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The ongoing crisis of global capitalism has served only to intensify the past four decades of neoliberal restructuring of cities across the world. In this paper I critically reflect on a lit- erary aspect of the neoliberalising city academic discourse that is too often left untheorised or underplayed—the prevalence of contemporary urban enclosure. My aim is twofold: to synthesise theories of old and new enclosure with more familiar understandings of neolib- eral urban processes; and to then apply this framework to the British housing experience of the past four decades. In doing so, I argue that enclosure is not only a metaphor for con- temporary urban policy and processes but also provides an explanation for what is taking place. The paper concludes with some brief thoughts on how today’s ‘urban commoners’ might contest the new urban enclosures by finding common cause around visions and prac- tices of a ‘new urban commons’.

Key words: neoliberal restructuring, housing, urban policy, urban commons

Introduction means of production and propelling over time a mass landless proletariat into the ver the past 40 years, capitalist swelling ranks of the industrialising and cities across the world have been urbanising centres so brilliantly captured Oradically restructured along neo- by Marx’s theory of primitive accumu- liberal lines. Our understandings of this lation in Capital: Vol. 1 (1990 [1864]). process have been assisted by insightful Seen through this lens, the old enclosures theorisations of ‘neoliberal urbanism’ that that privatised property and proletarianised capture the specific mechanisms through people in the Global North are very much which city space is continuously reorgan- alive today in those hitherto non-capitalist

Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 02:10 24 September 2012 ised and re-regulated in the interests of agrarian geographies and communal enclaves global (finance) capital (Brenner and Theo- of the Global South where the rate of urbanis- dore, 2002b; Harvey, 1989; Smith,1996; ation continues to astound and alarm (Davis, Leitner et al., 2007). In this paper, 2006). As millions are forced off the land and however, I want to bring to the fore and into these swelling urban centres, new urban critically reflect on a literary aspect of the enclosures are also emerging in the shape of neoliberalising city academic discourse gated communities where whole neighbour- that is too often left untheorised or under- hoods are physically fenced off or walled played—the prevalence of urban enclosure. and flows of people in and out are highly con- Connecting enclosure to the city is, of trolled and selective, driven in part by the course, common sense in historical terms. ‘fear’ of, and the need to exclude, segregate Enclosure was and remains, in many and control the criminalised poor (Landman, respects, the midwife of the capitalist city, 2006). But what is striking about urban life wresting the peasant producer from the in the apparently post-enclosed spaces of the

ISSN 1360-4813 print/ISSN 1470-3629 online/12/050500–19 # 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2012.709403 HODKINSON:THE NEW URBAN ENCLOSURES 501

Global North governed by normalised capital- to have gone through the spatial violence of ist social relations is that these neighbourhood primitive accumulation marks a significant enclosures are not only also rife, they are shift in our understandings of global trans- synonymous with neoliberal restructuring of formations integral to contemporary capital- city space. We tend to associate the explosion ism. And yet, urban enclosure continues to of gated and securitised zones—residential, evade in-depth theorisation and empirical office, retail and recreational—with the USA analysis in its own right. In particular, as (Blakely and Snyder, 1997; Low, 2006), but Vasudevan et al. (2008, p. 1642) argue, we they are on the rise across most of the so- lack ‘spatial histories of neoliberalism that called developed countries (Webster et al., take due consideration of the broader poli- 2002). In Seeking Spatial Justice (see City Vol tico-economic canvas’ and specifically 14 Issue 6 and Vol 15 Issue 1–2 for recent explore the ‘complex figurations through debates), Ed Soja argues that while the enclo- which enclosure and neoliberalism are inter- sure of public and private space is nothing twined’. Too much, meanwhile, remains too new, its form and proliferation under neoli- abstract: beralism are: ‘The material “facts” of dispossession are as important as their meanings—and they must ‘Not only are residences becoming be understood together in terms of multiple increasingly gated, guarded and wrapped in historical/geographical determinations, advanced security, surveillance, and alarm connections, and articulations.’ (Hart, 2006, systems, so too are many other activities, land pp. 983–984) uses, and everyday objects in the urban environment, from shopping malls and In this paper, I want to contribute to the libraries to razor-wire protected refuse bins and spiked park benches to stave off process of redressing the theoretical and incursions of the homeless and hungry. empirical lacunae of contemporary urban Microtechnologies of social and spatial enclosurebyreflectingonitsnature,mech- control infest everyday life and pile up to anics and implications with reference to neo- produce a tightly meshed and prisonlike liberal housing and urban policy in Britain. geography punctuated by protective My aim is twofold: to synthesise theories of enclosures and overseen by ubiquitous old and new enclosure with more familiar watchful eyes.’ (2010, pp. 42–43) understandings of neoliberal urban processes; and to then apply this framework to the Explanations of this phenomenon vary. For British housing experience of the past four some, urban enclosure is a response to the decades. I try to show that enclosure is not fear of threatening ‘others’ in ever-polarised only a metaphor for contemporary urban Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 02:10 24 September 2012 cities (Minton, 2009; Soja, 2010); for others, policy and processes but also provides an it is the inevitable securing of private prop- explanation for what is taking place. The erty rights to scarce resources in market paper concludes with some brief thoughts on economies so as to exclude potential free- how today’s ‘urban commoners’ might riders (Lee and Webster, 2006). For neo- contest the new urban enclosures by finding Marxists like David Harvey, urban enclosure common cause around visions and practices is one form of a much wider and historic of a ‘new urban commons’. process of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ in which the privatisation and dispossession Primitive accumulation on the land: the old of resources has moved to the forefront of enclosures capitalist growth strategies (Harvey, 2003). As Glassman (2006) argues, the notion that Following Marx, the classical story of enclo- acts of enclosure are somehow returning or sure and primitive accumulation is arguably are recurrent in spaces previously considered found in England. Before enclosure came, 502 CITY VOL. 16, NO.5

