A tale of two utopias

‘Khoteli kak luchshe, a poluchilos’ kak vsegda ‘We wanted to do our best but it turned out as it usually does’. Viktor Chernomyrdin, the ex-Russian Prime Minister

Every age has its utopians, and every age has its engineers. Utopians dream; engineers transform utopian dreams into hard reality. Utopian dreams vary but their guiding principles remain the same. The future will be better than the past; the problems that bedevilled the past will be resolved. The future will be perfect. The trouble with utopias, however, is that far from building a better world they often deliver a worse one. Part of the problem here is that while the utopian dream is sold on the basis that all will benefit, to build utopia you have to deal with those who stand in its way or who have no place in the envisioned future. These people become its casualties: the criminalised other, matter out of place, that which has no place and must be removed.

Here we will show how utopian dreams resolve themselves into projects that have criminalisation as their outcome. To do so, we will compare urban renewal projects in two societies: Britain under Tony Blair; Russia under its communist rulers. These projects of urban renewal share common features. They aspire to renew the urban fabric by rebuilding it. Both projects are marketed on the promise of the better and more inclusive world they will deliver. But far from resolving the social problems associated with excluded street populations, these still remain painfully present. Instead of rethinking the inadequacies of utopia, the problem of utopia becomes reconstructed instead as a problem of excluded populations who have no right to live within it. In both cases the ‘solution’ is the same: coercive eviction from the Promised Land.

Imagine now that we are in the late twentieth century and New Labour under Tony Blair is in the ascendant. New Labour has high hopes. It wants to renew the declining de-industrialised fabric of its industrial cities and create a better and more inclusive city; a city fit for the ‘cappuccino drinking’ enterprise society it aspires to construct. Town planners and property speculators enthused by the dream work hard and key areas are identified for development. Take King's Cross, traditionally an old working class area of London. At its centre lie two metropolitan train stations, King's Cross and St Pancras, key transit points into the capital. King's Cross is situated in the vicinity of large industrial wasteland, a brown field site which, together with the attractive but run down Victorian streets in the vicinity of the stations, constitutes an ideal area for redevelopment. Utopia will be built in what will become one of the most ambitious regeneration projects in the UK. But building utopia is not easy. Political forces oppose it asking ‘utopia for who and at what cost?’ but they are weak, and such forces are soon vanquished. A more pressing problem presents itself. King's Cross is a poor working class area and rates of deprivation and poverty in the area are high. The area is also home to thriving sex and drug markets in the vicinity of its train station. The area is also home to a vagrant population of street beggars, rough sleepers and street drinkers. Many have mental health problems, and many are also drug users and alcoholics.

This vulnerable and excluded population does not resolve itself into an included minority as regeneration commences. It stands in the way of utopia, and so a war is declared against it. Begging is banned and becomes a criminal offence. ASBOs are mobilised against the local sex workers, predominantly white, working class, chaotic drugusing women. The ASBOs contain an array of categorical prohibitions. They ban the women from plying their trade. They ban them from the King's Cross area—for many, the area where they lived—and many ASBOs are indefinite. Breaches regularly occur because the women cannot understand or quite believe what has happened to them. For breach they are imprisoned. Dispersion orders are mobilised to drive out the population of rough sleepers and street drinkers. They have no place in utopia and are coercively removed. They find themselves displaced into side streets and are driven from these. They move into adjacent parks and are targeted there. Hostel places are reduced while local parks and working class estates are ‘target hardened’ by being literally fenced in (see Young et al., 2007 ). Surveillance cameras are installed and under their gaze police officers and street wardens cleanse the streets of their ‘problem populations’. Utopia will indeed be constructed in King's Cross. Café culture will arrive. The global businessman will at last be free to enjoy his cappuccino without having to confront the unpleasant and distressing sight posed by those who will not fit in. He is ‘safe’, because they have been removed from view. Reconstructed as social litter, they have been swept away.

