United Kingdom

Toxic Class Encounters

Tim Strangleman — Mon, 07 Dec 2020 20:29:01 -0500

It’s thirty years this autumn since I began my undergraduate degree at Durham University in the North East of England. To tell you the truth I didn’t know much about the city before I applied there. My visit for the three required interviews was very enjoyable, and more positive than some of the less elite institutions I had applied to. I enjoyed looking about the Norman castle and cathedral set high on a hill surrounded by the moat-like River Wear. I should have guessed something was up however when the tutor in the sociology department asked me “What’s a good working-class boy like you want to come to a place like this?”. It was meant positively, and I took it in that way, but the penny really dropped when I arrived in the late September of 1990. I think about 60% of students then came from public schools (meaning they were privately educated), but in those first days and weeks of the autumn term it felt like 95% or more. Someone explained to me that Durham was where the public-school kids who couldn’t get into Oxbridge went. The result was often a toxic mixture of slumbering resentment among people who felt they had somehow missed out on their pre-ordained entitlement.

Class privilege was etched into the University, and the public-school kids took to it like ducks to water. Durham for them was simply an extension of the public-school system with colleges instead of houses, black tie formal dinners, and intense social networks built between their schools through sporting activities. The ‘Rahs’, the pejorative name for the worst-behaved of the tribe, walked around as if they owned the place. They had their own dress code, they sounded different, and they were often much taller than the students from ‘ordinary’ backgrounds or the local population of Durham City – in short they literally embodied class privilege.

This made Durham an excellent place to study sociology, especially class. It also makes clear how easily those with privilege deny their advantages. Students took offence in seminars where a tutor might gently try to lift the lid on the benefits some of my more upper-class peers might have enjoyed. I remember one woman took my tutor to task for even suggesting privilege by pointing out that her father had “Worked jolly hard to put her and her three siblings through public school at over £10,000 each per year”. I think I remarked that my dad had never earnt more than £10,000 a year in his entire working life, but the irony was lost on the rest of my class mates. The lid was firmly shut.

And there was a darker side to this experience of class. There was the working-class local kid who shared a bedroom in my student accommodation with a ‘Rah’. It was he rather than the ‘rah’ who left quietly after Christmas, never to return, so alienated was he by the whole experience. Or there was my teacher Ian, a local lad who had gained a first-class degree in sociology and an excellent PhD from Durham University but was laughed at as soon as he opened his mouth to give a large first-year lecture. His was a local North-East accent, something a largely public-school audience could only mock as it wasn’t the educated, received English that they and everyone who had ever taught them, or exercised authority over them, had shared.

Over the last three decades I’ve returned to Durham a number of times. I somehow assumed that things must have changed over the intervening years, but in the last couple of months Durham University has become the poster child for a form of toxic classism directed at working-class, often local students at the University. One of those students, Lauren White, eventually complied a report detailing instances from petty slights through to more serious incidents. As White noted of her treatment, “At first when they mocked and mimicked my accent, I sort of went along with it, even laughed, but then when I persistently became the butt of jokes about coalmining and started to get called feral because I was local it started to feel malicious.”

Read the rest of this piece at Working Class Studies.

Tim Strangleman, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, is a Contributor to Working Class Studies.

Photo: Members of the Durham University Working-Class Students Association marching in the city. Source: DurhanWCSA on Facebook.

Brexit and the Future of the Anglosphere

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 10 Feb 2020 20:29:28 -0500

The triumph of Brexit opens a new page not just in British history, but in the emerging configuration of the global society. It represents not just a rejection of universal globalism embraced by our political and business elites, including in Britain itself, but potentially the rise of new trans-national blocs held together not just by markets and capital, but culture and common beliefs.

This evolution was predicted neatly a quarter-century ago in Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations.”

At a time when the embrace of globalism was at its height, Huntington suggested, correctly, that the world would divide along historical, religious and cultural lines. These national divisions have become increasingly evident not only here but in China, the UK, India, Turkey, Russia and in other parts of Europe. The rise of nationalism is shattering the globalist structures and creating the basis for new forms of association.

No surprise then that in a post-EU world, Britain is looking to the United States for a new trade relationship which, according to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, could be in place by the end of the year. This new alliance would supplant the bureaucratic torpor of Brussels and provide a timely response to the Beijing-dominated Sinosphere that now extends itself throughout much of the world.

How the clash has changed

When Huntington wrote his famous thesis, he envisioned the rise of several cultural groups — Hindu, Japanese, Buddhist, African, Islamic, Orthodox, “Western” and Sinic.

Yet over the past 25 years, the trajectory of these “civilizations” has shifted in ways Huntington could not have foreseen. Once fearsome Japan has declined and there’s no break from continued chaos in the Islamic countries, while the Russian Orthodox world, Africa and Latin America have all failed to achieve anything close to global competitiveness.

Only China’s role has waxed and only its emerging system of alliances has gained power globally. In contrast, the Western alliance has weakened, as is clear from the EU’s internal divisions, particularly in Eastern and Central Europe, as well as with Brexit. This has left the U.S., with an administration widely despised around the world, as China’s only competitor in terms of economic growth, cultural power and military strength.

Given the failure of the EU, it makes sense for British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to reach out to the U.S. as his primary partner in the post-EU future.

This could be followed up with efforts to join other English-speaking democracies such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand. These are all far more politically compatible with British values than post-democratic continental Europe, where popular votes against EU intrusions have been repeatedly ignored by the ruling bureaucracy. Besides sharing a common language and history, these countries also can offer access to critical natural resources which, for the most part, Britain itself lacks.

The Chinese challenge

Dissatisfaction with the EU’s intrusive bureaucracy may have sparked Brexit, but the primary driver toward building a powerful Anglosphere lies in the rise of China. A quarter-century ago there was no such clear competitor; Tokyo and Brussels mattered much more than Beijing, and both were allied to Washington and London.

Today China easily surpasses everyone outside the United States in economic, military and technological power. It also has developed a powerful alternative to the West’s liberal institutions. China’s authoritarian system, its massive surveillance apparatus and widespread repression,appeals to dictators now thriving in an increasingly illiberal world where dissatisfaction with democracy is on the rise.

