ABSTRACT
In this chapter I propose to pick up on ideas of abandonment, conflict, and utopian politics explored in the previous chapter through an exploration of urban unrest in contemporary Britain. In this context, I seek to explore contemporary neoliberal Britain as a socio-economically divided nation, characterised by class conflict deferred by spatial and discursive strategies organised to deny the reality of inequality and injustice, and show how this Dis-United Kingdom has started to break down before the revelation of the irreducibility of social relations based in the catastrophic economics situation post 2008. In the first section of the chapter, I discuss the nature of asocial relations in neoliberal space, explaining the ways neoliberalism denies inequality in a theory of objective, competitive asociality, through a consideration of Robert Sampson’s (2012) recent work, The Great American City. Noting the theoretical connection between Sampson’s theory of space, the postmodern urbanism of the LA School (Dear, 2000), and the idea of the neoliberal city as a spatially disorganised city, I move on to refer to Loic Wacquant’s (2007) concept of advanced marginality. Here, and on the basis of Wacquant’s view that American urban marginality is coming to a city near you in the near future, I suggest that theories of American urbanism may be appropriate for studying neoliberal space in contemporary Britain. Building on this idea, and extending Sampson’s postmodern theory of the neoliberal city, I turn to Foucault (1986), Lefebvre (2003), and the idea of heterotopia or other space to explore contemporary Britain as fragmented urban space. First, I take Foucault’s (1986) concept of heterotopia, which refers to the modern attempt to territorialise economic circulation and thus defuse potential social turbulence in a strategy of spatial organisation, as a mode of governmentality which can be seen to police the neoliberal denial of social inequality, and particularly the abandonment of youth, through a strategy of division, separation, and segregation. Second, I use Lefebvre’s (2003) notion of heterotopia, which represents a space of encounter and possibility, to oppose this Foucauldian construct and open up possibilities for rethinking the social condition of the contemporary British city. However, rather than discuss these theories in isolation, 199and in order to create a dialogue, and situate them in a discussion of contemporary British urban society, in the second section of the chapter I focus on the heterotopic dimensions of the 2011 riots. My suggestion in this section is that the riots may be seen to represent the breakdown of the Foucauldian model of spatial governance under severe economic pressure and the violent emergence of Lefebvre’s space of social encounter and utopian possibility. Finally, and recognising the ways in which the riots opposed the neoliberal denial of social inequality, I spend the final section of the chapter considering the political response to the events of August. Here, I seek to show how the British government sought to pathologise the rioters, and thus render their ethical challenge irrelevant. However, my argument is that this failed to effectively defuse the contemporary political moment, caught somewhere between neoliberal separation and social encounter, and Britain remains in a state of social, political, economic, and cultural crisis, most clearly revealed by the protest vote that led to the decision to leave the EU in the summer of 2016. It is this space of crisis, this space of conflict in between division and sociality, which I seek to capture in the title of the chapter, Dis-United Kingdom (Charlesworth, 2007).
