Sterile city: how the elites’ fight to preserve their privilege undermines the city’s future

Almost exactly 10 years ago a councillor at the London Borough of Camden lashed out at well-heeled local residents objecting to a new Sainsbury’s opening in Belsize Park to “check their privilege”, warning that the area was in danger of becoming “too posh”. The objectors won after the company dropped its plan. The site is now a Pret a Manger.

The campaigners had successfully prevented another Tesco from opening on the same site while Sainsbury’s also raised the white flag over two other contested sites with half a mile from that one (one of which is still boarded up). The net result is that this mixed area has two mid-sized supermarkets, a Marks & Spencer and a former Budgens now run by an Irish chain as a “world class food emporium”, neither of which is best known for offering cut-price value for money.

The councillor, Theo Blackwell (now a senior figure at London City Hall), said that the new store would have benefitted residents on lower incomes and provided more choice. His telling three-word phrase encapsulated what was then an emerging trend for the established home-owning classes within London to act swiftly and concertedly to retain the status quo.

While this may seem a trivial example, it is one of an array of forces that threaten to leave London a sterile place, denied of variety and lacking in services that are needed, used and often provided by a large swathe of the city population. While some parts of London are succeeding in preserving their privilege, others are changing in nature as part of a gentrification process that is squeezing out the less well off.

Photo by JC Gellidon on Unsplash

Right to the city

From an urban geography perspective, this can be seen as a battle for the right to the city, as I discussed in May. This term, first set out by the French Marxist sociologist and philosopher, Henri Lefebvre, sees all people living in cities having the right to influence how their urban environment develops, no matter their legal status, background, physical capabilities or identity.

While anyone can be said to have right to the city, fellow Marxist thinkers such as David Harvey have said that the focus when thinking about ensuring everyone has that right should be on those who find themselves losing their rights — the poor, the underprivileged and those marginalised from political power. So how does this theoretical analysis map out on the ground?

The gentrification process taking place across London over the last few decades has seen urban renewal schemes replacing affordable housing for working and middle-class families with upscale developments. These new areas typically feature high-end residential units —often within gated, privately-controlled spaces — alongside international chain stores, temporary retail concepts, and high-priced dining and entertainment venues.

A brilliant piece of analysis of government data by The Londoner last year showed that in the prior 12 months, more than 50% of new housing construction consisted of two-bedroom properties. Nearly all remaining new builds were one-bedroom units. Just 10% of newly constructed homes featured three bedrooms, while an extremely small portion—merely 2%—contained four bedrooms or more. This represents the lowest proportion of larger homes since data collection started in 1991, tied with previous record lows.

On top of that the capital has the most expensive childcare in the country, where parents pay an average of £218 per week for one part-time nursery place. Given that and the shortage of family housing, it should be no surprise that birth rates in London are among the lowest in England with a birth rate of 1.41 children per woman in 2022 below the England and Wales average of 1.49.

Sterilisation

The shortage of affordable family homes coming on the market combined with a surfeit on one- and two-bedroomed “luxury” homes will inevitably change the mix of the population in that area, attracting the young and mobile as well as investors. While the elite groups and capitalist property developers are claiming their right to the city, the more marginalised and less well-resourced are losing ground.

One visible sign of the impact of the exodus is the rash of closures of primary schools across the capital as the number applying for state school places tumbles. The latest examples are two schools in Southwark, Charlotte Sharman and St Mary Magdalene that are set to close on 31 August. Aa local councillor put it: “Families are being priced out, and the result is plummeting pupil numbers, leaving our local schools in increasingly difficult positions.”

But if more families well from less well-off backgrounds are moving out of the city, then at some point the growing population of high-earning singletons and couples will find the services they rely on, both public and private, falling down as this accidental sterilisation programme leads to fewer workers able to travel to work to fulfil these roles.

There is no right to the city set in law anywhere other than Brazil, which put into statute in 2001. Elsewhere these rights are decided in the courts of law and public opinion and in the media. Perhaps the only remaining options who those who feel they are losing their right to the city is to copy the example of Belsize Park middle class and get there and protest, loudly.

