The decision to erect chain link fences along our canals and chase our homeless around the city is a purposeful and cruel political choice that needs to be opposed. Nathan Ó Broin analyses enclosure and gentrification in Dublin making the case for local resistance and a People’s City.
The neoliberal city sits on top of an immense regime of hostile architecture finely tuned to dispossess and discourage ‘unsavoury’ groups from exerting influence over a space. There is no better example of this than Waterways Ireland’s current plans to partially restrict access to public space along the Grand Canal by constructing permanent hostile architecture to prevent asylum seekers and homeless people from erecting tents there.
It has come to light that the cost for even the temporary fence infrastructure to do this has come to €145,000 for two months. This money could have easily been spent on accommodating the homeless along the canal three times over but was instead used to uphold a deeply cruel and hostile regime of city-planning and management.
Their justification for installing long stretches of elaborate chain link fences along the canal was their “serious concerns about the risk to health and safety and public health from people staying in tents by the canal”. The very structuring of this justification suggests that homeless people are not members of the public, instead they are people who may infect the public.
Homelessness is a public health issue though, for many it means a rapid deterioration in health both physical and mental, 2 men have just died along the canals this week, but it’s not the health of the homeless they care about, if this were true the city would offer accommodation not displace them without any supports.
The decision to endlessly chase homeless asylum seekers and the overall homeless population across the city is a stark symptom of a brutal neoliberal regime that primarily functions to maintain its control over the class boundaries that exist within our communities.
In the case of Dublin’s asylum seekers, Dublin City Council and Waterways Ireland have contributed to this violence by identifying this group as unwell, unsanitary and potentially dangerous in order to justify their brutalisation. Additionally, they have denied their right to exist in public space, to even be considered part of the ‘public’ at all and ultimately, plan to remedy this by introducing permanent hostile architecture affecting everyone. This is a group that has already been dehumanised by every corner of the Irish establishment and is now faced with an increasingly hostile and dangerous response from public institutions like Waterways Ireland.
These issues will inevitably lead to more hate being levied at asylum seekers and homeless people rather than the ideological foundations which denied them the proper resources to begin with.
The issue is not just one that affects these asylum seekers but one that affects all of our homeless and all those who want to keep public land public. Until we own the city and recapture it from the ideological dogma of neoliberalism no one is safe from these decisions. To understand them though, we need to delve into the logic that fuels the neoliberal city itself.
Gentrification and the Revanchist City
Gentrification often manifests as a revenge of the city’s bureaucracy against what it perceives to be the unruly and unlawful masses infecting the urban core with crime and depravity. Neil Smith championed this idea of ‘the revanchist city’ by which he means the civic attempt to go back to a ‘purer’ past, one devoid of working class, immigrant, alternative communities, and to reclaim control and purify the city of its ‘blemishes’. As nation states of the late 19th century sought to reclaim lost lands through inter-imperial conflict, revanchism also describes the neoliberal cities’ fight to maintain order and control through various acts of violence. But this revanchism is nearly always framed from the perspective of the besieged middle-class, rather than some egalitarian vision of a city which deconstructs class barriers, addresses social issues and empowers the masses. Instead we’re left with a litany of sensational reactions when anyone, be it Dublin’s working class or asylum seekers,seems to subvert the city managers’ ideals of who belongs where in the city. This revanchist drive is a permanent condition of the neoliberal city in late capitalism.
Cities themselves are great behemoths of capital accumulation. They contain within them a perpetual class struggle, as they embody all of the many contradictions of capitalism. These contradictions become concrete manifestations and take form through social issues like homelessness. The drive to urban growth at any cost, undertaken via the drive to profit, deepens the disparities between classes.
These disparities create tectonic shifts in power as waves and waves of gentrification slowly transform our communities. What emerges are extensive networks of class boundaries across our city, manifested as hard borders(walls and fencing) and soft-borders, which can be everything from the increased regulation of space, to the removal of public assets, like toilets and bins, and the introduction of hostile architecture.
This quiet class struggle has continued apace across Dublin, but in our docklands in particular the effects are enormous. This former industrial heartland of Dublin has been transformed as an influx of tech start-ups and megacorporations have moved in. Rents are driven through the roof as vast swathes of our working class communities face competition from a newly introduced class of ‘entrepreneurs’ and business owners.
In part, this is the result of our governments’ ideological failure to defend industrial communities from the onset of a fast-paced technological economy. It has also created an enormous housing deficit. Little to no effort has been made to allow communities to transition to the post-industrial landscape of modern Dublin. An inclusive agenda is absent, and our neoliberal cities are fractured by class boundaries. But this is not unexpected; it was the inevitable outcome of neoliberal policies from city managers who have no solutions to any of the city’s countless social problems.
