Editorial: “It's not for us…”?

'It's not for us and all the promises of affordable homes and local jobs is nothing but hot air and the real people benefiting are the large businesses.' T he words of a homeless youth in temporary housing in one of the boroughs adjacent to the London Olympics site. Nearby some residents of an estate claim that their proposed displacement/replacement/'development' is 'social cleansing in the name of … corporate objectives.’ Do such claims apply universally to working class and many 'middle class’ people that find themselves enmeshed in such development(s)? If so, could it be otherwise? This issue of CITY follows out the contradictions of these and related developments in six other contexts. In European borderlands, Henrick Lebuhn notes that not just the nature of border control but also that of urban citizenship is at issue. In U.S. cities (and beyond) Joshua Long looks at the counter-claim for respecting and enhancing the essential 'weirdness’ of particular cities as contrasted to the marginalizing uniformities that corporate objectives seek to impose. Looking across the European and North American experience Margit Mayer seeks to define a way beyond the proferred alternatives of austerity urbanism or 'creative city’ politics. Looking into the fast-approaching future, two further and apparently exclusively paths are sketched out by, on the one hand, Andy Merrifield who looks towards hopeful vistas of reconceptualised 'non-work’ beyond the accelerating progress/regress of planetary urbanization, and, on the other hand, by Adrian Atkinson, who looks from the emerging evidence of urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA), though currently marginalized, towards a future in which agrarianism will become central as urbanization declines and collapses. In a final context, the endpiece looks backwards as well as forwards - from the Renaissance through Romanticism, Marxism, social science, critical theory and materialisms, old and new - seeking tools for understanding and surpassing these apparently contradictory presents and futures.