land ownership was personally claimed for all the landowners in a parish; by special the ruling monarch and parcelled up and dis- Royal licence; by outright purchase by one tributed to the nobility in return for military owner of all common rights; by ‘various service in common with much of Western forms of force and fraud’1 (Slater, 1907, Europe (see Anderson, 1974). Shoring up p. 6); and, once Crown opposition had sub- the bottom of this feudal hierarchy was the sided, by the state itself under act of parlia- manorial lord who oversaw and lived off a ment, either by a private act or under the local system of open field strip farming invol- authority of the General Enclosure Acts of ving land-owning yeomen, tenant farmers 1830, 1836 and 1845 and its amending Acts, and, until the 15th century, serfs whose that provided enclosers with the legal labour was directly exploited by the lord. powers to enclose the commons while out- Underpinning the feudal village economy, lawing all opposition and rebellion as punish- however, was common right—customary pri- able by jail and even the death penalty (see vileges enjoyed by village landowners, their Hollowell, 2000; Marx, 1990 [1864]; tenants and certain cottagers that included Mingay, 1997; Slater, 1907). By 1760, the grazing livestock on fallow and harvested vast majority of England’s land had been land and the village commons, which had enclosed without the need for Parliamentary been enshrined in English law by the Magna sanction (Wordie, 1983). Whenever, wher- Carta of 1215 (Neeson, 1996 [1993]). For ever and however it came, the advent of the landless, meanwhile, whether labourers, enclosure always brought: artisans, small tradesman, the unfortunate, immigrants or squatters (Ward, 2002), survi- ‘... the extinction of common rights which val came through a more precarious form of people held over the farm lands and commons what Linebaugh (2008) calls ‘commoning’ of the parish, the abolition of the scattered through accumulated traditional rights or holdings in the open fields and a re-allocation of holdings in compact blocks, accompanied outright trespass on wastelands and forests, usually by the physical separation of the for free fodder, fuel, building materials, newly created fields and closes by the erection berries and herbs. Many historians believe of fences, hedges or stone walls. Thereafter, that entire village populations were economi- the lands so enclosed were held “in severalty”, cally supported in some way or other through that is, they were reserved for the sole use of the rights and customs of the commons (Per- the individual owners or their tenants.’ elman, 2000; Slater, 2005 [1907]). (Mingay, 1997, p. 7) The nobility’s right to enclose wasteland under certain conditions can be traced to The motives of enclosers varied, but the the Ancient Statute of Merton (1235), but it desire to privatise the riches of the soil was Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 02:10 24 September 2012 was in the mid-15th century that manorial omnipresent. By creating geographically con- lords and ecclesiastical landowners first centrated and enlarged farms, producers began making concerted efforts to evict cot- could profit from the rising prices of agricul- tagers and depopulate villages (Hollowell, tural goods, convert land for different uses 2000). Enclosure took place in myriad ways (e.g. from arable to pasture) when demand and evolved through time: by ‘piecemeal’ and supply dictated or mine the huge seams arrangements where landowners agreed to of coal and iron ore for expanding industry take small pieces of land out of the open (Mingay, 1997; Theobald and Rochon, fields or commons for their own exclusive 2006). Unsurprisingly, enclosure overwhel- use; by the Lord of the Manor collecting all mingly benefited the local minority of rich the tenancies into his own hands, not landowners and larger tenant farmers at enor- issuing new ones, or straightforward evic- mous cost to the rural majority. A key factor tions; by encroachment or squatting; by was the financial bill of enclosure comprised agreement based on the common consent of of various legal, consultancy and HODKINSON:THE NEW URBAN ENCLOSURES 503

parliamentary fees, and the costs of new the producer from the means of production. It roads, bridges, drainage and, above all, the appears as primitive, because it forms the pre- fences to line the new land holdings. The historic stage of capital and of the mode of smaller, poorer landowners, particularly production corresponding with it.’ (Marx, those who had relied on the commons and 1990 [1864], pp. 874–875) whose land holding was reduced through Primitive accumulation established the con- enclosure, were simply forced to sell part or ditions for capital accumulation through sim- all of their holding. Significantly, the com- ultaneously transforming the social means of monable meadows and wastes worth cultivat- (re)production into private property and ing were also divided up and privatised enforcing proletarianisation (i.e. making primarily among the existing owners. For people dependent on wage labour to literally the rest of the population, there was no survive); enclosure’s role was essential as the recompense, only dispossession and desola- physical–legal process that smashed the pro- tion, as peasants were cleared from the land, tective shield of common right that pre- their homes and villages demolished, to viously protected the peasantry from total make way for private farming or develop- wage dependence. Marx’s second critical con- ment. Local unemployment rose and wages tribution was to draw out the necessary fell; in the words of Gilbert Slater (2005 extra-economic forces behind this physical [1907], p. 2), it marked ‘the extinction of the process of divorce to which he referred ironi- village community’. cally as the ‘many idyllic methods’ (1990 While there have been important scholarly [1864], p. 895) that left capital ‘dripping contributions to our understanding of enclo- from head to foot, from every pore, with sure, Marx’s analysis remains the most blood and dirt’ (p. 926). As Perelman (2000) important and influential. In simple terms, argues, in Marx’s analysis the enclosure of Marx emphasised enclosure’s role in a much the commons was not enough to generate wider, revolutionary process of social the proletariat for capital—nature still pro- change from the 16th century onwards. vided the rural population with the means Fencing off the commons, he argued, to subsist while the social violence of enclo- enabled the very ‘primitive accumulation’ of sure generated resistance. Primitive accumu- capitalist social relations to occur by facilitat- lation, therefore, required a sustained ing the separation of producers from the ideological assault by pro-enclosure propa- means of production: gandists both on what Hardin (1968) would ‘The capitalist system pre-supposes the later coin the ‘tragedy of the commons’ and complete separation of the labourers from all the commoners themselves (‘conservative’,

Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 02:10 24 September 2012 property in the means by which they can ‘lazy’, ‘wasteful’, ‘drunks’, ‘barbarians’, realize their labour. As soon as capitalist ‘thieves’, etc.) for standing in the way of production is once on its own legs, it not only national economic growth and progress maintains this separation, but reproduces it on (Neeson, 1996 [1993], pp. 15–52). These a continually extending scale. The process, interventions helped to eventually win the therefore, that clears the way for the capitalist argument for enclosure in Parliament system, can be none other than the process (which was in any case dominated by land- which takes away from the labourer the owners), who passed into law a ‘system of possession of his means of production; a stern measures’ designed to prevent people process that transforms, on the one hand, the social means of subsistence and of production from finding alternative survival strategies into capital, on the other, the immediate outside of wage labour as well as to maximise producers into wage-labourers. The so-called productivity within the labour process and primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing subdue the poor who resisted by attacking else than the historical process of divorcing traditional rights (to common), customs 504 CITY VOL. 16, NO.5