China’s influence represents a challenge even to Anglosphere. Nowhere is this clearer than in Australia, a country whose trade of supplying natural resources to China have underpinned the fact that Australia hasn’t experienced a recession for almost 30 years.

“Our whole standard of living is virtually tied to our exports to China,” noted billionaire businessman Kerry Stokes in The Australian.

Under the current right-of-center government, curbing Chinese influence now has become a priority item. But Australia cannot hope to resist Chinese domination without allies, suggesting to some it’s time to once again strengthen ties with the Anglosphere, as well as with democratic Asian countries, notably India and Japan, that are also worried about Chinese expansionism and political meddling.

The future of the Anglosphere

The ability to absorb and incorporate other cultures may threaten some nativists, but it is the key to the Anglosphere’s long-term prospects.

Great societies, rather than turning inward, are by nature expansive and inclusive.

Rome’s greatness, suggested the historian Edward Gibbon, rested in part on tolerating religious heterodoxy and providing outsiders, including former slaves, a chance to rise above their station. In contrast to Athens, where the citizenry was restricted to the native-born freemen, Rome expanded its citizenry to its furthest possession and by 212 all free people were eligible to be citizens. “The grandsons of Gauls, who besieged Julius Caesar at Alesia,” Gibbon noted, “commanded legions, governed provinces and were admitted into the Senate of Rome.”

This ecumenical approach, made possible by the commitment to rule of law and democracy, also makes the Anglosphere attractive to other countries — India, Japan, South Korea — whose constitutional order was in large part shaped, or even imposed, from the English-speaking countries. All this is happening as the world learns more about the failures and excesses of the communist dictatorship, as evidenced by such things as its inability to deal with the coronavirus, the disturbances in Hong Kong and the systematic oppression of the Uighurs.

Those with the good fortune to live in pluralistic Western-style democracies, rooted in classical culture, should recognize how rare such open societies have been through history and how singularly attractive they remain.

Now that Britain has acted boldly, it’s time for its offspring to embrace again the promise of the Anglosphere, whose brightest future may still lie in the years ahead.

This piece first appeared on The Orange County Register.

Joel Kotkin is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. He authored The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, published in 2016 by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He is executive director of NewGeography.com and lives in Orange County, CA. His next book, “The Coming Of Neo-Feudalism,” will be out this spring.

Photo Credit: T P via Flickr under CC 2.0 license.

Standard of Living Crisis Evident in New Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey

Wendell Cox — Sun, 19 Jan 2020 20:29:01 -0500

One of the principal advances of the past two centuries has been the drastic reduction in poverty and the rise of a large middle-class, a process expertly detailed by economists Diedre McClosky and Robert Gordon. At the heart of this trend was the increase in the home ownership rate among the rapidly growing metropolitan population, which increasingly located in the suburbs, where land and houses were less expensive per square foot and which had good access to jobs, shopping and recreation.

For 16 years, the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey has rated housing affordability for metropolitan areas (which are both housing and employment markets) in multiple nations. Genuine analysis of housing affordability requires consideration of house prices in relation to household incomes. The Demographia Survey uses the Median Multiple,the median house price divided by the median household income to rate housing affordability (Figure 1).

This article summarizes the 16th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, including extracts.This year’s survey also includes an introduction featuring Singapore’s innovative and successful housing policy (“Focus on Singapore,” (Note 1) and a report on housing affordability in Russia (Note 2).

Housing Affordability in 2019

The Demographia Survey indicates that housing affordability has generally deteriorated over the last three decades in the 8 nations covered.By contrast, as late as three decades ago, (Figure 2) the national Median Multiples were “affordable” (3.0 or less) in six of the nations (Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States).

The housing affordability ratings are summarized by nation in Figure 3

Nonetheless, 10 of the 92 major markets remain affordable, all of them in the United States (Figure 4). The affordable major housing markets include Rochester, with a Median Multiple of 2.5, followed by Oklahoma City and Cleveland (2.7), Buffalo, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and St. Louis (2.8), Indianapolis and Hartford (2.9) and Tulsa (3.0).

In the least affordable metropolitan areas, however, there has been considerable house price escalation relative to incomes, which has been associated with urban containment regulation.

There are 31 severely unaffordable major housing markets in 2019 out of a total of 92 (Figure 5). Hong Kong is the least affordable, with a Median Multiple of 20.8. Vancouver is second least affordable major housing market, with a Median Multiple of 11.9. Sydney ranks third least affordable, at 11.0, followed by Melbourne, at 9.5 and Los Angeles, at 9.0. Toronto and Auckland are tied for sixth least affordable, at a Median Multiple of 8.6. San Jose has a Median Multiple of 8.5 and San Francisco 8.4. London (Greater London Authority) has a Median Multiple of 8.2 and is the 10th least affordable major market.

Where Middle-Income Households Cannot Afford Middle-Income Housing

The deterioration in housing affordability has made it nearly impossible for middle-income households to purchase the median price home, at least in the most unaffordable metropolitan areas. For example, in the United States, middle-income households (in the second through fourth income quartiles) did not have sufficient income in 2017 to qualify for a mortgage on the median priced house under typical financial terms in San Jose and Honolulu. Only top quintile (high-income) households qualified. The situation is nearly as dire in the San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego metropolitan areas (Figure 6).

In the Vancouver and Toronto metropolitan areas, middle-income households face similar barriers (Figure 7), as they do in other severely unaffordable metropolitan areas.

The Standard of Living Crisis

This housing affordability crisis is really a standard of living crisis, since the higher costs of living in the expensive metropolitan areas are largely attributable to higher housing costs (Figure 8).

This conclusion is supported by the analysis of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), in its recent report, Under Pressure: The Squeezed Middle-Class. OECD finds that the middle-class faces ever rising costs relative to incomes and that its survival is threatened. Again, the cost of housing is the issue. According to OECD, “Housing has been the main driver of rising middle-class expenditure.” Further, OECD notes that that the largest housing cost increases are in the costs of ownership, rather than rents.

