Gentrification on the planetary urban frontier: The evolution of Turner’s noösphere

Sexton’s new frontier

‘With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips’, we are told on the website Big Think (2014), ‘we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why?’. Big Think promises to help us sift through this vast informational rainforest, offering ‘an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet’, so we can appreciate and use the important concepts that can be ‘lenses for envisioning the future’. John Sexton, the charismatic and polarising ‘imperial President’ (Aviv, 2013) of New York University, has seen that future, and in a Big Think video (Sexton, 2008) he offers an appropriately audacious thought on what it all means. ‘Biodiversity is good’, he emphasises, challenging the obsolete American melting-pot ideology that tried to turn America ‘into some great Velveeta cheese of humanity’. No, Sexton warns, this kind of assimilationist logic is wrong and dangerous. Now, ‘post-environmental movement’, we now know that biodiversity is good, and ‘Human diversity is good. Intellectual diversity is good. This is a wonderful gift from God. We don’t want to homogenize. We want to create communities of microcommunities. New York is the first experiment in what the whole world is going to be.’ Sexton’s vision for NYU is an institution in and of the city, ‘ecosystemic in the city’, that will demonstrate through its community of microcommunities how ‘humanity begins to operate like a great watch of interconnecting parts, not isolated from each other, but a whole that’s greater than the sum of the parts’.

For those who remember the history of urban theory, Sexton’s ‘ecosystemic’ metaphors immediately remind us of the dominant Chicago School human ecology tradition of the 20th century, where the city ‘is a product of nature, and particularly of human nature,’ (Park, 1925: 1), with biological metaphors for neighbourhood change as ‘invasion and succession’, as each social group develops in its own distinctive ‘natural area’ of the city. The bio-logical genealogy of the Chicago School is certainly important for any understanding of the significance of Sexton’s project, but his direct inspiration comes from a more surprising, obscure source:

I have a doctorate in religion, trained by the Jesuits, so I tend to think in Teilhardian terms about a kind of noösphere, where there’s a whole different way of existence for humankind …

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) was an evolutionary vertebrate palaeontologist who was also an ordained Jesuit priest: his life’s work became a philosophical synthesis of the science of human evolution with the faith of Catholic theology. He was a prolific writer, but some of his most important works only appeared posthumously, thanks to the Church’s prohibition on his challenges to official doctrine. The concept that captures Sexton’s imagination comes from the Greek noos (mind) +sphaera (sphere), which Teilhard de Chardin developed through conversations in Paris in the 1920s with the French philosopher Edouard le Roy and the Russian geochemist-cosmologist Vladimir Vernadsky (Turner, 2005). Surveying the spreading environmental consequences of urbanisation and industrialisation, Vernadsky foresaw a collective human understanding of the need to live as part of, rather than against, nature in all of Earth’s ‘terrestrial zone containing life’ (Teilhard de Chardin, 1947, reprinted in Teilhard de Chardin, 1964: 151). Teilhard de Chardin refined the noösphere into the idea of a planetary ‘superstage of consciousness’, a ‘process of co-cerebration’ and ‘co-reflexive evolution’ in an irresistible inflexion from complex divergence towards a move that is ‘compressional and converging’, driven ‘by the double curvature of our rounded mother-planet and of our converging minds’ (Teilhard de Chardin, 1956: 109, 112, 111). Put simply, the expansion of travel, communication and human interaction to the planetary scale would allow – through ‘our converging minds’ – an entirely new phase of the collective evolution of humanity. Humanity would ‘move toward unheard-of and unimaginable degrees of organized complexity and of reflective consciousness’, to become ‘ultra-reflexive (that is, “ultra-human”)’ along the way to an ‘implosive concentration’ of the ‘cultural noösphere’ of Earth and every other ‘thinking planet’ in what de Chardin acknowledged was a ‘wild hypothesis of a transhuman universe’ (de Chardin, 1956: 111). Teilhard de Chardin’s noösphere combined the state of the art in biology and palaeontology to fuse ‘the rise of self-evolution’ of an ‘unbroken sheet of organized consciousness’ (Teilhard de Chardin, 1956: 109) with Christian theology in a universalising cosmological ontology of humanity, nature, science, communication, culture and God. The ‘Last Page of the Journal of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’, written on Maundy Thursday in 1955 three days before his death, presents a concise diagram of ‘What I believe’, and connects ‘Christogenesis’ to an evolutionary cosmology:

Cosmos = Cosmogenesis – Biogenesis – Noogenesis –

The universe is centered – Evolutively … (Teilhard de Chardin, 1955, in Teilhard de Chardin, 1964: 311)

