The fire this time: Grenfell, racial capitalism and the urbanisation of empire
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066119858388 |
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066119858388
European Journal of
International Relations
2020, Vol. 26(1) 289 –313
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066119858388
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JR
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The fire this time: Grenfell,
racial capitalism and the
urbanisation of empire
Ida Danewid
University of Sussex, UK
Abstract
Over the last few years, an emergent body of International Relations scholarship has
taken an interest in the rise of global cities and the challenges they bring to existing
geographies of power. In this article, I argue that a focus on race and empire should be
central to this literature. Using the Grenfell Tower fire in London as a starting point,
the article shows that global cities are part of a historical and ongoing imperial terrain.
From London to New York, São Paulo to Cape Town, Singapore to Cairo, the ‘making’
of global cities has typically gone hand in hand with racialized forms of displacement,
dispossession and police violence. Drawing on the literature on racial capitalism, as well as
Aimé Césaire’s image of the ‘boomerang’, I show that these strategies build on practices
of urban planning, slum administration and law-and-order policing long experimented
with in the (post)colonies. By examining the colonial dimensions of what many assume
to be a strictly national problem for the welfare state, the article thus reveals global
cities as part of a much wider cartography of imperial and racial violence. This not
only calls into question the presentism of scholarship that highlights the ‘newness’ of
neoliberal urbanism. In demonstrating how global cities and colonial borderlands are
bound together through racial capitalism, it also exposes the positionality of scholars
and policymakers that seek to counter the violence of neoliberalism with a nostalgic
return to the post-1945 welfare state. As the Grenfell fire revealed, the global city is
less a new type of international actor or governance structure than an extension and
reconfiguration of the domestic space of empire.
Keywords
Global cities, empire, Grenfell, neoliberal urban governance, racial capitalism
Corresponding author:
Ida Danewid, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9SJ, UK.
Email: danewid.ida@gmail.com
858388EJT0010.1177/1354066119858388European Journal of International RelationsDanewid
research-article2019
Article
290 European Journal of International Relations 26(1)
Introduction: Ghosts of Grenfell
Grenfell burned for local and global reasons. (Ish, former Grenfell resident)
When London awoke on the morning of 14 June 2017, Grenfell Tower had already been
burning for several hours. The fire, which began just before 1 a.m. in a fridge-freezer on
the fourth floor and quickly spread to engulf the entire building, left at least 72 dead and
hundreds more missing. Desperate residents trapped in the burning tower could be heard
screaming for help, with some jumping from windows as high as the 15th floor. In those
fateful hours, as pictures of the fire went viral and eyewitness accounts began to come in,
London was caught in shock: how, in one of the wealthiest boroughs in one of the world’s
richest cities, could a preventable fire have ripped through a 24-storey building with such
devastating results? Indeed, what had made Grenfell possible?
In the days, weeks and months after the fire, ‘class’ and ‘neoliberalism’ were the
answers most commonly given by the British media (Erlanger, 2017; McRobbie, 2017;
Tucker, 2017; Williamson, 2017). Grenfell Tower, it turned out, was owned by the local
council, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC), but lacked smoke
alarms, sprinkler systems and multiple escape routes. Residents had complained about
the building’s ‘dangerous living conditions and neglect of health and safety legislation’
(Grenfell Action Group, 2016) for years but had persistently been ignored by the council.
A refurbishment project carried out in 2017 addressed few of these concerns, and instead
covered the building in cheap and combustible cladding materials — a cost-effective
way to beautify its brutalist appearance for the benefit of wealthier neighbouring resi-
dents (Griffin, 2017). The cladding, which failed to meet the manufacturer’s own safety
standards and is forbidden in the US and many European countries, was later found to be
the main reason that the fire spread so quickly: it made the tower burn ‘like a fire that you
pour petrol on’, remembers one resident, and pushed temperatures up to over 1000
degrees (Kirkpatrick et al., 2017). For many commentators, neoliberal ideology and dec-
ades of privatisation, cuts, gentrification and deregulation thus formed the context in
which the fire had been made possible. The neoliberalisation of the British housing mar-
ket, it was argued, had created a dangerous climate in which local authorities were incen-
tivised to neglect the needs of their less well-off residents, and chose to put costs and
profits before health and safety. The fire, many concluded, was ultimately the terrible
result of neoliberal urbanism and ‘the class violence embedded in London’s rich, gentri-
fying neighborhoods’ (Arabia, 2017).
Two months after the fire, London rapper-activist Lowkey released a song in tribute to
the ‘ghosts of Grenfell’.1 The music video, which features local residents and survivors
mouthing the lyrics of the song, ends with a name call for the dead and missing. As the
names are read out loud and their pictures shown, it is difficult to not notice that the major-
ity of victims were black and brown, Arab and Muslim, and European migrants and refu-
gees from the Global South.2 On the night of the fire, Grenfell was predominantly occupied
by London’s racialised poor — by Nigerian cleaners, Somali carers, Moroccan drivers
and so on. Yet, in post-Grenfell debates about austerity, urban gentrification and social
marginalisation, race was either relatively absent or discussed in isolation from the sup-
posedly more fundamental problem of widening class inequality under neoliberalism.3
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