The ills of gentrification are well known, despite its continued denial by some. In Salt Lake City, because of the struggles of the Rose Park Brown Berets, the city has even recognized the severity of the urban crisis it produced, even going so far as to recognize its helplessness to act effectivley against its onslaught. Despite this recognition, however, it has chosen to continue furthering gentrification’s reach through a campaign of mass upzoning, partially achieved under the guise of creating incentives for developers to include “affordable” housing in their otherwise unaffordable developments. Gentrification continues to be a pressing issue in the Salt Lake valley, with planners acting as its shock troops, forced to create plans to oversee a vast reordering of existing land use regulations to allow for a massive increase in development across the valley. Through a single bill, ironically presented as furthering affordable housing, the Utah State legislature mandated cities to create Moderate Income Housing plans and, where relevant, Station Area Plans around transit stations. These plans are meant to remove zoning and code barriers to new, higher density, developments, often combined with tried-and-true business-friendly financing tools such as Opportunity Zones and Redevelopment Agencies funded by increasing property values (Tax Increment Financing), that is to say by increasing unaffordability. While hitherto, the most visible processes of gentrification in the valley have occurred in the metropolitan core within the boundaries of Salt Lake City, as cities complete these mandated plans and capital begins to saturate the core, we can, and should, expect the creep of gentrification to reach deep into the working class neighborhoods which comprise the Salt Lake hinterlands.
Geographer Phil Neel defines the hinterlands by “a factor of distance from the booming cores of the supposedly ‘post-industrial’ economy,” those places, largely suburban in character, which act “as a disavowed, distributed core, distinct from the array of services and FIRE industries of the central city but more integral to the ‘immediate process of production,’ in which labor meets capital and value is produced.” The Salt Lake hinterlands reveals itself in much of this project’s cartographic work; it can be seen through its high racial diversity, concentration of production and service workers, relatively affordable housing stock, and prevalence of poverty. The hinterlands also shows itself in the distribution of land uses in the valley. The real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield, an otherwise contemptible enterprise, nonetheless has done good work identifying the high-level distribution of industrial and office space in the valley. According to their most recent report (2023 Q1), 90% of all industrial space is on the west side of the valley (with 70% of the total in the North West section alone, think Inland Port) with 80% of all office space located on the east side. This division of land uses and economic sectors has significant implications, influencing housing affordability, class distribution, transportation infrastructure, etc. on top of inducing different urban growth trends, sometimes within the same city.
Just to spell it out, using municipal boundaries, the Salt Lake hinterlands covers West Valley City, Magna, Kearns, South Salt Lake, and parts of Salt Lake City (namely its west-side neighborhoods), Taylorsville, West Jordan, and Midvale. These places are separated from the wealthy east-side exurbs of East Millcreek, Holladay, Cottonwood Heights, Sandy, and Draper by highways, railroads, and industry, historically laid along the rail corridors.
Where the east-side exurbs are engaged in a program of new urbanism, supported by the state, constructing new master planned “communities” (where the only existing community is the socially-impoverished material community of capital) and spreading west below the hinterlands through the corporate sponsored sprawl of Rio Tinto’s (now Larry H. Miller Real Estates’) Daybreak and similar, upcoming ventures, the west-side hinterlands continue to play the role of the disavowed industrial core, gaining an airport expansion, Inland Port, new prison, and several new highway projects. While gentrification is making inroads into the hinterlands, the dominant economic force is, and promises to remain, manufacturing and logistics. The contradiction between the industrial economy of the hinterlands and the “post-industrial” economy of the metro core and wealthy exurbs is a mutually beneficial one. Despite its claims to the contrary, the post-industrial city is built on the back of the industry it displaced, and remains shackled to the “real” economy of commodity production and circulation. This is most easily seen in the service sector where the necessary material inputs to providing a service (tools and products used in providing the service) must first be manufactured elsewhere and transported to the site of service provision, but these ties exist also for the office-based industries, if not directly than through high-level economic trends. Beyond this, the negative relationship between industry and real-estate leads to relative affordability in neighborhoods near industrial areas, allowing for the convenient placement of the working class near the production systems they’re essential inputs of.
Despite drawing the ire of urban planners who think they know better, the hinterlands are essential to the capitalist metropolis. Contemporary urbanism reflects the inherent class divisions of capitalist society, which in the US’s case, is a highly racialized one. The working classes, that hidden mass of society interwoven with cultural differences but unified in their dispossession, lie largely dormant, but we know where it sleeps. The urbanists wish to build a better city, and not all their ideas are hollow, but without understanding the political economy of capitalist urbanism, and siding, whether consciously or naively, with the capitalist owners of space and those that own the means of its production (the engineering, architecture, and construction firms, etc.) they ensure their dreams will only ever be the dreams of capital and its supporters. We must do better.
