The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Claremont Road Situation
are subjective, not objective, responses to motorcars. But they greatly assisted
the road-building lobby, and thus the further expansion of capitalism.
The first wave of road building in Britain during the 1930s was
principally intended as a measure to relieve unemployment. And as such it
was very efficient—the roads were on edge-of-town green-field sites and almost
all of the spending involved went directly toward hiring unskilled labor.
18 But these roads also allowed capitalism to develop enormous swathes
of suburbia, complete with entirely new levels of mass consumption. 19 The
second wave followed government recognition around 1960 that unless
new, particularly urban, roads were provided, there would never be sufficient
demand for motorcars to support Britain’s motor industry. So roads
were seen as economically desirable, not just because they allowed the circulation
of goods already demanded but also because they stimulated entirely
new patterns of consumption. 20 By the mid-1980s, some estimates
suggested that as much as half the world’s measured economic activity
might be concerned with making, fueling, maintaining, and administering
motor vehicles. It has transpired that the motorcar is perhaps the most powerfully
narcotic product that capitalism has produced, precisely characterized
by Debord as “the pilot product of the first stage of commodity
abundance.” 21 For not only have motorcars themselves become increasingly
socially necessary, but as the places of social relations have been broken
down to accommodate them, so too, in the view of the road activists (and we
can presume Lefebvre and Debord would have concurred), emotional dependency
on commodities has increased. Roads and motorcars deepen the
reification of capitalism, the culture of separation.
Antiroad activists in Britain are now in particularly good humor. A
recently elected Labour government that is known to actively research public
opinion before forming policy has just cut the road-building program
even further. Less than a quarter of the new roads proposed five years ago are
still proceeding. The actions on Claremont Road and several other prominent
sites, such as Twyford Down, Fairmile, and Salisbury, appear to have
demonstrated the political effectiveness of appropriating space. But capitalism
is hardly teetering on the edge of collapse, and the road activists may be
tempted to overestimate their influence. David Harvey has argued convincingly
that capitalism has now effectively dominated space—that global
compression of space and time is sufficient to largely free capitalism from locational
constraints. And with this, place, or at least simulated hyperplace,
has gained new (economic) importance. 22 The dialectical balance is swinging
back. For this locational freedom no longer depends so much on the ability
to circulate commodities as on information and “pure” electronic spectacle.
Fifteen years ago the ten largest global corporations were all either oil com-