The middle class used to be an aspiration. For many generations it meant the assurance of living in a comfortable house and affording a rewarding lifestyle, thanks to a stable job with career opportunities. It was also a basis from which families aspired to an even better future for their children. At the macro level, the presence of a strong and prosperous middle class supports healthy economies and societies. Through their consumption, investment in education, health, and housing, their support for good quality public services, their intolerance of corruption, and their trust in others and in democratic institutions they are the very foundations of inclusive growth. However, there are now signs that this bedrock of our democracies and economic growth is not as stable as in the past.

The report further noted that households of the millennial generation are being “squeezed out of the ranks of the middle class” in advanced economies around the world.OECD expresses concern that “there are now signs that this bedrock of our democracies and economic growth is not as stable as in the past.”

Adult Children to be Less Affluent than Parents

An important characteristic of the historic transition to middle-income affluence has been that children have generally had higher incomes than their parents. In his The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, Harvard University economist Benjamin Friedman expresses the issue:

…what matters most is not so much how people’s incomes and living standards compare to the year before or even the year before that but whether the average citizen can see the evidence of progress over the last decade or even over the last generation: whether people have a sense of getting ahead compared to how their parents live, and whether their experience gives them confidence that their children will do even better.

Yet, consistent with OECD’s findings, there are indications that this is no longer the case in (at least) the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and elsewhere. A recent United Kingdom study indicates that millennials will be the first generation to be worse off than their parents since the 1800s.

National economies have already been injured. In talking about his nation’s housing affordability problem, New Zealand’s Minister of Urban Development Phil Twyford referred to “the consequences of this market dysfunction have had a harmful systemic effect on the health of our urban economies.” Similar points have been made on the consequences of restrictive land use regulation on national economies and inequality, such as by Herkenhoff, Ohanian and Prescott (2017), and Hseih and Moretti (2015) as well as by La Cava (2016).

Facilitating better standards of living should constitute the principal domestic policy priority. This requires urban policy that focuses on “people rather than places,” as Paul C. Cheshire, Max Nathan and Henry G. Overman of the London School of Economics have posited. Planning requirements that undermine prosperity need to be eliminated. It took millennia to create the incomparably broad prosperity of the modern middle-class. Where a prosperous middle-class remains it is worth preserving and where it has been lost it should be restored.

16th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey.

Note 1: The Introduction, “Focus on Singapore,” describes that nation’s more than half-century commitment to ensuring middle-income housing affordability. The lesson of Singapore for the world is not so much the intricacies of its housing market design. Rather, it is that Singapore pro-actively and successfully prioritized affordable home ownership for its citizens, and developed means to accomplish that objective based upon its unique conditions.

Note 2: The Demographia Survey summarizes data from a report by The Institute for Urban Economics (IUE) in Moscow Housing affordability in the major Russian metropolitan areas:3rd quarter 2019. IUE finds that two of the 17 metropolitan areas have Median Multiples that are seriously unaffordable, three that are moderately unaffordable and 12 that are affordable. The median market has a Median Multiple of 2.6. Moscow, now Europe’s largest metropolitan area with 17 million population, has a Median Multiple of 4.2.

Top Image: Housing in the Los Angeles metropolitan area: Orange County (by author)

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed by Mayor Tom Bradley to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. Speaker of the House of Representatives appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

The Jewish Dilemma

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 09 Dec 2019 16:04:30 -0500

Es iz schwer tzu sein a yid. It is hard to be a Jew.

~Sholem Aleichem

When Britain’s Jews go to the polls next week, they do so at an uncomfortable moment. For the first time in at least a half century, their community—roughly 330,000 citizens—has become a major, if unwelcome, political issue. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is a long-standing ally of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its terrorist proxies Hamas and Hezbollah, and a fierce opponent of Israel’s right to exist, so the prospect of him becoming Prime Minister has made Jews nervous. As the New York Times suggests, British Jews are “Labourites practically by birth,” but many of them are likely to vote Conservative this time around.

The dilemma British Jews face is an increasingly common one across Europe. Britain’s Jews may not much like Boris Johnson, as they opposed Brexit by a factor of two-to-one, but many, in the words of the former Chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks, see the prospect of Corbyn’s election as “an existential crisis.” Polls suggest that just six percent of UK Jews plan to vote Labour.

What is occurring in Britain, and much of Europe, reflects changes in the nature of antisemitism. In the past, this oldest of prejudices was widely linked to the far-Right, where it still resides. But in many countries today, the primary instigators of anti-Jewish conspiracism tend to be found on the Left, and often allied with Muslim activists. Under this pressure, it is increasingly dubious that Europe’s Jewish communities can do anything but decline.

Whether from the Right or the Left, from Muslims, reactionary Christians, or progressive Greens, European Jews are confronted by a threat not seen since the 1930s. Some 90 percent of European Jews, according to recent surveys, have experienced antisemitic incidents, and more than 80 percent of European Jews aged 16 to 34 believe antisemitism is a growing problem in their countries. According to a recent EU survey, half of German and Belgian Jews and well over a third of Jews in France, the United Kingdom, and Sweden report being harassed for their religious affiliation; the rates have grown everywhere over the past five years.

If these trends persist, we can expect Europe’s Jewish populations to erode further. The triumph of Corbyn—a man 87 percent of British Jews polled believe to be an antisemite—could cause nearly half to “seriously consider” emigrating, most likely to more congenial places like Israel, the United States, Australia, and Canada. France’s Jewish population, the largest in Europe, has been sustained largely by the mass migration from North Africa, although that source has pretty much dried up now. Even so, France still has fewer Jews than it did in 1939 and that number seems destined to continue shrinking. Since 2000, nearly 50,000 Jews have left, mostly for Israel, the United States, or Canada

In fact, it’s hard to find a place in Europe—with the odd exception perhaps of Hungary—where Jewish prospects are anything but dismal. Eastern Europe, the center of the Jewish world in 1939 with its eight million Jews, has less than 400,000 today. Germany, home to 500,000 Jews in 1933, now has as little as a third of that, most originally refugees from eastern Europe. Fewer than 15,000 of the Jews living in Germany today can trace their roots to the pre-Nazi era.