In one stark example, gentrification through companies like AirBnB is considered to be totally acceptable and normal – a sign of progress even. However, AirBnB has an enormous impact on the city’s housing crisis. Despite this, the city managers will consider neither ban on Airbnb nor any serious regulations. Let’s be absolutely clear: AirBnB’s particular contribution to gentrification is violent, they have emptied our homes of families and left thousands upon thousands of properties to the whims of seasonal tourism. No rationally managed city would ever allow such a deeply destructive company to exert such a dominant influence over its housing stock. It should be common sense to acknowledge the explicit harm done by Airbnb and to act immediately to prevent any further damage. However, our cities are not managed by rational individuals working from a sensible ideological position.
While campaigning for the local elections, People Before Profit Candidate Brigid Purcell recalled a conversation with a man who confided:
“Once-upon-a-time I had neighbours, now I’m surrounded by AirBnB’s.”
This man’s testimony is just one part of this awful story. Our city is being managed under a logic which produces deeply irrational outcomes. From housing to the Canals it is absolutely clear that we can not expect solutions to manifest out of the current system.
In response to the city’s dearth of ideas, the people most affected by its many crises are told to be glad some extremely wealthy minority are benefiting from it. They are angry that people are left to rot in tents.
Now the far-right are more than happy to mobilise around it which makes the most vulnerable even more vulnerable. Suggesting that those left-behind by the city’s failure should direct their anger at asylum seekers and immigrants, misses those who are responsible – the ruling class and their vulture funds, developers and neoliberal city managers.
Ceding ground and pawning off public space, homes and utilities to private developers and ‘business’ has destroyed communities and created the worst housing and services crisis in the state’s history. It’s the far-right who are stepping into the void to concoct a new and dangerous narrative about how communities can change this course. The creation of public spaces is -vital for everyone yet it is often overlooked. I believe this has to change.
Failing to tackle the problem.
Activists have assisted and supported the individuals living on the canal for months now. These people have been attacked with bricks and had 360 of their tents destroyed by the state. The violence is only escalating. After the death of 2 homeless men sleeping along the canal, local residents and activists joined with the rough-sleepers along the canals to host a vigil. Signs were attached to the fences showing their opposition to this outrageous enclosure, and a number of fences were removed. We need to support and build on these efforts and fight the cowardly response of the state to enclose public space, not toss our anger onto those forced to live on the streets.
Policing both through the Gardaí on the streets and chain link fences in our public doesn’t begin to deal with the slow death of our city. Force and repression are not the answer.
The regulation of space in our cities works one-way, top down Not bottom up. This is because the working class have no effective means of contesting gentrification or enclosure, beyond a kafkaesque bureaucracy, whereby signatures are collected en-mass to reject planning permissions. As long as the defining characteristics and principles of those terms are dictated by neoliberals then the city’s working class will always struggle to win back control. But important steps have been made to actively and directly take on the hostile architecture being forced upon our communities and this is a positive step toward building local resistance.
Ultimately, we need to reimagine how cities function and who they work for and we need a movement that can maintain momentum, build local resistance and contest space across the city.
Winning Control, “Right to the City”
The canals are not just some neutral space that a nebulous group of professionals have a right to enclose at will. This is about how we perceive and form our demands and how we build power. Space matters and we must shift the power dynamics of who controls it by understanding how it is controlled and through what mechanisms it is maintained.
Marx’s analysis of political economy concluded that the capitalist mode of production is above all else about time and the extraction of surplus value through exploitation. Henri Lefebvre developed this further, expounding upon it and concluding that time, exploitation and space are intrinsically connected through capitalist production. Spatial practices, via the economic activity conducted within a space is a product of the capitalist mode of production. Space has become a profitable commodity. Our cities and their planning represent the concrete form of neoliberalism and they reflect the social relations of capitalism. They reproduce rugged individualism , precarious labour and an insatiable drive toward enclosure and privatisation. However, spatial practices and the social relations within them can be altered radically by mass-movements and struggle. It is not fixed that a city built under capitalist logic can not be reclaimed piece by piece and be made to reenact solidarity and care. Cities should emphasise collective life rather than individual competition. These struggles for a people’s city, are part and parcel of fighting capitalism. We should contest space as we would contest exploitation by building trade unions. Exploitation and dispossession are just as much built into the design of our communities as they are in the model of production in a workplace.
Physical instalments like chain link fences represent both the disorder and command of public spaces.These fences will soon be taken down and replaced by permanent infrastructure to deny our homeless access to the space. In an effort to greenwash this anti-human infrastructure, waterways Ireland tells us not to worry though as it’ll come in the form of some nice shrubbery. We should not be fooled by this; our cities are regimes of hostile architecture denying more and more access to more and more people and it does not stop here. The whole system which produces these situations needs to be replaced. Rather than police homelessness we should be building housing accessible to all.This is not a complex issue, it is only complicated by capitalist relations.
All hostile architecture should be torn down, broken or dismantled, we need serious local resistance to start doing this. We want a future where we live beside well-loved green spaces and alongside people of all backgrounds – not chain link fences, private parks and empty gaffs for wealthy tourists.
