In attempting to understand the implications of London’s eastward turn it is important to situate this shift in the major changes in the economic, social and cultural life of the capital since the 1960s. The city has always been a divided one, with its wealth, prosperity and respectability concentrated in the west, while its poverty, deprivation and pollution are largely in the east (Rustin, 1996:2). Of course, the Thames creates an obvious north-south divide, so much so that it actually makes sense to think of London as a “quartered” city (Jarvis et al, 2001:46). Although it is often said that the East End is a product of the nineteenth century, East London has always existed as a separate and distinct region (Ackroyd, 2000:675). By the 1880s it had become known as ‘the abyss’ – a desperate, dangerous and ungovernable place (Stedman Jones, 1971). This symbolic marker of urban poverty was to a certain extent transformed from the 1930s to the 1960s as rising living standards combined with relative economic security to produce the ‘Fordist’ settlement of the ‘mixed economy’ and welfare state, based around large scale manufacturing for mass consumer markets.
By the 1960s London had ceased to be a major manufacturing city and was on its way to becoming a post-industrial, informational city (Hamnett, 2003:5). The closure of the docks accelerated de-industrialisation and the shift to a new global knowledge and creative culture based economy in the East End. A major influx of professionals attracted by the new economy coincided with an exodus of ‘old’ East Enders and their replacement by new refugee and migrant communities. In the polarised, ‘dual city’, poor, immigrant workers service the wealthy elite and much larger middle classes employed in hi-tech, knowledge-rich industries. Gaps between rich and poor are sharply increased. All this is well known. Less understood is the role of the migration corridors from London to the Essex coast in providing new forms of social practice. So much so that by the 1980s the figures of ‘Essex Man’, not to mention ‘Essex Girls’, came to symbolise in the public imagination what had happened to the affluent working class in Britain. The ‘cockney diaspora’ had deserted the labour movement, voted for Thatcherism, and were captivated by the culture of consumerism and possessive individualism. In this paper, I want to situate some of these changes in relation to the impact of consumption on the character of urban change.
In his famous book, The Cultures of Cities, written in 1938, Lewis Mumford drew a distinction between ‘producing cities’ and ‘consuming cities’ (cited in Miles and Miles, 2004:1). Of course, in the decades since the book was written consumption has become an even more fundamental aspect of urban life than Mumford could have imagined. Nevertheless, he would have recognised how it is often said that the West End has the money, and the East End has the dirt, the implication being that the West has leisure and the East has labour (Ackroyd, 2000:677). However, it was not until the 1970s that urban sociologists took consumption seriously. The key intervention was Manuel Castells’ book The Urban Question, published in English in 1977, which argued that ‘collective consumption’ is the primary process that shapes the city and ensures the reproduction of labour power.
Although the book is undoubtedly dated, it did mount a powerful critique against earlier forms of urban sociology pioneered at Chicago, and inspired many to engage with political economy to explore social injustice in the city. By concentrating on collective consumption Castells (1977) drew attention to the role of the state in providing goods and services – such as education, housing, transport and medical facilities – that at other times and other places were provided by the market. The ensuing privatisation programmes of many western governments have not diluted these arguments. In fact, they underline the way that the distinction between privately and collectively provided goods was not a result of any intrinsic qualities which they possess, but occurs through specific political struggles.
While critics soon complained that the ‘urban’ could not be purely defined in terms of collective consumption, Peter Saunders work during the 1980s approached the topic through the lens of privatised consumption. His somewhat controversial position was that the opportunity to consume was a more fundamental factor than class in determining urban social relations. Saunders (1981) argued that privatised consumption marked the core division in society between people who purchase services individually through the market and those whose lives are subject to the welfare state. With the benefit of hindsight it became clear that Saunders drew for his evidence too much on the specific historical circumstances of the 1980s. For instance, he read too much into the social and political implications of home-ownership. As Savage et al (2003:168) put it: ‘Individuals can buy entire houses but not entire hospitals or roads.’ Houses are also distinctive in that they can be bought and sold for a profit, yet few other artefacts have this potential. Cars, for example, rapidly depreciate.
At the same time as Saunders was developing his arguments, the controversies surrounding postmodernism were hotly debated and have seen a proliferation of studies on the fragmentation of culture, the aestheticisation of everyday life, and the reorganisation of production along post-Fordist lines. What unites a diverse set of authors is a concern with consumption as a communicative rather than an instrumental activity. This focus on the images, signs and symbols of consumption has also led to a renewed interest in personal identity over collective practice. Another important development has been the influence of Pierre Bourdieu. For Bourdieu consumption is motivated by the need for social groups to achieve status through ‘distinction’ that reinforces class position. Taste judgements are a marker of social class and deeply tied to hierarchical access to economic, cultural and social capital.
