White-washed Metapolis Under the 3D (Part. II)

We invited researcher, videographer, and activist Pablo Gaytán to share his reflection on gentrification and its implications with whitening through dispossession, cultural industries, and the modification of sensibilities through interdependence with social media. This is the second part of the commissioned text.

metropolitans
Along with this proletariat flows another class category: we refer to the metropolitan proletariat, which, unlike the sub-metaprolitan one, survives thanks to the guaranteed salary of the welfare state or free enterprise –payroll, fees, payment for specific work, scholarships. The first can be education workers, employed in the different public institutions of the state: bureaucrats, officials and cultural workers; The second are at the service of free enterprise inserted in the service sector of the cultural and creative industries, in financial services, in the quaternary sector of art and the tourism economy, as well as private higher education.

Unlike the sub-metaprolitan class, members of the metaprolitan class can usually get around by car, which they pay in installments to feel part of the dominant class. They live in debt all their lives to pay for their own home, for their children and grandchildren. Their chains are mortgages and the needs created by the social status derived from consumption and entertainment (from paying for television and music services via platforms, vacation plans, changing cars whenever possible, high-end bicycles and motorcycles, concerts of music in exclusive places), payment of rents or mortgages in residential and housing areas in the west and south-west of the city, or in the residential areas of the metaprolitan states.

Although the vast majority of members of the metaprolitan proletariat live in some middle-class housing unit or in some suburb far from the metaprolitan centrality, they live chained to the car, with eternal debts on their digital cards –for all-inclusive trips, private schools, visits to the “magical towns”—and attend all types of entertainment for the metaprolitan masses. Always prosecuted for maintaining “a lifestyle” that they deserve. For this reason, they are “aspirationists”, opportunists, careerists or whatever you want to call them, because they are always eager to climb to the top of the social-bureaucratic pyramid, be it the State or the company, for which they work. The new generations of the guaranteed or nationalized metaprolitan class have long sought to live in the coveted areas of metaprolitan centrality, in an effort to simulate a high status or belonging to the creative classes that they consume and display in the media, reproducing the stereotypes of success. In particular, the young ones are authentic EDipads, fanatical about access to existing information, which they certainly do not know how to digest or process.

For these, “sustainable capitalism” ––environmentalism, diets without industrialized foods, urban gardens and organic food–– allows them to socially access sustainable or social responsibility issues, ride bicycles and electric skates to move around central neighborhoods in process. white-washed by dispossession. They live, work, have fun and can create communities of digital workers and creative industries, always under the mantle of immaterial capitalism and the Platform-State. Until recently, this class, very functional to capitalism, served as a baby class, pampered and the spearhead to white-wash some areas of urban and territorial reserve that the real estate cartel and State promoted in the last decade.

Just as the creative industries displaced former urbanites to the other side of the borders of metropolitan social apartheid, as previously illustrated by the first wave of white-washing of Regina Street in the Historic Center in 2003, and now the trend is in Colonia Obrera, Colonia Guerrero, the neighborhood of Tepito, Santa María la Ribera, Anáhuac, and the gray areas of San Miguel Chapultepec and Avenida Constituyentes, heading to the Fourth Section of the Bosque de Chapultepec and the CETRAM Observatory, and from there to the Interurban Train to the city of Toluca. But the pleasure of belonging to an artificial first world fell apart for the emerging megapolitan class, particularly for the young people who tried to live the golden age of the CDMX creative class in Cuauhtémoc, Miguel Hidalgo and Benito Juárez. With pandemic times, these young people had to emigrate to their parents’ homes, and that was the time to reconvert that metropolitan proletariat towards a capitalist reality when these young people returned “to normality.” The increase in rents and the increase in prices in bars, cafes and restaurants considerably impacted their income, and this motivated their migration to the neighborhoods of Guerrero, Tepito, La Obrera or Santa María la Ribera. This replacement or forced displacement applied to the old white-washing “bulldozers” was operated by the monopoly of temporary stays in airbnbs.

The pandemic and post-pandemic crisis was used to provoke the arrival of thousands of digital nomads from other countries (groups or workers in the creative industries and financial companies of “developed” countries) to now occupy those fertile neighborhoods that are full of homes and ideal places to exploit the income and value of the land, by global companies that practice nearshoring or relocation of companies. In this case it was the industrial and creative sector of platform capitalism. The white-washers were white-washed. The short historical time went down again. Although one of the characteristics of this class is precisely the refusal to recognize themselves as members of the proletariat and their insistence on fluctuating consumer trends, clothing, music, entertainment and other market niches, they continue to cling to a fictitious reality.