(to holiday) and workers’ collective action (to and local road networks to facilitate access unionise) (Perelman, 2000, p. 14). to the new agrarian estates. Enclosure stimu- lated an active local land market, especially in small plots, as owners cashed in on their valu- The spatiality of enclosure able asset usually to meet the costs of enclo- sure, and investors looked for long-term As many authors have noted, although profits. Rents rose rapidly to reflect not Marx’s focus was proletarianisation, his only the higher land values of these exclusive theory of primitive accumulation and of the holdings but also the large debt and interest role of enclosure therein, proffered a far repayments stacked up in the process. Primi- more comprehensive, multidimensional and, tive accumulation by enclosure thus went crucially, globalised set of relational pro- much deeper than the separation of the cesses essential to capital’s genesis. These peasant producer from the means of subsis- included ‘colonial, neo-colonial, and imperial tence and production: it involved a massive processes of appropriation of assets (includ- appropriation of state and church lands and ing natural resources); the monetization of their wealth of valuable resources into the exchange and taxation, particularly of land; private hands of landowners, generating the the slave trade; and usury, the national debt, concentration and expansion of landed class and ultimately the credit system’ (Harvey, power—an original accumulation if ever 2003, p. 145; see also Glassman, 2006). Land there was one; and unleashed more automatic enclosure was thus just one of many mechan- processes of commodification and market isms of primitive accumulation. Nevertheless, law that fuelled further displacement. Above it played a central spatial role that is too often all, enclosure enshrined and ideologically ignored. embedded the ultimate cultural value of capi- The physical geography of enclosure was talist society, the sanctity and inviolability of central to the new legal settlement of private private property in land, performing the property rights that held precedence over tra- ‘legitimizing function for all forms of ditional rights to share land: the borders that private property’ including private owner- lined the land were to stop the ‘free passage of ship of the means of production (Harvey, men and animals’ and reflect its now ‘exclu- 1982, p. 360). sive ownership and occupation’ (Slater, 2005 [1907], pp. 1–2). The privatisation of medie- val public space—the open fields, meadows, Contemporary enclosure: new, continuous commons and wastelands—fenced off places ... urban? of cooperative labour, social interdependence Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 02:10 24 September 2012 and commoning from the general population. Enclosure thus acted upon and transformed Dispossession and displacement were not space for the benefit of capital in multiple simply the consequences of enclosure, they ways, whether through privatising land and were its very essence, and led to both the its resources, objectifying the body for wage commodification of labour power and the labour and colonising the spatial imaginary. commodification of space as a highly valuable These processes are evidently alive and well asset that could now be commercially in those hitherto non-capitalist spaces of the exploited for private gain. This in turn made Global South (Bush, 2007), but how are enclosure itself a new and profitable form of they relevant to cities in the Global North? speculative investment, providing an outlet To try to shed some light on this question, I for the immense profits made in the colonies turn to two quite different but relevant litera- and the slave trade to underwrite the huge tures on contemporary enclosure: theory and costs of what amounted to early forms of research that takes an exclusively urban/city regeneration in the building of new farms focus; and scholarship that brings HODKINSON:THE NEW URBAN ENCLOSURES 505

contemporary enclosure within a wider fra- of the city itself through the countless resi- mework of new or continuous primitive dential, office and retail developments that accumulation. both destroy the existing use values and pub- licness of particular spaces and seek to ‘dis- place’ and ‘exclude’ the urban poor from the Enclosure and commons in the city city. As Blomley (2008) argues, wherever landowners or developers enforce their legal One of the most lucid and still relevant con- rights to demolish and/or redevelop their ceptualisations of the ‘creative destructive’ private property that also happens to be neoliberal processes by which cities in someone’s home or a community’s park, Western settings have been (re)claimed as neighbourhood, play area or local shop, etc., central sites for capital accumulation, elite they are by definition appropriating and consumption and financial speculation can thus dispossessing and excluding local be found in Brenner and Theodore (2002a). people from what they see and treat as their They set out a 12-pronged framework of common property: ‘politico-institutional mechanisms’ employed by national governments and urban growth ‘State, private and collective property, coalitions to replace the national institutional including streets, parks, residential hotels, arrangements and political compromises of community centres and so on, are all imagined Keynesian–Fordism with a ‘new infrastruc- here as integral parts of a local land claim over ture for market-oriented economic growth’ which the poor have legitimate interest, with set within a globalising and financialising rights that are both symbolic and practical.’ economy (Brenner and Theodore, 2002a, (p. 316) p. 362). These mechanisms include inter Blomley’s wider, class-based understanding alia: (i) the privatisation of the municipal of urban commons rests primarily on the public sector and collective infrastructures; imagined rights of community residents (ii) the gentrification-led restructuring of that, in contrast to capitalist property law, are city centres and inner-city housing markets through gated mega-development projects, ‘...based upon and enacted through sustained widespread clearance of public housing and patterns of local use and collective habitation, other low-rent accommodation, and the elim- through ingrained practices of appropriation ination of various regulatory protections for and “investment”. By virtue of being in place tenants; (iii) new strategies of territorial for a long time and using and relying upon the development that expose localities to global commons, residents both acquire and sustain market forces and encourage business (re)lo- a legitimate property interest ... The poor Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 02:10 24 September 2012 cation through special zoning incentives; have “invested” in that space ...There are and (iv) the privatisation and intensified sur- echoes here of the common law notion that sustained use can lead to a sharing of even a veillance of public spaces and the creation transfer of title, as in the case of prescriptive of new, privatised spaces of elite/corporate easements, adverse possession and public consumption both governed by zero toler- rights of way. The commons, in other words, ance, discriminatory and illiberal social is not so much found as produced ... the control (pp. 370–372). commons is a form of place-making.’ (p. 320) Although they do not directly use the term ‘enclosure’ itself, Brenner and Theodore’s Enclosure moves more insidiously through analysis makes it clear that enclosure is the the privatisation, corporatisation and revan- modus operandi of neoliberal urbanism. chist control of public space and the associ- Enclosure abounds in the ‘privatisation’ of ated political curtailment of the public spaces and services formerly publicly owned sphere that have become familiar experiences and open/affordable, and in the ‘fencing off’ of urban entrepreneurial strategies 506 CITY VOL. 16, NO.5