This equation appears under the notes ‘St. Paul – the three verses: En pase panta Theos’. This is Greek for ‘God All in All’, the culmination of 1 Corinthians (26–28), written by the Apostle Paul in 55 cE in an attempt to unify a fractious church begun only three years earlier in Corinth, Greece’s thriving, cosmopolitan world city of the day – with its synagogue and its raucous temples to Apollo and Aphrodite. Teilhard de Chardin died in the Corinth of the American Century, New York City, at the height of an imperial modernity shaped by a collective imagined community built on histories of a West descended from the Greek polis. Images and narratives of these collective memories of the present were suddenly flooding the expanding planetary circuits of the electronic age – and Teilhard died in ‘almost famous’ obscurity, even as technological communications breakthroughs were vindicating his claim that ‘the axis of twentieth-century social evolution lay in the psychic (interpersonal) and political realm’ (Buttimer, 1971: 85). In an oral history in the 1990s, Tom Wolfe recalls that Marshall McLuhan was ‘deeply influenced’ by Teilhard de Chardin, but McLuhan ‘never’ acknowledged the connection to avoid offending the Catholic hierarchy at his professional home, St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto (see Cavell, 2002: 256). But now, in the 21st century, the Teilhardian medium is the message, in a ‘superstage of consciousness’ achieved through planetary communication circuits of entertainment, advertising, marketing, investment and education in a multipolar world of diverse, dynamic global cities. The noösphere has been the buzzword, the next new thing in Silicon Valley for more than a decade (Lanier, 2010, 2013), and there is now a thriving literature analysing how globalisation and technological change have given rise to a new kind of ‘cognitive-cultural capitalism’ (Moulier-Boutang, 2012; Scott, 2007, 2011a, 2011b, 2014) – a ‘“knowledge-based” capitalism’ with ‘biomedical and genetic engineering and artificial intelligence at the forefront’ (Harvey, 2014: xii). Sexton’s (2008) contribution to these discussions involves ‘glocalizing’ NYU’s ecosystemic heritage: ‘we take being in that local city and we extrapolate it out to the world’. Sexton’s noösphere is what he calls the Global Network University: students are admitted to NYU through one of three gateways – NYU New York, NYU Shanghai, or NYU Abu Dhabi – and then spend parts of their degree programme circulating amongst a world urban system of ‘idea capitals’ including Accra, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Florence, London, Madrid, Paris, Prague, Sydney, Tel Aviv and Washington, DC. Sexton is explicit in moving beyond the ‘Eurocentric bias’ of existing Ivy League Study Abroad programmes, and the goal is ‘at least 16 sites’ in world idea capitals, ‘with at least one on each of the six inhabited continents’ (Sexton, 2010).

Sexton’s purpose is to mobilise educational institutions in the world’s ‘glocal cities’ to demonstrate the power and possibilities of collective human understanding through diversity – as an emancipatory alternative to the ‘fortress mentality’ of gating strategies that are destined for global catastrophe in rising fears and tensions, ‘culminating in a “clash of civilizations”’ (Sexton, 2010). The noösphere, in other words, offers ‘a tremendous opportunity in the process of global evolution’ (Sexton, 2010). A university ‘in and of the city’, Sexton shows us, can teach us how to nurture what Kwame Anthony Appiah (1997) calls ‘cosmopolitan patriots’–‘men and women whose interests, vision, and allegiance are not bounded by place or sovereignty and who are “citizens of the world” as well as of their particular cultures’ (Sexton, 2010). While the phrase carries a whiff of elitism, ‘cosmopolitan patriots’ embody an elitism of meritocratic achievement that moves beyond the narrow nationalist patriotism of the 19th and 20th centuries – with a fresh transnational outlook that signals the possibility of a benign, empathetic and responsible collective force for progressive change. The world’s best students will come to learn with – and transform – NYU’s world-class faculty in ‘kaleidoscopic interaction with deep connectivity’, as humanity learns how to produce future generations of ‘citizens of global society’. This is among the world’s most selective classes: of the more than 9000 who applied for the inaugural class, NYU Abu Dhabi admitted only 188, representing 39 countries and 43 different languages. ¹

Sexton draws inspiration from cosmopolitan patriots as today’s planetary pioneers. ² They have the competitive drive and individual ambition signified by Richard Florida’s (2003, 2006) ‘creative class’, but their diverse and hybrid educational trajectories give them a transnationally refined version of the political progressivism associated with the ‘new middle class’ remaking of city life (Ley, 1996), and they also understand what it means to think and act within collective assemblages of the human and non-human – creative human beings circulating in a system that he describes as ‘connected skeletally by highly sophisticated’ ‘social networking technology’. To see where the cosmopolitan patriots are going, Sexton borrows from a borrowed metaphor of Prime Minister Gordon Brown:

To adapt an aphorism coined by President Kennedy, the new frontier is that there is no frontier: no frontier for the internet, for the mobile phone, for e-mails, for the cyber-world; no frontier for the capacity of individuals to influence, inform, or even infuriate each other. (quoted in Sexton, 2010)

Frontier. Consider three dictionary definitions: ‘the border separating one country from another’, ‘an area of mental activity where much remains to be done’ and ‘a marginal region between settled and unsettled lands’ (Cayne, 1990: 382). This is where John Sexton’s Big Think, Gordon Brown’s New Frontier, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s noösphere help us understand the frontiers of gentrification today – more than half a century after Ruth Glass (1964) first gave us a word to describe this process of urban transformation. In The New Urban Frontier, Neil Smith (1996) analysed how the genocidal disposessions of Frederick Jackson Turner’s understanding of the frontier in 18th- and 19th-century America – ‘the meeting point between savagery and civilization’ (Turner, 1893: 200) – became the powerful discourses and material realities of developers ‘circling the wagons’ to retake Harlem and all the other territories lost in America’s 20th-century urban crisis. In ‘Gentrification as global urban strategy’, Smith (2002) diagnosed how these frontier processes were being consolidated through transnational urban systems of entrepreneurial capitalist-state coalitions mobilising city spaces as vehicles for speculative real-estate accumulation. And in one of his last written works, ‘The evolution of gentrification’, Smith (2011) diagnosed the accelerating pace of dispossession as cosmopolitan capital operated through transnational network architectures of revanchist uneven development on a planetary scale.