From these sources there has emerged a vast and bewildering literature on consumption with much work in the last decade concentrating on consumer culture and personal identity. Yet largely ignored are accounts of what Elizabeth Shove and Alan Warde have termed ‘inconspicuous consumption’ – the more mundane and unglamorous dimensions of practice that nonetheless pose major problems of waste and destruction of scarce resources. For instance, petrol for the car, electricity for the fridge, and water for the washing machine are just some of the environmentally significant energy supplies that make consumption possible. It is also significant that cars, fridges and washing machines themselves have moved from extraordinary, luxury commodities to being almost universal, unremarkable features of many homes.
Where this work can usefully reconnect with urban sociology is in relation to recent accounts of infrastructure networks that likewise have remained hidden from much analysis. Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin’s (2001) book Splintering Urbanism, which views cities as complex sites of sociotechnical processes, is important in this context. As they put it, ‘technologies of heat, power, water, light, speed and communications have…been intrinsic to all urban cultures’ (Graham and Marvin, 2001:12), but have been systematically ignored by geographers, sociologists, planners and so forth. This is partly due to the invisibility of cables, ducts, pipes, tunnels and other technical networks that interlace cities, but also says much about their taken-for-granted status and almost banal normality.
What Graham and Marvin (2001) are also very clear about is how the construction of spaces of mobility and flow for some, always involves the construction of barriers for others. A road is an obvious example: for a car driver it is a pathway; for a child it is a dangerous boundary. How they define splintering urbanism is also important, as it involves a trend toward increasing social polarisation. For instance, they describe ‘how urban “spaces of seduction” and safety are being “bundled” together with advanced and highly capable premium networked infrastructure (toll highways, broadband telecommunications, enclosed “quasi-private” streets, malls, and skywalks, and customised energy and water services). Together, these linked complexes of networks and spaces provide secessionary “network spaces” for elites and upper-income groups in the contemporary metropolis – shopping malls, entertainment and leisure developments, gated communities, “smart” homes and the like’ while those left behind inhabit marginalised “network ghettoes” (Graham and Marvin, 2001:220). What they are less clear about is how these new mobilities and old immobilities are lived and experienced. However, I want to suggest that the concept of mobile privatisation can grasp some of the relationships between consumption, the city and social practices.
Raymond Williams (1975:26) initially coined the term in his discussion of broadcasting to define one of the distinctive features of the modern condition encouraged by the ‘complex of developments’ surrounding consumption. The car, camera, washing machine, and television all contribute to the paradox of contemporary urban living; increased social mobility accompanies a retreat, which is both effective achievement and defensive response, into the home. Williams later revisited the concept in Towards 2000, to explain that:
It is an ugly phrase for an unprecedented condition. What it means is that at most active social levels people are increasingly living as private small-family units, or, disrupting even that, as private and deliberately self-enclosed individuals, while at the same time there is a quite unprecedented mobility of such restricted privacies. (Williams, 1983:188)
For some commentators this intensification of private experience and mobility is now the dominant set of social relations in market societies (Taylor, 1999:137). Others have pointed out how a whole new domestic design aesthetic based around domestic labour- saving devices have produced a cult of the home which is especially evident today in the prevalence of DIY stores and home-makeover TV programmes (Miles and Miles, 2004:33).
There is a very clear sense in which this diagnosis anticipates Robert Putnam’s (2000) hugely influential examination of the collapse of civic engagement and social capital in the United States, captured in his title Bowling Alone. In this book he draws on quantitative evidence of declining participation at public meetings, church services, voting booths, Parent-Teacher Associations and other voluntary organisations, in order to illustrate the extent of social disengagement across contemporary America. The most significant factor contributing to the erosion of social connectedness in Putnam’s (2000:283) account is generational change: ‘the slow, steady, and ineluctable replacement of the long civic generation by their less involved children and grandchildren’ (the post war baby-boomers and Generation X Slackers). A whole raft of demographic transformations have fundamentally altered American family life since the 1960s – fewer marriages, more divorces, less children, lower real wages – each of these changes accounts for some weakening of civic engagement as married, middle-class parents tend to be more socially involved than others, in his reckoning.
The second crucial factor disrupting social capital formation is the technological transformation of leisure. Television has played a key role in ‘privatizing our leisure time’ (Putnam, 2000:283). While the introduction of personal computers and Internet access into the home have further broadened infotainment possibilities in the last decade, this has arguably been of the individualising kind devoted to intensifying private experience. A third telling factor has been the changing geography of the American landscape rendered by increased mobility, suburbanisation, and car commuting. Each has corroded social connectedness in distinctive ways. From mall culture to gated communities the ‘privatization of suburban life has become formalized and impersonal’ (Putnam, 2000:210).