(MacLeod, 2002; Minton, 2009; Mitchell, What is less clear, however, is why enclo- 2003; Smith, 1996). This is producing what sure is so essential to the urban recipes of Bottomley and Moore (2007, p. 173) see as neoliberalisation. Widening our gaze the ‘fortress city’ in which city rulers— beyond the city reveals that contemporary whether public or private—use both physical enclosure is, in fact, equally rife in non- and immaterial technologies of enclosure to urban realms from animal farming (Theobald block and stop enemy movement and and Rochon, 2006) to education (Harvie, render it impotent ‘as part of a broader 2000), information and intellectual property pattern of regulation and control, which has (Boyle, 2008), nature and indigenous knowl- affected our access to all urban space, includ- edge (Shiva, 1997), border regimes (Cunning- ing non-enclosed and non-privatised “public ham and Heyman, 2004) and military space”’. Enclosure, then, appears as the essen- imperial adventures in Iraq (RETORT, tial accomplice to neoliberal urbanism. If 2005). Literature on cities equally tends to theorisations become a little fuzzier on why be unable to explain the connections that might be, a common thread running between urban enclosure and this wider through the literature is the belief that enclo- process of new enclosures. This is where sure in all its multiple senses (privatisation, recent theoretical work on the role of primi- physical fortressing and control, displace- tive accumulation in contemporary global ment, exclusion, etc.) is the principal capitalism can provide some important method by which city space can be purified, insights. attracting and retaining the desired on the inside of, and made secure against all those who serve to devalorise its exchange value Accumulation by dispossession or disrupt the process of consumption—the poor, the homeless, the street traders, the pol- It was Midnight Notes Collective’s (1990) itical campaigners, the alternative types, etc. rousing analysis of ‘the new enclosures’ that (Beckett and Herbert, 2010). Indeed, the first convincingly broke with orthodox read- need or desire to create borders so as to ings of Marx’s theory of primitive accumu- ‘include’ and ‘exclude’ is effectively the lation as representing only ‘the pre-history same argument made by those writing from of capitalism’ (Bonefeld, 2001, p. 2). Instead, a more neo-classical perspective. Lee and enclosures were ‘a regular return on the Webster (2006) argue, for example, that the path of accumulation and a structural com- growth of private neighbourhoods and ponent of class struggle’ representing a gated communities is part and parcel of a ‘dynamic capitalist response’ to the expan- global trend towards private management sion of proletarian power, whether through Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 02:10 24 September 2012 and decision-making in cities today caused the appropriation of new resources, the cre- by the ‘tragedy of the commons’. Rising ation of new labour power or the extension land values produced by economic growth of capitalist relations in order to save capital- and privatisation of urban public domains in ism from ‘extinction’ (Midnight Notes Col- market economies create ‘an inescapable lective, 1990, p. 1). They saw the global secular trend towards the subdivision of economic crisis of capitalism from the 1970s property rights’ that must inevitably onwards as triggering a new and historically produce ‘physical enclosure’ to exclude unprecedented wave of enclosure under neo- potential free-riders from land and other liberalism on a planetary scale designed not scarce urban resources: ‘Without a mechan- simply to source new outlets for accumu- ism to protect a community’s property lation but to generate ‘the large-scale reor- rights over shared goods, no entrepreneur ganization of the accumulation process’ will supply unsubsidised neighbourhood itself (ibid.) in order to undermine collective goods’ (Lee and Webster, 2006, pp. 28–29). organisation and place-based struggles, HODKINSON:THE NEW URBAN ENCLOSURES 507

depress wages, and make workers vulnerable ‘On the one hand the release of low-cost assets and precarious and thus more compliant to [through privatization] provided vast fields for capital. This two-fold process did not the absorption of surplus capitals. On the simply unfold in the classical expropriation other, it provided a means to visit the costs of of land and the expulsion of a massive new devaluation of surplus capitals upon the weakest and most vulnerable territories and army of mobile and migrant labour into the populations.’ (Harvey, 2003, pp. 184–185) global economy, but encompassed privatisa- tion of industries and sectors in the core capi- A contrasting perspective can be found in the talist countries and the enclosure of the work of Massimo De Angelis (2007), who human species’ very own reproduction understands contemporary acts of enclosure through both the destruction and genetic and primitive accumulation, not as responses patenting of nature and the commodification to periodic overaccumulation crises a`la of human affects and immaterial attributes at Harvey, but as part of the normal, day-to- the frontline of service sector wage labour day functioning of capital accumulation and (ibid., p. 7). the reproduction of capitalist social relations. The subsequent development of primitive Underpinning this theory is the autonomist accumulation theory has arguably taken two Marxist contention that the circuit of capital related but discernibly different paths, one accumulation and the wider nexus of capital- remaining faithful—albeit critically—to a ist social relations are inherently prone to more orthodox reading of Marx, and the crisis because of class struggle (see Bell and other blazing a radical reinterpretation in Cleaver, 1982). Significantly, De Angelis the space opened up by Midnight Notes. does not simply restrict this crisis potential The former path is best represented in to the familiar spheres of production and con- Harvey’s 2003 epic, The New Imperialism, sumption but extends the immanence of crisis in which he introduces the term ‘accumu- to the sphere of reproduction, where, for lation by dispossession’ as a way of under- example, the very biological and ideological standing these extra-economic forms of new production of wage-labourers (and obedient enclosure gripping the planet under neoliber- citizen-consumers) could be threatened by alism. Two aspects of his thesis stand out: alternative value practices such as the creation first, that in advanced capitalist countries we of collective forms of economic self-provi- are seeing the restoration of old enclosures sioning or education that refuse to obey the through ‘rolling back’ the state interventions dictates of capital (Federici, 2004). Enclosure (public ownership, universal services) and is thus a ‘constituent element of capitalist class compromises of the 20th-century Key- relations and accumulation ... characteristic nesian Welfare State that created degrees of of capital’s strategies at whatever level of Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 02:10 24 September 2012 collective protection from untrammelled capitalist development’ that shares a singular market forces and exploitation (Harvey, aim regardless of place: 2003, pp. 145–148); and second, the return of enclosure and other extra-economic acts ‘...to forcibly separate people from whatever of dispossession is a response to the chronic access to social wealth they have which is not mediated by competitive markets and money problems of overaccumulation that have as capital ...New enclosures thus are directed engulfed capital since the early 1970s. In towards the fragmentation and destruction of this context, ‘accumulation by dispossession’ “commons”, that is, social spheres of life the has been pushed by neoliberalism to the fore- main characteristics of which are to provide front of capital accumulation, working along- various degrees of protection from the side expanded reproduction, in order to market.’ (De Angelis, 2007, p. 145) create ‘new terrains of accumulation’ that find profitable outlets for the huge surpluses Capital must therefore continuously and sim- of capital (and labour) lying idle: ultaneously devise ‘strategies of enclosure’ in 508 CITY VOL. 16, NO.5

