Isaac Rose, a tenant-union organizer in Manchester, recently launched a new book with Repeater, The Rentier City : Manchester and the Making of the Neoliberal Metropolis. In it, Rose unravels the causes of today’s intensifying housing crisis in the city, alongside the role of the local government and their private-sector developer partners in transforming this once archetypal postindustrial city. The result has been the replacement of its working-class communities, public spaces and affordable housing with skyscrapers and a rental market that creates wealth for global and local rentiers while impoverishing everybody else. The book has been written with a public audience in mind, bringing concepts and theory from urban studies scholarship into an accessible but detailed and sophisticated critique of the operation of finance capital in our cities and the longer-term municipal politics that helped produce this financialization.
Over the years, Isaac and I have worked closely with many others in the city to try and bring attention to the politics and financial calculations that have driven this transformation through organizing, generating data and research reports, public education, mobilizations, and other tactics. As more communities experience the multiple different pressures of the housing crisis alongside endless austerity, public anger over these conditions has grown. Under such conditions, the need to present an authoritative and accessible analysis of how the city is transforming was becoming politically imperative.
Could you tell me about your background and relationship to Manchester and how it relates to the book ?
I grew up in a town about half an hour outside Manchester, with family on my dad’s side all coming from the city. Just under a decade ago, I moved here. I found myself caught up with the political tumult of the late 2010s, in the movement that had coalesced around [Jeremy] Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party and the housing movement. Since the pandemic, I’ve been working as an organizer for the Greater Manchester Tenants Union. The neighborhood-level organizing with working-class communities at the hard edge of Manchester’s housing crisis was invaluable to shaping the analysis within the book.
What was your motivation for writing this book in terms of both what was going on in the city and the need to write about it ?
At root, it was simply living in the city while such dramatic changes were underway—and the fascinating ability of vast flows of money to rapidly transform space and place, and the fact that finding an account of what had happened that wasn’t celebratory was hard. The last authoritative critical analysis, Peck and Ward’s City of Revolution, was 20 years old. Anyone wanting to get a better critical understanding of what had happened since then would have to piece together various reports, the odd article or book chapter, and old websites to develop their understanding. The perspective that I had developed through the experience of being in the housing-justice movement made me well placed to fill this obvious gap for a single well-referenced volume that would explain the postindustrial transformation of the city.
Why do you think it important to write about Manchester specifically ?
Manchester has this position as the first world-city of industrial capitalism. It’s a city where so many aspects of modernity—from liberalism to working-class radicalism—find early and significant expression. These facts in and of themselves give the city a certain universal relevance.
This historic picture is built upon by the changes that have been wrought within the city since the late 1980s. The particular skill and accomplishment with which the city’s elites were able to embrace a property-led entrepreneurial postindustrial economic agenda means that Manchester has become a model for other city elites to follow, certainly at least within the UK. So Manchester, across the [last] 200 years of its history, acquires a certain totemic or paradigmatic place within urban capitalism.
The trajectory of its political leadership, from urban new-left radicals in the mid-1980s, then, via the experience of political defeat, to embracing the private sector and urban entrepreneurialism from the late 1980s onwards, with political stability and a unified elite agenda, make the city’s journey into the neoliberal era interesting and worthy of study.
You are clearly inspired by and draw on a series of urban studies/geography scholarship. Could you tell me a little more about how you structured your argument around certain concepts ?
The book is structured into three parts, which correspond to Lefebvre’s theory of the circuits of capital reproduction. These parts map onto the eras of Manchester’s history : the first section, from the late 18th to the middle of the 20th century, is the “primary circuit”—the circuit of capital reproduction through the production of commodities. The last section, between 1996, the year the IRA bomb went off in Manchester, resulting in the regeneration of the city centre, and today is the “secondary circuit”—or the reproduction of capital through circulation in finance and speculation. The section between is termed “the interregnum.”
Alongside this macro framing is a second key concept : the role of rentiers within the production of the built environment. Contemporary Manchester is posited as an archetypical rentier city in Britain, a country which some have placed as the archetypical example of rentier capitalism. But again, by taking the long view, the book reveals that this is nothing new. The story of the building of the industrial city—the speculators who built the slums and the suburbs—reveal that the rentier city is not the end point to which we have arrived, but rather the return of old pathologies. The social democracy of the 20th century that was typified by council housing [1] and public control over planning and land—or, we might say, “the euthanasia of the rentier”—appears as an aberration.
Aside from these overarching frames, the later chapters in particular draw upon theories of gentrification from Marxist urbanism, in particular Neil Smith’s theory of the rent gap—the idea that gentrification happens when the gap between actual ground rent and potential ground rent (pending investment) grows large enough. These I have found to be remarkably useful tools when trying to explain to people why gentrification happens. It was the hope of popularizing this a bit more as a concept that also, in part, motivated my writing of the book.
The book draws a clear link between the ideology of Manchester Liberalism and today’s contemporary political economy of urban development. I was interested in how you consider the ways in which what we see around the city today in terms of its built environment, its political leadership, and the contradictions of capital are shaped by and overlap with these histories ?