Read the rest of the piece at Quillette.

Joel Kotkin is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for the Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His last book was The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us (Agate, 2017). His next book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class, will be published early next year. You can follow him on Twitter Twitter @joelkotkin

A Clash of Values

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 14 Nov 2019 20:29:01 -0500

Most American concerns with China revolve around economic issues, and, for some, the threat posed by that country’s expanding military. But China’s real existential challenge is not over market shares or submarines, but in a battle of values. Right now, it does not seem we are certain to win.

China presents the most profound challenge to liberal values since the end of the Cold War, a development that has caught our consistently lame political establishment by surprise. The leaders of both parties, and much of the corporate America, never saw it coming.

Many embraced Francis Fukuyama’s notion in “The End of History” of a future of “greater homogeneity among cosmopolitan cultures” that would all embrace Western-style liberal capitalism. But Harvard social scientist Samuel Huntington early on saw a conflict of cultures, carried out with modern means, but hardly trans-nationally democratic.

Huntington’s analysis proved much closer to the truth. His notion of a clash of civilizations predicted less “Kumbaya” and more conflict not only with China, but with other cultures including worldwide Islam, South America and Russia. But of these competitors, only China, the world’s second-largest economy, presents a clear long-term danger to our civilization and its values.

Rot from within

China’s wealth, married to political discipline, has made its appeal irresistible to large portions of the America corporate and political elite. Some of our most powerful firms consistently kowtow to suppression of human rights, most recently in Hong Kong as well as in mass incarcerations in Xinjiang. The pathetic bleating for China by NBA stars like LeBron James exposes how lucre influences even the most self-righteous social justice warriors. It’s remarkable how many powerful political voices, and woke academia, ignore the harsh reality of the Chinese police state.

This disconnect runs through large parts of the political class. The hapless Joe Biden earlier this year stated China was “not competition” for the United States even as his family sought to enrich themselves there. Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg insists that President Xi is “not a dictator” since has to listen to his “constituents.” Sure, that also applied to Mao, Hitler and Stalin, each of whom employed huge resources both to cultivate the adulation of the masses and repress dissent.

Some in the climate change movement embrace the Chinese model as superior in dealing with environmental issues to our own clunky democracy. The idea of a top-down approach has long appealed to a strain of left-wing environmentalism, somewhat ironic given that China is by far the world’s largest GHG emitter.

China’s civilizational state

China’s challenge is less about Communism and more about the resurgence of a state that even as late as the 17th century enjoyed a technical and industrial infrastructure at very least equal to Europe. China’s past is now promoted assiduously, with party leaders embracing the very Confucianism so reviled by the People’s Republic’s founders.

China’s current system rests upon this ancient hierarchical model. Chinese history lacks examples of a politically successful middle class winning in a rules-based democracy. It never embraced, as did Japan and other East Asian states, the primary lodestones of liberal civilization, such as individual and property rights. It represents instead an alternative to liberal capitalism, one that is being inculcated in its own population and also exported to universities and governments around the world.

China’s system is not really Marxist but resembles, as the late Japanese futurist Taichi Sakaiya put it, “high tech feudalism.” Rather than rule by proletarians and peasants, the leadership is increasingly dominated by so-called “red princelings,” such as President Xi himself, who trace their roots to generals and top officials of the initial Maoist regime. Even the entrepreneurial class has been subsumed. Some 90% of China’s millionaires, notes Australian political scientist David Goodman, are the offspring of high-ranking officials.

Mao’s portrait may still grace the yuan currency, but “socialism with Chinese characteristics” has created massive inequality. The country is now more unequal than Mexico, Brazil and Kenya as well as the United States and virtually all of Europe. In today’s China, about 1,300 individuals hold roughly 20 percent of the country’s wealth and the top 1 percent has roughly a third of it — while much of the country, particularly in the countryside, still lives at the brink of poverty.

Is China the wave of the future?

Among all our competitors, only China, home to nine of the world’s 20 biggest tech firms, presents any kind of challenge to American and Western economic preeminence. The regime intends to use this technology to expand its control by employing facial recognition systems to modulate behavior in ways approved by the state. By 2020 China is expected to deploy over 400 million surveillance cameras in cities across the country.

Often with the connivance of Western tech firms, China also seeks to harvest biometric data, track smartphones and impose a compulsory satellite-tracking systems for vehicles. Brain-monitoring devices are becoming increasingly common in Chinese factories, ostensibly to improve productivity. It’s more likely, of course, meant to tap into and shape the thoughts of their potentially rebellious workers. As MIT researcher Christina Larson puts it, “Who needs democracy when you have data?”

Nothing, however, benefits the Chinese challenge more than our own elites’ increasing disdain for the West’s political canon, with its emphasis on legal norms, free speech and competition. Donald Trump’s lack of interest in human rights and instinctive embrace of dictators is certainly no more help than the kowtowing from his progressive opponents.

Confronting China’s autocracy is about more than military or even economic warfare. This is fundamentally a conflict of values. For ours to have any chance of success, our own leaders, as well as the populace, need openly to embrace them, even at the cost of some short-term business or political advantage.

This piece first appeared in The Orange County Register.

Photo credit: Studio Incendo via Flickr under CC 2.0License.

Why Can’t It Be Like That Now? Remembering What We Had and Could Have Again

Tim Strangleman — Sat, 13 Jul 2019 01:30:38 -0400

‘But why can’t work be like that now?’ my colleague Julia asked when I told her about my research into the former Guinness brewery at Park Road in West London. After working on the project for the best part of a decade and a half, it’s sometimes difficult to sum up quickly. Over that time, I’ve looked at thousands of photographs, scores of staff magazines, and hundreds of documents, and I’ve talked to dozens of workers. But Julia’s question cut straight to the heart of the book. She got the point straight away, unlike some of my academic colleagues, who have been skeptical about the appreciation the brewery workers I spoke with expressed toward Guinness. Perhaps this is because they have not had blue-collar jobs. But I have, and when I worked on the London Underground, I appreciated the conditions that unions and previous generations had won for me, so I recognise what the brewery workers I wrote about valued in their work.

