Miles

Planetary Urbanisation and Affect: The Production of Paradise/Place

Nigel Thrift describes cities as “roiling maelstroms of affect”, with “anger, fear, happiness and joy…continually on the boil” (2004: 57). ‘Affect’, in the Deleuzian frame, is an always-emergent capacity to both affect and be affected: to be suspended in certain atmospheres but also to contribute to these same moods and ‘intensities’ (Anderson, 2016). As Thrift suggests, the affect of a particular place that is occupied by certain people and things mediates the embodied experience of the immersed subject, predisposing them to certain actions. Walking down a street may have a specific affect - relaxing, or fearful - that is modified by the actants present - a smoker leaning against a wall, a blossoming tree, the literal atmosphere and light, or a piece of information learned just prior to setting off - with these “manifold beings” all coming together into a specific ‘composition’ that fundamentally informs the emotions and thus actions of the walker (Thrift, 2004: 62).

This essay sets out to discuss the role of property law and municipal-private initiatives in attempting to engineer a specific affect in urban spaces, centring around how ‘anti-homeless’ legislation is used as an instrument to further certain political ends. First briefly providing a macro-scale examination of urban homelessness control through a planetary urbanisation lens, I move on to a more situated analysis of how specific assemblages of urban actors cultivate affect by manipulating the urban fabric. The essay concludes by considering how this process has taken place in Birmingham (UK) city centre since 2016, around the Westside Business Improvement District and the square formerly known as Paradise Circus.

The planetary urbanisation thesis begins from the hypothesis of Henri Lefebvre that “society has been completely urbanized” (1970). By this, Lefebvre means that capitalist industrial mechanisms have increasingly instrumentalised all earthly material for growth, ensnaring the planet in a uneven and fragmentary ‘urban fabric’: ‘urbanisation’ comes to mean not the expansion of cities, but the integration of terrain into regional and global-scale divisions of labour and systems of extraction (Brenner, 2014; Schmid, 2014). Lefebvre also develops the notion of ‘implosion/explosion’, used to denote the specific process whereby capitalist means of agglomeration (drawing value and capital inwards) simultaneously expand the urban fabric outwards. This ‘explosion’ entails the continual transformation of peripheral ‘operational landscapes’, re-articulating territory and environment into the capitalist system (Brenner, 2014). Crucially, these transformations and re-articulations are mutual and can occur at any scale and in any place, including the city.

Now, to apply this specifically to the issue of urban homelessness and affect, I turn to Don Mitchell’s 1997 treatise on the ‘Annihilation of Space by Law’. Mitchell argues that globalisation (which can be figured as a symptom of planetary urbanisation) is “not predicated on the ‘annihilation of space by time’”, as is commonly argued, but in fact relies on “the constant production and reproduction of certain kinds of spaces” (1997: 304). Capital, unshackled from the constraints of space by technology and deregulation (a condition of ‘time-space compression’), is envisaged by Mitchell as swirling around the globe, frantically attempting to stave off the existential crisis of the declining rate of profit by searching for places of comparative advantage. All around the world, therefore, municipal policymakers, property owners, and businesses must “prostrate themselves before the god Capital” and reconfigure the built and legislative environment to indicate themselves as effective spaces of production, thus attracting investment and relocation (1997: 304).

The attractiveness of a particular city is intrinsically tied to the notion of affect. As Schmid explains, another Lefebvrian concept is that of ‘centrality’: the city as a centre, a site of “exchange, rapprochement, convergence, collection, meeting” (2014: 71). This quality of the city, as a heterogenous place of convergence and potentiality, is denoted through the figure of the ‘encounter’ (Wilson, 2016). Everyday encounters with fellow citizens - the other - are seen as events which can foster meaningful community and a rich democratic politics. However, there is frequently a normative assumption that the encounter is always productive and positive when in reality, urban interactions can often be fraught with danger, fear and anxiety: experiences of abuse, unpleasantness, crime or violence. Such experiences - whether present or past, personal or secondhand - undeniably possess powerful affects that can shade entire communities and cities.

Returning to Mitchell, a city that wishes to attract investment must therefore cultivate a welcoming affect and reduce the chance of negative encounters occurring: it must artifice what Davis & Bertrand (2007) call a ‘neoliberal dreamworld’. Naturally, different individuals can process the same experience differently, meaning the city must thus reshape itself to project a particular affect to a particular audience: the “footloose capital” of the jet-set and entrepreneurial “middle class, politicians and managers of the new economy” (1997:304). This can take the form of constructing “extravagant convention centres, down-town tourist amusements, up-market, gentrified restaurant and bar districts” and so on, but simultaneously also involves the manipulation of public spaces to remove those with whom such individuals are likely to have negative encounters: the guilt-inducing homeless, unsavoury loiterers, and intimidating hecklers. This manifestation of implosion/explosion, where the urban environment is remodelled to appeal to potential investors, is summarised by Mitchell as thus: “if there has been a collapse of space, then there has also simultaneously been a new, and important reinvestment in place — a re-investment both of fixed (and often collective) capital and of imagery”; or, in other words, of affect (1997: 304).

