Cities are home to well over half the world’s 7.3 billion people. By 2050, they are expected to accommodate nearly two-thirds of Earth’s projected 9.5 billion human inhabitants. In Australia, nearly 90 percent of the population resides in cities, making it one of the most urbanised countries in the world.

Cities are battlegrounds in which social classes fight for control. The legacy can be seen in every urban landscape.

The wide boulevards of Paris, for example are the product of Louis Napoleon’s paranoia about the restive population in the 1850s. Their width was intended not merely to induce awe, but to prevent the formation of barricades, and their straightness “a method of crowd control (artillery could fire down them at barricaded masses)” as architectural historian Joseph Rykwert pointed out in Seduction of Place.

Urban rebellions in US cities such as Detroit, New York and Los Angeles in the 1960s, driven by the neglect of predominantly black inner city areas as wealthier whites abandoned them for the expanding suburban belt, shook the country to its core. The resulting investment in urban renewal and upgrade, combined with law and order hysteria that caused incarceration rates to skyrocket, transformed the nature of US cities and in the process generated new social tensions.

And when general Augusto Pinochet came to power in Chile in a bloody coup in 1973, his military bombed not only the Presidential Palace but also the shanty towns and poor areas of Santiago, changing the nature of the city profoundly.

The importance of public space and the urban environment continues to be evident in struggles today. The Arab Spring, with its iconic occupations of central public areas, epitomised by the 18-day occupation of Tahrir Square in central Cairo, was a dramatic demonstration of this. So powerful was it that it has been replicated globally, most notably inspiring the “Occupy Wall Street” action, which in turn became “Occupy Everywhere”.

From New York to London to Melbourne, the use of public space was at the heart of this movement – the right of citizens to take political action in their urban environments versus the corporate interests that pervade and dominate our visual and physical collective space.

Closer to home, Melbourne’s proposed East West Link, the heinous Barangaroo development in inner Sydney and the elimination and running down of public housing across the eastern seaboard demonstrate how cities continue to be contested spaces shaped by the relative power of the social classes that inhabit them.

Public policy in Australia, as in most of the advanced capitalist world, has been shaped by neoliberalism over the last 40 years. The accompanying drive to wring profit out of every last pore of social life has transformed our cities – both their nature and the expectations people have about services, housing, recreation and public space within them. It has led to the erosion and corporatisation of facilities and services that were once operated, putatively at least, for the benefit of citizens rather than profit.

Marxist geographer David Harvey describes how the approach that characterised the 1960s “has steadily given way to initiatory and ‘entrepreneurial’ forms of action in the 1970s and 1980s … there seems to be a consensus emerging throughout the advanced capitalist world that positive benefits are to be had by cities taking an entrepreneurial stance”.

In the 1970s, the ability of Australian workers and the poor to resist this agenda was stronger than it is today. The green bans movement of the 1970s, which involved building and construction workers refusing to demolish bush land, public housing and other urban landmarks slated for “development” (including the Victoria Market in Melbourne and the Rocks in Sydney), is the most well known. Community campaigns against specific developments, such as the proposed freeway through Carlton and a similar one through East Melbourne, also had some success.

But as the unions have become weaker, and the left has declined, successes have been fewer and further between. Campaigns have been unable to stop projects such as the conversion of Albert Park into a Grand Prix track, the demolition of the Olympic pool in the working class suburb of Sunshine in Melbourne or the development of The Block in Redfern.

Public space

The public spaces that have perhaps been most encroached on by corporate interests are parks and squares. As simple spaces for the public to enjoy, they generate very little revenue or economic activity for governments and the private sector. Innovative ways are thus perpetually being found to impose a user-pays, for-profit ethos on them.

The disastrous 2008-9 redevelopment of King George Square in Brisbane typifies this trend. What began as an inner city park has undergone a $30 million transformation, in the course of which it has been reclassified from a park to a square and more recently to a mall. There are now plans to establish permanent commercial operations in the space, on top of the more than 200 private events that have been held there in the last financial year.

Increasingly, governments are demanding that parks generate revenue for their upkeep, or risk being sold. In NSW, for example, funding cuts have forced the Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust to allow more corporate events to occur in the grounds. As a result, the number of paid private events in the Botanic Gardens doubled between 2009-10 and 2012-13, and the number of large corporate events, in which the public is denied access to most of the park, is projected to increase from about 60 last year to an average of 100 annually over the next five years.

