This process is particularly acute in East London as the City bonuses continue to soar, and the Olympic juggernaut comes closer. While little social housing is built, everyday it seems that a new luxury gated development goes up alongside the council estates and run down markets and shopping streets. With names like “Tequila Wharf”, “Zenith e14” or “2N1” and facilities such as private cinemas, all encased while building work goes on, in bright hoardings, where young professionals smile down on us, flushed with success.
So what is to be done? Call in the Space Hijackers! Working in the city since 1999 this group of “Anarchitects” are dedicated “to battling the constant oppressive encroachment onto public spaces of institutions, corporations and urban planners”. And opposing “the way that public space is being eroded and replaced by corporate profit making space”.
The Space Hijackers aim is to change the way that ownership and usage of space are perceived and to try to awaken all our imaginations to the possibilities of how things could be, rather that what is. They do this through a number of innovative, playful, militant actions all of which are archived on their website. So successful have some of these actions been that the advertising industry has been regularly keeping an eye on what they do in the hope of getting some “urban” inspiration.
Past projects have included wandering en masse into stores at Christmas wearing T-shirts that proclaim “everything in store half-price today”, then watching the ensuing chaos created for the store managers and “Guerilla Benching” where benches that have been taken away by councils to stop their use by the homeless are replaced by rogue builders. And they also attempted to sell cases of artificial limbs at the Arms Fair In Docklands.
Two projects shown on the group’s website – “Luxury Flats” and “100% Government Support” – use the space around us to raise questions about democracy, public space and what freedom of “choice” we really have, while putting their tongues firmly in cheek and keeping two fingers aloft to a neoliberal government and profiteering property developers.
In November of last year, there was a brief moment of light amid the darkness that was 2020. Scotland became the first country in the world to make period products free for all. Just as the weekend and the eight-hour-day are now regarded by many as a given, future generations may be in disbelief that...
On 4 November last year, when many of us were watching the aftermath of the American presidential election, the US formally left the Paris Climate Agreement. Written in 2015 at the United Nations’ COP21 climate conference in Paris, the agreement is often considered to be the most significant document of international climate cooperation. Back then,...
To say 2020 was dramatic would be an understatement. The world situation has been completely transformed by the Covid-19 pandemic and the inadequacy of governmental and state responses. As we head into 2021 it feels like we are entering uncharted territory. To make specific predictions would be unwise. But the Covid-19 crisis raises fundamental questions...
The 2020 crisis we’ve endured isn’t an aberration of the system but, as Alex Callinicos argues, an aspect of its permanent crisis.