the spheres of both production and reproduc- contradictions of neoliberal urbanism for tion so as to open up new areas of commodi- social reproduction, or due to the periodic fication, keep open old areas of crisis of capital (see Dawson, 2010 for a commodification under attack from com- Harvey-esque periodisation of enclosure); moning or recolonise spaces that have been whereas for others, enclosure is a logical, turned into spaces of commons. De Angelis evolutionary or continuous feature of (2007, p. 79) sees these enclosure strategies market societies, whether in the physical as embodying both ‘generative’ and ‘preser- enclosure of privatised resources as their vative’ moments, which can be best under- value and scarcity rise, or in the more stood through Perelman’s metaphor of the general and diverse strategies of capital to ‘two blades of a scissors’ (2000, p. 14)—the accumulate in the face of everyday threats first blade being the act of enclosure that against that process. This links to a third dis- periodically cut away people from the agreement, over the actors and mechanisms of means of reproduction to create markets, enclosure: for some, enclosure is intrinsically consumers and proletarians, the second an extra-economic act of separation, privati- blade representing the processes of ‘disciplin- sation and dispossession embodied in phys- ary integration’ (De Angelis, 2007, pp. 80– ical and legal mechanisms principally 81) (whether disciplinary forms of orchestrated by nation-states (acting alone command over subjects, the continuous dis- or in concert) and other political actors able pensation of rewards and punishments to to exercise physical and legal control over shape norms of interaction and social pro- resources in order to privatise them for duction, subjectification through govern- some and dispossess others; for others, these mentality, etc., laws, violence, education) to extra-economic acts extend to micro-technol- ensure that diverse value practices become ogies of control, surveillance and, crucially, subordinate to the one model that is pervasive subjectification that can eventually assume on society, that people eventually respect the automatic processes of regulation and confor- enclosures. mity without the need for physical and legal enforcement. Rather than viewing these differences as New enclosure theory: towards a synthesis? irreconcilable, however, I think we can find in them commonalities and complementarities How should we understand and relate to that offer the basis for synthesis from which a these differing theoretical approaches to con- provisional theory of neoliberal urban enclo- temporary enclosure? On first thoughts, sure can be sketched out. In a general sense, there are clearly important divergences that what binds these approaches together is a Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 02:10 24 September 2012 appear to be partly rooted in different ontol- rethinking of ‘enclosure’ away from the tra- ogies of capitalism. The first concerns the ditional Marxian formulation of ‘the separ- general causality of enclosure with expla- ation of producers from their means of nations ranging from the neo-classical production’ as a distinctive phase within a ‘tragedy of the commons’, the extreme phys- teleological development of the capitalist ical response to fear and inequality, the mode of production to encompass multiple changed accumulation needs of capital strategies and forms in response to the crisis during periodic overaccumulation crises, or of capitalist social relations. Enclosure can the threat that class struggles pose to pro- thus seek out new spheres of life for accumu- duction and reproduction. A second variance lation, take place within spaces that have lies in the place of enclosure in historical time already been enclosed but where capitalist with some authors viewing today’s enclo- relations are under threat, or target spaces or sures as responses to historically specific networks that embody forms of commons, moments of crisis, whether due to the not just as natural resource pools, but also as HODKINSON:THE NEW URBAN ENCLOSURES 509

socially constructed resources that provide capitalist–imperialist–authoritarian machine degrees of protection from market forces and as factors of capitalist production (wage accumulation strategies. These commons do labour), as consumers of the capitalist not necessarily have to be completely alterna- market, as ideological adherents of capitalist tive non-capitalist economic spaces but rather society (entrepreneurs or property owners) form a sufficient composition of security to at the mercy of ‘capitalist realism’ (Fisher, undermine accumulation. In other words, 2009). To be enclosed is to be commodified, primitive accumulation and enclosure are not objectified, dehumanised; and thus it is to just about closing off soil and land in a be subjectified. narrow sense but shutting down access to However, if we can understand the any space or sociality that threatens our ideo- purpose and mechanisms of new enclosure logical or material dependence on capitalist in the abstract, how can we use these theoreti- social relations, thus threatening cal frames to explain life in the concrete, and accumulation. how do they help us to understand what is With this general principle established, we happening to cities on the ground? In the can understand ‘new enclosures’ as consisting remainder of this paper, I try to usefully of three main acts. The first is privatisation— respond to these challenges through a brief this is the ‘physical–legal’ process of en- and illustrative example of housing privatisa- closing something, that is, fencing it off, to tion and urban regeneration policy in Britain enable an exclusive separation to occur under neoliberalism. between those who have the sole right to own, access, and determine access and use of that thing and to realise exchange-value Neoliberal urban enclosure in motion: (and profit) from it—whether land, services housing privatisation policy in Britain or ideas—and those who have no such rights. The fences might be solid steel or Since 1979, successive UK governments irre- immaterial borders policed through behav- spective of political composition have ioural codes and surveillance, but they simul- pursued a continuous neoliberal ‘project’ taneously prohibit and protect individual towards the wider housing system aimed at private property rights. The second act of rolling back citizen’s protections from enclosure is the dispossession of those who market forces and rolling out new forms of are now on the other side of this new enclo- market-based housing provision. The nature sure line, whether in the loss of land to of these protections and how they came to grow food, of one’s home or access to afford- be institutionalised are too complex for this able housing, or the denial of certain services paper, but the essential features can be sum- Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 02:10 24 September 2012 or even knowledges that people used to marised as follows. During the late 19th and enjoy. The final act of enclosure comes early 20th centuries, the spectacular failure from the process of capitalist subjectifica- of private landlordism (and Victorian philan- tion—here enclosure means the encapturing thropy) buttressed by fears of working-class of people, place, space and culture within revolution being forged in the insanitary the commodifying and alienating logic of inner-city slums gradually fuelled an unstop- capital accumulation and the competitive, pable momentum for state intervention that marketising logic of neoliberal rationality. for various reasons would form a key pillar To be ex-closed from the means of life of the post-war welfare state consensus (see means to be en-closed within the accumu- Harloe, 1995). The principal form of public lation process, and the particular logic and intervention was a sustained, state-financed rationale of capital. Here we can think of mass public house building programme that enclosure as imprisonment, as the enclosure by the end of the 1970s had created a valuable of our minds and bodies within the asset of 6.6 million public homes directly 510 CITY VOL. 16, NO.5

owned and managed by municipal landlords, rights to common property, in this case the accounting for around a third of the country’s public’s right of access to public housing, housing stock. have been replaced with individual private What Malpass and Victory (2010) call the property rights. Privatisation has targeted British public housing model was character- the public housing model through encoura- ised by three main attributes: a mainstream ging direct sales at large discounts of public tenure of choice and ‘non-market’ alternative housing to sitting tenants (known as the to private ownership or renting, accommodat- ‘Right to Buy’) so as to expand home owner- ing a broad social spectrum (Hills, 2007); a ship at the expense of the public housing municipal production in which local auth- stock (Forest and Murie, 1988). Over the orities were directly responsible for the build- past 30 years, some 2.7 million public ing, day-to-day management and maintenance homes have been sold off in this way. Enclo- and financing (supported by central subsidy) sure by individuals has been complemented of their public housing stock, and accountable by the privatisation of individual estates and to tenants through the ballot box; and an allo- entire local authority stocks to charitable cation model based on general and not special housing associations or Registered Social needs that offered the security of a ‘home’ to Landlords (RSLs) as part of the state’s the queuing public on a first come, first desire to end municipal landlordism served basis with some discretion based on cir- altogether, accounting for a further 1.5 cumstances. However, state intervention went million public dwellings. However, the state beyond public housing to encompass at has gone much further than this as part of a various points regulation of the private ‘wide ranging mutually reinforcing privatiza- rented sector in the form of rent controls tion strategy’ (Murie, 1993, p. 154). Under a and protections against evictions, and with deliberate policy of residualisation (Cole the 1977 Housing Act, the legal requirement and Furbey, 1994), new public house building that local authorities provide lifetime tenancies has been gradually constricted to a trickle to the most vulnerable homeless groups (see with the majority of the dwindling public Hughes and Lowe, 1995). subsidy for ‘social rented housing’ switched Although private home ownership became to housing associations, who have in turn the dominant and preferred tenure over the been increasingly forced to rely on commer- course of the post-war era, assisted by gov- cial borrowing, putting upward pressure on ernment subsidies, at the same time the prin- rents. The result has been a net loss of 1.9 ciple of decommodified housing provision million social rented homes since 1979, a was won, and the state ensured that an shift from 31.4% of the overall housing alternative, complementary set of decent supply in 1981 to just 18.1% today (CLG, Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 02:10 24 September 2012 housing spaces were produced. The advent n.d.). Other mechanisms include: deregulat- of neoliberalism with the election of Thatch- ing rent controls and tenancy rights in both er’s Conservatives in 1979, however, brought the private and RSL sector, while commercia- a systematic assault on this settlement in ways lising social sector rents; using both public that capture the essence of the new urban subsidy and legal measures to encourage enclosures in motion. private provision such as mortgage market deregulation or housing benefit to support private rental consumption; contracting out Urban privatisation construction and services such as caretaking, cleaning and maintenance, as well as the up- Spearheading the neoliberal attack, particu- front financing of these activities, to private larly during the 1980s, has been the phys- companies, for example, the Private Finance ical–legal form of enclosure— Initiative (see Hodkinson, 2011); and priva- privatisation—through which traditional tising the development process through HODKINSON:THE NEW URBAN ENCLOSURES 511