Yet there is a tantalising absence in Smith’s use of the word evolution. While he diagnoses ‘an extraordinary new departure’ in the scale of today’s ‘economic excommunication of working-class people from their communities’, Smith is uncharacteristically cautious and modest in this essay, and never pushes the meaning of ‘evolution’ beyond the familiar, neutral sense of change or transformation. We can learn a great deal if we take Smith’s title literally, to be bold and explicit on the evolutionary dynamics of gentrification. Part of my inspiration here comes from Eric Clark (1987), who undertook a meticulous examination of centuries of land records in order to build an empirical foundation for Smith’s (1979) theory of the rent gap in the dynamics of urban transformation; more recently, analysing the unprecedented challenge of ‘collective self-regulation’ of planetary humanity that will be required if we are to achieve sustainability, Clark has documented the distortions of evolutionary science that have privileged ‘gene-centered thought’ and an ‘excessive individualism’ that obscures Darwin’s perspective on species participating collectively in their own development (Clark and Clark, 2012: 563). In this paper, my goal is to extend this line of inquiry, focusing more explicitly on the matter of evolution in frontier metaphors in urban theory, and in the driving ambitions of cosmopolitan patriots and their visionary mentors such as John Sexton. My central claim is that we are living through a planetary software update of 19th-century, Turneresque social Darwinism – creating a bizarre transnational urbanisation of Chicago School positivist logics masked by the deceptive drop-down-menu multiculturalism of Silicon Valley’s automated postpositivist standpoint epistemologies. The noösphere is the new frontier of gentrification as the new urban colonialism (Atkinson and Bridge, 2005) of today’s planetary cognitive capitalism. We are challenged to reconsider the explicit and implicit political ethics of the ‘recurrence of the process of evolution’ in the ‘process of expansion’ of this new frontier (Turner, 1893: 200).

Let me tell this story in three parts. First, we’ll consider the role of evolution in the historical context of conventional urban theory before Ruth Glass gave us a discourse for the analysis of gentrification. The key point here is that fundamental axioms of a hijacked social Darwinism accomplished a stealth corruption of mainstream urban theory, necessitating the aggressive political edge that came to define the very best of gentrification scholarship; unfortunately, gentrification theory was shaped by reactions to specific and partial aspects of the Chicago School’s legacy – perpetuating debates over narrow empirical issues, and distracting attention from the evolutionary frontier ontology that is much more relevant for an understanding of the cognitive-capitalist noösphere under conditions of planetary urbanisation. Second, we’ll consider a recent political paradox that has emerged with the arrival of planetary urbanisation: influential, well-intentioned calls for cosmopolitan perspectives from beyond the ‘core’ of the Global North are being voiced at the precise moment when powerful coalitions are consolidating the networked infrastructures of gentrification on an unprecedented planetary scale. Third, I will evaluate the way this latest era of gentrification is a recombinant blend of old and new, with intensified class competition in education, labour and housing markets legitimated on the basis of harsh 19th-century evolutionary frontier philosophies masquerading as inclusive multicultural meritocracies. Special scrutiny is here reserved for the bizarre technological theologies enacted in and through Silicon Valley – a location that only begins in the San Francisco Bay Area. The ‘non-place urban realm’ of ‘community without propinquity’ diagnosed by the Berkeley urban theorist Melvin Webber (1964) has been thoroughly transnationalised, as the ‘massive communication systems’ (p. 86) of urbanism are now enmeshed in planetary networks of finance, information and production sweatshops – all interconnected through billions of smartphones that promise the wealth of accumulated human knowledge at the swipe of a thumb. The possibilities seem infinite. But Silicon Valley’s noösphere is creating dangerous new frontiers of Turner’s evolutionary encounters between ‘savagery and civilization’.

The urbanisation of evolutionary consciousness

The first part of our story involves the way social Darwinism was encoded into the 20th-century hegemony of urban theory that conditioned public policy, capital investment and social analysis in the generations before Ruth Glass (1964: xviii) first wrote the word ‘gentrification’. As industrialisation transformed political economy at the beginning of the 19th century and produced the world’s first urbanised nation at century’s end, evolutionary perspectives on urban life were quite explicit. In Cities in Evolution, Patrick Geddes (1915) portrayed the day’s emergent, large, polycentric city-regions – what he called ‘conurbations’ – as the logical evolution of previous kinds of cities, in a new industrial revolution. For Geddes, the old ‘paleotechnic’ industrial age dominated by obsessions with individual wealth and class division was evolving, through urbanisation, to a ‘neo-technic order’ of collective, civic wealth, ‘its skill directed by life towards life, and for life …’. Humanity would set its mind ‘towards house-building and town-planning, even towards city design; and all these upon a scale to rival – nay, surpass – the past glories of history’ (Geddes, 1915: 71).

