From time immemorial, the “city as utopia” has been a recurring theme in religion, politics, and literature. From the “city on the hill” of classical Christian belief, to Balzac’s Paris, to the socialist city of the Paris Commune, there have been many versions of the utopian city.

Given this long history, how does the city as utopia manifest itself today? According to co-editors Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, in their new book Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism: Evil Paradises, today’s “new luxury cities” are nothing less than a utopian frenzy that “enflame desires” for infinite consumption, total social exclusion, and physical security, and architectural monumentality. The book provides a guided tour of the globe’s urban luxury palaces: the gated communities where elite groups live in a privatized heaven amid the public squalor that lies just beyond their gates.

Weclome to Dubai

Mike Davis shows us around Dubai, a city situated in the middle of the conflict and chaos in the Middle East that is reconstructing itself as a safe haven for oil booty. More than any other, Dubai illustrates the unquenchable thirst for consumption characteristic of those residing in a virtual country that includes the elites of each country and excludes the vast majority of all countries. With only 1.5 million people, Dubai is currently the world’s second biggest building site. Davis lists “dozens of outlandish mega-projects” including the artificial island world‚ the earth’s tallest building, an underwater luxury hotel, a domed ski resort, and a hyper-mall‚ all either under construction or being planned. As Marco D’Eramo writes in regards to another city, “The ultimate tendency” in a commodity-dominated world “has been to reduce the variegated arena of social relations to the single dimension of capitalist market relations: to corral the entire public sphere within the realm of private commercial transaction.” D’Eramo goes on, “Free will is boiled down to the equivalent of the intense concentration of selection from a restaurant menu, while individuality is defined by our sum total purchases.”

But, “in every dream house a heartache” as the old song goes, and Dubai’s heartache, like so many in neoliberalism’s pleasure domes, arises from its relationship to labour, a k a the poor. Dubai’s gilded elites depend upon a vast international immigrant indentured working class—poorly paid, badly housed, subject to racism and to sexual abuse, and living without rights.

As construction companies refused to pay the type of wages needed to attract locals, the country began importing labour internationally, largely from Asia (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines). In some cases, lodged in crowded bunk houses without proper sanitation and with little potable water, the workers began organizing. The condition of Dubai’s working class illustrates one of the book’s key arguments, repeated in many of the essays. In the introduction the authors write, “Monstrous paradises presume sulfurous antipodes.” Or as Timothy Mitchell documents in a long essay, entitled “Dreamland,” about Cairo’s enclaves for the wealthy, while a tiny sliver of the population drives Egyptian consumerism, the vast majority of Egyptians suffer: a schoolteacher earns about $2 per day, household consumption has dropped sharply, and Egypt’s poverty rate has grown rapidly.

Concrete pipes for you

Reporting from Johannesburg, Patrick Bond documents the rise of its “edge city,” Sandton, home to the local chapter of South Africa’s new bi-racial elite who are “surrounded by skyscrapers, banks (including a brand new Citibank tower), boutiques for the ubiquitous nouveau riches, five-star hotels, a garish convention centre, and Africa’s biggest stock exchange” writes Bond. Sandton is set in a country where real estate values rose 200% between 1997 and 2004, and within a city where homeless children live in stacked concrete piping, where the HIV rate is “above 25%, and cholera and diarrhea epidemics” spread among the population, and where tuberculosis has returned to ravage the people.

Meanwhile the government-privatized sanitation system proves unable to provide services to the whole population. Judit Bodnar looks at the growth of “informal” (that is, off-the-books) employment in gentrifying Budapest, paying particular attention to the influx of women from surrounding countries who work largely as domestic servants. She argues that among Budapest’s wealthier families, “the existence of a maid thus constitutes the very definition of bourgeois private space.”

Contrary to the popular wisdom propagated by groups like the Fraser Institute and CanWest-Global’s legions of company scribblers, “the hegemony of neoliberal policies has little to do with self-regulating markets [and] supply and demand” argues Davis. Instead, he says, the economic boom since 1991 has been powered by “the massive, naked application of state power to raise the rate of profit for crony groups, billionaire gangsters, and the rich in general.”

Evil Paradises abounds with evidence that corporate capitalism requires authoritarian regulation to survive. There is a “symbiosis between the free market and tyranny,” as China Mieville puts it in his article. In “Delirious Beijing” Anne-Marie Broudehoux tells us how hundreds of thousands of Beijingers have suffered evictions and house demolitions as Beijing destroys itself to be remade with a neoliberal happy face in preparation for the 2008 Summer Olympics.

Forrest Hylton exposes the history of bloody violence that gave birth to “new” Medellin, Colombia, and its evolution from murder city (55,000 people were murdered in Medellin between 1990 and 2002) to a city with a murder rate significantly lower than that of Washington DC or Baltimore. The pacification of Medellin, now the home of Colombia’s largest “conglomerates and over 70 foreign enterprises,” is due not to a crackdown by law enforcement on the cocaine traffickers, but rather in the cocaine traffickers, in partnership with the police and fascist paramilitary outfits, quashing the violence to facilitate a “better business environment” in which to sell vast quantities of the drugs, as well as to branch out into legitimate business.

Who’s oppressed now?

But the violence of the elites against the majority gets reversed in the social imagination like an image in a carnival mirror might. While it is those struggling to get by that suffer overwhelmingly from the state’s violence, the violence of criminals, the disease associated with a poisonous food industry and an increasingly toxic environment, the rich hide out in gated communities with armed security guards at the fences and full of fear of the people they oppress.

Unlike crime which requires an act of commission, “fear proves itself: the social perception of threat becomes a function of the security mobilization, not crime rates,” wrote Davis in another essay. China Mieville satirizes the “Freedom Ship,” conceived as a floating community of over 100,000 who will avoid paying any taxes as they wander aimlessly at sea, going from port to port, conducting their business affairs while on board using the latest in hi-tech communications systems. This elite utopian community advertises the fact that it will have a private security force of 2,000, led by a former FBI agent. Only one officer for every fifty or so passenger/citizens: how can they sleep at night? It is a dream of exclusion and isolation that the new elites covet. Say goodbye to the inviting heterogeneity and disorder of the city as defined by Robert Park, “a mosaic of little worlds which touch but do not interpenetrate,” a “dangerous experiment of living at the same time, in several different, contiguous but otherwise widely separated worlds,” full of “chance and adventure.” Say hello to a Disneyfied urbanity where “designed and contrived diversity creates marketable landscapes, as opposed to unscripted social interaction,” as Don Mitchell writes in “The Right to the City.”