Gareth Millington

Territorial Stigma and the Politics of Resistance in a Parisian Banlieue: La Courneuve and Beyond

Drawing on research carried out in the Parisian banlieue of La Courneuve, this article contributes to the sociological analysis of urban marginalisation in post-riot France. Beginning with a discussion of the broad relationship between society and space, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s relational understanding of social space and how these complexities are inscribed in the urban, it moves on to consider how this relates to Lefebvre’s production of space thesis. The main body of the article outlines some of the ways in which territorial stigmatisation is imposed and reproduced. Empirical material is treated here as ‘diagnostic’ of the symbolic domination that blights La Courneuve. Yet this material is also illuminative of the irregular and scattered forms that resistance to territorial stigma takes. It is suggested that the complex relationship between social and physical space is expressed through the construction of symbolic geographies of domination/resistance and negotiated through intricate ‘entanglements of power’.

Racism, class ethos and place: the value of context in narratives about asylum-seekers

The British public view asylum-seekers in generally negative terms. Yet whilst there are an abundance of reports and opinion polls that measure levels of hostility in order to fuel political ‘debate’ very little is known about how asylum seekers are spoken about in more quotidian contexts. Based on an ethnographic study of racism in Southend-on-Sea, Essex this paper identifies two kinds of narrative (abstract truths and context-dependent stories) commonly used by established members of the community to speak about asylum-seekers. The paper then seeks to explain why more affluent, suburban residents of the town tend to draw upon the abstract narrative while less wealthy, centrally located residents are more likely to regale context-dependent stories about asylum seekers. An explanation for this socio-spatial phenomenon is constructed around a Bourdieusian theory of practice that unravels local class relations and maps out a field for local symbolic prestige. Finally this microanalysis is used as a springboard to consider the wider relationship between racist narratives and social and cultural reproduction.

East London mobilities: the 'Cockney Diaspora' and the remaking of the Essex ethnoscape

Essex, a county to the east of London, has long been a place of destination for Londoners, especially East Enders (‘Cockneys’), either as a site for day trips and holidays or for more permanent relocations. In this paper, we explore the mutating Essex ‘ethnoscape’ (Appadurai, 1996) with reference to those residential, work, leisure and family-related mobilities that traverse East London to the city’s eastern suburban hinterlands. For most of the post-war period, these mobilities have taken the form of a ‘Cockney Diaspora’ comprising white emigres from the East End of London, pushed as well as pulled into New Town, rural, coastal and riverside Essex destinations (Fawbert, 2005; Cohen, 2013). Although this is not a diaspora proper in the generally accepted sense of constituting a transnational flow of migrants across national borders, it nevertheless has certain diasporic qualities in relation to notions of dispersal, scattering and being in one place but identifying with another. We illustrate these diasporic qualities through a consideration of ‘white’ mobilities and place-based belonging with reference to empirical data drawn from research projects undertaken in two areas of Essex — Thurrock and Southend-on-Sea, as highlighted in Figure 7.12 — that have long been identified as emblematic sites of the Cockney Diaspora.

Urbanization and the City Image in Lowry at Tate Britain: Towards a Critique of Cultural Cityism

This article explores cultural cityism at a time when a more expansive, ‘planetary’ urbanization is argued to have superseded ‘the city’ as the dominant urban form. It takes an essentially Lefebvrian problematic and works this through an examination of one aspect of contemporary metropolitan culture, the L.S. Lowry exhibition at Tate Britain, held in the summer of 2013. The article scrutinizes the juxtaposition of Lowrys images of the industrial city with the image of ‘global’, corporate London provided by Tate Britain itself. The exhibition is presented as evidence of Lefebvres argument that although the urban core has imploded and exploded, through images the city ‘can perpetuate itself, survive its conditions’. Taking stock also of the preponderance of city images in culture more widely, it is argued such images make a fetish of the city, producing also an ‘urban pastoral’ that obscures the defining characteristics of urban life today. Finally, Benjamins concept of the ‘dialectical image’ and Rancieres notion of the ‘sentence image’ are invoked to capture the flashing together of past and present city images and the opportunities for critical reflection this constellation presents.