The book describes the conditions that workers had enjoyed at the plant from the end of World War II through to the early 1980s. Along with earning decent wages and good pensions when they were relatively rare features of blue-collar life in the UK, Park Royal workers also had access to a range of sports facilities and cultural activities onsite, subsidised by the company itself. On top of that, Guinness had hired Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, the premier architect of the day, to design the buildings. The grounds were laid out by some of the top contemporary landscape gardeners, who planted hundreds of different tree species and thousands of shrubs. All this not because the company had too, but because they felt it was the right thing to do, because they wanted to.

Some academics view these conditions as manipulative management practices. After one presentation at a university in North America, a visiting German scholar told me that they were ‘merely simple propaganda’, while others have described that these conditions as ‘crude ideological control devices lulling workers away from their revolutionary mission’. Such responses ignore the complexity and nuance of workers’ experiences and perspectives, but they also miss why the story of Guinness matters for us now.

I think a lot about the contrast between what corporate strategy looked like in the years after World War II and now. When I ask students in my sociology of work courses to reflect on their work experiences, their stories sometimes make for grim and even disturbing reading or hearing. Most are in their late teens or early twenties and work predominantly in-service jobs such as retail and, increasingly, coffee shops. They ‘enjoy’ very different working conditions, including internationally known brands limiting them to six-hour contracts to avoid having to pay for statutory breaks mandated by weakened employment law. They describe the abuse from customers frustrated at waiting those extra seconds for their beverage because the company has pared down staffing levels to a minimum. My students also tell me about the training packages they must complete at home rather than getting paid to train in the workplace.

When I talk to them about my Guinness research, I feel a mixture of emotions. I feel guilty that I am showing what their parents — or really grandparents — thought of as ‘good work’. Am I rubbing their noses in their own situations, highlighting unobtainable riches they will never enjoy? But I also believe that it’s important to describe the working conditions of the past so that we can understand where we have been and why we are where we are now. Work now looks very different than it did in the past for many people, but those changes have occurred because of structural shifts which are often deliberate choices made by corporate and political actors. Equally the ‘good jobs’ of the past exemplified by those at Guinness came about because of a set deliberate decisions and actions taken by employers, politicians, trade unions, and grass roots workers.

Reflecting on my own guilt about parading ‘good work’ in front of younger people reminds me of a seminal moment in the process of interviewing soon to be laid off workers at the plant. I will never forget one interview I did with a Guinness worker. At the end of a long session, the interviewee came out with pure gold (after I had turned the microphone off, as was so often the case). Reflecting on his early working life at the brewery in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he said, “Can you imagine what we used to have here?” The interview had drawn up a whole series of memories and reflections on a working life, his benign contract, the sports and social clubs, the vertical integration of the site, and the workplace camaraderie. The tone of disbelief in his voice was vivid, as if he had enjoyed some illicit pleasure and even remembering and admitting enjoying those features of working life was somehow wrong. He seemed to have a profound sense that the conditions of work in the past, and indeed the other forms of corporate investment, were illegitimate extravagances that were bound to end sooner or later. He spoke for many of his peers in voicing an obituary for a lost world of work.

Perhaps what is more striking is just how deeply neoliberal ideology has penetrated our collective consciousness, to the point where it has completely delegitimized a more expansive, progressive, and humane vision for capitalism. In short, contemporary culture and politics seems to have restricted our imaginations so completely that we cannot see alternatives to the current state of affairs.

And this is why I was so gratified when my colleague ‘got’ the point of my book: in studying the past we chart both what we had and what we have lost. But we also ask critical questions as to why, not so long ago, ordinary working-class people could enjoy conditions at work that gave them dignity, confidence, and hope that their lives were getting better, decade by decade, and that the children’s lives would be better still. It poses questions for all of us as workers, as voters, stock holders, and citizens: why is treating workers well seen as a cost on the balance sheet to be controlled rather than the right thing to do?

This piece originally appeared on Working Class Perspectives.

Tim Strangleman, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent.

Why Socialism Is Back

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 03 Jul 2017 01:33:38 -0400

Even as Venezuela falls deeper into crisis, and the former Soviet bloc nations groan under its legacy, socialism is coming back, and in a big way. Its key supporters are not grizzled pensioners yearning for Marxist security, but a whole new generation, most of whom have little memory of socialist failure.

Although the trend is a-historic, it’s not happening in a vacuum. The primary driver is the global ascendency of neo-liberal capitalism, which in virtually all countries has accelerated inequality. This is particularly true in the United States and the United Kingdom, where the gaps between rich and poor are greatest among developed, democratic countries. In these nations, socialist politicians such as Sen. Bernie Sanders and British Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn (pictured) are now political rock stars among young people.

In the 2016 presidential primaries, Sanders outpolled Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton put together among younger voters, and is now the nation’s most popular politician. His supporters are gradually taking over much of the Democratic Party, state by state. Corbyn, widely portrayed in the media as a walking time electoral bomb, secured for his party 61 percent of the vote among those under 40 in the recent parliamentary elections. It is increasingly possible that this once-marginal figure could someday occupy 10 Downing St. If the 75-year-old Sanders were a decade younger, he would also have an excellent chance of ascending to the White House.

A Different Kind of Leftism

Although neither Sanders nor Corbyn can be labeled classic Stalinists, they do represent a radical departure for their respective parties. Both adopt what are generally seen as far left positions, with Corbyn even suggesting that people displaced by London’s Grenfell fire occupy expensive, but unoccupied units, in the city’s rich precincts. Sanders has called for national health care, massive tax increases for the top income earners -- with rates upward of 90 percent -- and a ban on new fossil fuel development on federal lands.