Robert Ezra Park was similarly explicit when he was strengthening the foundations of a department of sociology at the University of Chicago that would eventually come to be known as ‘Urbanism, Incorporated’ (Martindale, 1958: 28). Park’s (1921) theoretical justification for the young discipline – ‘the science of collective behavior’ (p. 21) – combined Durkheim’s theories of organic solidarity with the social philosophies of the 19th century physical scientists who had made sociology possible. Auguste Comte’s (1842) ontology of ‘social physics’ offered a scientific, post-theistic positivist theory of cumulative, intergenerational advancement in the ‘Great Being’ of humanity, while Herbert Spencer’s grand synthesis of biology and physics provided a framework for the progress of industrial modernity and the development of what he had called as early as 1860 the ‘social organism’. In turning to Spencer, Park was channelling the evolutionary theorist with the deepest influence on the American mind in the last half of the 19th century. ‘Mr. Herbert Spencer is already a power in the world’, the Atlantic Monthly enthused in 1864; ‘As far as the frontiers of knowledge where the intellect may go, there is no living man whose guidance may more safely be trusted. Mr. Spencer represents the scientific spirit of the age’ (Atlantic Monthly, 1864: 775, 776). Yet that spirit was a chaotic conception of revolutionary advances in science mangled with the entrenched conservatism of economics and religion. Spencer’s ‘doctrine of the Unknowable’ provided an overriding concession that gave theologians a credible, face-saving reconciliation of creationism and evolution (albeit an obsolete Lamarckian version) while his insistence on the absolute freedom of private enterprise made him the philosopher of choice for America’s dominant capitalists. In a Sunday-school speech, John D Rockefeller cited Spencer’s catch-phrase ‘the survival of the fittest’ to justify the ‘law of nature’ and ‘the law of God’ in the growth of the era’s powerful industrial and financial trusts (cited in Ghent, 1902: 29). But if Park’s (1921) theorisation of the ‘collective mind’ and the ‘social consciousness’ was influenced by Spencer’s linear laissez-faire evolution – Spencer was, after all, a major influence on Albion W Small, the sociologist who hired Park at Chicago – there were other, more progressive influences at work. Long before he came to Chicago Sociology, Park took a low-paid research assistant position after completing his doctorate in order to work at Harvard with the pragmatist philosopher William James. Earlier still, as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan between 1883 and 1887, Park had been deeply shaped by the teaching of a newly arrived PhD from Johns Hopkins – John Dewey. Of the ten courses Park took in the philosophy department, six were with Dewey.

Dewey fundamentally transformed Spencer’s self-rationalising apologies for structured social inequalities – what Dewey (1920: 190) called ‘the apparatus for intellectual justification of the established order’. Whereas Spencer’s logic portrayed individual competition and selection in a fixed environment, Dewey realised that Spencer misunderstood Darwin: cooperation matters as well as competition, and the environment is changed by human actions – which change over the generations as human knowledge and tradition evolve. ³ Born in the year Darwin’s Origin of Species was published, Dewey in later years wrote that the book not only ‘marked an epoch in the development of the natural sciences’, but also revolutionised nearly all of the ‘conceptions that had become the furniture of the mind’ over 2000 years, transforming ‘the logic of knowledge’ across the expanding terrain of the social sciences ‘and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion’ (Dewey, 1909: 90). In America, however, these ideas had been distorted by the brutal orthodoxy of the ‘laissez-faire conservatives’ (Hofstadter, 1944) – the hardcore Cro-Magnons whose extreme positions were too much even for Richard Ely, the conservative economist who helped fuse ‘environment, evolution, and cartography’ by getting Frederick Jackson Turner so interested in maps when Turner was pursuing an otherwise classical, non-geographical history curriculum at Johns Hopkins (Block, 1980: 32). Ely (1884: 64) became concerned that evolutionary theory was being abused ‘as an excuse for doing nothing while people starve’, citing the ‘all-sufficiency of competition as a plea for grinding the poor’.

Dewey brought together Comte’s insights on the intergenerational collective of knowledge (what Marx once called the ‘general intellect’) with Darwinian evolution. It is not just bodies and physical characteristics that evolve; knowledge, understanding, methods of communication, social and cultural institutions, and human possibility evolve too. And we can decide how to participate in our evolution. In the same way Spencer’s dogmatic commitment to an atomised individualism had provided a fraudulent justification for laissez-faire, ‘our ingrained habit of regarding intelligence as an individual possession’ (Dewey, 1939: 456) had thwarted the progressive possibilities of education and politics. ‘Intelligence is a social asset’, Dewey (1939: 456) emphasised, ‘with a function as public as its origin, in the concrete, in social coöperation’. There was no need to remain trapped by the retrograde conservatism of Spencerian Social Darwinism, of ‘drifting’, waiting ‘for the slow process of evolution’ as the ‘working out of unconscious, natural law’ (Dewey, 1918, quoted in Dewey, 1939: 424). Cooperation and the development of the collective societal wealth of knowledge make us active, conscious participants in our relations with one another and with the social and natural environments in which we build and share knowledge. ‘It is proved now’, Dewey wrote, ‘that it is possible for human beings to take hold of human affairs and manage them, to see an end which has to be gained, a purpose which must be fulfilled, and deliberately and intelligently go to work to organize the means, the resources, and the methods of accomplishing those results’ (Dewey, 1918, quoted in Dewey, 1939: 424). Evolution is a collective, social process that proceeds through cooperation and communication – social relations that were concentrating and accelerating with urbanisation. The ‘untranscendental pragmatist’ Dewey and the ‘empirical sociologist’ Park became America’s most perceptive analysts of how cooperative, communicative evolution was urbanising (White and White, 1962: 155).