Manchester Liberalism was characterized by the predominance of “Manchester Men” within the political system—factory owners, “hard-nosed shopkeepers,” and liberal agitators who exercised political hegemony throughout the 19th century. Their politics privileged the absolute right of private property and laissez-faire economics. It was also an agitational, propositional political movement, fighting and winning causes such as the repeal of the Corn Laws and even the incorporation of the city government itself. The book traces the great political battles of the middle of the 19th century between Chartism and the Anti-Corn Law League, and shows how it was the political defeat of the former that paved the way for the long decades of liberal rule.
The growth coalition that emerged around the city’s multiple Olympic bids at the end of the 1980s was predominantly composed of a set of local businessmen who self-consciously molded themselves after the 19th‑century bourgeoisie. Dubbing themselves the “New Manchester Men,” they believed they had a responsibility as part of the local elite to drag the city out of its postindustrial crisis. The thickening of these networks would have a profound impact on the city’s governance, arranged through a proliferation of “public–private partnerships” between local state and bourgeoisie that ultimately tipped local power structures in a deeply antidemocratic direction.
One of the most interesting parts of the book from my perspective has been the way in which you foreground the commodification of culture as critical to the shift to a financialized city.
If Manchester is known internationally, it is often because of its culture, particularly the music of the 1980s and early 1990s. The role of this scene in catalyzing early interest in the city center and the property-led regeneration has been well covered.
I wanted to make a few points about this culture that are usually missed. First is the importance of Black culture to Manchester’s music scenes of this era. The networks of shebeens, blues and other all-night dance spots within Moss Side, as well as the circulation of dance music records themselves, were critical to the emergence of the “acid” scene that made Manchester famous in the late 1980s. The first DJ at the Haçienda, Hewan Clarke, had come up through this culture. There’s a story I’ve heard about him introducing Peter Hook to Klein + M.B.O.’s “Dirty Talk,” and lending him his copy, and shortly after that, “Blue Monday” appeared. Without that ecosystem and those roots, the so-called “Second Summer of Love” would have never occurred in Manchester. Second is the more well-known argument that it was the cheap space and the environment of postwar social democracy—art schools, cheap housing, pulp modernism, the dole—which gave working-class kids access to the arts, that was the other bedrock of this culture.
These historical truths have been forgotten in the cultural mainstream, in favour of a sanitized and whitewashed version of what happened in the 1980s as somehow prefiguring the “entrepreneurial” Manchester of today.
We met through Greater Manchester Housing Action many years ago when the transformation of the city was really accelerating. Could you tell me how organizing around these issues in the city has evolved in the last decade as the housing crisis has intensified ?
Since the time we met, the most significant organizational change in the housing-justice movement in Manchester has been the development of the Tenants Union. As well as a focus on place-based community organizing, the key shift has been the adoption of a membership model, internal democracy, and a clear organizational structure.
The neighborhood-branch approach means that there has been a significant variety in our activity : in some areas we’re collectivizing tenants of one social-housing provider to push for repairs and win compensation ; in others, we are supporting tenant-led campaigns against estate demolition, or new-build gentrification and displacement. Elsewhere, we organize pay-as-you-feel cafés and distribute surplus food to community projects, strengthening neighborhood resilience. We also act on a regional or national level with organizational representation on national coalitions, such as the one pushing for renters’ reform ; or working with the mayor’s office on tightening regulation of the private rented sector. The Tenants Union therefore has the capacity to act across a range of scales.
You’re not the first person to write about the housing conditions in Manchester. I wonder how you think your book and its ideas of the contemporary city might have been received by a couple of its most prominent writers, Friedrich Engels and Doreen Massey, both of whom feel very present in the text and who would surely have been fascinated by this transformation and your analysis.
The prescience and enduring relevance of Engels’ ideas appear striking to us today, perhaps because he also lived in a “rentier city.” I suppose the author would find much that was familiar about today’s city—right down to the squalor that many are condemned to live in—though, of course, he would remark to us that our failure to bring about the general systems abolition lay at the roots of the persistence of the housing question !
Massey was an unexpected companion throughout the text—my familiarity with her theories was fairly limited when I embarked on the project. But her work kept intersecting in unexpected ways, whether it was her analysis of the global nature of place, her reflections on the multiple defeats of the left in the late 1980s, or her highly personal and revelatory essay on Wythenshawe, [2] where she grew up, from which I took her highly perceptive comments on the crystallization of class forces within the state, and the changing class character of resistance to that state.
For me personally, Massey appeared at an interesting juncture—I once saw her speak at a conference in Oxford called “House of the Commons” in 2014, alongside people from Focus E15 and other housing movements. I can trace my politicization on questions of housing and urban development to this, and a follow-up event I attended a week later in a squat off Russell Square in London that the Radical Housing Network had organized in response to MIPIM, the annual property-investor fair on the French Riviera. I would hope that she would have felt a certain satisfaction that comes with discovering the unforeseen consequences of speaking in public or organizing an event that only make themselves known years later ; and I can only hope that, one day, my book, or one the many events I have organized around it, will be something similar for someone else.
