Over the course of the next few months, Oxford Urbanists will be publishing dispatches from around the world on what feels like an unprecedented era in modern history, both for cities and the world, during — and perhaps after — the COVID-19 pandemic. We want to know how cities are responding; what lessons we can learn for the future; and how we think cities might change indefinitely.

Case study: European metropolis (London, Berlin and Milan)

The city is dying,

the city wants to survive;

preventing our minds

from finding their ways,

it imprisons our bodies

in pointless jobs,

disrupts the reciprocity

of the human soul.

The city is dying,

we are now aware of that,

but we need to make an effort

in not dying with it.

The tentacles of the sinking monster

capture every object

happening on their way,

but it can’t find

the only good supply

to full its stomach:

we are opposing the industry,

the cold carbon

and the black oil;

so that the monster

tries to get our integrity:

it decreases the prices,

it increases the range of consumption,

by giving us credit,

by exploiting our work.

We will oppose the false conscience,

we will reclaim the power of our hands,

the autonomy of our brains.

 ***

I am not a poet, even less in English. However, last November, I happened to write the lines above, and during these days of lockdown, I rediscovered the poem I had written. It inspired me to reflect upon themes connected to the article Barbara Russo published on this website earlier in the month.

In her piece, Barbara talks about the relation between private and public space and how individuals behave differently in the two; in her analysis, she correctly points out that not all of us have the same privileges when it comes to housing, as she refers to the a paradoxical — and dramatic — situation of homeless people and prison detainees. However, I think it is important to emphasize that, contrary to what governments constantly say — e.g. “we need to stay home” — the streets of the European metropolis are far from empty.

This is because, during a health crisis, not everyone has the right to stay home. This concerns not only the most essential workers (i.e. doctors, sanitary operators and supermarket assistants), but, also, all those workers who are the real producers of the city, the ones that assure its growth and functioning. They can be divided into two main groups connected to the two big projects of urban development: manufacturing workers, essential for the industrial production of the Fordist city; and drivers, food deliverers, cleaners and care workers, who are all necessary to the privatization and individualization processes of the neoliberal city. For the latter, there is a double movement: on the one hand, the privatization of previously public services has led to the emergence of low-paid carers and sub-contracted cleaners; on the other, by creating new individual needs, it now depends on the work of food deliverers and large-distribution drivers. As the Fordist and neoliberal projects, in many cases, overlap, the two groups of workers conduct different struggles, but share the same geographical space.

Following this poem, this article walks around — metaphorically — the streets of the main European metropolis in order to show how the current health crisis highlights the controversies of the dominant urban model of development, and how workers and citizens are reacting. The empirical basis of this come from my transit in London while I was going to the airport; the experiences that I am having in Berlin, where I live; and the news I am receiving on a daily basis from my hometown of Milan.

***

The city is dying, but the city wants to survive.

Since the beginning of March, numbers of coronavirus cases were increasing exponentially each day in Italy despite its national lockdown, and the situation, as we know, rapidly spun out of control. Lombardy emerged as the hardest-hit region, in particular the neighbouring areas of Milan, Bergamo and Brescia. As the Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte appeared every night on Italian households’ televisions to communicate further restrictive measures, the situation in the Milanese industrial area became dramatic. Specifically, the provinces of Bergamo and Brescia — which are full of factories — were the biggest centres of the virus.

Once all the possible individual restrictive measures were implemented, workers, trade unions and social movements started demanding the government to halt non-essential factories amidst concerns that production processes were not safe for workers’ health. Entire cities were put under lockdown, but underground trains were crowded with people going to work every day, as the industrial employers’ organization (Confindustria) stated that construction and manufacturing could not be stopped. The economy is considered as a living, breathing being that needs to full its stomach: keeping the economy alive is seen as more important than guaranteeing the health of workers, who are therefore asked to put their lives on the line. While the streets of the city were empty, except for the long lines in front of supermarkets, the factories in the periphery of Milan were running. On March 25th, an online protest filled Facebook’s boards with pictures of signs with the hashtags “Io sto con chi sciopera” (I support the strikers).

