To really understand some things you have to go back to the beginning.
Back to where it all began...
Manchester, the first industrial city in the modern sense of the word.
In the 19th century, Manchester was not just a city; it was the first major stage of the population explosion, where child labor turned into slavery. Women workers were condemned to half the wages of men, and their working hours in factories reached 12-15 hours. For the first time, labor was systematically exploited on this scale.
And was that all Manchester was about?
Of course not.
In the coal mines needed by the industry, 5-10 year old boys, known as “trapper boys”, stood guard for hours in the darkness at the gates of narrow galleries. “Hurrier girls” dragged coal wagons with straps attached to their bodies, carrying the unseen but indispensable burden of the industry.
Coal-black poverty on the one hand, and a shining new world order on the other...
Manchester
Where the atom was split, where the first railroad was built.
But above all, it is a city where you can see the traces of capitalism and communism at the same time: factories, chimneys, production, labor and exploitation side by side.
This article is not a narrative of romance.
Because Manchester was a place where poverty was visible but invisible, a place where class differences and new class states emerged so clearly for the first time.
David Harvey, Social Justice and the City in his book, he quotes Friedrich Engels on how he saw Manchester from a class point of view. Engels said:
“Workers' houses piled on top of each other... A life of noise, smoke, filth...
Middle class houses carefully separated from working class neighborhoods...
Further away is the world of the upper bourgeoisie: villas with gardens, fresh air, spacious houses...”
And the main thing Engels points out is this:
“When you look from above, you see a strange order.”
Manchester was deliberately designed so that classes saw each other as little as possible. Roads, arches and boundaries ensured this. The working class was systematically pushed out of the city, so that the bourgeois would not be distracted by poverty, would not be annoyed, would not pollute the landscape.
Engels was not only talking about Manchester. What he had to say about London was just as striking; perhaps even more brutal:
“People now looked at each other only as useful objects.
Everyone was looking for a way to exploit everyone else.
The inevitable consequence was that the strong trampled on the weak.
A small but powerful minority is taking over everything,
the vast majority were left with a bare life, barely surviving.”
The image that sticks in the mind from these descriptions is one of poverty and destitution sandwiched between the smell of melting iron and coal. While the working class was piled up in production and filth, the bourgeoisie lived in safe, clean and spacious areas.
How familiar that sounds, right?
It's as if nothing has changed.
It is as if that day and today are intertwined.
Today, while the poor continue to live in the muddy peripheries of the city, the urban elites, who consume the capital of the cities, use, consume and own the time and spaces of the city, accompanied by fresh air, green spaces and landscapes.
Moreover, this exploitation and privilege can take even more brutal forms at the hands of governments that define themselves as “social democratic”. What Engels describes is repeated today in more invisible but more veiled forms. The urban poor are pushed out of the city, rendered invisible, and in order to make these exclusion unobtrusive, fake service practices and fancy success narratives are produced.
The difference between the past and the present is not that inequality has disappeared; it has only been masked. And these masks are now brighter, more insidious.
Today “city of contrasts” Mumbai comes to mind. Skyscrapers and residences on one side; makeshift huts and poverty on the other. Poverty that used to be hidden is now on display. The rich see it but don't look; they notice but don't care.
The height of ostentation and the depth of poverty in one...
Times may have changed, buildings may have risen, but the burden of the city remains the same.
This burden comes from the carpet looms entrusted to the fingers of children during the British colonial period. Small knots tied by small and slender fingers, children's bodies exploited in obedient silence...
But does the exploitation of these small and delicate bodies not exist today?
Of course there is.
Today, in Mumbai and many other metropolitan areas, there are still thousands of children, their faces and hands dirty and their bodies bruised, forced to live amongst industry and garbage.
And the sharp contrasts of the past stand between us like an unclosed parenthesis.
Today, the spaces of the poor are often not intertwined, as they are in Mumbai. This is where the ghetto comes in. A ghetto is not just a poor neighborhood; it is the deliberate separation of a group, a class or an identity from the city. Ghettoization is the perpetuation of this segregation: by roads, prices, gated communities, sometimes by municipal decisions.