This marks a major departure from past progressive politics in both countries. Democrats and Labour have done best by adhering to the center, and calibrating reforms with the demands of the capital markets. Even President Obama, although revered by progressives, was hardly a radical on economic issues. He did little to stop the consolidation of tech industries -- which were also key supporters -- as his Justice Department failed to press the anti-trust button. He also supported the expansion of free trade codified as Democratic Party orthodoxy during Bill Clinton’s presidency and which are favored by corporate and commercial interests. Tony Blair and his successor, Gordon Brown, also consistently embraced neo-liberal ideologies and courted support among London’s financial elite.

In contrast, Sanders, a Senate “independent” for most of his career, is a committed socialist who took his honeymoon in, of all places, the communist Soviet Union. He has adopted positions on trade and special visas for tech workers that are closer to those of Donald Trump than Clinton’s. Corbyn’s leftism is even more extreme than Sanders’, embracing long discarded notions of nationalization of industries, massive re-distribution of income as well as a distinctly pro-Palestinian, pro-Third World view common among European leftists.

The ‘Precariat’ -- the Modern Proletariat

The “Bernie Bros” who made Sanders such a sudden and unlikely political force in 2016 were disproportionately young white voters who swelled the ranks of the precariat -- part-time, conditional workers. The numbers of such people is destined to grow with the emerging “gig economy” and the digitization of retail, which could cost millions of working-class jobs. Even university lecturers in Britain, notes the Guardian, fear that their jobs will be “Uber-ised,” a phenomena also seen at American universities.

For most Americans, the once promising “New Economy” has meant a descent, as one MIT economist recently put it, towards a precarious position usually associated with Third World countries. Even Silicon Valley has gone from one of the most egalitarian locales in the country to a highly unequal place where the working and middle class have, if anything, done worse (in terms of income) than before the tech boom.

For its part, the precariat has rational reasons to embrace socialism, particularly if capitalism seems unlikely to meet their needs. The notion of getting a steady, well-paid, full-time job has vanished for an increasing number of young people. Most millennials are not doing as well as their parents did at the same age. The idea of buying a house -- once a sure sign of upward mobility -- has declined in much of the U.S. for the current generation, particularly on the coasts, and even more so in the U.K., where house prices are higher and incomes lower. The Grenfell fire was not just something that happens to the poor; it could be the future for many young people who may never live in anything much better.

How Capitalism Is Failing

“Capitalism,” Lenin noted, “begins in the village marketplace.” Yet Americans are increasingly loath to start a business. There are now more businesses failing than being born, very different than the pattern of the 1980s and 1990s. The dream of starting a business has often been the way out for people with modest educations and means. Without the societal steam valve of entrepreneurship, the alternative for many millennials is in blue-collar or service jobs, where wages have been falling over the past decade.

Even in the tech world, which represents the largest opportunity for younger people, start-ups have become increasingly rare. This reflects the growing consolidation of the technology sector, which reduces opportunity even in new fields. As one recent research paper demonstrates, “super platforms” such as Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple depress competition, squeeze suppliers and drive down salaries, much as the monopolists of the late 19^th century did.

These tech behemoths assert that their success is based utterly on merit, but they have also exploited their structural advantages, as the most ruthless of moguls did. Companies like Amazon have been able to attract investors even with scant profits, an advantage not enjoyed by their competitors, as investors await the rewards of a near-monopoly. Apple and other tech companies have also become adept at avoiding taxes in a way almost impossible for a business on Main Street. As occurs in corrupted systems, insiders usually do best, almost no matter how well they perform; Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer earned $239 million over five years -- almost a million a week -- despite failing to revive one of the net’s earliest stars.

Intersectionality: The Problem Facing Neo-Socialism

On the surface, the analytics look good for a socialist revival, particularly in the wake of the almost certain failings of Trump’s ersatz populism. A large number of young people, in both Britain and America, have a more favorable view of socialism than capitalism. They never witnessed the failures of the past and they are reeling under present conditions. And given that many older people feel their children face a diminished future, building a majority for socialism is not inconceivable.

Yet the neo-socialists face a challenge because their potential coalition is fraught. On numerous policy issues, modern progressivism’s interests diverge starkly from those of potential adherents. Corbyn’s multiculturalism and desire to allow more refugees into Britain may win praise on campuses and in left-wing media, but how attractive is this prospect to British working-class voters, many of whom supported Brexit to help cut back on immigration.

Similar dynamics exists in the U.S. For example, in discussing politics at the Utah AFL-CIO (where I recently spoke), the local president, Dale Cox, suggested that many parts of the progressive agenda -- he specifically mentioned opposition to fossil fuel and mineral development -- directly threaten the livelihoods of union laborers. Similarly, police unions also feel alienated from progressives who embrace the agenda of groups like Black Lives Matter. Far better, Cox suggested, would be for progressives to focus on improving the lives of working people in ways that really matter, such as expanding opportunities for business and home ownership, health care, and tax reform.

These economic positions could gain a majority, but not if the progressives maintain their polarizing embrace of the most radical aspects of social identity and environmental policy. This in particular threatens to undermine working-class support, particularly in the interior states. The leftists’ thinly disguised distaste for how most Americans live in small towns and suburbs does not help make their case. Until the left decides to focus on the everyday issues that matter to people outside their bubble, the dream of the socialist revival will remain a fantasy.

This piece originally appeared on Real Clear Politics.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book is The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Photo by paulnew (https://www.flickr.com/photos/paulnew/28243001503) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Erasing Anglo cultural heritage risks what makes our republic diverse

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 28 Oct 2016 01:38:32 -0400

It’s increasingly unfashionable to celebrate those who made this republic and established its core values. On college campuses, the media and, increasingly, in corporate circles, the embrace of “diversity” extends to demeaning the founding designers who arose from a white population that was 80 percent British.

In this American version of Mao’s “Cultural Revolution,” which tried to eviscerate traces of China’s past, venerable buildings are being renamed, athletes refuse to stand for the national anthem and, on some campuses, waving the American flag is now considered a “microaggression,” while English students at Yale want to avoid reading the likes of Milton, Shakespeare and Chaucer.

