Continuation
I found it quite interesting when I was chatting to people over the my travels darn sarf how even the least politically minded had noticed London's problems, especially the gentrification in the midst of poverty. Just read this description of London in 1844 by Engels, quoted in David Harvey's Social Justice and the City:-
"These Londoners have been forced to sacrifice the best qualities of their human nature, to bring to pass all the marvels of civilization which crowd their city, a hundred powers which slumbered within them have remained inactive, have been suppressed in order that a few might be developed more fully and multiply through union with those of others...The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest becomes the more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together within a limited space...The dissolution of mankind into monads, of which each one has to separate principle, the world of atoms, is here carried to its utmost extreme...Hence it comes too, that the social war, the war against all, is here openly declared...people regard each other only as useful objects; each exploits the other, and the end of it all is, that the powerful few, the capitalists, seize everything for themselves, while the weak many, the poor, scarcely a bare existence remains...Everywhere barbarous indifference, hard egotism on one hand, and nameless misery on the other, everywhere social warfare, everyman's house in a state of siege, everywhere reciprocal plundering under the protection of the law, and all so shameless, so openly avowed that one shrinks before the consequences of our social state a they manifest themselves here undisguised, and can only wonder that the whole crazy fabric still hangs together"
Frederick Engels, The Condition of the English Working Class in 1844~ (London, 1962 edn. pp.23-5; quoted in David Harvey (1973) Social Justice and the City (London, Edward Arnold) pp.133-4
Well I most definitely couldn't have put it better myself. And as Harvey points out, remove the bits about class war and capitalists, and you could have a quote from any of the better government reports about urban deprivation from the past 200 years.
"These Londoners have been forced to sacrifice the best qualities of their human nature, to bring to pass all the marvels of civilization which crowd their city, a hundred powers which slumbered within them have remained inactive, have been suppressed in order that a few might be developed more fully and multiply through union with those of others...The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest becomes the more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together within a limited space...The dissolution of mankind into monads, of which each one has to separate principle, the world of atoms, is here carried to its utmost extreme...Hence it comes too, that the social war, the war against all, is here openly declared...people regard each other only as useful objects; each exploits the other, and the end of it all is, that the powerful few, the capitalists, seize everything for themselves, while the weak many, the poor, scarcely a bare existence remains...Everywhere barbarous indifference, hard egotism on one hand, and nameless misery on the other, everywhere social warfare, everyman's house in a state of siege, everywhere reciprocal plundering under the protection of the law, and all so shameless, so openly avowed that one shrinks before the consequences of our social state a they manifest themselves here undisguised, and can only wonder that the whole crazy fabric still hangs together"
Frederick Engels, The Condition of the English Working Class in 1844~ (London, 1962 edn. pp.23-5; quoted in David Harvey (1973) Social Justice and the City (London, Edward Arnold) pp.133-4
Well I most definitely couldn't have put it better myself. And as Harvey points out, remove the bits about class war and capitalists, and you could have a quote from any of the better government reports about urban deprivation from the past 200 years.