The time is now the 1930s, and we are in Moscow. This is the ‘model’ communist city. In its new factories and scientific institutes, spacious parks, and squares, Soviet workers are learning how to be true communist men and women. These will be well rounded, physically and mentally healthy, constructors of the new world. But there are other people who spoil the picture. These are not the Kulaks, or political ‘enemies of the people’. The powerful NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs – aka the Soviet secret police) has seen to these. Also painfully apparent are the down and outs, the displaced, the unemployed and the unemployable. They do not fit and they have no justifiable presence here. In Erdman's play ‘The Suicide’ (Erdman, 1928 ), an unemployed everyman pleads with the state on behalf of millions of people like him: ‘Give us the right to whisper. You'll be so busy constructing the new life that you'll never even hear us’. The impatient authorities will concede no such rights. People are forced into compulsory labour, placed under the supervision of workers’ collectives, or find themselves re-educated. But these human casualties of the Russian revolution remain stubbornly present. A policy shift occurs. By the early 1930s, all ‘unproductive and unattached’ elements pulled from the streets are sent to the gulag. These policies continue after the war.

After Stalin's death, Khrushchev begins regime liberalisation. He expects great enthusiasm and collective effort from the masses, who, no longer encumbered by fear, will build a truly communist society. But yet again the masses let the party down. Alcoholism, absenteeism, ‘non-labour incomes’ (employment in the shadow economy), homelessness—the old problems remain. Instead of looking at their causes, the party develops policies designed to penalise the victims and remove them from sight. Some may strike the reader as familiar. New legislation is passed criminalising ‘anti-social behaviour’; communitylevel initiatives are launched to ensure public participation in the state's campaigns against those who ‘bring shame’ on the Soviet way of life. Residents are encouraged to report people involved in ‘vagrancy, begging and other parasitic ways of life’ to the police. Communal courts are established where residents of state housing can apply for eviction orders directed at those who are seen as troublemakers. Posters appear on the streets naming and shaming alcoholics, idlers, women with loose morals, and those involved in ‘rowdy behaviour’. Police support teams, made up of public volunteers, monitor public order on the streets. Vagrants and beggars, after receiving three warnings, are criminally prosecuted. These policies will be continued and further intensified by Gorbachev. History repeats itself.

Two utopian projects in two societies that appear so different. Yet the similarities are profound. Urban renewal under ‘cappuccino capitalism’ and Soviet socialism, spot the difference if you can. But this poses the question as to why? One answer might be that authoritarianism comes easily to both regimes, so why should we be surprised when they revert to type. But maybe there is an inevitable structure to the way utopian projects unfold anyway; a dialectical movement that repeats itself irrespective of time and place. If we were to liken it to a play, it would be a tragedy with three acts:

• Act 1: (thesis) Dawn of a New Day. The sun is shining. Committed to progress utopians, influenced by visionaries, produce the blueprints for a better tomorrow. Everyone they claim will benefit because utopia is an inclusive space. Engineers ensure that blueprints become bricks and mortar and a new order is established. Like the ant that moves the rubber tree plant, everyone has ‘high hopes’.
• Act 2: (antithesis) Daylight fades and Shadows Appear. The utopian project requires herculean effort and a consistency of will. Unfortunately, it also has to be built in the face of enemies that oppose it. Wreckers subvert progress; reactionary elements remain committed to a past that has no future in the future. Worst of all, the very problems the utopian project sought to resolve persist stubbornly into the present. The vision appears tarnished. Resentment takes hold. Strong measures become necessary.
• Act 3: (synthesis) Night closes in and the nightmares begin. Utopia must be built but to realise the dream those who stand in its way must be liquidated. The mask of benevolence falls away and utopia reveals its dystopian face. But the policeman was always waiting in the shadows anyway. Utopias are built with the best of intentions but what begins as a dream translates into a nightmare. Repression begins and the weakest suffer.

Simon Hallsworth is Professor of Social Research at London Metropolitan University where he is also the Director of the Centre for Social Evaluation Research.

Svetlana Stephenson is Senior Lecturer in International Comparative Sociology at London Metropolitan University.

References

Erdman, F. (1928), The Suicide , in Major Plays of Nikolai Erdman. The Warrant and the Suicide, translated and edited by J. Friedman, 1995, Routledge: London and New York.

Young, T. , Hallsworth, S., Jackson, E., and Lindsey, J. (2007), Crime Displacement in King's Cross, Report for Camden Community Safety Partnership.