streamlining planning and building controls, process has also generated enormous fortunes and making public land available for private for private consultants and myriad legal, insur- development, including through so-called ance and accountancy firms. A striking regeneration schemes that involve the demo- example is the story of social housing consul- lition of public housing (and also privately tancy, HACAS Chapman Hendy, whose owned housing) to make way for private resi- balance sheet grew on the back of advising dential development (Allen, 2008). local authorities pursuing stock transfers These acts of privatisation appear to be pri- whilst at the same time merging with and marily geared towards Harvey’s notion of acquiring rival consultancies, before it was ‘accumulation by dispossession’. Expanding bought by Tribal Group in 2003 for £45.1 home ownership has been vital for finding million, making some of its director-share- new sources of accumulation for finance holders instant millionaires (Inside Housing, capital. This is why neoliberalism made the 2003). The privatisation of public land banks privatisation of public housing in Britain its in valuable urban and suburban locations has flagship policy, shutting down affordable in turn unlocked private residential develop- and secure alternatives to the market and ment, enabling speculators to cash in on co-opting key sections of the working class large ‘rent gaps’ (Smith, 1979) (the difference into what Thatcher called ‘popular capital- between the possible rental values that land ism’. Direct privatisation of public housing could command due to its prime location has created new outlets for surplus capital, and the actual rental values currently most obviously as opportunities for the cir- charged), and the incoming homeowners and culation and accumulation of interest- private landlords to take advantage of rising bearing capital owned by banks and other land values. More recent state-led gentrifica- finance capitalists, for example, through tion interventions have worked alongside mortgage lending to individual tenants earlier privatisation technologies, such as the taking up their legal right to buy or loans to Right to Buy legislation. New Labour, for RSL companies to enable them to buy up example, pursued policies designed to stimu- and invest in public housing stocks. This has late the local land market to encourage a glut enabled interest-bearing capital to gain more of public sector tenants to become enclosers profitable access to the land rents previously themselves by taking up their statutory dis- locked up within the old collectivist model counts in the knowledge that in a few years of housing finance by being able to time they could sell on their home for a huge command higher rates of interest from profit, or borrow against the equity to tenants who became mortgagees, or from finance consumption or further investments. the RSL companies who must over time Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 02:10 24 September 2012 charge higher rents to service the higher Urban dispossession debt charges attached to smaller and thus riskier organisations. While RSLs are char- However, finding new outlets for surplus ities not legally permitted to distribute capital for accumulation through privatising profits to shareholders, they are still run as assets and services is only part of the enclo- commercial enterprises geared towards sure story in housing. Identifying disposses- making operating profits and remunerating sion requires us to look at how these policy their executive and managerial staff at cor- interventions have worked together over porate, not public sector, levels of pay and time and across space to separate people, conditions. Meanwhile, large corporate land- whether directly or indirectly, wholly or par- lords have been able to grow in the vacuum tially, from forms and spaces of commons left by the loss of public housing. embodied and built up within housing pro- As well as raising tens of billions of pounds vision. In this respect, public housing in in revenues for the state, the privatisation Britain has in many ways performed a 512 CITY VOL. 16, NO.5

decommodifying role as common property dependence on the market just as surely as helping to partially reverse enclosure in restricting their access to the means of food many cities. During its production phase, production.’ the local state purchased land for the public sector from private owners by using the col- Overall, the neoliberal turn has led to a lective sharing of risk across the population massive enclosure of the post-war protected to borrow more cheaply from money public housing commons and has meant markets, or offer attractive bonds to inves- that for increasing numbers of people, tors. Although rents were initially unafford- access to housing is through private means able to much of the working class, they (ownership or renting), which has in turn became lower over time due to the pooling actively contributed to an affordable of historic costs of construction and borrow- housing crisis caused by the basic contradic- ing into average rents across local areas. New tion between the quest for profits by both public housing construction was in turn part- landowners and financiers, and the provision financed by the rental income generated by of housing that responds to real wages and housing that had become debt-free (see incomes. As more households have been Ambrose et al., 2005). This economic protec- locked out of both public renting and home tion against exploitation by capitalist land- ownership, they have been displaced into lords was reinforced by higher housing the private rental market which has in turn rights and regulations than the private been subject to further enclosure processes market. Public housing provision also had a such as strengthening landlords’ power to wider sphere of influence that parallels how evict, the removal of rent controls and a suc- common right supported the feudal village cession of cuts to housing benefit. This is pre- economy: by directly shielding millions of cisely what De Angelis means by the workers from the disciplinary role of rents ‘disciplinary integration’ into the logic of and mortgages, and indirectly placing a dam- accumulation that enclosure brings. pening effect on market values, public This general dispossession of the urban pro- housing reduced the social power of capital letariat from forms of housing commons has in the workplace. There are, of course, also been accompanied by the direct displace- serious limitations and contradictions within ment of people from their homes, commu- public housing that undermine its nities and neighbourhoods, and thus their ‘commons’, particularly in the top-down, urban commons as conceptualised by paternalistic and bureaucratic treatment of Blomley (2008). This statement needs some tenants by municipal landlords (see Ward, qualification. The Right to Buy one’s 1974). Nevertheless, by returning to De council home has, in the first instance, actu- Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 02:10 24 September 2012 Angelis’s theory of enclosure we can see ally empowered individuals to gain legal pos- how the rights and provisioning attached to session of their rented home, at least as long public housing, as well as rent controls and as they keep up with their mortgage pay- more secure tenancies in the private sector ments. Similarly, the transfer of council- introduced in the 1960s and 1970s, provided owned housing to housing associations people with a means of reproduction not entails a change of landlord but does not ordi- directly dependent on wage labour, in class narily involve tenants losing their homes. conflict and threatening accumulation. As Moreover, in contrast to the fate of com- Perelman (2000, p. 34) argues: moners under the old enclosures, where direct displacement has occurred through ‘... urban people still provide for themselves demolition of either public or private directly in a multitude of ways other than the housing, legal protections have provided growing of food. Depriving people of these both tenants and homeowners with a degree means of provision forces a greater of financial compensation and rights to be HODKINSON:THE NEW URBAN ENCLOSURES 513

