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Abstract
The urban uprisings which occurred across England in the summer of 2011 are deemed in this paper to highlight the unstable, depoliticised ‘publics’ being increasingly convened within neo-liberalised cities. It contends that the diverse, dispersed and multiple events of August 2011 were ‘staged’ and ‘storied’ by assorted media and political narratives to represent socio-spatial ‘communities’ as fallen, harmed or resurgent entities. The paper exposes some of the evidential limitations of these reworkings but largely focuses on these imaginaries to reflect on how they implicate the city in the delineation of fragile and contradictory socio-spatial formations emerging from, through and in response to neo-liberalisation. In this regard, the scripting of the ‘riots’ around narratives of community crisis and redemption belies the sifting, bordering and reproducing of urban populations through the strategic governing dualities of abjection/exclusion and participation/responsibility. The paper suggests that these modalities produce landscapes of both depoliticisation and contingent disruption, an apparent contradiction which appears to be both intensifying and unravelling in a period of ‘alchemic austerity’, and which renders logics of restructuring as both unremitting and glaringly problematic.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Paul Watt, Bob Jeffrey, Pete Somerville and the anonymous referees for their comments on earlier incarnations of this paper.
Notes
1 Although Occupy did succeed in initiating short-lived bursts of encampment and experimentation in the heavily cleansed spaces of the City of London and ‘black bloc’-style tactics were used by a group of highly mobile anarchists to briefly disrupt the shopping precincts of the West End during a demo in 2011.
2 Millington (Citation2011) notes that the ‘stonyhearted’ centres of political, financial and consumer power went untouched during the ‘riots’, testament perhaps to the structural exclusions and isolations which protect and spatialise neo-liberal power.
3 A framework introduced by Loic Wacquant to denote the structural reproduction of spatialised class inequalities in late capitalist economies. He describes advanced marginality as: ‘a novel regime of sociospatial relegation and exclusionary enclosure’ (Wacquant Citation2008, 2).
4 The apparent disbelief of Conservative Ministers at this urban ‘crisis’ was surprising in itself given their ‘broken Britain’ policy motif promulgating a pernicious thesis of social ‘breakdown’ (see also Slater Citation2012).
5 Much of which was seized by police afterwards, perhaps justifying the rioters' aggression towards these professional voyeurs (Aufheben Citation2012, 12).
6 The short film Riot from Wrong offers a poignant and coruscating account of these injustices for those growing up on the Bridgewater Farm estate in Tottenham before, during and after the ‘riots’. See http://www.fullyfocusedproductions.com/. See also Watt Citation2013 for a vivid account of the surveillance of young people in East London exacerbated by an Olympic-related securitisation apparatus.
7 The BBC later apologised for the treatment of Howe in which the interviewer accused him of ‘being no stranger to rioting yourself’. A clip of the interview is available here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzDQCT0AJcw
8 The Wombles was a popular UK children's book series and television programme about fictional creatures who live on Wimbledon Common, London who collect and recycle rubbish in creative ways.
Additional information
Andrew Wallace is a senior lecturer at the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Lincoln.