This document discusses rising inequality in cities and the spatial divisions between wealthy and poor residents. It notes the growth of exclusive, gated communities for the wealthy that isolate them from the problems faced by those in poorer areas. This spatial divide weakens social cohesion and the ability of urban elites to engage with and address issues outside their enclaves. When the affluent retreat into isolated, "fortified" spaces in the city that insulate them from social issues, it can undermine empathy for the poor and lead to the neglect of growing problems in other areas.

1. Some reflections
Cities of the Few:
Wealth, Inequality
and Urban Life
Rowland Atkinson
Research Chair in Inclusive Socieites
Inaugural Lecture, 8th October 2015

2. ‘The extent to which people can learn to pursue
aggressively their interests in society is the extent
to which they learn to act impersonally. The city
ought to be the teacher of that action, the forum
in which it becomes meaningful to join with other
persons without the compulsion to know them as
persons.’ (Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, 1974: 340)

3. Pushed out
• Gentrification and
displacement in London
• Estimating flows of what had
been an invisible problem
• Contemporary relevance –
housing stress, exclusion, role
of the state in favouring
winners

4. Area effects
Is it worse to be poor
in a poor area than
one which is more
socially mixed?

5. Looking-up
What about the wealthy? Fat cat
sociology? (Katz 1968)
– How are preferences of rich
articulated through urban and
political systems
– Do these choices impact on life-
chances of poor?
– Is a socio-spatial contract breaking
down?

6. Gated communities
USA
5.9% of households –
walled communities
3.4% controlled
access
Sanchez and Lang,
2005
UK
1,000 GCs
Atkinson, Blandy,
Flint and Lister, 2002
Australia
2% h’holds in
guarded
communities
Atkinson and Tranter,
2011

7. Pro-social drives
• Homophilia
• Social reproduction
• Privacy
Anti-social circuits
• Housing
• Transport
• Education
• Work
• Leisure

8. growth of up-market suburban areas and gated communities,
on the one hand, and the simultaneous increase in
overcrowded tenement zones, ethnic enclaves, slums and
informal settlements, on the other. Strong contrasts have also
emerged between technologically advanced and well-serviced
economic production and business complexes such as export
processing zones, and other areas defined by declining
industry, sweatshops and informal businesses.
Global Report on Human Settlements 2009, UN Habitat

9. ‘Connectivity and wealth creation has generated
global demand for the finest properties’ (Knight
Frank 2015)

10. A Spatial Revolt of the Elites?
• City a site of retreat by political and social
elites into enclaves and out of social life of
city
• ‘New’ elites do not engage in political and
social life of the city as did those earlier
• Work and ‘play’ but presence almost
invisible

11. The great cut

12. Interior - Exterior

14. Professor Peter Newman,
said in an interview with
the Herald that Sydney
and Melbourne could no
longer afford to exist as
two-tiered cities where
the wealthy had access to
transport and the poor
struggled on the fringes.
"That is one of my
themes, that we stop
cities developing into eco
enclaves surrounded by
Mad Max suburbs," he
said.
(Sydney Morning Herald,
Jan 6, 09)
14

15. Domestic Fortress

16. If you could buy any home, what
would it look like?

17. Enya’s castle, Ireland

18. Barclay Brothers residence, Isle of Breqhou, Channel
Islands

19. Detroit, 2009

20. Koenig house, Los Angeles, 1960
Prospect - Refuge

23. Domestic Fortress:
Fear and the New Home Front
Rowland Atkinson
Sarah Blandy

24. Into the Alpha Territory

25. Gilded ghetto effects
• What is it like to be rich among the rich?
• What does a community study of the
extremely affluent tell us about urban life
today?

26. London
• Largest global concentration
of ultra-wealthy people
(Wealth-X)
• International migration and
wealth deposition, 75% of
sales central London to non-
UK
• 72 billionaires, 5,955 ultra-
wealthy ($30m investable
assets) in London (Knight Frank)
• 550,000 HNWIs in UK
(Capgemini 2015)

27. Helipads
Private banking
Prestige car
dealerships
Luxury hotels
Exlusive clubs
Michelin restaurants
Private schools
Events & venues
Museums & galleries

28. Infrastructure
Helipads
Private banking
Prestige car
dealerships
Luxury hotels
Exlusive clubs
Michelin restaurants
Private schools
Events & venues
Museums & galleries