rehoused, although there has been plenty of maximise the market potential of centrally evidence of abuse and injustice here. Under- located council estates in order to bring the standing direct displacement, therefore, ‘benefits’ of the city centre housing market requires us to understand the dynamic boom while at the same time reinforce the market forces unleashed by enclosure and values of that private housing market. By the subsequent efforts by the state to ‘regeneration’, I mean the use of state-led capture and accentuate these forces in order gentrification technologies designed to to ‘regenerate’ deprived inner-city areas replace apparently ‘obsolete’ working-class (Smith, 2002). Writing about the impact of housing (and its apparently ‘obsolete’ inhabi- Thatcher’s 1980 Right to Buy policy that tants) with new private housing develop- enabled working-class tenants to buy their ments attractive to middle-class households public rented home sold at large discounted (Allen, 2008). This approach was pursued prices, David Harvey (2003) argues that most clearly in Labour’s Housing Market once the housing was transferred from Renewal Pathfinder programme, launched public to private ownership and released in 2003. This identified specific urban areas into the capitalist property market, a of northern England, most famously Salford dynamic process of further enclosure and Liverpool, as suffering from so-called emerged: ‘housing market failure’—low or falling house prices, low demand and abandon- ‘...housing speculation took over, particularly ment—caused by a chronic oversupply of in prime central locations, eventually bribing, downmarket working-class terraces and cajoling or forcing low-income populations social housing that could only be solved by out to the periphery in cities like London, and large-scale demolition and displacement— turning erstwhile working-class housing funded and facilitated by the state—so as to estates into centres of intense gentrification. The loss of affordable housing produced enable new private housing developments homelessness and social anomie in many urban that would be attractive to a middle-class neighbourhoods.’ (p. 158) market (Finlay and Brown, 2011).

The Right to Buy also incentivised those private sector landlords who had already Capitalist subjectification gained a foothold on council estates through former tenants selling into the private In many ways, urban privatisation and dis- market to invest in their own properties, possession in the field of housing have also leading to further displacement and dispos- contributed to the spread of neoliberal gov- session of the estate’s private sector tenants ernmentality (Lemke, 2001), that is, in Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 02:10 24 September 2012 unable to afford the new higher rents, or helping to cultivate the conditions in which directly displaced by the landlord who may people become entrepreneurial, self-reliant, no longer want them to live in the renovated rational economic actors who actively property. To paraphrase Marx (1990 [1864], support the priorities of capital accumulation p. 899), the ‘extra-economic’ hand of the and who are unwilling to resist or contest the local state has enabled the ‘silent compulsion’ way things are. The Right to Buy in particular of market forces to rip through the urban played a decisive ideological role during the commons, creating a vicious cycle of specu- height of class conflict during the 1980s in lation, gentrification and displacement that three senses. First, it represented the van- Harvey outlined above. Under New Labour guard policy of Thatcher’s ‘popular capital- in particular, the ‘bottom-up’ processes of ism’ mantra which aimed to widen property gentrification sparked by the Right to Buy ownership and speculation to the working were superseded (but not replaced) by top- class, and legitimise dismantling the welfare down ‘regeneration’ schemes designed to state. Second, because it had a diluting effect 514 CITY VOL. 16, NO.5

on council housing estates collectively trying individuals’ (Malpass and Victory, 2010, to defend themselves. Third, because it p. 13). This has been pursued through brought a sizeable number of the working several, overlapping policies. One is the cre- class into the more precarious world of ation of official ‘tenant participation’ pro- home ownership and mortgage repayments, cesses in which involvement is mainly which had significant political implications: limited to ‘rating’ the performance of land- lords in narrowly defined surveys. Another ‘Homeownership individualises the worker’s is the policy of ‘Choice-Based Lettings’ in consumption of such a basic use value as which tenants and potential tenants, not shelter, and it saddles the working class housing managers or councillors, supposedly mortgagor with a large, individual ‘choose’ where they would like to live from indebtedness to financial capital. Owner the available lettings. In reality, there is no occupiers are not politically involved with the local authority as council tenants necessarily ‘choice’ because of the scarcity of social are, and they are not in a position to housing available and because the criteria struggle collectively with landlords, public or used to allocate that scarce housing rest on private, unlike tenants.’ (Ginsburg, 1983, how many ‘points’ they have accrued pp. 46–47) through their particular personal circum- stances. However, the purpose seems to be At the urban political scale, the assault on to create a process in which tenants learn to council housing was a major governmentality both ‘compete’ with and to ‘resent’ those weapon against local authorities who lost less fortunate than themselves, as well as to their best and most valuable housing assets identify to the local authority which areas while once popular inner-city mixed or types of property they would never working-class communities increasingly choose to live, providing more ammunition became by-words for poor quality housing, for privatisation and dispossession in the unemployment, social ills and welfare depen- future. Linked to this is the national rent dency, ideologically reinforcing the privatisa- restructuring regime, which since 2002 has tion momentum. These more organic aimed to harmonise council and RSL rents processes of subjectification have been within a single rent-setting approach based accompanied by successive waves of on property size, value and local earnings, reforms aimed at introducing greater com- and an annual above inflation increase. The mercial disciplines, asset and risk manage- purpose, apart from increasing council ment culture, market-type governance, housing rents, has been to create a more private sector organisational and manage- market-like structure in which, according to ment practices, and more competition a former Housing Minister, tenants can act Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 02:10 24 September 2012 between providers into the whole of the as more discerning consumers, choosing social rented sector largely modelled on ‘whether to pay more for a better property New Public Management (NPM) techniques or to save money by choosing a less popular (Walker, 2001). If social housing providers property’ (Sally Keeble MP cited in Wilson, have been forced to internalise the value prac- 2012, p. 2). tice of markets, competitiveness, commercial- ism, corporate management and profit- making, on the consumption side, the state Conclusion: from urban enclosure to has sought to shift the role of tenants from urban commons? passive recipients of social housing albeit within a representative democracy to ‘a Returning to the original intention of this more consumerist orientation, in which the paper, I have attempted to bring together the- individual rights and responsibilities of ories of primitive accumulation and enclosure tenants are emphasised ... increasingly as and explore how they relate to and make HODKINSON:THE NEW URBAN ENCLOSURES 515