The outer-inner city: urbanization, migration and ‘race’ in London and New York

This article explores the emergence of ‘outer-inner cities’ located on the periphery of London and New York. As traditional ‘zones in transitions’ and inner city districts of both cities have gentrified, these neighbourhoods no longer offer an affordable entry point to the low-waged immigrants whose work is necessary to keep the global city working. Moreover neoliberal practices of immigrant and working class dispersal in addition to the manipulation of fear regarding the ethnic and ‘racial’ other and the threat of deportation exert considerable centrifugal pressure making the central an increasingly hostile environment for immigrants. As such devalued sections of the periphery, such as suburbs suffering from disinvestment, are emerging as unlikely meeting points for new immigrants, those displaced from the central city and descendents of previous waves of suburbanisation. Common to both forms of inner city is the racialization of antagonistic community relations. Yet in contrast to the ‘inner city’ of the Fordist metropolis the outer-inner city is more fragmented, characterized by informal and flexible arrangements of labour and dwelling and most crucially lacks symbolic resonance on a government and policy level.

'Man Dem Link Up': London's Anti-Riots and Urban Modernism

Commentaries on the London riots of August 2011 have tended to ignore the urban context of the disturbances or have treated the city and the urban as an implicit part of their analysis - merely as a backdrop to events. This paper offers an urban perspective in arguing that the socio-spatiality of contemporary London - the legacy of competing forms of urban modernism - plays a critical role in explaining how and why the disturbances unfolded in the highly idiosyncratic form they did. The first stage of the analysis introduces competing notions of urban modernism ranging from a modernism of the street, to a modern urbanism of welfarist/statist control and finally a deregulated neoliberal (post)modernism. Second, the socio-spatial dimensions of contemporary London are outlined. Third, the article moves to contrast the ‘inner city’ riots of Brixton 1981 and what is described here as the ‘anti-riots’ of August 2011. In the fourth section the events of August 2011 are argued to be part of a dialectic between the homogenisation, fragmentation and hierarchization of London-space and the resilience of an urban modernism that seeks to re-engage with the experience of the city as totality, as a sum of human efforts.

‘Central London under siege’: Diaspora, ‘race’ and the right to the (global) city

Drawing upon an ethnography of recent Congolese diasporic protests in central London, this article pays attention to the traversal histories of ‘race’ and the postcolonial dynamics that precede the emergence of a contemporary diasporic ‘right to the city’ movement. The authors critically engage with Henri Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’ as a way of explaining how the urban is not only the site but also, increasingly, a stake in urban protests. In doing so the authors relocate urban centrality – its meaning, symbolic power and heuristic status in protests – in a context where activists’ claims are not restricted to one city or, simply, the political present. Rather, protestors talk about making geopolitical connections between local and global scales and contemporary and historical injustices. Drawing upon Simone’s notion of ‘black urbanism’, the authors claim to enrich Lefebvre’s original formulation by unpacking the complex performative dimensions of protest as they intersect with race and, more specifically, blackness and postcolonialism. It is concluded that activists’ experience is fundamentally ambivalent; they are at once enchanted and disenchanted with protest in central London.

Urbanization and Migration: From City to Camp?

This chapter examines the notion of planetary urbanization, from its roots in the work of Henri Lefebvre through to more recent scholarship. It aims to consider how migration is connected with urbanization; to pick through different ways of conceptualizing this relationship. By examining the urbanization–migration nexus closely it becomes possible to scrutinize the role that the migrant, both as figure of the imagination and actualized individual, plays in contemporary urbanization and to contemplate the degree whether they are victims of urbanization, active producers of the urban or both. This chapter also introduces what Mikhail Bakhtin would call the ‘real world’ ‘chronotopes of threshold’ that are increasingly characteristic of the contemporary urban experience for migrants. T chronotopes of expansive urbanization , it is suggested here, are expressions of breaks or crises in urban experience.

Cinema, Cities and Urbanization

This chapter critically examines the relationship between cinema and cities. It establishes a sociological position whereby cinema is integrated into Lefebvre’s (1991) theory of the production of space. The conceptual and theoretical work in this chapter is an attempt to develop an understanding of the relationship between the ‘real’ and the ‘reel’ that is grounded within a dialectical materialism that gives due credence to the creative, artistic and poetic aspects of production. First, the chapter introduces recent scholarship on cinematic cities. Second, it outlines how the relationship between cinema and cities has been theorized. Third, the chapter considers the potential political implications of urban cinema. Finally, the role that the image of the city plays in organizing urban space and our experience of it is considered.

Introduction: Cinema and Urban Society

This chapter begins by considering the importance of cultural questions in the critical study of planetary urbanization. After introducing the aims of this study, the chapter provides a brief sketch of each of the seven films analysed here. This is followed by a discussion of realism and a short summary of the key arguments made in this book. The chapter then introduces the notion of spectrality, focusing in particular on how the ‘spectre of the city’ haunts the films analysed here. The chapter closes by providing an outline of the structure of the book.