A mercenary and convenient class very close to the criminal, street or union lumpen-proletariat. They are codified and identified with capital, despite their high social and cultural capital. And although some of its members have tried to collectivize through collective or commercial projects, such as the flea market located until a few days ago in the Glorieta de los Insurgentes, they have not been able to recover from the decline in the social scale. Today this metropolitan proletariat coexists with the sub-metropolitan proletariat in neighborhoods such as Tepito, La Guerrero, and La Obrera. They live in the central sub-metropolis.
Now some groups or collectives are trying to resist by opposing the “social hygiene” policy of the Cuauhtémoc mayor’s office that began with the erasure of the signs of the permanent and semi-fixed positions, and continued covering the mural graffiti with paint, evicting young people from the public squares and face police persecution for daring to denounce these policies. The truth is that the interest of some arises to support and join the organizations that have been fighting for years against the processes of bleaching by dispossession in the western areas, in the rocky areas of Coyoacán or in Xochimilco.

Metapolitans, the invisible power

At the top of the apex of the great class pyramid of the metapolis is the metapolitan class. The class in power, this bourgeoisie that lives in certain neighborhoods in the west of the metropolis, in municipalities and housing areas in the middle of the forests converted into exclusive areas for the owners of infrastructure, capital and the state-platform. In the city, these classes move in luxurious vehicles impenetrable to urban gaze, surrounded by police convoys that make way for their privileged vehicular flow. When it is necessary to travel in order to visit or negotiate with their peers in some space in the metropolis or in neighboring cities, they do so using the air transport service that, when night falls, blends in with the lights of hundreds of surveillance drones.
From their glass towers or their homes in the middle of the forests, metapolitan communicate with their subordinates through innovative hyper-private multimedia virtual communication systems. Their task is not to work to survive as the sub-metropolitan or metropolitan proletariat does, but to define the future of those same millions of beings who work to feed their financial cities. From their offices and consultancies they create laws and regulate standards taking advantage of university, scientific and artistic research. Through them they launch infrastructures of all kinds; they make and carry out business plans; they promote rulers, judges, legislators; They intensify entertainment projects or decide how the proletarian classes should be exploited, how they should have fun, what they should consume, where they should vacation or in which places they should spend their leisure time, if they have time for that strange feeling of doing nothing.

They discovered since the end of the last century that white-washing by dispossession is the best tool to fatten the reserve land and, to this end, legislative loopholes are the best way to appropriate rural and urban land. The ways of exercising the various forms of laundering range from the appropriation of money from criminal companies to launder it to the search for records of the homes of the elderly, or on supposedly vacant land to dispossess the families or communities that own it for generations of those properties. Above all, they have discovered with the help of some of their consultants, that an endless source for laundering by dispossession is culture, in its various expressions: from the neighborhood to the original or indigenous, through collective memories and art.

The exit

The different strategies of white-washing through dispossession can be combated from a class perspective if an attempt is made to penetrate from a seminal neighborhood and community process. Since those who make the metapolis have an immense subaltern and underground connection to obtain information and with it they can create initiatives of all kinds to stop the “fattening” of the reserve land. It is necessary to highlight the areas of appropriation of neighborhood and community economies by designing useful alternatives for that public space. Look for legal loopholes to take away the privilege of private companies to invade them, and normative regulations that defend tenants from the rents that overwhelm the economy of any proletariat.

Recovering decent housing can be achieved by regulating the increase in surface area and including new forms of property such as collective-urban ownership. The greatest challenge for the metapolitan or subaltern classes is to remake the metapolis from the neighborhood, from the territory, from the community, staying away from the cathartic opinion of social networks. The metropolis seen as an immense neighborhood made of neighborhoods where we can humanely prevail from the art of collective improvisation and the creativity of living outside the colonizing frameworks of academic, state or business specialists. The destiny of urbanites can only be built by the sub-metropolitan and metropolitan classes.

Sources
Asher, Francois. Métapolis ou I´avenir des villes (1995). Odile Jacob. París.
Fisher, Mark (2016). Realismo Capitalista. ¿No hay alternativa? Caja Negra. Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Gaytán, Santiago, Pablo (2020). “Blanqueamiento por despojo: una categoría polisemántica descolonizadora”. Págs. 262-269. En Ciudad en disputa. Política urbana, movilización ciudadana y nuevas desigualdades urbanas, coordinada por De la Torre, Galindo, Javier y Ramírez Velázquez Blanca (Coordinadores), UAM. México.
______________________(2004). Apartheid social en la ciudad de la esperanza cero. Ediciones InterNeta. Distrito Federal, México.