but social self-control is an inherent feature of social capital. It is hard to entirely reject or condemn this social self-control. Cases which have been reported in the press where children, people with disabilities, women or the elderly are abused for years by their families – with a total lack of interest by their neighbours, police, social services or anyone – show that social self-control is not just a case of looking for neighbours under the covers or inside closets, and that its absence can cost lives. Perhaps because of all these concerns and perspectives, social capital is a concept so difficult to define and unilaterally reject as a relic of the past that the relic as proposed by Florida – which is incompatible with liberal-democratic postindustrial (capitalist) social formations – seems to me an abuse. Tolerance, which is the foundation of a liberal-democratic consensus – and which Florida sees as a basic unification of ‘soft’ social bonds, and the soil from which creative capital may emerge (this point is very important because it demystifies Florida as a radical supporter of capitalism) – also has a disadvantage: tolerance often degenerates into indifference. Nobody will give you a hand in need. Nobody will react when you are abused. Nobody will help you for free. The advantage of tolerance is precisely its weakness; tolerance is emotionally cold. Tolerance does not result in pogroms but it rarely prevents them. The reluctance of liberals to embrace social capital is easy to understand. It does not necessarily translate directly into economic growth and sometimes blocks it, because each ‘good deed’ done selflessly is an anarchist attack on the GDP. Social capital affects the quality of life, but not necessarily economic growth. Social capital was used to fill the gaps left by the failings of capitalism during its industrial phase but today, when everything – even emotions and affection – must be bought or sold, it has become an obstacle to the development of capitalism. Here, postmodern and postindustrial Florida is different from Glaeser.
I am interested in social capital primarily in the context of space – so let us return to the City. Areas in which social capital is in bloom are the neighbourhoods most forgotten by God, people, and (thank goodness) planners and city officials. The neoliberal city does not have the available space for them and recent events in Copenhagen, relating to the sale and then destruction by the buyer of the historic house of culture in the district of Christiania, are proof of this. It is worth considering the aforementioned transition of the citizen into the consumer. The dominance of one-dimensional perceptions of the world – that only recognise the maxims of economic efficiency and GDP growth – makes any discussion about the City as a political community lose its meaning. Because if it is not your quality of life but the amount of money in your bank account that is the only measure of your being, any such discussion must lead to the admiration of the free market and neoliberalism. If the neoliberal model is not working as its followers would like it to, it is because these assumptions are not subject to discussion – it has no alternative. It can and must improve, but there is no rejection of its underlying problems. Neoliberalism needs the city as a space and an administration, but not as a community. It is not just the domination of economy over everything else: it is a new kind of rationalism that superimposes the market rules onto ‘everything else’.24 Terror of GDP and economic efficiency pervades all aspects of a city’s existence. Willingly or not, I come to the critique of capitalism. For now I shall leave it as an unspoken assumption, without specifying either the extent or the nature of this criticism.
Designing urban space, we can easily imagine the ‘neoliberal’ spaces – ones in which ‘public’ space is replaced by a ‘space of consumption’ (just count the number of free benches around parks and town squares, and then the places in the cafe gardens). We can also imagine a ‘social space’ – ‘social’ housing complexes like Park Hill council estate, built in Sheffield in the early 1960s and also Europe’s largest listed building, were inspired by the examples of Sweden, Finland and Germany. Perhaps we could also imagine a ‘creative space’ – though there are not many examples of such space. But can we actually imagine a democratic space? A space which each resident could potentially plug themselves into? The question is intimate – are we ourselves able to accept everyone? Social capital is linked to a specific spatial structure of cities. I mentioned in the previous chapter that ethnic neighbourhoods are the most spatially thick and dense in terms of interpersonal interaction. In his essay The Vital Businesses of Immigrants, Peter Elmlund wrote: “Racism is not the problem. On the contrary, the ability of immigrants to generate a varied economy of small businesses has the potential to revitalise declining cities. But the Swedish model, like others in Europe, is still dominated by large scale modernist planning, which creates forlorn suburbs, segregates people and strangles economic growth.”25 This explains (in terms of a single factor, of course) the relative success of immigrant integration in Britain, which succeeded (although not completely) in avoiding the errors of Modernist continental urbanism, and the surprising dramas of Parisian suburbs which culminated in an explosion of social hatred in 2005.
The ‘premodern’ spatial structure of cities in the UK (but also Chinese neighbourhoods in the United States), which allows them to cope much better with the ‘postmodern’ challenges of mass immigration, is in an interesting way connected to Jadwiga Staniszkis’ thesis about the greater efficiency of premodern methods of governance in the U.S. and China, in comparison with the ‘modern’ and ‘rational’ in Europe. Peter Elmlund is a traditionalist, yearning for historical, premodern structures, but reaching similar conclusions about the necessity of ‘dense’ spaces as the architects and city planners – whom one cannot in any way accuse of being traditionalists – such as the guru Rem Koolhaas. In his book Content he presents a draft for the CBD (Central Business District) in Beijing, where instead of the typical high-rise buildings he offers two types of structure – one recalling the classical quarters and the second being a megastructure. Both have something that the traditional office districts did not have: interaction densities.
So what is the significance of social capital in modern cities, and what might it be in Polis? Again, I quote Staniszkis: “It turned out that for the state to act, it needs a ‘social infrastructure of power’. Without this, it is powerless. This society, functioning as a community (local, as in the U.S., or more abstract, united by a common code of communication, such as in the Netherlands), and not guns, determine the strength of the state.” Social capital was necessary in the era of industrial capitalism, is still necessary today in order to fill the gaps left in countries that operate in the global capitalist system (it is thus understandable that the Nobel Prize awarded for Yunus’ microcredits was a peace award), and will also be needed in the resurrected Polis. Acknowledging as partially right the critics of social capital, I will defend it for two reasons: first, social capital is in fact the only capital that can exist outside the capitalist system. Social capital, as I said, does not convert directly into cash. The second reason is emotion, which is associated with social capital. If ‘the state exists primarily in the imagination’, then let us add: ‘and only when stimulated by emotion’. Without emotion there is nothing. There is no person or society.
Fall of the Peripheral Cities
Disposable Cities
Today’s world is a world of cities. Cities continue to grow and it seems that nothing is able to stop this process, but besides growing cities there are many that are shrinking.26 There are also cities that are held in suspension – failing to make the step towards metropolitan and global cities, but with the capacity to sustain themselves without shrinking – and do not collapse. Not only will the shrinking cities collapse; all the world’s cities are decaying from within – contrary to appearances, growth and health – along with the fall of City. They are becoming the local representatives of global forces and structures, but this process is most noticeable in semi-urban and peripheral areas. Semi-peripheral cities are those with ambitions to become globally recognised (because the term ‘global city’, in the sense that is given by the Globalisation and World Cities Study Group and Network of the University of Loughborough, GaWC, is not fully adequate) but which lack the capabilities to do so. They are associated with a lack of sufficient human resources, economic and geographical peripherality, and a lack of tourist attractions that could otherwise – by increasing the ‘fluctuating’ population – fill gaps in their human and economic potential. There is, however, a way to build global position – and we can turn to Hong Kong for an example – that involves the use of human resources associated with the city but not