Indeed, workers started spontaneous strikes whenever or wherever employers did not guarantee masks, gloves and social distancing. While many of us were adapting to the new house life, these workers were denouncing that they were not “meat for slaughter.” Eventually, after a chain reaction spread the strikes throughout northern Italy, the government was forced by unions to pass a decree suspending activities in all non-essential factories. We are opposing the industry has become a shared feeling amongst different layers of the population (whose bodies are imprisoned within house walls) that sympathised with workers (whose bodies are imprisoned in factories). In this sense, reclaiming the power of our hands was not in the sense of the productive value of workers’ hands, but in their capacity to safely interact with their families, locked at home but exposed to the double risk of losing a loved one and, also, being infected by a loved one.

*** 

During the pandemic, it is not only the industrial periphery of European metropolis that is crowded with workers. The streets of London, Berlin and Milan are still populated by a vast variety of workers that are fundamental in immediate welfare provision — doctors, nurses, pharmacists and supermarket cashiers — but, also, of many others that are necessary to the urban lifestyle typical of contemporary cities: drivers, food deliverers, cleaners and care workers. This distinction is not to make one group more important than the other, but to explain certain labour market patterns that are typical of the neoliberal city. While the Fordist model of production and urban development is becoming outdated, so that most of us feel the factory as a cold, distant and criticisable place, the neoliberal metropolitan production is based on our lives as urban citizens, so that it becomes much harder to identify what’s right and what’s wrong. The monster tries to get our integrity is the phenomenon for which, under a lockdown, companies like Amazon or Deliveroo become fundamental infrastructures of the economy, in a similar – although less visible – way to the State.

Without public places, where people can gather, talk and interact, it becomes even harder to recognize the reciprocity of the human soul. The result is that for many workers, this means a further push towards exploiting our work: food delivery, logistic and distribution have seen increases in workload so that bikes and van are now the only means of transport in the streets. Reflecting on the meaning of life while we are locked in our houses — “I really need a better work-life balance,” “I can’t cope with online teaching,” or “Who knows whether we’ll ever return to work in our offices?” — we hardly think about the habits we have developed over the past ten years. It is therefore normal to order food or any other sort of product online, also because service companies have tried their best to decrease prices and increase the range of consumption.

But should this habit be considered normal during a pandemic that requires social distancing and lockdowns as the most immediate measures to prevent the spread of the virus and, thus, the safety of individuals? One could argue that this is important for those people who can’t leave the house. This is correct. That being said, an incredible outpour of initiatives has developed in countless London, Berlin or Milan neighbourhoods to support people in need: in London, community aid groups have sprung up everywhere, with volunteers covering the needs of the most vulnerable; in Milan, “voluntary brigades” not only bring food to old and disabled people, but have also started different crowdfunding initiatives to buy food for people who struggle financially during the pandemic. The same happened in Berlin. All these groups reclaim the power of our hands and the autonomy of our brains to organize and help others in such a hard time. These groups have rapidly become the most reliable platforms for citizens’ support, so that, for example, the Milan city council has even introduced a switchboard to facilitate organization.

 The city is dying, as most of the activities are closed. But many of us need to make an effort in not dying with it.

The privatization of many public services — the externalization of health services, for example — has created the carers, who once were nurses and now operate by going to the houses of old people, traveling every day on public services, thus increasing the risk of contagion for themselves and their patients. Those who try to prevent the risk of contagion in highly trafficked areas are cleaners. In most of the cases, cleaners have continued working, also in closed buildings, to maintain hygiene standards. While carers couldn’t decide to stay home — as they bear a responsibility towards other human beings — deliverers, logistic staff and cleaners could have decided to stop working, but they chose not to do that. This is because the emerging precarious urban workforce — in many cases, immigrants — rarely has access to income and unemployment protection. In London, in particular, unions such as IWGB supported these workers on their daily life struggles before the pandemic, and now have opened up their doors to workers coming from all sectors. In Oxford, a recent petition by different groups demand the university to “protect workers during operational disruptions caused by [the] Covid-19 pandemic.”

