently fascinated by these places which are more than places. Places which are processes. London is, then, in a sense, fucking. Fucking the planet, perhaps.
You can hear a Doreen Massey lecture here. She's particularly good on the one-way nature of the supposedly "borderless" world of globalization; the fluidity depends totally on who you are and where you are.
According to Massey, who's basically a "geographer of inequality" with the Open University -- someone who's applying a topographical model to inequalities usually thought of as purely financial -- London is one of the three big "world cities" which co-ordinate the neo-global economy. The other two are New York and Tokyo. These are the key places from which global neo-liberalism is organized. But in a sense they're not so much places in themselves as machines for transforming -- and displacing -- other places.
Decisions taken in London's skyscrapers -- those centres of finance, law, accounting, and global business service industries -- have major effects all over the world. Decisions of investment and dis-investment have real repercussions in the dislocations of lives, the making and breaking of whole sectors of economies around the world.
One of the things you can't do in London, says Massey, is imagine yourself as the victim of global forces. When you're talking about the relationship between the local and global, it's tempting to think of the local as the victim of the global. The global arrives, a deux ex machina, and wreaks havoc on the local place. That's the victim model. But if every place thinks that then globalization isn't really anywhere, it's just somewhere up in the ether. It's placeless, disembodied completely from any location.
But when you're in London you can't feel like that sort of victim. Because you're right at the centre of that very process. You're in the place that devours other places. Globalization was made here, produced and disseminated here. Londoners can feel that, even if they can't necessarily see the effect their city is having -- a profoundly dislocating effect -- in other parts of the world.
First of all, there's the huge bringing of goods to London every single day, the lopsided consumption of resources. Then there's the leeching of talent, of skills and training, of human labour and enterprise from other places.
London's multiculturalism is one of its triumphs. Nonetheless, people have left other places all over the planet to be part of that "rich ethnic tapestry", and that's had effects in the places those people left. The import of skilled labour comes not just from other parts of the UK but from the global south. Many of these people will use, in London, training that's been paid for elsewhere. London, in this sense, "steals" that education, that talent. It impoverishes the places that paid for it by cherry-picking.
This, then, is the process of geographical inequality caught in action. It's a relatively recent process. For most of the 20th century London was in decline, as the sun set on its vast 19th century empire. London manufacturing wilted, its water traffic and docks collapsed. At the same time, there was a certain kind of social justice in London up until the 1980s. During the 1980s, says Massey, the post-war social democratic settlement, the period of the welfare state, of Keynesianism, of egalitarianism, all of that was falling apart. You see the change in Thatcher's determination to crush the left-wing local council, the GLC, abolished in 1986.
London has since risen from the ashes to become a new imperial city, a centre of the neo-liberal global economy. But this re-invention isn't a "triumphal march towards modernity". It's something rather sad and sinister: the birth of a mega-leech. If you want to get technical about Massey's ideas, they're based on an application of Marxist ideas to geography: the spatial division of labour.
I'm interested in this not only because I lived through -- and wrote albums about, culminating in 1989's disgusted and disillusioned Don't Stop the Night -- London's transformation from a decaying post-imperialist place softened by Keynesian socialism to the neo-imperial hub it now is, but also because I'm fascinated by the idea of places which aren't places, but are better defined as effects on other places. This might be a strange insight, but I think London has something in common with the inside of a jet engine -- a place that, on ignition, becomes a process which radically transforms position -- or... or... a vagina.
A vagina -- or perhaps I mean a womb -- is a small place in the human body. But, with the visit of a penis, it's capable of becoming much more than a place. It can become a person, which is, in one way of looking at it, a living process which alters places, then replaces itself and dies. I'm currently fascinated by these places which are more than places. Places which are processes. London is, then, in a sense, fucking. Fucking the planet, perhaps.
You can hear a Doreen Massey lecture here. She's particularly good on the one-way nature of the supposedly "borderless" world of globalization; the fluidity depends totally on who you are and where you are.
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Date: 2007-07-05 05:02 am (UTC)For the first five of the ten thousand years of human civilization, wealth and power belonged to villages with green technology, and for the second five thousand years wealth and power belonged to cities with gray technology. Beginning about five hundred years ago, gray technology became increasingly dominant [...] In the last hundred years, wealth and power were even more heavily concentrated in cities as gray technology raced ahead. As cities became richer, rural poverty deepened.
[...] as the continued exploring of genomes gives us better knowledge of the architecture of living creatures, we shall be able to design new species of microbes and plants according to our needs. The way will then be open for green technology to do more cheaply and more cleanly many of the things that gray technology can do, and also to do many things that gray technology has failed to do. [...] An economic system based on green technology could come much closer to the goal of sustainability, using sunlight instead of fossil fuels as the primary source of energy.
[...] Many of the people who call themselves green are passionately opposed to green technology. But in the end, if the technology is developed carefully and deployed with sensitivity [...] it is likely to be accepted by most of the people who will be affected by it, just as the equally unnatural and unfamiliar green technologies of milking cows and plowing soils and fermenting grapes were accepted by our ancestors long ago.
[...]
What has this dream of a resurgent green technology to do with the problem of rural poverty? In the past, green technology has always been rural, based in farms and villages rather than in cities. In the future it will pervade cities as well as countryside, factories as well as forests. It will not be entirely rural. But it will still have a large rural component. After all, the cloning of Dolly occurred in a rural animal-breeding station in Scotland, not in an urban laboratory in Silicon Valley. Green technology will use land and sunlight as its primary sources of raw materials and energy. Land and sunlight cannot be concentrated in cities but are spread more or less evenly over the planet. When industries and technologies are based on land and sunlight, they will bring employment and wealth to rural populations.
In a country like India with a large rural population, bringing wealth to the villages means bringing jobs other than farming. Most of the villagers must cease to be subsistance farmers and become shopkeepers or schoolteachers or bankers or engineers or poets. In the end the villages must become gentrified, as they are today in England, with the old farm workers' cottages converted into garages, and the few remaining farmers converted into highly skilled professionals. It is fortunate that sunlight is most abundant in tropical countries, where a large fraction of the world's people live and where rural poverty is most acute. Since sunlight is distributed more equitably than coal and oil, green technology can be a great equalizer, helping to narrow the gap between rich and poor countries.
My book The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet (1999) describes a vision of green technology enriching villages all over the world and halting the migration from villages to megacities. The three components of the vision are all essential: the sun to provide energy where it is needed, the genome to provide plants that can convert sunlight into chemical fuels cheaply and efficiently, the Internet to end the intellectual and economic isolation of rural populations. With all three components in place, every village in Africa could enjoy its fair share of the blessings of civilization. People who prefer to live in cities would still be free to move from villages to cities, but they would not be compelled to move by economic necessity.
Thanks!
Date: 2007-07-05 03:35 pm (UTC)Simon