In Melbourne, barely a day goes by when City Square, transformed in the 1990s into the forecourt of a multinational hotel built over half its area, is not occupied by a corporate promotion or equivalent event. Nearby Federation Square is no different. The exorbitant fees required mean that only corporations or otherwise wealthy organisations are in line to capture the space.

Recreational public space in other places is at risk of disappearing entirely. A 2013 report by the NSW Department of Local Government found that in the last decade there has been an 18 percent reduction in public space owned by councils. That is a loss of nearly 27,500 hectares of park and recreational space.

Once public space disappears, it is very hard to reclaim. In central Melbourne, where parks are desperately needed, the price of land per square metre has doubled since 2009, from $10,000 to $20,000. As the Age has reported, this is making it impossible for councils to acquire land for much-needed green space, as “skyscraper developers swoop on the city’s best blocks and price government out of the market”.

Criminalising the poor

The shift towards consumption and profit-making as dominant activities in public space has had its parallel in the criminalisation of non-consumerist practices. Greater police powers to enforce move-on orders of various types have been used against young people, the homeless and other “undesirables”. The message is clear: those not paying their way, engaging in activities befitting a wealthy area or otherwise adding value to local house prices are not welcome.

University of Melbourne academic Rob White has documented the relationship between the increasing privatisation of public space and how “urban planning … becomes intertwined with crime prevention and security assessment”.

Writing specifically about public spaces in which young people congregate, such as shopping centres, he reports: “The regulation of public space in this instance is not driven by concerns with public order per se. Rather, most policing strategies are premised on the idea of promoting such spaces as ‘consumer’ spaces and doing whatever is necessary to facilitate consumption.” The key consideration here is that the interests or recreational activities of the public must be subordinated to the needs of the market.

Beginning in the 1990s, this shift has extended repressive powers to non-state actors. White points to the example of the Southbank Corporation Amendment By-Law (No.1) 1994, which governs Melbourne’s Southbank riverside area. The law “provides power for security officers to stop people, ask for their name and address, and direct them to leave the site.

“The Act was amended in December 1995 to enable security officers to unilaterally ban people from returning to the site for up to 10 days if the person disobeys a direction, is drunk or disorderly, or even if they simply consider the ban is ‘justified in the circumstances’. They can also apply to the court to ban them for up to one year. It is important to note here, that not only does the law give the private police greater powers of exclusion than those available to state police [at the time], but it is available to security officers regardless of training or attitudes to young people.”

The result of this is intensified police and security harassment of people acting outside a commercial framework. In Brisbane’s King George Square, fines of more than $2,000 can be issued to members of the public who engage in unauthorised singing, chanting, dancing or busking. In Melbourne, pro-Palestine protesters have been (unsuccessfully) prosecuted for trespass after holding a protest in a public place (a skate park that had shamefully been converted into a shopping mall but is still formally public).

University campuses have not been immune from this trend. As administrations have become more and more focused on how best to market and sell degrees, they have moved towards asserting greater control over how students and staff use campuses. Student activities are frequently sidelined for the sake of corporate events, and the right to organise politically is increasingly circumscribed by university administrations.

The design of public space also acts to enforce a social agenda, via “hostile architecture”. Structures are deliberately made so that they cannot be used for non-commercial recreational activities, such as concrete with jutting edges to prevent use by skateboarders, or benches with protrusions so that homeless people cannot relax on them. Similarly, modern public spaces rarely provide for the possibility of mass assembly. Instead, structures like water features or garden beds are used to break up space.

Housing

Housing shapes the quality of life in every modern city. In Australia, there is an acute housing crisis, driven in part by inadequate supply and upkeep of public housing, the gentrification of inner city areas forcing lower socioeconomic residents further towards the margins, a boom in residential construction driven by developer greed and a bubble that is pricing many out of the housing market.

A 2014 study by UNSW academic Alan Morris entitled “Public housing in Australia: a case of advanced urban marginality?” noted that in 2010, 210,000 people were waiting for public housing, with 64,000 of them deemed to be in “greatest need”, and many more thought to have given up and dropped off the waiting list. A 2011 Reserve Bank paper, “Urban structure and housing prices”, shows that population exceeded dwelling supply for the first time in Australia in 2006, and that there continues to be a considerable deficit.

