Capturing the City

Abstract

This chapter explores the racial politics of planning in Thatcher’s Britain, considering in particular the response to urban riots in 1981 and 1985. I argue that planning and development, both public and private, borrowed heavily from the early twentieth-century liberal colonial, and further, that the neoliberal city, even in the former metropole, cannot be understood without reference to its colonial origins. I analyze the role that spatial surveillance and policing plays in shaping urban design, in particular considering Alice Coleman’s critique of council estates as a form of order maintenance policing, more popularly known as broken windows policing. Finally, this chapter considers how Black artists responded both to the riots and to neoliberal spatial interventions through a reading of John Akomfrah’s 1986 film Handsworth Songs, produced by the Black Audio Film Collective. I argue that Akomfrah’s film does not attempt to straightforwardly document the “local realities” of neighborhoods like Handsworth in opposition to government rhetoric, but more complexly works through the difficulty of such a representation in a way that throws into relief Thatcher’s neocolonial urbanism.