Cities and Cops
I’ve just read a short essay by Riccardo Petrella titled “A Global Agora vs. Gated City-Regions.” The title refers to two visions of the future. The first is a world (”Global Agora”) in which things like information technology have made it possible for the voices of people around the world to be heard, and where therefore a new sense of ethics, justice, and equality takes hold. Petrella believes that utopian view lies in the distant future. In the meantime, we are stuck with gated city-regions, a network of about 30 urban conglomerations where wealth, technology, management skills, and political power is centered. Petrella’s list includes New York, LA, Miami in the U.S., Tokyo, Osaka, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Jakarta in east/southeast Asia. Odd (to me) that Mumbai and Abu Dhabi didn’t make the list, but that’s neither here nor there.
Here’s what I’m thinking. Imagine there is a world of a limited number of wealthy cities, and a vast hinterland of poor areas squeezed out by the imbalance of capital. Imagine, therefore, people immigrating to cities to try to gain a portion of the wealth. How do you think the rich mercantile powerbrokers would react? Perhaps their response would have something to do with police? And perhaps this structure of the world might have come into existence in the late nineteenth century?
That’s what Frederick Wakeman’s Policing Shanghai made me think. He describes the French and British both competing and colluding with the Chinese public security forces in Shanghai in the 1920’s and 30’s. The city was very corrupt, with various forces trying to control the opium trade, and the imperialist powers having a deep interest in helping Chiang Kaishek defeat the Communists (who, the British and French worried, might spur revolts in Indochina and India). Seems like this scenario supports Petrella’s hypothesis.
Occurs to me that this basic regime has only shifted its centers of gravity, not its fundamental logic. How depressing..