London is the beating heart of an invisible empire built around wealth. This empire bridges nations but also the hidden interests and machineries of offshore finance that have enabled the enlargement of riches, not least through capital returns to the nodal urban centres of a global hierarchy of cities in which London sits at the top. The alpha city is the city that was destined to arise within this complex configuration of interests, institutions and shifting power arrangements. This book has offered an impressionistic view of a city and its increasing colonisation by many of the world’s wealthy. But examining who London’s wealthy are and how they live in the city has required a critical perspective from which we can begin to understand not only how the city ‘works’ but who and what it works for. A key object of this analysis has been the kind of laissez-faire and embracez les riche ideas so much in evidence in the city – an urban economy that has produced deeply dysfunctional and divided outcomes. Even so, many of the super-rich elite are happy to take all they can and to burn the social bridges that might link them to the wider city on which they depend.
The rich kill the cities built to attract them. They are the people who arrive when the dirty work is already done, whether in their factories or businesses, or by the builders of the homes they consume. They are parasitic non-contributors. Their barrels of cash feed a political machine that hankers after easy money in an economy that favours landlords, winners, gamblers and inheritors rather than those who make, do, care and support. Cash drives a finance and real estate economy that adds little value even while sucking it out elsewhere. The rich distort and damage the fundamental meaning of the city as a place for all citizens. Such obvious truths are invariably denied or at least reworked into a more private and selective vision of who and what belongs. Such assessments will leave you either nodding your head or apoplectic, depending on your personal politics.
Political and financial elites have shown little interest in the city’s poor and marginalised. These cast-off groups are frequently seen as non-participators, rather than as the outcome of a particular brand of economic stewardship that has feted finance to the exclusion of a more encompassing social vision. The idea that throwing a few crumbs off the table in the name of good causes will resolve the structural conditions under which poverty and violence are generated is shot through with problems. Nevertheless, many among the wealthy today are indeed concerned with ideas of social justice and redistribution, not least because of the risks to the system from which they benefit if something is not done to moderate its worst excesses. Only governments are in a position to provide a level playing field and progressive taxation laws. But here, national, city and local government actors have all too often shown their willingness to favour capital and those who benefit from it, including in some cases themselves.
The rich themselves are not evenly scattered across the world; they are found in abundance only in those urban centres capable of offering the kind of support systems they need to maintain their security, privacy and social standing. Within these centres they inhabit a distinctive geography. Those cities capable of offering the optimal configuration of these features, alongside history, culture and an open society, win out more fully. The effect is to declare the city open for business, to encourage ‘tax heroes’, and to find a range of methods to attract the rich and their money. Things on which no price should be put are magically made available for purchase – care homes, hospitals, libraries, playing fields, sports centres and even public housing estates. This gives the wealthy significant power; it is not that billionaires make direct demands of political parties (though this does appear to happen), but that those parties are engaged more or less subconsciously in guessing their needs and responding accordingly.
Those with economic and political power continue to defend an economy based on property and finance as a magical machine driving up living standards and reputations. The resulting system of outright winners and vulnerable losers, however, raises big questions about who the city is for and whose interests are being served. Ultimately, the capture of the city by money occurs less by design or hidden plans (though those no doubt exist as well!) than through a market logic that generates a particular psychology, a way of being, in which money, what it can buy, what it somehow does, becomes so naturalised as a good in itself as to become invisible. Thus the rules of the game, the skewed machinery of the city and its capital resources, become embedded in the psychic life of the city – as something incapable of being observed or understood because it somehow is the unseen fabric of the city. The alpha city’s population has been slowly guided into the anger-sapping temptations offered by its new shopping arcades, coffee houses and grandiose towers. Its unsuspecting citizens appear in awe of this glittering metropolis when, in reality, it symbolises their very enslavement to an alienating and socially dividing economy built for the few.