This is where we encounter a fascinating yet forgotten moment in our inherited memories of urban studies. Viewed as a distant historical reference point, Chicago School urbanism is today understood as a vanquished but unrepentent hegemony, as a ‘bourgeois social science’ so dominant that Harvey (1978: 68) once likened a debate request to ‘an invitation to the sheep to come sit down and parley with the wolves’. The ossified dogmatic paradigm Harvey encountered in the last quarter of the 20th century was a betrayal of the progressive possibilities of the first. The most crucial potential emerges from the fascination that Dewey, Park, and the first generation of Chicago School sociologists had for the central role of communications technologies in accelerating the circulation of information and meaning in urban society – a circulation process that was constantly altering the very constitution of ‘society’ and thus producing new social environments for the collective process of evolution of the next generation. ‘Park espoused a cognitive Darwinism’, J Nicholas Entrikin (1980: 47) writes in a landmark history of human ecology, ‘in which knowledge evolved and expanded in order to meet the needs created by new problems’ faced by humanity. ‘Cognitive Darwinism’ might strike you as a bizarre, slightly troubling phrase: Darwinian evolution requires death to achieve progress, and ‘cognitive’ means that you are now thinking about what it means for that progress to involve your death. I certainly did a double-take, and thought of my own mortality, when I first saw the phrase in Entrikin’s brilliant historiography of a figure so central to Chicago School urban theory. The phrase has been forgotten, with only a few exceptions (e.g. Rescher, 1977, 2005), ⁴ because evolutionary urbanism developed a politicised amnesia. Especially in America, evolutionary social theory began to avoid explicit references to Spencer, Darwin or any other clearly recognised biological framework. Park’s work at Chicago building a new urban theory took place in the era of the Scopes Trial, and the violence of the ‘War to End All Wars’ had discredited the influential racist and imperialist perversions of Darwinism that had made so much of European civilisation and Teutonic superiority. Likewise for the eugenics movement that flourished from the turn of the century, which ‘grew with such great rapidity that by 1915 it had reached the dimensions of a fad’, when notions of the preservation of the ‘racial stock’ as a ‘means of national salvation’ fostered support for the geopolitical theories of ‘evolutionary human geography’ led by ‘militant nationalists’ such as Theodore Roosevelt and his geographer, Isaiah Bowman – who, not incidentally, declared that Turner’s death in 1932 was ‘a loss no less severe to American geography than to the study of American history’ (Bowman, 1932: 499; cf. Hofstadter, 1944: 161, 163–164; Smith, 2003: 223). The eugenics movement became politically toxic as the Nazis pursued its logic in a refined science of genocide. In this environment, ‘[m]ention of Darwinism in the social sciences became highly unfashionable’ (Hodgson, 2009: xix).

Despite (or perhaps because of) this hostile environment, evolutionary logics quickly mutated in ways that made them ever more central to mainstream theories of change in economy, society and urbanism. The paradox was most pronounced in economics. The Darwinian epistemologies of Milton Friedman’s (1953: 22) portrayal of the maximisation-of-returns hypothesis of firm survival in terms of ‘natural selection’ and Thorstein Veblen’s proposal for a reconstruction of economics as a ‘post-Darwinian’ science were downplayed in favour of the technocratic, neutral discourses that were coming to define American logical positivism (Hodgson, 2003a; Mirowski, 2005). ⁵ The institutional and evolutionary economist Geoffrey Hodgson (2003a: 93) notes that as late as the establishment of the Association for Evolutionary Economics in 1966, the label ‘evolutionary’ was adopted ‘only by ridding it of any of its former and Veblenian connections with Darwinism and by interpreting it in the broad and banal sense of “change”’. And yet Darwinism had always been a ‘derivative of political economy’ (Hofstadter, 1944: 38), what Donald MacKenzie (1976: 503) calls ‘the biological variant of political economy’. Darwin struggled for more than a year after his expeditions on the Beagle trying to make sense of his samples and empirical observations, but it was only after he read a book on the political economy of population that he ‘at last got a theory by which to work’. ⁶ The theory that Darwin finally got – Malthus’s (1798) Essay on the Principle of Population – had become one of the definitive manifestos of the 19th century. Darwin was reading the sixth edition, published in 1826 (Secord, 2008: xix), and it helped break his writer’s block as he worked out the details of his theory – until the discovery that the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace was pursuing the same line of inquiry led to a simultaneous announcement at the 1858 meeting of the Linnaean Society in London. ‘Since it had been one of the great figures of the classical economic tradition who had led Spencer, Darwin, and Wallace toward their evolutionary theories’, the historian Richard Hofstadter (1944: 144) observes, ‘the economists might have had some justification for proclaiming that biology had merely universalized a truth that had been in their possession for a long time’. The core of economics had always privileged laissez-faire competition as a ‘doctrine of social selection’ (Hofstadter, 1944: 144), and Keynes (1926: 113) went so far as to declare that ‘the principle of the Survival of the Fittest could be regarded as one vast generalization of the Ricardian economics’.