sense of the ‘new urban enclosures’ punctur- we should not lose sight of the power we ing the neoliberal city today. Following the command when we resist, when we say work of David Harvey and Massimo De ‘no’, when we look for ‘cracks’: Angelis amongst others, my argument, in short, is that the nature and purpose of ‘The method of the crack is the method of urban enclosure today is not reducible to crisis: we wish to understand the wall not Marx’s original thesis of primitive accumu- from its solidity but from its cracks; we wish lation—the ‘separation of producers from to understand capitalism not as domination, but from the perspective of its crisis, its their means of production’—but encom- contradictions, its weaknesses, and we want passes a much wider, multidimensional to understand how we ourselves are those process aimed at finding new urban outlets contradictions.’ (Holloway, 2010, p. 9, my for capital accumulation, controlling the use emphasis) and exchange value of urban space or shutting down access to any urban space or sociality— As I have written elsewhere (Hodkinson, commons—that offers a means of reproduc- 2011), the inherent structural weaknesses of tion and challenging capitalist social policies to privatise housing or gentrify relations. These enclosure processes take neighbourhoods are almost always embodied three main forms—privatisation, disposses- within the specific community under threat sion and capitalist subjectification. Through (whether tenants, homeowners, traders, this lens, I have explained how housing priva- small retailers) and specifically in their tisation has played a fundamental role in power to ‘delay’ through multiple tactics ‘accumulation by dispossession’ and urban from the mundane to the spectacular. Each enclosure strategies over the past four delay creates new costs and new risks and decades, dispossessing society of its main uncertainties, not only hitting the financing decommodified housing alternative to the of schemes but also radically altering the market while displacing countless households context in which enclosure is being pursued, from their homes and communities, and downgrading its expected profitability and bringing neoliberal governmentality into the making it seem far less desirable to its prota- day-to-day production and consumption of gonists and backers. The community’s power housing. of delay holds true in any regeneration If these reflections appear anything but scheme, regardless of how it is financed. It optimistic, we can find comfort in De Angel- shows the importance not only of building a is’s assertion that enclosure is a response to militant campaign and fighting schemes all crisis and crisis is a result of class struggle the way, but also of demanding to be heard, (2007). In other words, capital must enclose recognised and involved in the regeneration Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 02:10 24 September 2012 because we are continuously resisting and process which simultaneously opens it up moving outside its logic, something we have and slows it down, while unearthing a huge been doing throughout the history of enclo- amount of information that will help the sure (see Linebaugh, 2008; Neeson, 1996 struggle. The power of delay, ultimately, [1993]). Daily life in cities across the world can generate bargaining power with the com- is brimming with grassroots resistance to munity able to intensify or scale down their the new urban enclosures (see Porter and delaying tactics in return for concessions, Shaw, 2009). Inevitably, anti-enclosure creating a crack in what was previously a struggles are often defensive and reactive, brick wall for people to make demands for defending the status quo without advocating what they want. a positive alternative that can unite a commu- One major weakness of the ‘delay’ strategy nity beyond opposition. However, this is not is that, more often than not, even if the bar- necessarily a bad thing. As John Holloway gaining chip can be cashed in, the outcome argues in his recent book, Crack Capitalism, will not radically change, and all out 516 CITY VOL. 16, NO.5

opposition remains the only course of action. Purcell (2002), involve two fundamental This is not a problem when contesting mega- rights for urban dwellers: the right to partici- developments designed to erase neighbour- pate directly in all decisions that produce hoods and public space; but it is a problem urban space (whether perceived space, con- where, despite the threat of privatisation or ceived space or lived space) in their city; displacement, much-needed investment in and the right to appropriation, that is, to crumbling urban and housing infrastructures physically access, occupy and use urban is on offer and will be withdrawn and be unli- space, including the right to produce new kely to reappear should the resistance urban space to meet the needs of inhabitants. succeed. This perennial dilemma for urban When combined, these rights mean that use social movements underscores my own con- value, and not exchange value, becomes the viction that the only way to contest the new primary criterion by which urban space is urban enclosures is through the production produced. However, although this sketched and reproduction of urban commons (see outline of urban commons might seem attrac- Chatterton, 2010). Urban commons can take tive, the question remains as to how we might many different forms, but they are ultimately achieve this vision. I can’t do justice to it here, alternative forms of sociality that protect us but I hope that this might stimulate others to against enclosure and market forces, enabling respond and generate new debates in City in us to survive independently or with degrees the near future. of independence from wage labour. What underpins the protective shield of urban commons, moreover, are alternative social Note relations based on what Linebaugh (2008) has termed ‘commoning’, where individual 1 For example, Hollowell (2000, p. 6) argues that the interests and differences are articulated into legal basis of many major landowners’ holdings common interests and people produce to enclosed earlier by informal means was tenuous to say the least, and so they often deliberately share and share what they produce. Space orchestrated in collusion with a fake plaintiff a legal does not permit a comprehensive articulation challenge to his land ownership claim that would here, but at its core urban commons might collapse due to the failure of the plaintiff’s witnesses rest on three fundamental principles of city to appear, thus legally establishing the landowner’s life: the first is that a city constitutes a title beyond future dispute. shared ‘resource-pool’ to which everyone has equal access and right and should not be privatised; secondly, the city is also ‘public References sphere’ based on human interaction, interde- Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 02:10 24 September 2012 pendence and cooperation from which no Allen, C. (2008) Housing Market Renewal and Social Class. London: Routledge. one should be excluded; and third, the collec- Ambrose, P., Rafferty, R., Nicolson, P., Griffins, S., Woyd, tive ownership claim of an existing commu- T., Cook, T. and Junster, B. (2005) Z2K—Memoran- nity over their place of residence, dum to the Prime Minister on Unaffordable Housing. neighbourhood and locality generates a fun- London: Zacchaeus 2000 Trust. damental ‘right to stay put’ (Hartman, 2002 Anderson, P. (1974) Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism. London: Verso. [1984]) that supersedes the right of the prop- Beckett, K. and Herbert, S. (2010) Banished: The New erty owner to displace them. This speaks of Social Control in Urban America. Oxford: Oxford what Lefebvre (1968) sketched out as ‘the University Press. right to the city’, and as Harvey (2008) has Bell, P. and Cleaver, H. (1982) ‘Marx’s theory of crisis as a argued, what this means at its core is the col- theory of class struggle’, Research in Political Econ- omy 5, pp. 189–261. lective power of the masses, not the elites, to Blakely, E. and Snyder, M. (1997) Fortress America: Gated shape and control the processes of urbanis- Communities in the United States. Washington, DC: ation. This collective power could, following Brookings Institution Press. HODKINSON:THE NEW URBAN ENCLOSURES 517

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