But this core proposition, indeed this ruling set of ideas, today appears increasingly unsustainable and is everywhere being eroded.
According to Oxfam’s annual survey, in 2018 the number of billionaires who owned as much as the poorest half of humanity stood at twenty-six – enough to fill little more than a third of the seats on a new London Routemaster bus. Yet the system that produces such evident excesses has its massed ranks of defenders. While the world rushes headlong towards numerous precipices, whether they be political, ecological, economic or social, its fundamental structures continue to create subsidiary winners who become the cheerleaders of capital and capitalism. Today the hollowness of this vision is everywhere being pointed out and denounced. Increasingly, the exclusive and excluding landscape of new and unaffordable homes is generating a simmering rage, a substrate of feeling throughout the city whose consequences we do not yet know.
What does a city run for the rich mean for everyone else? Certainly its effects and costs can be calibrated in social terms: in the shifting, unrecognisable and often alienating urban landscape; in the creeping privatisation of public space; in the subtle messaging and forms of control relayed through the city’s media and politics. But what does it say about the influence and power of money, and about capitalism itself, that it can create a city that appears to be both flourishing and floundering at the same time? The heart of this system appears to beat ever faster, running the risk of overload or systemic breakdown. Yet if another crash is around the corner, we know that it will not be footloose capital or the wealthy who will suffer.
The global financial crisis of 2007–8 marked the beginning of a new level of indulgence towards the wealthy, with tax cuts, quantitative easing, asset price inflation and a reduction of interest rates among the measures taken. Since that moment there has been a long boom in property generated by the effects of the crisis, motivating the wealthy to pour money into those cities that appeared safe bets in an unstable world. The alpha city is today more a place for money and the moneyed than it is for living in, and this has had significant consequences. The most important result perhaps lies in our losing sight of what cities are for – as places where people live and thrive, where the city’s economy is set up to serve its residents’ needs, rather than being a magical playground for the super-rich in the hope that a few others may be enriched as a result.
London is a world city, one of a select few that command and control the world economy. In fact, it is not simply one of the world cities, but the world city, the paramount member of a group producing and receiving vast fortunes within a global economy run increasingly for finance. Simply put, London is the alpha city.
The alpha city presents itself as the domineering, swaggering and altogether ruder sibling of those cities lower down the global hierarchy. Like a posturing man in a meeting, it jostles to maintain its pre-eminent place, as the one to whom all others should offer respect. A language of entitlement flows from this status. It is found in the effusive adjectives of the brochures describing the city’s most select trophy homes and luxury high-rise apartment blocks. There can only be one One Hyde Park, 1 Kensington Road, 77 Mayfair, Clarges Mayfair or Embassy Gardens among the myriad unique residences and palatial homes dotted around the city’s West End and beyond. As in the market for rare art or wine, appeals to the unique, to luxury and to marks of good taste are found here in abundance.
This is a city increasingly for money, not for people. It is here that capital, capitalism and the capitalist elite come together. In doing so, these combined forces have torn up the mission statement of the city as a place for all. Now, perhaps more than ever before, it is a playground for the wealthy and a hothouse in which to grow capital under hydroponic conditions, carefully tended by the city’s politicians and financial institutions.
One Hyde Park
The argument of this book is that for all the spectacle and beauty of a city created by expanding personal fortunes, such decorations are distractions from the more vicious and discriminating impacts of wealth on the life of the metropolis. Beyond the facades of the luxury homes, the smoked-glass nightclub entrances and the comfortable private clubs, lies a city in the process of being hollowed out.
This city above all others appears to the wealthy like a beacon in a storm, a luxurious harbour in which to weigh anchor in a restless and troublesome world. London sits at the top of those rankings showing where the world’s wealthy, political and social elites reside. These groups of the super-rich are distributed across a constellation of fine residences in select quarters of the city and beyond, in comfortable suburbs and small satellite towns – untroubled by the split fortunes of a city in which vast wealth co-exists with significant hardship and social stress. It is to London that so many of the world’s ultra-wealthy come to live, invest or indeed hide. The city’s abundant luxury homes and quiet districts offer them safe spaces insulated from the intrusions of unsightly poverty or anything else one might find disagreeable about city living.
Whether measured in terms of its wealth, GDP, cultural offering or liveability, London can confidently lay claim to being the alpha city. Its bright lights only cast other cities into the shadows. The dusty cloth of the establishment, old boy’s networks and gentlemen’s clubs has been re-cut and tailored to suit a new power elite formed out of a mash-up of old and new money, political and corporate power, and personal or dynastic wealth. The international rich come to the city in search of prime assets to buy and sell, to take advantage of house prices cheapened by strong foreign currencies, to escape the insecurities or dangers presented by their own governments, or to offload bundles of criminally sourced cash, laundered through London’s real estate. Some even come to the city to live.
Compared even to New York or Tokyo, the two other truly ‘world’ cities, London has the largest number of wealthy people per head of population. It is the epicentre of the world’s finance markets. It is also an elite cultural hub, offering enviable open streetscapes, swathes of green space, a reputation for safety and low levels of state intrusion. Within what is referred to as the world urban system, London is the most brilliant celestial body. But, we should remember, even stars die.
‘Alpha’ denotes both the beginning and the most powerful member of a group. London as an alpha territory is sufficiently large to generate its own gravitational field, a force that pulls in much of the world’s wealth and many of its most wealthy individuals. But it is also a kind of social centrifuge that increasingly, to paraphrase Shelley, spits out those damaged or unhoused by its workings – the poor and the unwanted. All of this goes on under a regime of interests operated effectively by the city’s elite of politicians, governors and financial institutions. This group defends markets and rising inequality while courting the wealthy at a time of enormous hardship for many.
All of this raises the question of how we might begin to understand the city and what it stands for when the rich sip £8,000 gold-infused cocktails while swathes of public housing are demolished and those on low incomes are evicted from tenancies to the city’s hinterlands. Such uneasy comparisons might be defended as simply representing instances of diversity in a city that has always offered massive contrasts. In reality, these and many other examples of exclusion and poverty are connected to the fortunes and positions of the wealthy by deep, subterranean flows of capital, political ideology and social networks. Despite being invisible to the naked eye, these underlying forces drive the stellar gains of the wealthy, seduce and enroll those who come to rely on their spending, and assist the development of programmes that further exclude those on low incomes. In one sense London is shared, but its various prizes and dividends are most definitely not.
London’s