From the 1940s through the 1960s during the period Hodgson (2009: xix) labels ‘The Dark Age of Darwinism in Economics’, the field’s foundational implicit social Darwinism conditioned the development of conventional urban theory, as neoclassical economic methodology was enmeshed with Chicago sociology frameworks for analysing neighbourhoods, cities and metropolitan regions. Classical economics and social Darwinism were both founded on an axiomatic trinity: (1) ‘the fundamentally self-interested animal’ maximising utility (survival), (2) the normality and universality of competition, and (3) the survival of the organism/producer/worker most efficiently adapted to its environment. Yet while ‘both classical economics and natural selection were doctrines of natural law’ (Hofstadter, 1944: 145), the 20th-century consolidation of econometrics created an entirely new infrastructure in which social Darwinist processes could be embedded in the technocratically scientific and presumptively neutral, objective mechanisms of simultaneous equations, general and partial equilibrium solutions, and marginal productivity estimates as applied to the exploding observational vistas of economic data. The methodological genealogy goes all the way down, to a literally embodied Darwinian lineage: we would not have the correlation coefficient if Darwin’s cousin, the eugenicist Francis Galton and author of Hereditary Genius (1869) had not been so obsessed with the ‘Gaussian Law of Error’ describing the variations around the averages of physical measures of human bodies (biometrics) and the ‘mental peculiarities of different races’ (p. v); those variations around the mean ‘could be made the source of intellectual progress: specifically for Galton’s purposes geniuses could be made’ (Barnes, 1998: 213). And in turn we would not have chi-square or regression if Karl Pearson had not been so anxious to ‘provide his particular form of Darwinism with a proper scientific basis’ (Norton, 1978: 6) and if he had not been inspired in 1890 to focus on statistics after meeting a zoology professor, Walter Weldon, who was infusing Galton’s ideas into evolutionary biology to create a ‘mathematical theory of evolution’ (Norton, 1978: 6). When Galton died, his financial remains allowed Pearson to become the first Galton Professor of Eugenics at University College, London, and to merge the two laboratories he directed – the Biometric Laboratory and the Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics – into the Department of Applied Statistics. The Galton legacy of correlation and the dismal-science moralism of Malthus that inspired Darwin almost crossed paths with the noösphere and urban studies at the international symposium in Princeton, New Jersey in 1955 (‘Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth’) where Father Teilhard was scheduled to present his paper, ‘The Antiquity and World Expansion of Human Culture’ (de Chardin, 1956). Teilhard didn’t make it, but Patrick Geddes’ American acolyte Lewis Mumford did, and so did Sir Charles Galton Darwin (grandson of the Darwin), delivering a neomalthusian warning on ‘the menace of world overpopulation’ and outlining a ‘rather fanciful exaggeration’ in the form of a scenario of a ‘genetic surgeon’ working to improve humanity by distilling all of the accumulated knowledge of the chromosomes of humanity ‘to produce an embryo which will develop into’ a ‘really great man’: ‘Shakespeare, Newton, Napoleon, or – let us be broadminded, since we cannot foresee the political tastes of the surgeon – perhaps Marx’ (Darwin, 1956: 965). ⁷

To be sure, this discussion takes us a long way from the familiar debates of the gentrification literatures. But this context was crucial in shaping urban social theory at a pivotal moment, when vivid memories of the environmental determinism of Turner’s day (see Block, 1980) jostled awkwardly with a new evolutionary mainstream from economics, mathematics and physics (Berry, 1978, 1980) and the aspirations of the social sciences’ quantitative revolutions. In the industrialised urbanism of America, these tensions could be resolved through the implicitly Darwinian economics of ‘applied statistics’ and the ‘imperial conquests of the rational actor model’ (Hodgson, 2003b: x) fused with Chicago School human ecology – yielding a comprehensive and internally consistent matrix of policy-relevant theory. Housing filtering metaphors emphasised households’ adaptive responses to the changing landscape of old and new homes in the expanding metropolis (Lowry, 1960). Neighbourhood ‘life cycle’ theories naturalised the hierarchical processes of ‘upward’ status mobility via suburbanisation, and ‘downward’ spirals of decline with racial transition in the inner city (Metzger, 2000). The deeply influential Alonso–Muth (Alonso, 1964; Muth, 1969) formulation of spatial equilibrium had the effect of concealing the ruthless struggles of urban class competition behind the elegant calculus of market-clearing locational bid-rent curves. The explicit ethno-racial hierarchies that structured the spatial evolution of the American metropolis – such as Homer Hoyt’s (1933: 314–316) famous ranking of the effect of different racial groups on neighbourhood rents in Chicago, from ‘English, Scotch and Scandinavians’ at the top to ‘Negroes and Mexicans’ at the bottom – emerged from interwar America’s putrid stew of market democracy and populist Spencerian eugenic racist thought. But all could safely be hidden in the multivariate masquerade of hedonic pricing models and the economic discourse of ‘property values’ as a floating signifier for the dangers of difference. ⁸ And the entire theoretical apparatus was hard-wired as the default setting in the mainframes of urban public policy through the deceptively obscure accounting jargon of ‘highest and best use’, distracting attention from the political contradictions of property rights in capitalist urban planning (Krueckeberg, 1995).

This is the historical context that shaped the discourse and analysis of gentrification in urban theory: social Darwinist competition disguised in the naturalised narratives of Chicago-School urban ecology and quantified neoclassical equilibrium. Initial responses to the empirical realities of a process that defied the expectations of mainstream urban theory were dominated by the analysis of individual consumer preference: if gentrification defied the predictions of Alonso bid-rent curves, then obviously the explanation was a shift in the ‘indifference curves’ of wealthy and middle-class households re-evaluating the tradeoffs of time, space and accessibility (Schill and Nathan, 1983; Stegman, 1969; Wheaton, 1977). ⁹ These tautological pivots became the targets for the new revolution in urban theory when Harvey (1973: 135) sardonically observed, ‘All this actually means is that the rich group can always enforce its preferences over a poor group because it has more resources’ to exploit all the dimensions of competitive bid-rents. Similarly, Neil Smith’s first analysis of the transformation of Philadelphia’s Society Hill was aimed squarely at Urbanism, Incorporated: ‘The Chicago School’s latter-day followers have bequeathed to urban geography an empiricist and ecological quagmire in which substantive theory nearly drowned’, Smith (1977: 7) wrote in the opening pages of his undergraduate honours thesis. This was the first salvo of a lifetime project of politics and research devoted to challenging the friendly, market-tested violence of the ‘consumer sovereignty’ logics that built the foundations of aggressive, state-driven neoliberal urbanism and populist middle-class support for revanchist wars on the poor and homeless. Nevertheless, despite the incisive rigour and political integrity of a generation of critical perspectives on gentrification, an important genealogical insight has been neglected: the entanglement of gentrification with the suppressed memories of social Darwinism. We have forgotten how explicit Glass was in making this connection. Only a few lines after describing how ‘modest mews and cottages’ became ‘elegant, expensive residences’ in an ‘invasion’ spreading from Hampstead and Chelsea to Islington, Paddington, North Kensington and even the ‘shady’ parts of Notting Hill, Glass reminded readers of the ‘neomalthusian’ Depression-era assumptions of the Greater London Plan of 1944. The Plan had been amended in 1947 to implement what we would now recognise as neoliberalism: ‘development rights have been de-nationalized; development values have been “liberated”’ (Glass, 1964: xx). Along with the weakening of rent controls, these measures quickly accelerated the polarisation of the metropolis:

In such circumstances, any district in or near London, however dingy or unfashionable before, is likely to become expensive; and London may quite soon be a city which illustrates the principle of the survival of the fittest – the financially fittest, who can still afford to work and live there. (Not long ago, the then Housing Minister advised those who cannot pay the price to move out.) (Glass, 1964: xx)

Decolonising the new urban colonialism?

The second part of our story involves a paradox of politics, theory and discourse in the half-century since Ruth Glass wrote these words. Can anyone deny that London is a city that illustrates the survival of the financially fittest? From all over the world, the financially fittest capitalists are bidding the top end of the residential market above the US$100 million mark in London and New York ( New York Times, 2015), as the ‘uber-rich’ buy homes as ‘safe-deposit boxes’ for cash (Rees, 2015). We are now at half that level in Vancouver, where a one-time CEO of the San Francisco social media game-maker Zynga recently sold a 25,000 square-foot home for $51.8 million Canadian dollars; the buyer heads a conglomerate with interests in property development, pharmaceuticals, hotel management and textiles. The buyer grew up in poverty and did not finish high school, and he failed at his first business venture – a duck farm (Lee-Young, 2015: A6). But Chen Mailin persevered and succeeded; he has worked his way to the top, just as Rockefeller in a previous century, and he is a hot trending topic in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. But representing a city – even a big city such as Nanjing – in the PRC’s People’s Political Consultative Committee is not as secure as it once was. Things could change. ¹⁰

All around the world, the ‘financially fittest’ who have survived and thrived in the creative destruction of capitalism’s ecosystem (especially in those growth frontiers of savage competition that ‘pair capitalism with authoritarianism’, Dorfmann, 2015) are bidding up real-estate prices in a planet-wide search for what the Vancouver urban planner Andy Yan calls ‘hedge cities’ – safe places to store capital in real estate as insurance for an uncertain future. ¹¹ These circuits – what Tom Slater (2015) has carefully theorised as ‘planetary rent gaps’ – are now the subject once again of evolutionary social physics models and frontier metaphors that would be all too familiar to Robert Park and Frederick Jackson Turner. The prolific science writer Philip Ball – an editor at Nature and contributor to the Financial Times who has chronicled the new field of ‘econophysics’ (Ball, 2006) – writes a story in the Guardian making the case that ‘Gentrification is a natural evolution’, based on a paper published in the journal Physics and Society. Those authors, Ball (2014) tells us, ‘are studying city evolution much as biologists study natural evolution – almost as if the city itself were a natural organism’ – what Jane Jacobs called ‘the spontaneous self-organization of urban environments’. Mark Buchanan, another Nature editor, chronicles the ‘quantum revolution’ of ‘social physics’ in the example of Thomas Schelling’s ‘atomic physics’ interpretation of the ‘social cascades’ that took place at the ‘fringe between civilization and lawlessness’: Times Square (all quotes from Buchanan, 2007: x, 102, 22). The pioneers in this lawless urban fringe included Viacom, Bertelsmann, Morgan Stanley and the Walt Disney Company. Similarly, Ed Glaeser – a 21st century Richard Ely who has become the celebrity intellectual du jour among the world’s leading capitalists, praises cities – but only those dynamic, entrepreneurial free-market cities that ‘speed innovation by connecting their smart inhabitants to each other’, serve as ‘gateways between cultures and markets’ or as ‘gateway[s] to ideas’ (Glaeser, 2011: 7). For Glaeser, the city, collective humanity’s greatest invention, ‘makes us richer, smarter, greener, healthier, and happier’, and it makes us an ‘urban species’. But we are also a gentrifying species, and a gregarious, networked species. Tom Slater (2014) strikes up an email correspondence with Ball, and publishes an eloquent response: ‘There is Nothing Natural About Gentrification’. The apparent sophistication of complexity theory used to predict where gentrification will happen next should not confuse us, Slater warns; this is ‘a dangerous diversion towards social Darwinism’, ignoring ‘structural forces of power, politics, policy, and privilege’. Not long after Spike Lee is heard on an audio recording at a Pratt Institute lecture honouring African American History Month calling the gentrification of Fort Greene ‘Motherfuckin’ Christopher Columbus syndrome’, a New York Times editorial manager sends a note to the newsroom asking reporters to please stop describing neighbourhoods in every city from Beijing to Cape Town in terms of how much they resemble hipster Brooklyn (Nguyen, 2014). But it was already too late. The `#Christophercolumbussyndrome’ hashtag entered the twittersphere and was carefully dissected in an article in the daily online Spanish finance and politics site El Confidential – ‘Es el puto síndrome do Christóbal Colón’ (García-Ajofrin, 2014) – amidst powerful structural imperatives. In the early 1970s when Harvey and Smith were first refining Lefebvre’s theory of the capital-switching dynamics of the production of urban space, global capital had to find profitable investment opportunities for about US$6 billion of annual surplus value; now that figure is more than US$2 trillion every year (Harvey, 2014: 228). Most of that is going into cities. And almost a century after Robert Park declared the city a product of human nature and Patrick Geddes foresaw a ‘neotechnic order’, the technologies of unprecedented planetary connectivity are accelerating the evolution of accumulation away from the old industrial capital of the Global North towards the new informational empires as well as cosmopolitan capital of all kinds from the Global South. John D Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie are replaced by Bill Gates, Tim Cooke, Mark Zuckerberg and Rupert Murdoch, but also by Chen Mailin, Jack Ma, Carlos Slim and Mukesh Ambani. Planetary connectivity is also allowing the kinds of communication that Park and Dewey first theorised at the scale of the city to now reach the scale of Lefebvre’s planetary urbanisation. Woven from contextual blends of indigenous local processes and fast-moving policy innovations, gentrification has gone global.