Despite the desperate need for more housing, successive governments generally have continued to allow public housing to run down, and used that to justify further privatisation. In every state, governments are selling off public housing in lucrative inner city areas to developers, while tenants are relegated to less desirable areas, usually without comparable amenities or access to infrastructure such as transport or libraries. Recent examples of this include the Manitoba estate in central Adelaide, Millers Point in Sydney and the Carlton estate in Melbourne.

This acts to ensure that only those who can afford it are able to enjoy the advantages of living in well-serviced and resourced, usually inner city, areas, many of which exist today only because of the past efforts of the workers’ movement to defend them from developers.

In a similar vein, governments champion integration with the private sector, through subsidising private rents or privatising parts of existing housing. But as a 2014 paper from City Futures Research Centre at UNSW points out, this has nothing to do with the spin about “diversifying” but is a result of underfunding or mismanagement by the housing authorities.

In NSW, 30-40 percent of housing stock is substandard and in need of improvement. But the government would prefer to sell it off rather than fix it. Spending on public housing nationwide declined by 54 percent in the decade to 2004.

In the private sector, low income renters have not fared much better. They too have been forced into less desirable areas through being priced out of the market as investors, developers or renovators buy up real estate in desirable areas, or as landlords raise rents.

The beneficiaries of this appalling state of affairs, in which workers and the poor are denied access to secure, affordable and quality housing in one of the richest countries in the world, are once again the corporate sector and the already wealthy. Meanwhile, housing stress for workers and the poor is at record highs, with almost one in five households spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent or mortgage repayments.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure shapes modern cities; roads, transport, airports, hospitals, libraries, recreational facilities and schools all have a tremendous effect on quality of life. Privatisation of public assets and infrastructure has dramatically reshaped this aspect of city life.

During the 1990s, federal and state governments rushed to sell off public assets in industries including banking, shipping, air travel, water, electricity, insurance, telecommunications and gaming. Competitive provision of services run for profit on a user-pays basis was promoted as the optimal model. The same ethos applied when it came to much-needed new infrastructure: if the private sector could make money from it, governments were keen to provide it with the opportunity to do so, with the backup of the public purse, of course.

Australia has been at the forefront of these public-private partnerships (PPPs), such that today they absorb around 10 per cent of state spending, according to Michael Regan, professor of infrastructure and program management at Bond University.

The problem with this model of infrastructure for profit is that it is under no obligation to meet the needs of the majority. Rather, it leads to outcomes geared towards those who can pay or the needs of industries that wield influence. Generating maximum revenue for corporate heads and their friends in government very rarely coincides with workers’ needs.

The greater use of toll roads is the best example of this. Whether it’s the Harbour Tunnel in Sydney or CityLink and the East Link in Melbourne, user-pays roads have resulted in road use, and investment in roads, being promoted over public transport. For workers, these roads result in a greater proportion of inadequate wages being spent paying for services that taxes are meant to fund. Those who can’t afford to pay the tolls face even longer commuting times because the construction contracts often stipulate that existing roads be altered to guarantee maximum traffic for toll road owners.

For all the talk of the wider benefit of private infrastructure, the real beneficiaries are the construction companies, legal establishment and the finance industry. Age economics writer Kenneth Davidson has argued that PPPs are generally more expensive and of no greater quality than fully publicly funded projects would be, especially considering that the government continues to bear the majority of risk. “CityLink tolls are twice as high as they would have been if the toll way had been financed by government borrowing.”

A political question

It is certainly not the case that all urban development is negative. Opposition to development can at times reflect a narrow-minded “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) mentality springing from concern about house prices rather than the public good or the rights of the marginalised.

The problem is that profit is the overwhelming determining factor in change, and corporate interests the main players in the process. As such, workers and the poor, along with some middle class NIMBYs, have very little input into urban restructuring and are far more likely to suffer the consequences of it. This is a political question, determined by the strength of the workers’ movement relative to that of the capitalist class and its representatives in government.

As Harvey puts it in his book Rebel Cities: “[C]apitalist class domination [is] not only over state apparatuses … but also over whole populations – their lifestyles as well as their labour power, their cultural and political values as well as their mental conceptions of the world. That level of control does not come easily, if at all. The city and the urban process that produces it are therefore major sites of political, social, and class struggles.”

It’s therefore up to our side to strengthen our ability to stand up to this domination and fight for the kinds of cities we want to live in.