The Future We Deserve
It’s no joke to suggest that Manchester’s periphery of suburban residences was civic
planning miming doll’s house construction. That city's flight of
the middle-class in 18th century not only emptied the city core of
its dormitory populations, but also dramatically segregated Manchester's distinct socioeconomic strata. In fact, as Engels notes, suburbia was never
simply a compromise in which the wealthy chose to inhabit ex-centric residences
but instead a coercive restructuring of the industrial city which stretched
from the cities interior where the middle-class housed their business,
factories and show-rooms out to the picturesque domiciles of this suburban
Eden. Accordingly, Manchester’s civic leaders specifically carved out the shared
social terrain of the civic sphere as their own privatised arena forcing the unlucky populace
to make do, either as a banished supplementary populace on the margins, or
genuflecting loyalists dependent upon the sycophantic peccadilloes of the leisure dollar. This divisively cordoned the city, running its
façade of a public terrain straight into the highly polished charters of today's entertainment-destination retail. So there’s nothing really surprising about
this make-over, in fact it’s little more than the trickle-down economy, only
brutishly manifest. Today’s version is
no different it is just more insidiously coded, folded into urban appraisals
rather than overlaid upon them, but if we’re not careful it’ll become (if it hasn’t
already) the future we deserve rather than the future we want.
22page essay exploring suburbia's relation to tilt slab retail
jdr52 (September, 2013).