Although Putnam (2000:148) recognises the importance of small groups (self-help groups, reading groups, support groups etc), social movements (black civil rights, women’s liberation, gay pride, religious fundamentalism etc) and the Internet (virtual communities, e-mail, e-commerce etc) as qualifying the one-directional drift of his thesis, there is little sense of how these transformations have been lived and experienced. A further problem is that while he cautions against romanticising small town middle class civic life of the 1950s, it is precisely against this nostalgic vision that he measures the decline of community (surprisingly untheorised in the book – especially given the ideological assumptions and mythological connotations associated with the concept of community). Moreover, he clearly regards this process as dehumanising, whereas Williams (1983:189) is careful to acknowledge that this ‘is not at all how it feels like inside the shell, with people you want to be with, going where you want to go’. In other words, a more nuanced account of the shifting geographies of belonging, ambivalence and difference is necessary. For example, Carrabine and Longhurst (2002) have developed the concept of mobile privatisation in relation to the car cultures of young people and the extended networks of sociability afforded by auto-mobility.
There is another set of literatures that are important to this overall discussion (though they have developed completely independently of each other). The debates surrounding ‘the death of the social’ (Rose, 1996) impact on how the forces promoting mobile privatisation might be theorised. In this body of work, loosely influenced by Foucault’s thinking on governmentality and compatible with Beck and Giddens’s work on risk, there is a concern with how social insurance (national health insurance, state pensions for the elderly) has given way to private insurance (private pensions, private health insurance). The overall argument is that there has been a move from collective forms of insurance provided by the welfare state to the ‘private prudentialism’ encouraged by neo-liberalism (O’Malley, 1992). As Barbara Hudson (2003:54) suggests:
This private insurance is supplemented by smaller collectivities of individuals who come together in transitory groups for specific purposes (residents in neighbourhood watch schemes; traders in a shopping mall sharing the costs of security patrols and cameras; ‘friends’ of a hospital raising money for specialist equipment; lobbyists for or against a proposed road scheme).
Clearly the advance of the ‘private’ over public alternatives has many different genealogies (to which could be added the privatisation of state-owned industries in the 1980s; the promotion of home ownership by the New Right; the transformation of urban governance from managerialism to entrepreneurialism; and the ways in which the market had become sovereign by the 1990s). This withdrawal of the state from collective provision of services explains some of the structural processes at work.
Yet in other key respects these issues posed by mobile privatisation return us to old debates surrounding the distinctions between community and association: the impersonal and instrumental social relations that predominate in urban culture over the intimate and rich ties of rural life. The distinction was most famously drawn by Toennies between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (association), where different kinds of place determine social relations such that the city produces anonymous and fleeting relationships, while in rural localities intimate and secure communities predominate. Of course, one of the lasting legacies of the British community studies tradition was the revelation that strong community ties and dense kinship networks existed in inner-cities (Young and Wilmot, 1962) while challenging sentimental views of rural life to indicate how conflict and resentment arose from inequalities of class, status and participation in the countryside (Frankenburg, 1957). The common theme running through the studies was that of class, mobility and social change, and our suggestion is that the development of a Cockney diaspora along the new (and old) migration corridors – from Dagenham to Southend and Liverpool St to Clacton via Shenfield – offered new settlement patterns signifying affluence, modernisation and individualisation. Meanwhile, it is claimed by Castells in more recent work that those left behind in the ‘dual city’ are trapped by locality, tribalism and the past (Mollenkopf and Castells, 1991), where the old divisions of race and class have become post-modernised and exposed to forms of ‘mundane cosmopolitanism’ (Hebdige, 1990, in Young, forthcoming) in the emerging global city economies.
So the central question posed by this discussion becomes: how are senses of belonging sustained in the face of the geographical dispersal, cultural dislocation and social disembedding that mobile privatisation produces? The question is especially timely given the de-territorialisation of identities out of the East End, but also among an elite cosmopolitan class that is ‘not tightly tied to any locale, but at home in many’ (Mitchell, 2000: 280). While for large swathes of the middle class, unaccustomed to living with the new ‘precarious freedoms’ (Beck and Beck-Gernshiem, 1996), a bitter localist politics has arisen which Neil Smith (1996, 2002) has termed ‘revanchist’ so as to signal a politics based on revenge and a brutalising criminalisation of poverty in the re-taking of the inner city by the middle classes. It is highly significant that Smith (2002:440) develops these arguments in a discussion of gentrification and examines how the repressive class-based nature of the process ‘is assiduously hidden in the verbiage of the British Labour government’. All these developments have been subject to intense speculation but little empirical analysis and one of the major tasks of future research will be to challenge and refine existing theories of migration, place and identity.
Eamonn Carrabine lectures at the University of Essex
© 2004·06
Increasing numbers of black Caribbean residents are also making … the exodus out to Essex
Welcome to this issue
Contents of this issue
Editor’s letter
Academic
Debate
Entertainment
Essays
Journalism
Feedback
Britishness, multiculturalism and globalisation
Consumption, the City and social practice
White flight, black attitude
How the ‘War on Terror’ helps terrorism
Religiosity and the politics of identity
Tolerance with conditions
Shooting the Brazilian
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