More interestingly, there is also “ghetto wandering”. Poverty, misery and marginality become objects of spectacle. Neighborhoods photographed, streets visited as “authentic”...
People's suffering is reduced to the cityscape and put at the service of capitalism under the name of tourism.
Then we come across another concept: urban gentrification.
The replacement of low-income groups living in urban centers with middle- and upper-income groups...
How?
By transforming valuable land in the center into rent-seeking areas.
“By restructuring neighborhoods under the name of ”transformation“ and ”renewal".
First, rents go up.
Then the former residents who cannot pay these rents are quietly pushed out.
Neighborhoods become beautiful, but there is no room for their real owners.
There are no physical walls, but there are invisible borders.
A silent modern migration begins towards the outermost peripheries of the city. Tired, sweaty, dirty, “maladjusted” poor who are tired of doing the hard labor of the rich are quietly displaced.
“You don't belong there”.
With prices, with lifestyle...
Sometimes with a soft demeanor, sometimes with security at the entrances...
Where there is old, there is new life built at high prices. If there is no price, there is a fee; the rent is quite high, but the fee is even higher.
“A thousand veiled ways of saying, ”You don't belong here anymore."
This is exactly the temporal equivalent of Manchester today.
This is where the question arises: What is municipalism?
The municipality does not just build roads or organize parks; it decides who owns the city. Where will a park be built, will a neighborhood be declared a “risky area”, for whom will the transformation be for?
Today, many social democratic municipalities, instead of challenging the rent system, implement a model that is compatible with it. As a result, urban centers are purged of the middle and lower classes, and public spaces are effectively handed over to private businesses. The neighborhood of the poor is taken away from them and then sold back as a “service” at a higher price.
There are shiny masks; the real winners are often behind them.
While the poor look on at these fancy services, the city is quietly divided into tenders and rent calculations. Showy parks with artificial ponds and green areas are built; at first glance, they are refreshing. Residents of the neighborhood are happy. But soon luxury residences surround the park, making it inaccessible to the former residents. The public quietly changes hands.
And what Engels said about London in the past still applies:
“Everywhere reigns a barbaric indifference, a harsh selfishness.
On the one hand, unspeakable misery,
on the other side an unending social war...”
Yes, the social war is neither over nor has it changed sides. It was only adapted to the spirit of the times. Barbaric plunder continued to reign.
In the past and today, it is the poor who bear the burden of cities with their bodies, while it is the privileged classes who enjoy the comforts of cities.
However, a city in the modern sense should be for everyone who lives there. Because a city is not just about buildings, asphalt and “vision” projects. A city is a promise of life: a safe childhood, accessible housing, public breathing spaces. In other words, it is the right to live humanely.
But this right must be a real right, not a masked one.
Today, some services provided by municipalities claiming to be social democratic are similarly masked examples of success. Day-care centers, elderly care homes, social facilities, city restaurants are opened. Of course, these are valuable, but most of the time they are far from poor neighborhoods, limited in number and located in city centers.
In other words, it is not the poor who are targeted; it is a show of service.
And still today, the masked faces that smile on the side of power, the friends of capital, are applauded.
Not those on the side of the poor.
Not those who say children should not go to bed hungry.
This is the essence of the story of inequality from Manchester to today:
The unchanging story of choices...
In this story, it has already been determined who will be comfortable, who will be stuck, who will share in the profits. For private car owners, there is flowing traffic, but crowded subways, unsolvable and expensive transportation, deepening class gaps...
However, if social justice were a goal, transportation, the city and human life would be organized differently.
Because all this negativity is not an omission, but a clear choice.
In other words, it is the natural consequence of political decisions that prioritize the welfare of elites over social justice.
The question then is simple but striking:
Are cities really shared together?
Or is it planned to open new rent-seeking opportunities for capital?
And the question is:
Who is the real winner?