Verso and Compass present: Our London
A series of conversations in the run-up to the London Mayoral elections
London is the space where people from across the globe make their lives, histories and communities, creating one of the world’s great cultural hubs. But while our capital is one of the most exciting places to live, it’s also one of the most divided.
Life in London is getting harder, with unaffordable rents, widening inequality and dangerous levels of pollution. On every level it is getting harder for us to live, move, work and play in this great city we call home – from the price of housing to the toll it takes on our mental health. We face a crisis for the future of our city as it is pulled apart by tensions of financial capital, policing and the enclosure of public spaces.
In the run-up to the Mayoral and Assembly elections in May, Compass and Verso Books host a series of conversations looking at how we can turn this around. Themed around power, living, working and moving in London, the series asks: how could we organise our communities and our city differently?
Living – 23rd March
One of the greatest aspects of living in London is its diversity, but at the same time the city is striated by racial politics. In London, as throughout the UK, people from BAME groups have been historically much more likely to be in poverty than white British people, as well as suffer from housing deprivation, homelessness and inferior access to healthcare and education. Meanwhile, racist violence is on the rise, with state racisms against ‘Muslimness’, an institutionally racist police and the ‘extreme centre’ of the British political elite enforcing tensions between race, class and nation in a context of increasing immigration and numerous global crises.
In response to all of this, Novara Media, Verso and Compass will be co-hosting a panel that focuses on living in London and some of the intersecting oppressions that increasingly define it. Novara Media’s Aaron Bastani chairs the panel and is joined by Liz Fekete, Director of the Institute of Race Relations and author of the forthcoming Fault Lines (Verso, 2017), Ash Sarkar, also from Novara Media, and activist and academic Adam Elliott-Cooper.
We remember those who died in police custody and ask: What does it mean to call London a multicultural – or even a post-racial – city in the context of neoliberalism? What is the relationship between race and class in the city in 2016 and how should mayoral candidates be responding to these issues?
Tickets: £8 full price, concession £5 (students & unemployed)