29. Criminal capital
‘Laundering and facilitation [of
crime] lie behind the infliction of
misery and suffering on countless
millions of people, allow the
perpetrators to get away with and
retain the proceeds. Very few
bankers knowingly assist such
people; the vast majority would
be aghast if confronted with the
abuse of their institutions by
criminals’ p.2 Platt, 2015

30. Crime, Capital
• City facilitates through
inattentiveness
• Political machinery courts
sector as mainstay of economy
• Generates insulating urban
milieu facilitates the denial of
harm
• Social crisis that might spur
reform being exported to avoid
possible impacts –
gentrification, demolition,
welfare reform

31. Badge of confidence

32. Sign of global disorder

33. We have to remember that London is a global
centre for trade, and finance, London is a global
centre, for finance and services and culture, sport, a
whole variety of different things, and one of the
main things we’ve seen in the headlines for the past
ten years, conflicts, civil unrest, global instability,
and the United Kingdom is a clear beneficiary of all
these problems around the world.
PH, Mayfair Property Seminar

34. Forting-up

35. Fear and
insulation
It's just like an empty village, people just go away to
their other homes. But how do the people feel?
They like that anonymity but they like to have, they
like that it's safe, there's very little crime, the things
that they complain about are the sirens that the
police cars make, and generally they just like the area
because it's, it offers them anonymity, Herbert

36. Privacy,
security, status
Eaton Square

38. 1 Palace Street, excavated 3 basement
levels via two car lifts

40. One Tower Bridge

41. One Kensington Gardens

42. One Blackfriars

43. Nine Elms

44. Marble Arch Tower

45. Canary Wharf Residential

46. £75m for a fixer-upper

47. South Quay
Plaza, 791
residences

49. ‘every day will evoke five-star ambience’
• Chilterns

50. Cercopoidic space
• Cocooned in a security foam
• Interconnected
• Socially insulated

51. A lot of people who are very very rich don’t want to be
seen walking across a pavement from their car to the
front entrance of their house, because it is a security
risk, so the ability to be able to drive in in the back of
a blacked-out car and get out inside the car park and
jump out and get in the lift to their own apartment…
is a very attractive thing these days. Property agent, Chelsea

52. The ‘World’

53. What kind of city emerges?
• A ‘hedge city’ – global wealth
destination
• Callous dispositions toward
social problems
• Growth coalition of politics,
real estate, finance – capital
has the right to the city

54. Space structures
empathy and social
politics
So they've now started camping out in Park Lane,
there's this underpass and they're all sleeping in there,
so every morning the council go in and hose it down
with a big power hose. But you know there's part of
you that feels sorry for these people, you can't help
it, but there's also a big part that just says I don't
want that problem on my doorstep. It's a problem
that has to be addressed. So that's what we've got to
put up with. Samantha, Mayfair

55. I think there are inequalities but
nowhere near as extreme as in
other global cities I've travelled
and visited. I think inequality's just
one of the sad facts of the way the
world is. Although London has it I
think there is a good welfare
system, a good support system and
generally if people are willing to
work there are jobs around right so
it's rare that you really see poverty,
people really struggling.
KJ, Senior investment banker

56. ‘Live to Live’
(sign in hedge
fund office,
Notting Hill)

57. The toilet assumption
• Built environment
structures morality and
propensity to deal with
problems
• Generates a metropolitan,
yet cosmopolitan, security
bubble that drives benign
neglect of global problems
(Slater, 1970, Pursuit of Loneliness)

58. Making evil paradises
• City run by and for capital
- Produces socially
distressed conditions
while displacing them
• Insulated spaces that do
not reveal external social
realities

59. Plutocratic City
• Heartless elites
• Barbarian manifesto:
plunder public
resources by savvy
techno-elite
• LeGales – Partial exit
of urban elites

60. Terminal city
• Parasitoid – organism that spends much of its
life attached to its host, unlike a parasite it kills
or consumes its host
• Character of urban super-rich:
– Ecological, housing consumption, skewing of
political agendas to private wealth
– Slow death of public space and place of working
classes in the city?

62. Strategic ejection
Autotomic space - spaces rejected from body
politic because unruly, expensive, ungovernable,
‘no-go’
– Assurances of citizenship suspended
– Power/policing and policy exercised in a modulating
way – periodically overwhelming or absent

63. Back to Sennett…
What does hard-wiring of
invisibility do for our
understanding of, and
response, to social problems
and inequalities?