Smart Cities: urban innovation needs people-centred guidelines

Seven out of 10 people are likely to be living in cities by the year 2050 compared with around half now, increasing both their contribution to, and vulnerability from, climate change. Given that cities are drivers of both innovation and economic growth, they must surely play a key role in devising smart solutions to low-carbon urban living.

While the primary focus should be on ways to reduce carbon emissions and improve the environmental efficiency of city dwellers’ lifestyles, the potential for technology to deliver improvements is once again on the agenda. Central to that is the idea of the smart city, which leverages data systems to gather information and deliver services.

It is a concept that has risen without trace (there is no commonly accepted author or definition), but it can be described as a synergy between humans, technological systems, and operational frameworks that collaborate across essential domains including healthcare, transport, education and infrastructure.

The debate over so-called smart city projects will move into the spotlight at the end of May 2025 when UN-Habitat, the United Nations’ agency for promoting environmentally sustainable towns and cities, will debate draft international guidelines on people-centred smart cities.

In the UN’s vision, smart cities are designed to help cities and communities ensure that digital innovation and smart technologies “meaningfully improve quality of life” for everyone, particularly the most vulnerable. If agreed, the guidelines will be a “non-binding framework” for rolling out smart city strategies, plans and regulations.

UN-Habitat says that its guidelines, which will be voted on by all 193 United Nations Member States at the summit in Nairobi, Kenya, in the week beginning 26 May, will ensure digital urban infrastructure and data contribute to making cities and human settlements “sustainable, inclusive, prosperous and respectful of human rights”.

Fututistic smart city? Photo by Conny Schneider on Unsplash

Contested claims

Inevitably, these claims are highly contested. For every claim about more efficient delivery, personalised services delivery and fully informed citizens, there are counterclaims of intrusive surveillance and predictive policing, exclusion of the vulnerable and the less technologically proficient, and a management agenda driven by the tech company whose equipment is installed. This is why efforts are needed to create codes and best practices for implementing these innovative systems, even if on a non-binding basis.

Examples in cities that can claim the “smart” description include Singapore, which uses digital sensors to collect data on citizens’ behaviour, enabling the measurement of aspects such as overcrowding, congestion times, and off-peak periods. Seven years ago, London mayor Sadiq Khan unveiled a 60-page plan (PDF) that includes initiatives on digital inclusion, healthcare innovation and smart infrastructure.

Like artificial intelligence, which has fuelled even more anxious debates about the pros and cons, the smart city is likely, slowly but surely, to become an integral part of how cities are developed, regenerated, and even built from scratch, such as Toyota’s Woven City in Susono City, Japan. Canute-like resistance may delay but not block its spread.

Many analyses of urban regeneration schemes have found that it is often the more vulnerable and less wealthy communities that find themselves disadvantaged or even displaced by the infrastructure that is put in place as part of the new investment. It is crucial that bodies such as UN-Habitat set rules that ensure smart cities do not foster a permanent apartheid between rich and poor areas.

The 21st century has established the smart city as a crucial urban planning framework. The significance of its potential impact on millions of people is immense, and it may indeed substantially contribute to aligning urban environments with net zero goals.

For successful implementation, however, it is essential that urban planners, local authorities, and central governments involve citizens in the development process and convince them about how these innovations will positively transform their daily lives and deliver genuinely sustainable cities.

A fresh perspective on smart cities demands both adopting innovative technologies and harmonizing business and government priorities while supporting the New Urban Agenda and Sustainable Development Goals.

The UN-Habitat framework offers a significant chance to rethink city governance by putting citizens at the heart of technological advancement.

Beyond ‘slums’: rethinking urban informal settlements in the Global South

The pejorative word “slums” has made a reappearance in the mainstream Western media following the death of Pope Francis as mourners recalled his visits by bus to reach the poor shanty town areas of Buenos Aires where he was archbishop — giving him the nickname of the “slum pope”.

