Brexit, Elitism and our Urban Communities
At a real estate event that I attended last week, property developers focused upon ‘the creative classes’, ‘millennials’, the value of collaborative workspaces and their well-designed bike racks.
As ever, the sales pitch was that these places express the power of ‘we’ and are havens for creativity, co-design and co-everything for a new post-industrial, post-work, well-being-centered generation.
Post-Brexit, will this form of workspace start to feel like a form of gated community, an over-curated place capable of generating an address but not a genuine sense of belonging?
In the Brexit vote, densely populated urban areas in the UK with a lot of young people, such as Hackney and Islington in London, voted overwhelmingly to remain in the European Union.
Areas where more residents had higher education skewed sharply to Remain, while areas where more had no formal qualifications were slightly more likely to vote Leave.
The vote expressed division and victory for Leave a cosmopolitanism that many within the UK don’t like - or want.
Put another way, swathes of fellow citizens are just not in step with cultures of rolled-up jeans, Tumblr times or the multiculturalism many of us assume is a given.
So will creative, educated communities in our cities now start to notice an elitism, feel uncomfortable about it and change their ways and habits?
Will global elites in our cities now get down and dirty with the rest?
Taste and fashion err towards more inclusion and localism?
Will the ‘right-on’ tag that has long besmirched the idea of inclusion now disappear?
And what might all of this mean to the kinds of places that we create and grow for ourselves to live and work in, places that in so many ways are an image of ourselves?
It feels as if the new moral and economic climate — and an associated ‘tech drain’ that will play through the Telecommunications, Media and Technology market — will mean that place-making will be forced to open up to a new, more diverse set of users.
Landlords will have to worry more about the challenges presented by less free movement of labour, such as a low levels of productivity and skills, as well as a decrease in external finance for enterprise, such as for innovation, research and development.
For sure, the connected-ness between ‘creative communities’, elites and the places that they inhabit with other communities will need to change.
To my mind, it is entrepreneurialism, inter-generational relations, and grassroots localism that will hold the clue.
David Barrie is a creative advisor to real estate companies, social entrepreneur and Founder/CEO of Wild Blue Cohort.
