Giant shopping centers, private cities in the middle of the desert or ocean ? These are the urban and architectural phantasmagoria of neo-capitalism. The book led by Mike Davis and Daniel Monk offers an analysis, critical and parodic, through the portrait of 11 cities.
This collective collection which brings together 15 authors is intended to describe and openly denounce the evils which affect cities at the time of neo-capitalism, as clearly indicate the introduction and the title. The objective is not really amazing for the reader familiar with the work of Mike Davis who since the publication of his bestseller on Los Angeles regularly adopts this sarcastic tone with regard to the dominant logic of profit. A priori he is not wrong. This time, he stages 11 cities: two cities in Latin America (Managua and Medellin), two of Africa (Cairo and Johannesburg), two from the Middle East (Arg-E-Jadid and Dubai), three in Asia (Kabul, Beijing, Hong Kong) and two in Europe (Paris, Budapest). The United States is of course in the first chapter but the author does not deal with a particular city. He simply proposes to denounce two products from real estate production, the shopping center and the closed residential center, Mall shopping And Gated Communityby referring explicitly to two states, Minnesota and Arizona. THE Mall of America (located in the metropolis of Minneapolis/Saint-Paul) and the GATED-RESIDENT MUST (closed subdivisions for retirees whose state of Arizona is certainly the most representative) are thus the subject of violent criticism, which a priori is not innovative insofar as we already have large -scale work on these objects.
After reading this first chapter centered on two American real estate products, we expect the authors presenting the other cities to continue the reflection by staging the transfer of these two models Made in America which, for the majority of the inhabitants of the planet, are many elements of the “ American dream ». No way. In fact criticism relates mainly to the “ Consumption dream worlds In different cities like Paris, Hong Kong and Dubai (to limit themselves to a few names) and sometimes its alliance with political regimes and military strategies (Arj-E Jadid, Beijing, Dubai, Kabul) but all allusion to theAmerican Way of Life is nonexistent. Odd. Only the rich who cross in “ All-powerful gods The nightmarish gardens of their most secret desires Are truly questioned. As for the interesting allusion made from the introduction with regard to the advent of tax havens, corollars of this new phase of capitalism, the reader then expects to find a few pages or chapters analyzing the regime of tax havens or at least describing the operating mechanisms. It is not. Only chapter 2 entitled “ Floating utopias »Addresses the theme of tax havens by being limited to a presentation of the website
a simple pretext to denounce libertarian ideology. A visit to the site makes it possible to realize that it is simply a group of individuals imagining going around the world on a ship. The maps of the site that give an idea of the journey through the continents are funny and fun.
Most chapters like those in Dubai or Beijing are organized from a description of the airport, the report of the presence of luxury hotels and cars, themed parks or shopping centers before taking the time to describe the mega-projets in progress (Palm Jumeirah in Dubai) likely to become mega privatization of security. Large architectural names are cited, sometimes accompanied by some figures highlighting the pharaonic investments in the real estate sector. Here and there is a question of the low remuneration of local workforce or from immigration (in Dubai as in Beijing) who bring together individuals obliged to submit to survive or even the rights that states have to confiscate the land while advocating the general interest. In Beijing, a million inhabitants were expelled from old districts to make way for towers. The chapter on Hong Kong is limited to describing the closed subdivision of Palm Springs which according to the author represented the miracle solution to fill the identity gap of the rich who refusing to opt for Chinese identity and British identity, preferred a lifestyle resulting from “ Global Cultural Supermarket ». As for the article on Johannesburg, he evokes the question of water, after having insisted on the legacy of apartheid without highlighting the real challenges of powers within the city.
Within this collection, the article on Cairo turns out to be the only one based on serious documentation and which is not limited to the description of megaprojets. However, the analysis of Timothy Mitchell presents itself more as a case study of the policy carried out by the IMF in the 1990s – at the height of the famous “ Washington consensus – that he does not really approach the urban theme. There is certainly a question of the real estate project Dreamland – Carried out not far from the Pyramid of Giza and inspired by images of closed American housing estates – but criticism is more about international organizations, the American state and the Egyptian state. On different occasions the author recalls that Egypt is a country where only 5% of the population can be found in the category “ middle class And where also the weight of the informal economy in the national economy is considerable.
Criticism or parody ?
Faced with this work which aims to be a criticism of globalized capitalism through a panorama of 11 cities, the reader can only feel an ambivalence with regard to publishers and authors. A priori the objective announced in the introduction corresponds well to the intentions of the social sciences which have always had the mission of accounting for economic, social and cultural processes, to explain and criticize them by highlighting social inequalities and the mechanisms of exclusion. But the status of this collection is in fact akin to a simple parody of the social sciences. He borrows a priori style and tone a priori but the research work which consists in bringing together documents under different sources, encrypted data and collecting the point of view and the representations of actors through interviews with political authorities, economic actors or even the populations concerned, is practically non -existent (outside the chapter on Egypt). The texts are based on information that any internet user can easily find in the multiple Websites that the Internet offers and do not give more information than what the daily media (offline And online) offer. The authors certainly use learned references by often quoting remarks made by Adam Smith, Karl Marx or Bourdieu (“ only researcher who criticized neocapitalism with eloquence ») Or by referring to classic films like Metropolis of Fritz Lang or Blade Runnerbut they are only there to give a glamor touch of the Marxist type in the chapter. The reader is then invaded by the strange impression of finding himself once again in the world of appearance and consumption that we also seek to denounce. What discrepancy with the work of the social sciences based on the Marxist analysis which with us marked the 1960s and 1970s !
Infernal paradise presents itself as a story more part of the Urbanophobic genre than in the analysis itself. This genre is no stranger to the character of Mike Davis but it was so far relatively well hidden as in his first work denouncing industrial capitalism as much as the lifestyles of “ bourgeois ” of THERE At XXe century. It is true that Davis is American and that American civilization has never really favored the city as “ Cradle of civilization And that she chose to anchor democracy in the values of the rural world. At the age of industrialization and its corollaries, urbanization and immigration, it was the first to promote “ suburb As a privileged place of the American family because in measurement of conveying a feeling of belonging to a place while being close to nature, like the small town. Infernal paradise Presents a serious relationship with the remarks made in the aftermath of the First World War by the German philosopher Oswald Spengler associating the big city and the metropolis with the symptom of the decline of civilizations (and in particular of the West). Spengler’s influence was seriously overshadowed later due to new works adopting a different point of view like those of Georg Simmel who favored the figure of the metropolis as the sign of the advent of modernity.
By moving from one city to another (or from one website to another), the reader circulates in a universe of stereotypes (eg drugs in Kabul) under science fiction, without that it is said in an explicit manner by the two publishers of the work wearing the Habit of the Social Sciences. Also faced with this observation, one can only wonder about the policies carried out by the publishers to translate foreign works. Why did you choose Infernal paradise While remarkable studies are published by American and other researchers working on mutations in cities at the time of globalization while adopting a critical posture ? The bravest of them do not hesitate to emphasize the dynamics of transnationalism as a factor of increased complexity in the city in parallel with an awareness of individuals in their interconnection capacities with other individuals in real time and to act together independently of any geographic location. Transnationalism presenting itself as a major question and a real challenge for democracy and for political powers at the time of globalization.