Her paper also drew on the late Neil Smith’s forensic critique of urban regeneration in the UK that appeared in Mute two years ago (in part a review of Owen Hatherley’s Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain). It remains a sober reminder of everything wrong with contemporary urbanism in the UK.  Lees drew on two passages from that text that still stand out:

Regeneration was always ever a gentrification strategy, and we knew it. We knew it from Blair’s 1997 launch of New Labour’s regeneration policy from the stigmatised Aylesbury Estate in London where the desperate 70s class-neutral language of revitalisation, recycling, renaissance and especially regeneration was revived in the 2000s – a language as deliberately anodyne as it is ideological and mendacious; an environmentally friendly cover for class cleansing in the urban landscape.

The organised left only ever had a spotty record on housing and community politics and no real opposition to Blair’s regenerationism emerged there. More broadly, the political defeats after the mid 1980s left many with little energy to fight, and many otherwise good souls, exhausted by the defensive and broadly failed struggles against Thatcher and desperately keen to see a Blairite alternative, concluded that if they couldn’t beat them they better join them. Ex-radicals became frontline regeneration managers for local councils, others even became developers. Architects and planners, not generally given to the language of gentrification, leveled no audible objection; and few academics put up any resistance [...] The melancholy of political defeat in the 1980s became the new normal for subsequent generations of urban professionals, and the same melancholy was built into the wrecked urbanism in the 2000s [Neil Smith, The Regeneration Railway Journey]

Image courtesy of http://southwarknotes.wordpress.com/

(These questions are motivated by a desire to think differently about the city as a site of social transformation. If we are to, in fact, ‘see like a city’ (Amin, 2013),  we must abandon the selfsame critical postures that act as alibis for business-as-usual and re-connect with practices that seek to actively assemble and sustain the necessary conditions for radical political change.)

Is it not time to rethink how crisis has come to re-define the city?

Is it not the case that our concepts and practices are no longer adequate to building an alternative urbanism? If so, how might one act on the ‘nerve endings of urban inequality’ (Pieterse, 2008: 176)?

In what way can the city be re-occupied and re-imagined as a site of association and care, subversion and solidarity? Is it not desirable to contest the proliferating revanchisms that peddle fear and violence?

What might an urban politics that recognizes and responds to necessity and vulnerability actually look like? When will we finally call time on narrow institutional vehicles that celebrate development and profiteering?

Why should we accept the transformation of cities into crucibles of security and resilience? Why is it acceptable that so many are condemned to zones of bio-political abandonment and sustained exposure to a host of ecological risks?

Is it not the case that affordable sustainable housing is a right and is it possible to reconnect urban infrastructure with radical political action?

Can the ‘secular crisis’ of contemporary capitalism open a space for imagining new alternatives forms of urban dwelling?

Images: via http://openhouse2013.com/ and http://www.moma.org/

“Open House is a nine-day space that will bring together people facing the housing crisis across London to organise and take action around our collective housing needs.” 

All the details of events can be found here.

Immaterial Labour isn’t Working is organized by Auto Italia South East and Huw Lemmey. All the details of the series will be available here.

Image courtesy of http://autoitaliasoutheast.org/blog/news/2012/10/29/immaterial-labour-isnt-working/

“Teaching is good. Memories come flooding back – the enthusiasm of my lessons in Padova, the seminars at the Institute, and then those meetings, either abroad or at other universities, where I was able to give bodily form to my thinking, speaking it aloud far more than writing it out. That profound emotion which, in discussions in class, pushes you into finding ways to be clear – almost an excavation you do into yourself, for others, driven by their need for understanding” (237).

“I have an incredible need to reconnect with the corporeality of communication, to re-adjust the measures of the relationship with the real. In communicating you form concepts which criticism often does not register [...] The years spent in prison have been a kind of intrusion, a raid into the void. Now I experience this void of communication as detritus and passivity” (237-238).

“Teaching will force me to break the inertia and to locate myself in a living milieu. I have to have the courage to take the plunge and swim. For me, if I am to succeed in operating practically, at the political level and in life, restarting teaching is a precondition. How pleasurable is the tiredness you get from teaching!” (238)

“Teaching demands great generosity – like a stripping bare of one’s own scientific knowledge in order to show it, and the only slowly to re-cover it with its clothing. This moment of nakedness is fundamental. It is fundamental because in teaching only a pure subjectivity can accept open dialogue and the free development of discussion. When, in 1968 and after, the professors refused this naked condition of liberty, they were not defending the substance of teaching – they were reneguing on it” (238).

Source: Antonio Negri, Diary of an Escape, trans. by Ed Emery (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010).

There is an absolutely fantastic piece by Peter Linebaugh over at Counterpunch in which he describes a new radical archiving initiative in conjunction with the May Day Rooms. The May Day Rooms is “a safe house for vulnerable archives and historical material linked to social movements, experimental culture, and marginalised figures and groups. A site for gathering, holding, and animating documents and idioms of dissent which continue to offer a critically productive and emancipatory relation to the turbulent present.”

Linebaugh’s article describes a recent initiative (with Silvia Federici, George Caffentzis and others) to document the cluster of pamphlets, books and other marginalia associated with the Midnight Notes operation. This includes the Zerowork project of the mid 1970s, the New York Wages for Housework campaign and the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa.

This is a pressing initiative, as Linebaugh suggests:

“In our day, as the traces of our radical movements are being thrown into rubbish pits, as state sponsored ‘austerity’ demands the commodification of every inch of space, and with sinister intent destroys the evidence of our past, its joys, its victories.  Clear out the closets, empty the shelves, toss out the old footage, shred the underground press, pulverize the brittle, yellowing documents!  Thus neo-liberalism organizes the transition from the old to the new; they must silence alternatives.”

If Linebaugh’s piece artfully reconstructs a counter-history of radical dissent around Clerkenwell Green and the Marx Memorial Library, I was struck by the connection between archiving and the assembling of a radical infrastructure for social transformation. As the recent arson attack at the Freedom Bookstore shows, it is imperative that we continue to nurture spaces that seek to document and preserve the actions and words of earlier struggles for a different world. Those struggles, more than ever before, are our struggles.

IMAGE: From http://maydayrooms.org/collections/round-about-midnight/