Walking down UK high streets now has the sobering effect of exposing our nation's political failures. Barricaded shops, inadequate transport systems and a clouded sense of community hardly seem expressive of development. Capitalism is failing us and our cities - this is no accident. What makes a good city is an inclusive environment where opportunity is flowering, people are benefitting from elevated well-being and there is a forecast for sustainable development. Instead, we’re witnessing decline and lifelessness in our urban landscapes.
When discussing urban decline, the importance of ‘third spaces’ is always restated - but how can we amend their disappearance from our society? Third spaces refer to the places where people seek recuperation and community outside of one, the home, and two, the workplace¹. Nowadays many people have only one space; working from home. This is, of course, a tragedy, it makes our cities places for solely profit-making rather than socialising. Every building sees you as its next customer, rather than guest. Our time is dedicated to productivity, and gaining or selling capital. Our environments do not cherish our growth as beings but as workers. Looking at the past, churches, parks and pubs were often third places.
But each of these has a hint of exclusivity - churches require religion, pubs require spending and drinking and parks are often placed in proximity to wealth, alienating working classes. The other truth is that under capitalism, there is little to no reason for anyone to care about third spaces beyond moral or psychological duty. All of that care, and duty is now privatised - you go to your Mum for advice, not the local bartender. It has in fact become taboo to raise issues or be vulnerable with people who aren't in your assigned tight social sphere – you're trauma dumping — you don't owe anyone anything… and nor do they? The church recuperation that was traditionally seen as the opium of society, that numbing, but oh-so-lovely symbol, has now become obsolete.
The family, the media, and your school reproduce capitalism now - they do it all for you – to the point where God doesn't need to scare you into believing in capitalism, you decide to believe, all on your own. Marx’s view of the function of churches is now in every institution we exist amongst. Hence, Jane Jacobs, a feminist urban planner, reminds us that third spaces cannot come from the top-down and be institutional. True third spaces are a natural product of good, mixed-use urban planning, they are street corners where you run into neighbours, they are queues at the local butchers and cheap pints. This requires trust - trust that cannot be sustained in a climate of polarised politics where the TV is telling you that crime is rising and local immigrants are your competition.
The relentless drive for profit has also destroyed our climate, and many cities are feeling the effects. LA is burning and Jakarta is sinking. Inside our cities, the working class and ethnic minorities are sidelined in areas that suffer from pollution, landfills, and hazardous fumes - with activists such as Hazel M. Johnson exposing environmental injustice and the ways that urban decay is disproportionately felt.
Post-war city development involved a large amount of zoning; rather than mixed-use development, we have large shopping centres, extensive office districts, and suburban housing estates. We now observe deserted, eerie work areas outside of 9-5, and lifeless housing districts during the the day. Why has the life and bustle of urban life faded? Because it was designed for the perfect capitalist male breadwinner. A man whose family lives in the suburbs, drives to his job and then returns home. Not only does this increase traffic, encourage spending, and the spatial segregation of classes, but it also disregards women’s lifestyles. Mothers often perform numerous tasks in one morning, such as dropping children at school, doing a food shop and assisting family in appointments. This results in a complex process of ‘trip-chaining’, making life more difficult and unsafe, simply based on capitalist perceptions of spatial functionality². We must stop leaving humans behind in our expansion.
Unfortunately, none of this is new. Towns and cities, such as Sheffield and Manchester, became hubs for manufacturing and industry with the inception of capitalism but fell apart with the rise of neoliberal expansion and off-sourcing labour. Neoliberalism was championed by the likes of Thatcher and Reagan and encourages deregulation of markets, privatisation and austerity. Thus, mines were closed, our textile industry sank, jobs were lost and cities depopulated³. This was also felt across the Rust Belt of the US, in cities like Detroit and Pittsburgh. In select places, cities have bounced back, but at what cost? Manchester is arguably a thriving student hub of arts and culture. However, capitalism generates a constant dichotomy: how can a place develop positively, while also producing profit, without gentrifying? I’m yet to see it.
Manchester is now heralded as great, but not for the locals, who can no longer afford the city they have lived in for generations. Councils are slowly working to push out those who are suffering from poverty, employing anti-homeless architecture, benches with dividers that prevent someone from lying on them and bus stops without a surface for people to sleep upon⁴. This is a truly unethical process of apathy. Instead of tackling our embedded system of class warfare, it is simpler to push marginalised groups away and hide them from sight so as not to tarnish a city’s reputation.
Many of our beloved cities had deep histories before us and will after we leave, but how can we ensure that they will cater to generations ahead? Building places for humans means slowing down. It is better for us and for nature. Let's pedestrianise our high streets, and employ mixed-use development rather than functional zoning - I want to walk around the corner and know I can reach coffee, groceries, or my job within a 15-minute walk. Let’s plant trees and cater to biophilia; our longing to be amongst nature. We are yearning for cities that remember what they owe to us; connection and a comfortable livelihood. I’m tired of the tragedy of clusters of people, waiting to interact and grow together, yet are pushed apart by grey, cold design and the relentless push for profit and expansion.
Let's repopulate what was lost, and design it through play and joy. Most people don’t want grand 50-story towers, they seek a simple park to take their children to. What are humans if not beings seeking their little sense of place, of belonging, in the world we call our own?