These workers are fighting not only for decent sanitary conditions in the workplace, but, also, for welfare protections in case of lay-offs, for if they are left home, then there is nothing they can do to protect themselves and their families.

*** 

“The city is dying, the city wants to survive” — this piece’s namesake — therefore has a double meaning in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic. On the one hand, it refers to corporate economic interests to commodify the needs of people even during this phase, to not let some of their profits go — despite the fact they have been insured by large government subsidies. These groups use channels of influence to persuade governments to waive social distancing measures just for them; or they fight to be included in the essential economic activities, even in cases when they know they can’t assure safe health conditions to their workers. This is nothing new: economic elites have always acted in this way. Indeed, while I was writing the poem, I had in mind the environmental catastrophe that our planet is facing, and how business communities have continued to pursue their strive for profit without any interest for the collective good. The novelty here is that, during a crisis — and even more during this crisis — daily life mediations disappear, and we have the opportunity to see clearly what certain groups prioritize. 

On the other hand, “the city is dying, the city wants to survive” refers to the struggles of workers and the autonomous organizations of citizens to take care of the “common” — health, food, shopping, education, social activities. The crisis is threatening all these caring activities: overwhelmed hospitals that force doctors to let people die; income losses that prevent many people in European cities to stockpile food supplies; social distancing preventing gatherings and educational activities. At the same time, however, a new economy of ‘care’ is emerging in two different ways: first, without any daily life mediation, we’re realizing that the fundamental workers for our societies are not managers or brokers, but workers in the reproductive sectors, like doctors, nurses, carers, and shopping assistants; second, as Barbara Russo noted, locked at home, we find new purposes to our lives, which clearly point in the direction of more care towards the other. The ‘care’ economy is still a gendered and racialised economy, so that the burden of these activities has always – and continue now – fallen mostly on women’s shoulders. Recognising the importance of these activities can therefore spur a broader reflection on how to de-commodify them. It is in this context that the Italian Basic Income Network has launched a campaign for a ‘quarantine basic income’ to guarantee income protection to all the Italian population, but also to move towards a different way of organizing our societies. 

The tension between these two fights for survival is now more than ever happening in the city. In the global post-industrial economy, cities — or, rather, metropolises — hold most of the economic activities, and house close to two-thirds of the global population. If the city dies, a certain approach to the city dies with it. The way in which the life of European metropolis will look like after lockdowns will largely depend upon the distribution of the “common”: it could be seized by economic elites — through socialization of economic losses and austerity programmes — or it could be shared by everyone — through investments in welfare provision and the ecological transformation of our economies. These fights will happen in cities, as they are the core of production of value and pollution, as well as of social interaction and political organization.

In his 1992’s book The City and the Grassroots, Manuel Castells explained how the conflict between different visions for the city is articulated around three main points: 1) over the definition of urban meaning, i.e. the structural performance assigned as a goal to the city; 2) over the adequate performance of urban functions, i.e. the system of organizational means aimed at performing the assigned goal; 3) over the urban form, i.e. the symbolic expression of urban meanings and functions with respect to their historical superimposition. All three urban-defining features are now suspended, replaced by the pervasive meaning of social distancing. However, once lockdown measures will be eased, the struggles of those that are now in the empty streets will be the starting point for the development of alternative cities: “to obtain for the residents a city organized around its use value, as against the notion of urban living and services as a commodity, the logic of exchange value,” Castells wrote. “The ideological themes and historical demands included in this goal are: social wage, quality of life, conservation of history and nature”[1]. The economy of ‘care’ that is developing during this crisis shall transform cities into a spatial support for life.

 ***

Emilio Caja is completing an MPhil in European Politics & Society at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on labour markets and welfare transformations in contemporary Italy and on the new forms of working class representation.

[1] Manuel Castells, The City and the grassroots: a cross-cultural theory of urban social movements, London: Edward Arnold, 1992, p.305.