The word dates back to the 18th century and, while its origin is unknown, some speculate it might come from slime meaning a waste product from mining or German word for mud, schlamm — implying dirtiness — while others point to the stem for “slumber” i.e., somewhere to lay one’s head.

Its meaning as a description of squalid housing conditions became associated with the rapid urbanisation of western cities such as London and New York as the Industrial Revolution drew thousands of people into the expanding cities for work. As the influx outstripped the available housing, the new migrant workers had to make do with what they could find.

This led to the creation of slums whose common features can be summarised as heavily populated places that lacked public services and whose residents had inadequate housing and little if anything in the way of security of tenure.

Programmes of social house building such as council estates and housing projects as well as commercial developments led to slums being razed and the residents often displaced rather than rehoused. In London and  Britain’s first council estate, Boundary Green Estate that replaced the Old Nicol slum, saw only 11 of the original residents rehoused there.

Map of Old Nichol slum from Charles Booth's mapping Source psychogeographicreview

Redeveloped-Boundary-Estate-Housing_for_the_Working_Classes-Report-1912-1913-William-Edward-Riley

St Giles Rookery near the British Museum — immortalised by Patrick Hamilton in his book Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky — was bulldozed to make way for New Oxford Street as was The Devil’s Acre in Westminster that is now Victoria Street. Agar Town in Camden was demolished to make way for the railways to Scotland and the North of England.

No universal solution

In the 21st century, the focus of the debate has move to Latin America, Asia and Africa. Thanks to hit movies and media coverage there are many significant places that are known by name in terms of their slums —Kibera in Nairobi, Dharavi in Mumbai and huge areas of Mexico City.

Informal semi-legal housing is thus widespread across the world and is likely to become even more important over the coming years if forecasts of population growth are met. The United Nations says the global population will hit 9 billion by 2025, a rise of more than a third since 2020. But the urban population will grow faster, doubling to more than 7 billion and, of that, the number living in informal urban settlements will treble to 3 billion.

Kibera in Nairobi. Schreibkraft, CC BY-SA 3.0 httpscreativecommons.orglicensesby-sa3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

These forecasts have led to mounting concern about the potential impacts on slum dwellers and societies without some sort of intervention. This was crystallised by the American urban theorist Mike Davis in his best-selling book, Planet of Slums, in which he sets out an apocalyptic vision of cities expanding beyond their limits and growing beyond what might be deemed as acceptable.

To give an example, writing in 2006, he warned that cities had “absorbed nearly two thirds of the global population explosion since 1950 and are currently growing by a million babies and migrants each week”.

UN-Habitat the United Nations’ sustainable urban development agency, in 2003 issued a report called Challenges of the Slums, which warned that the number of slum dwellers was “growing and will continue to increase unless there is serious and concerted action by all relevant stakeholders”. It was motivated by the growing concern over urban poverty and identified slums as physical and spatial manifestation of that and of inequality within cities.

This has encountered criticism from academics particularly those based in the Global South who argue that the word slums, which rose out of a specifically British and European experience of the Industrial Revolution, has connotations that are not appropriate for the informal settlements of the cities of the Global South.

These urban areas that are often peripheral to the more established city are not homogenous: there are many types of settlements varying by country. While they may look cramped and overcrowded to western eyes, that is a relative concept. Often the individual slum residents will build their own homes and will improve their housing as they get hold of the funding. These communities will often work together to gain political power, giving them a voice within the city government.

Another unwelcome echo is that the historic word slum is used as a justification to repeat European and American practice of evictions, removals and displacements, often to make way for real estate developers working alongside the government to build high-end buildings that will attract wealthier residents. Even if they are well intentioned, such programmes often have the opposite impact to that intended: driving the urban poor to the further fringes of cities where they are usually cut off from opportunities of work.

Policies based on lessons learned from urban developments in the Global North are unlikely to translate well to cities in the Global South. A whole new mindset is needed, that is based on the lived experiences of the people who live in communities in peripheral and informal settlements. Rather than take planning policies and theories developed 100 years ago, the focus should be on learning from the experiences of the multitude of different types of settlements. Instead of one universal truth there should be hundreds of lessons for building better cities.