Brexit is what happens when you've got problems like this and can't address their realities
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Most of London’s current and future high-rises aren’t public housing (1). More than 400 high-rise developments are now in progress or have received planning permission. Almost none of their homes will be affordable, and very few are public housing. In the stories now told of London’s massive inequalities and housing problems, the private towers signal the city’s social extremes and the inability of state or market to resolve social needs. These pads are intended for the global elite and look like a disposable environment that fits the need, in many cases, to rest money. The ‘community’ imagined by starchitects and estate agents on billboards and in brochures is a sales pitch to a floating class of the rich and investors. Whatever drugs the architects of the gold apartment block at Battersea Power Station were on, their inspiration was a pound sign, not the floating pig on Pink Floyd’s Animals album cover. Much of the development along the Thames is a parody of place and a mirage of communal life. These are dead spaces and dwellings, their lifelessness important for the realisation of maximum exchange value, rather than being valued for their residential use. The question of who benefits from such development is an ongoing irritant to managers and politicians.
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*A vision of London as a future financial Detroit:
