Rising East Online

Sixes and Sevens: LONDONE year on

—Phil Cohen

On 6th and 7th July 2005, London went from utopia to dystopia as news headlines changed from ‘London 2012’ to ‘London bombings.’ A year later, Rising East hosted a seminar to review public policy responses to the events. The discussion hinged on whether ‘London 2012’ and ‘London bombings’ are being jointly deployed as iconic opposites in an attempt to engineer social solidarity, to make us feel that ‘we are all Londoners’. Phil Cohen disagreed:

Exclusion Not Inclusion

Is there a link between the Olympics and terrorism? The answer seems stupidly obvious after Munich. As the world’s greatest media event, the Olympics provides a perfect setting for staging the spectacle of terror, to broadcast fear, anxiety and horror on the faces of those who have come to witness an athletics competition designed to produce pleasure, joy or disappointment – what a propaganda coup! Only where the metaphysics of presence remains intact, where ‘being there’ as eye-and-ear witness still counts for something – counts for so much that only the well-off and well-connected get to be there, only there and then does propaganda by deed still deliver. A great sporting occasion like the Olympics is just such an event.

As a result, since Munich security has been a major consideration in the sitting of the Games, and the design of the main stadium and athletes’ village. But I would argue the result has been to promote a form of urbanism which has intensified rather than reduced the risk of attack.

The Olympics is about globalisation in economic, cultural, social and political terms.

What it does is to inject concentrated investment in globally networked infrastructures (transport, infotechnology etc) into areas of the city where this is largely lacking. In general the construction of iconic buildings, and public landmarks, signals to the world that these are premium sites where the new international business elite are to live and work. The Olympic zone is not only a premium site in its own right, but creates a cluster of similar sites around itself. In its very grandiosity, its contempt for its surroundings, this architecture is inviting attack. In Hegel’s words, these are the prophetic ruins of globalisation. And their downfall may be closer in time and space than we think.

Premium sites require a local service class: people to clean, cook, child mind, chauffeur, and generally look after all the domestic and professional needs of the business elite. This class will be drawn from refugees, asylum seekers, migrant workers of every kind, as well as a residual, de-industrialised but home grown labour force who are clustered in the neighbourhood of premium sites, adding a little local colour, whilst being carefully corralled so as not to spoil the view. These groups often operate through diasporic social networks, embedded in the informal economy, but they are largely excluded from the opportunity structures generated by the global knowledge economy. In the East End of London we have already seen the consequences of this splintered urbanism on the Isle of Dogs. Is the same scenario now set to unfold in Stratford in relation to the Olympics?

From my research, and that of others, it is clear that to be young and Asian and to grow up in the shadow of Canary Wharf or Stratford City is to have the promised land of global capitalism on your doorstep, apparently within easy reach; and yet for many, these places might as well be on the other side of the moon in terms of the real opportunities they afford. Radical Islam in both its religious and political versions offers an alternative set of aspirations, a whole world view that rejects everything that Canary Wharf, and Stratford City , and yes, the Olympics, has come to stand for.

After the fiasco of the Forest Gate affair , this sense of alienation from ‘mainstream’ civil society has inevitably intensified; at the same time , and especially in the wake of the recent arrests in Waltham Forest , East London is now routinely portrayed in the mass media as a ‘dark continent’ where a new dangerous class has taken up residence. So of course we need a special Commission on Social Cohesion (not to mention countless journalistic ‘inside stories’) to explore this imaginary geography of political and religious extremism, and colonise it for ‘common sense’. Yet despite the popular fears and prejudices being whipped up by this new kind of orientalism, the really scary thing is that the ‘suicide bomber’ is just the boy or girl next door.

There are some hopeful signs that the nature and depth of the problem is being recognised in some quarters. The CRE has made strong representations about the need to introduce special measures to ensure that the Black and Asian communities do not lose out in the employment and procurement stakes. LOCOG has been alerted to the fact that gang masters will exploit the system of contract labour in the construction industry so the Olympics stadium and village end up being built by the new navvies from Eastern Europe. Unless these issues – and the public concerns they ventilate – are addressed, the story of London 2012 is likely to be about accelerated gentrification and creating a new geography of social exclusion.

Phil Cohen is director of the London East Research Institute.

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