Of course, some changes are justified. Asking anyone, particularly African Americans, to revere the Confederate flag or attend schools named after the founder of the Ku Klux Klan is, indeed, offensive. But in our zeal to address old wrongs, we may also be sacrificing the very things that have made this republic so attractive to millions from distinctly different backgrounds for the last two centuries.

Why we come here

Just to clear the air, I have not a single drop of British blood in me. The closest ties I have to what I consider my cultural and political home country come from my great uncle Simon, who served in Gen. Allenby’s Jewish brigade in World War I, and that my wife, born in Montreal, came into the world a subject of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth. Career wise, I did work for a think tank in London for several years.

But what ties most Americans to the founders is not race, but our embrace of a political and legal culture based on distinctly Anglo-Saxon ideas about due process, representative government, property rights and free speech. These proved infinitely superior to the divine right of czars, kaisers, emperors and other hereditary autocrats for generations of non-Anglo-Americans.

This system, always capable of amendment, has allowed waves of traditional outsider groups — African Americans, Latinos, women, Mormons, Jews and Muslims — to join the economic, political and cultural mainstream. In some cases, as in the case of President Obama, they have also secured the highest reaches in the national firmament.

Read the entire piece at the Orange County Register.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Photo: William Robert Shepherd [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Solidarity, not Division: Understanding London’s East End

Sarah Attfield — Mon, 03 Oct 2016 01:38:50 -0400

The East End of London has a long history of working-class community. It has been a place of industry, where the river Thames and the river Lea have provided work for many people. The area attracted many immigrants, including workers from Africa since Tudor times, sailors from China, former slaves from America, French Protestants facing religious persecution in the 1600s and Irish weavers working in the textile industries. There have been Jewish communities in the East End for centuries, too. The twentieth century saw an increase in immigrants from the former British colonies, including South Asia, particularly Bangladesh. Not only has it been a place to seek a livelihood, but it has also been a place of refuge.

One side of my family hails from the East End and North East London, so I have a strong personal connection to this part of London. My ancestors worked in the local industries and on the river. We might not technically be ‘Cockneys’ (in that we weren’t all born within earshot of Bow Bells), but we are Cockney by nature. Family gatherings would include a raucous ‘knees-up’ (dancing and singing) and traditional local fare of jellied eels. We’re a working-class family who have lived in East London for generations.

So I was interested when I came across a recent short BBC documentary called Last Whites of the East End. I was disturbed by the title, which suggested that white people in the area are somehow endangered – an odd idea and potentially a racist one. This racism was confirmed when I watched the show. The documentary focused on residents of Newham, one of the poorest working-class boroughs in England. The filmmakers interviewed a number of working-class residents about their experiences of living in the East End and the decisions of some of them to leave the area. The majority of the subjects were white, though they also included one man of Bangladeshi background and one man of white and Afro-Caribbean heritage.

The narration of the documentary presented a racist agenda, describing the neighbourhood as at ‘tipping point’ with the ‘lowest white population in the UK’. It also noted a ‘dwindling cockney community’ who were in danger of disappearing in the face of increased immigration. Some of those interviewed were moving outside of London, to places like Essex, so they could live in areas with larger white populations. Some described themselves as ‘traditional East Enders’ and lamented the loss of the old community. They spoke of local services being shut down and the closure of the local pub. The film presented the interviewees as embodying white racism and a fear of the other, highlighting their reluctance to build bridges due to perceived differences. As one young white woman explained, they wanted to ‘stay with their own’.

But there were many contradictions in the documentary, too. It included an elderly white woman, who was preparing to leave her home and move out of London, not due to her fear of her Muslim neighbours (as implied by the narration, despite the fact that she was obviously upset to say goodbye to her Somali neighbour), but because she was elderly and alone and wanted to move closer to her daughter. Like many of her neighbours, she had once been a new arrival to the neighbourhood, moving there from the north of England. The two people of colour in the film both spoke of their connections to the local area and their identification as East Enders. Like their white neighbours, they pointed to the changing environment, but I’d suggest that the changes they were criticising were not tied to the latest influx of new immigrants.

Instead, they are matters of class. Gentrification and austerity are disrupting the lives of the working-class residents of the East End, not immigration. Housing has become too expensive, and government funding cuts are squeezing local schools and health services. Interviewees complained about the closure of a club which wasn’t just a local pub but also a community centre that elderly residents relied on for social events and to reduce isolation. Some white people are leaving, but, as I’ve seen with some friends and family members, that’s for financial reasons. They can purchase bigger properties if they sell their London homes, or they can pay less rent by moving to areas outside of London with smaller populations and less pressure on local services. And of course, not all of those leaving London are white.

The documentary downplays this part of the story. It also downplays the working-class solidarity that connects residents despite their differences. Residents of the East End share the experience of hardship and struggle, and this shared struggle has a very long history. The East End has a tradition of political radicalism and collective action. East Enders have looked after each other during tough times and shown a united front against hostile external forces. Famously, in 1936, the local community stood up against a group of anti-Semitic fascists who wanted to march through a Jewish area. The confrontation, known as the Battle of Cable Street, was won because the community put their bodies on the line to keep the fascists out. The same community rallied during the Second World War and looked after each other during the bombing raids of the Blitz. More recently, local people have been supporting each other and engaging in collective action in the face of forced evictions as local public housing is sold and redeveloped for private profit.

If the ‘traditional East End’ is disappearing, that isn’t because some working-class white are moving out of London. Working-class communities are not made up of just white people, and I’ve certainly never known a London that was mono-cultural. Yes, there are racist white working-class people. But the East End of London is a diverse and dynamic place, and always has been. It has also been a place of solidarity and struggle. The filmmakers chose to emphasize division instead of showing how East Enders act collectively, and it cast immigrants as a threat, when the real threats facing this community are austerity and gentrification.

This piece first appeared at Working-Class Perspectives.

Photo Credit: Daryl Hutchison, @daryldactyl

Urban Future: The Revolt Against Central Planning

Roger Weber — Thu, 07 Jul 2016 01:38:47 -0400

In Milton Keynes, perhaps the most radical of Britain’s post-Second World War “New Towns,” the battle over Brexit and the culture war that it represents is raging hard. There, the consequences of EU immigration policy, of planning instituted by national authority, and of the grassroots yearning to preserve local character have clashed together to shape a platform that may set a precedent for whether central planners or local residents will determine the urban future.