The rest of this essay explores how this engineering of affect operates at the expense of the homeless, examining the physical and legislative ‘solutions’ employed. Sasha Davis (2016) draws on the work of Deleuze in discussing how spatial control can be exercised through an ‘archipelagic’ assemblage of actors that possess islands of non-contiguous territory. This ‘translocal assemblage’, held together by a varied number of “human practices enacted in place and organised by specific regulative principles”, is an effective way to understand the ‘saturation’ of urban spaces with control (2016: 199).

All together, these heterogenous and variably-scaled actors form an assemblage of independent but overlapping expressions of control over urban space, all aimed at maintaining a highly political ‘public order’: in other words, cultivating an often sterile atmosphere of comfort and safety for the professional-managerial class.

To conclude, I will provide an example of how this process has occurred in central Birmingham. Paradise Circus was a distinctly modernist square over the mid-to-late twentieth century, home to the Birmingham and Midland Institute (dedicated to the promotion of education in the city), Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham School of Music, and Birmingham Central Library (at opening in 1974 the largest non-national municipal library in Europe). Since 1999, the entire area has been redeveloped in a joint venture partnership between the City Council and BT Group, managed by the property development manager Argent. The Central Library and School of Music were demolished starting in 2016 to provide space for the seven storey One Chamberlain Square bought by PwC accounting the same year, and the eight storey Two Chamberlain Square occupied by a variety of multinational firms (Paradise Birmingham, 2022). One Chamberlain Square is multipurpose commercial, with the bottom floor occupied by two similarly high-end establishments: the Indian chain restaurant Dishoom and novelty bar/club Albert’s Schloss. Alongside this first phase of development has been the expansion into the area, now branded Paradise Place, of the Westside Business Improvement District (WBID) another public-private partnership which has aimed to ‘enhance’ the area “for the benefit of all who live, work, trade and visit” there (WBID, 2022). This has involved in particular the establishment of the ‘Westside Street Wardens’, a group of private security guards who are collectively employed to patrol the area during evenings, creating an atmosphere of sanitised safety for those travelling between the commercial, entertainment and residential units on the square. The redesign of the square, in summary, has aimed to attract the attention of global investors not only by creating property but by deploying an instrumentalised ‘cosmopolitan’ affect that has entailed the destruction of public spaces of gathering and more intense policing (Thrift, 2004).

Computer generated publicity image (Paradise Birmingham, 2022). The area is distinctly dusty and desolate during colder months due to a lack of greenery and footfall.

To summarise, this essay has discussed how municipal legislation and initiatives are increasingly utilised to manipulate and manufacture the affect of particular urban public spaces in an effort to attract footloose capital. Building on a framework of planetary urbanisation and the ‘annihilation of space’, I have explained how the built and legal environment is engineered by a heterogeneous assemblage of public and private actors, with the result of more strictly regulating the affect of key strategic investment sites, ‘insulating’ potential investors from unpleasant experiences or encounters (Lauer, 2005). This analysis was grounded and demonstrated in the case of the redevelopment of Paradise Circus/Place in Birmingham, which will prove to be an increasingly rewarding subject of study over the course of the 2022 Commonwealth Games to be hosted in the city.

Post-script:

This was an essay I wrote during late February to early March that aimed to synthesise a lot of the ideas that I'd developed in my 'Global Urbanism' paper. A friend at UCL had introduced me to affect in the context of urban studies and had this really nice idea about private automobiles being used to 'insulate' the driver from the affects of their urban surroundings. I took that idea and decided to integrate it into this framework I'd been developing about planetary urbanisation and the annihilation of space by law by Don Mitchell. It was really energised by these observations that I'd made about the very cold and eerie atmosphere of Paradise Place during the winter months, as well as the opinions that I'd been forming about encounters with the homeless in Cambridge often being fraught with awkwardness and guilt from a lot of the more posh and 'striving' students, who somewhat understand deep down that these people are suffering because of the world created by those they circulate with and will eventually replace. Back to the actual essay - I think overall there's something quite nice here and earnestly believe it's a very elegant framework that can be applied to a lot of 'Worlding' schemes across the globe, probably deserving of a more fleshed out attempt and possibly sending it to a few calls.