Currently, the position best suited to the critique and eventual liberation of space is that of anti-gentrification, but this is a negative position, it stands against a specific process of renewed capital concentration (investment) in previously discarded (disinvested) space. Its horizons are the defense of the current, divided capitalist city with its small and poisoned allotment for the working classes. Its only positive expression allowed by capital shows itself as a reactionary bid to uplift its own, local, capitalists, landlords, and businesses, but such an effort is devoid of any hope for a world without exploitation, domination, and oppression, promising instead only a more diverse, homegrown, ruling class. With anti-gentrification as our starting position, we must extend it in several ways. First, the scope of our antagonism must grow, anti-gentrification is suited to the encroachment of the “post-industrial” economy and specific processes of real estate investment, while we must retain this critique we must grow it to encompass the pollution of the industrial economy, the exploitation of landlords and banks alike, increasing cost of living, the construction of unsafe spaces (both public and private), etc. Second, building on an expanded scope of struggle, our opposition to capitalist urbanism must strive to expand beyond the activist milieu and non-profits. While this will take years of struggle and organization, our short term goal must be the creation of autonomous organization based squarely in the everyday lives of the working class, lives lived largely in the hinterlands. Currently, this is the space of non-profits, but despite being backed by capital, the horizons non-profits offer are necessarily impoverished, offering little more than temporary respite. Midterm, we must displace these organizations in the hinterlands, building networks of common aid and common struggle and celebration and creativity free from capital. Third, we must expand the horizons of our struggles beyond capitalism. This expansion should be a reflection of the actions taken by those organized against capitalist urbanism, and just not the empty talk of self-proclaimed radicals (this blog included). The deepening of our understanding of contemporary oppression, the growth of engagement among the working class (defined broadly), and the opening of new horizons of urban struggle, all work towards developing a position of revolutionary urbanism.
The most revolutionary idea concerning urbanism is not itself urbanistic, technological or aesthetic. It is the project of reconstructing the entire environment in accordance with the needs of the power of workers councils, of the antistate dictatorship of the proletariat, of executory dialogue. Such councils, which can be effective only if they transform existing conditions in their entirety, cannot set themselves any lesser task if they wish to be recognized and to recognize themselves in a world of their own making.
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
The contemporary city is the city that capital built. It is marked by the privatization and parcelization of space, the disunity of activities and uses each decided individually by whatever capitalist owns a particular parcel of land or enterprise and in accordance to market trends (not social needs). It is also, despite the existence of so-called “urban planners,” an inherently unplanned expanse, brought together only by the alien logic of value, the inhuman compulsion towards growth, and a shared government structure built to oversee and perpetuate the capitalist economy. Even its planned elements, so-called “master planned” communities and state-directed endeavors, fail to break free from a market prone to crisis which it is still forced to draw its materials and labor from. To advocate for a revolutionary urbanism is to tie the fight for the deconstruction and abolition of the contemporary metropolis to the horizon of its reconstruction as a place of liberation and communal self-realization.
This fight will inevitably take place in the hinterlands, where racial and class conflict is sharpest and the most necessary aspects of the capitalist economy are currently fixed (manufacturing/warehousing/logistics). The ability for revolutionary urbanism to take hold in the hinterlands will be a determining factor in the liberation of these places and ultimately of all space from the yoke of capitalist oppression. The struggle against the capitalist city will likely begin with isolated struggles against particular aspects of capital, it might be the struggle of a neighborhood against an enterprise which is polluting their homes, or warehouse workers organizing against unsafe working conditions, perhaps it will be tenants opposing an exploitative landlord, or even an owner-operated business opposing increases to their shops lease. It is the role of revolutionary urbanists to understand and tie together these struggles, point to their shared roots in the capitalist mode of production, and build from them a common antagonism towards capital and other forms of oppression.
We are set to inherit a city rife with division and inequality and home to a mode of production made to reproduce class divides and exploit workers, women, and any others who it is not yet profitable to integrate. It will take a program of revolutionary urbanism to undo this harm and create something new, and it will not have the luxury of a fresh start. Instead, it will need to reconstruct piecemeal, picking through the urban environment to find what is truly needed and what was built only to satisfy capital, racism, and patriarchy. Such a program is necessarily revolutionary because in order to produce real freedom it must embody a total break with current systems of oppression. It must consciously oppose the spatial expressions of patriarchy, racism, and capitalism, it must actively incorporate the ecological systems which it exists within, and it must be the product of all those who live within it, not the coveted property of a class of owners. In fact, an essential step of reconstruction will be the total socialization of space and the means of its production, the placing of all land under than control of those who live and work on it, the abolition of private property and the constitution of common ownership based on use and need. It is only through total socialization that the built environment will cease to be the private playground of capital, a place where oppression reifies, and instead become the common realization of common life and common freedom.
Through understanding capitalist urbanism, we might find ongoing sites of struggle, currently waged in isolation. The work of clarifying their context and drawing out their horizons, let alone finding and connecting them, remains the current task of this project. Revolutionary urbanism will be a constellation of struggles in space, all oriented against oppression and towards a common horizon.