Milton Keynes is unusual for planned cities. Founded in 1967 and having matured in the last few decades, it defies virtually every tenet of contemporary planning orthodoxy. In its day it was a product of Britain’s national planners; despite that, today Milton Keynes drives the country's national planners crazy. Instead of a mixed-use, dense, transit-oriented bastion of urbanism – the predictable and commonly reiterated goals of many British town planning leaders today – Milton Keynes is exactly the opposite, intentionally.

A modernist experiment, Milton Keynes was planned to be low-density. It was also planned to be auto-oriented, and suburban. Its houses are large, its buildings do not front streets, and its transportation modes are separated by grade: that is, they are at different heights, with different means of transport often moving at different speeds. This is the antithesis of the now-favored idea of “complete” streets. The town's downtown shopping enclave is an inward-facing mall – the largest in Britain – with downtown as a whole designed as a business and commercial center rather than a mixed-use playground. Mixed-use development is clustered in the city’s low-density neighborhoods and villages, all on a grid, rather than scattered with the UK’s more favored randomness.

Milton Keynes was designed to be livable and functional, family-friendly, job-friendly and conducive to convenient mobility. The daily grind, by design, was to bear a closer resemblance to a rural experience than to an urban one. Original advertisements promoted a healthy, carefree lifestyle sheathed in nature, away from the nuisances of the big city. Even the logic of its location, equidistant from Britain’s other large cities, sought convenience over traditional planning rationales.

To those with a one-track view of what a city should be, Milton Keynes is unrecognizable. To these people, the city is bland, sterile, and without the day-to-day vibrancy that defines cities. In many planning texts it has been written off as a failure, and to many residents of Britain, Milton Keynes is not a preferred destination.

But in many of the most important metrics that define urban success, Milton Keynes shines. It has virtually no traffic, it attracts lots of families, and it has the highest job growth in the country. Its population has swelled over 20 percent since 2001, over twice the national average, to 255,000 , and its residents ardently defend it. It has built out nearly identically to the original vision, with its millions of trees and lush, anti-urban character earning it the affectionate moniker “Urban Eden”.

Today, however, Milton Keynes faces ever-mounting threats to the integrity of its original character. Thanks to the consequences of EU immigration policy, which spurred population growth in the UK to a level that exceeded housing construction to the tune of 70,000 units a year, or roughly 50 percent, cities like Milton Keynes are under fire to take up their “fair share” of the difference. Although Milton Keynes was originally developed independently through a long-range loan to the Milton Keynes Development Corporation, the nation's housing issue led Britain’s deputy prime minister to effectively lift the city’s self-rule in 2004 in a sweeping authoritarian central takeover.

That move transferred planning authority from local government to a national regeneration authority. The authority promptly set a housing quota for the city based on national targets, and began the task of systematically increasing density, narrowing roads, reducing unit sizes, instilling a transit-oriented ethos, discontinuing the grid, and concocting plans to build new development that directly fronted the street, all at odds with the city’s original masterplan.

The new ideas reflect tenets frequently promoted by the Royal Town Planning Institute, Britain’s central planning body. The moves reflect what has become a familiar narrative of planner as a high-minded savior and opposition as selfish NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) residents, who lack regard for the broader picture. That Milton Keynes’ defenders are arguing on behalf of a thoughtful vision – one shaped decades ago and misaligned with contemporary planners’ aspirations – is a complicating wrinkle. In contrast to the narrative that the suburbs were an unfortunate accident that have destroyed communities, Milton Keynes’ defenders are trying to save a city that was planned to be suburban and that is successful today, and are defending it by citing affection for its character and sense of community.

Because of Milton Keynes’ unusual design, traditional NIMBY dynamics have been inverted. In a rare twist on the oft-repeated Jane Jacobs narrative of residents against the planners, Milton Keynes’ defenders are fighting for the planned suburban character of their town: a primary complaint is that the central planners promoting density and mixed-use development lack creativity or an understanding of the bigger picture vision that shapes their sense of place, even though the tactics the planners are employing are often advocated using the same argument in reverse. Far from being ad-hoc selfish obstructionists, the Milton Keynes defenders are well-organized and thoughtful: a group called “Urban Eden” offers a well-composed six-point vision as the baseline for alternatives to the central plans.

Milton Keynes belies the narrative of a lack of intentionality as a disqualifier for suburbia. More importantly, its future will tell us much about whether creativity and self-determination can continue to exist in Britain at the local scale, and whether the forces that induced Brexit can topple an internal bureaucracy, in addition to an external one.

While local freedoms may ultimately help cities like Milton Keynes preserve their unique character, additional bureaucracy in the UK must be lifted to solve the larger national issue of housing affordability. In particular, Britain should free the private land development market, which has been effectively nationalized since 1947. Britain’s self-imposed shortage of developable land is the primary reason British housing production is well under half what it was when Milton Keyes was originally conceived. In an ironic twist, if it maintains such strict centralized planning strategies, Britain may continue to choke the character of its cities over the issue of housing production, wielding a national-scale bully pulpit to try to solve a crisis that could perhaps best be solved by eliminating the nationalization of property development altogether.

Brexit offers a lesson to planners world-wide, with Milton Keynes a creative case study of an alternative to the hegemony of contemporary urban planning. While many planners loathe Milton Keynes, many residents like it, and its demonstrable successes suggest it should be a worthy case study. So many planning bodies are dominated by a singular ideology. Instead, a new era of open-mindedness to local creativity should be embraced… lest Britain and the world rise up to circumvent the planners behind a movement with a nickname as catchy as Brexit.

Roger Weber is a city planner specializing in global urban and industrial strategy, urban design, zoning, and real estate. He holds a Master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Research interests include fiscal policy, demographics, architecture, housing, and land use.

Flickr photo by Sarah Joy: Double Rainbow, Milton Keynes