Let me be clear on this point. When I argue that gentrification has gone global, I am not suggesting that the phenomenon Ruth Glass identified in London in the 1960s – and that many researchers have investigated and discussed in subsequent years – began in the Global North and has now been simply copied or applied in cities of the Global South. Gentrification (as a process, not a word) has a deeper history and a wider geographical lineage than is usually recognised (Lees et al., 2015a, 2015b). Rather, I contend that the varied forms of the competitive class reshaping of urban space that have always defined urban modernity are sufficiently pervasive and transnationally connected through flows of ideas, money and aspirations to be reasonably considered part of something ‘global’ in reach and influence.

As gentrification has gone global, so have Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier metaphors. They are on the ground and in the cloud, in the streets and in the tweets, as the frontier as ‘a moving section’, a ‘form of society’ (Turner in 1914, quoted in Bowman, 1932: 499) replaces Charles Galton Darwin’s (1956) ‘genetic surgeon’ with an emergent transnational social field of escalating multicultural competitions in education, employment and housing. One future of gentrification is clear from Ley’s (2010: 82) analysis of Vancouver’s position at the nexus of ‘a dispersed social and spatial field’ of ‘trans-pacific life-lines’ for competitive, entrepreneurial middle-class and elite families that incorporate ‘the capital-generating station of East Asia with the family-nurturing station of Canada into a single life-world’. Such transnational fields are now apparent across a growing number of cities, and fortunes are being made by those entrepreneurial pioneers of the noösphere who move quickest to adapt and exploit the new ‘science of collective behavior’ (Park, 1921) on the frontiers of transnational spatial fixes of informational capital. The processes Harvey (1989: chapter 8) diagnosed a generation ago as the ‘urbanization of consciousness’ are now operating through a global noösphere in an interconnected, evolutionary and variegated planetary urbanisation.

As situated, embodied and urbanising individuals, each of us can see, understand or experience particular empirical facets of this latest urban revolution – and now billions of us are also able to talk, learn and fight about it in real time, in the evolutionary algorithmic ecosystems of social media. No wonder John Sexton, with that doctorate in religion from the Jesuits, thinks in Teilhardian terms. He is in the noöspheric administration of one of the most exclusive private universities in one of the world’s most widely recognised epicentres of gentrification, where admission requires a ‘superstage of consciousness’ of grades, test scores and extracurricular achievements – along with ever-escalating tuition payments and a Hunger Games survival of the financially fittest competition in the City’s housing market. NYU’s ‘real-estate footprint’ in Greenwich Village and Brooklyn has grown by more than 2 million square feet in the past decade, while Sexton responds to critics of the ‘globalization of the university’ by contextualising the competition: ‘I live in a city where the people with all the choices, all the money, all the information, kill to get their kids into $35,000 kindergartens’ (quoted in Carapezza and Noe-Payne, 2014). He is right, and so is Spike Lee when he describes the cutthroat competition of White parents to get their kids into private schools, ¹² and when he describes the next generation of pioneers in Harlem: ‘When you see White mothers pushing their babies in strollers, three o’clock in the morning on 125th Street, that must tell you something’ (quoted in Coscarelli, 2014). Meanwhile, the acceptance rate for NYU Abu Dhabi’s second entering class stood at 2.6% – a group of slackers compared to the previous year’s 1.2% – and NYU Shanghai’s recruitment criteria have been fully integrated with China’s informational intravenous drip ¹³ gaokao National College Entrance Examination. Even so, Sexton’s Teihardian new frontier of ‘idea capitals’ cannot always evade the Limits to Capital (Harvey, 1982): NYU’s Tisch Asia biz-school gamble in Singapore failed after a cascade of embarrassing financial and management crises.

This is the new urban frontier, half a century after Ruth Glass established the link between gentrification and the survival of the financially fittest in the global city. Unfortunately, critical perspectives on planetary gentrification have been distorted by a new paradox of theory, politics and practice. A half-century of theory and discourse built to analyse the causes and consequences of the systemic socio-spatial inequalities of gentrification – what Atkinson and Bridge (2005) call the ‘new urban colonialism’ – is now itself under scrutiny as a colonial imposition. Considering the catastrophic history of evolutionary hierarchies and developmental teleologies that continue to define the colonial present, this new challenge can be seen as a cosmopolitan, emancipatory evolution beyond the narrow view from Anglo-America – what Jim Blaut (1993) famously called the ‘colonizer’s model of the world’ (see also Baptista, 2013; Harris, 2008; Lees et al., 2015a, 2015b; McCann et al., 2013; Ren, 2015).

Gentrification and the noösphere

My third claim is the most provocative, because it puts me in the position of attacking the emancipatory narratives of multicultural meritocracies of competition in technology, creativity and education. Contemporary gentrification is a recombinant urbanism of old and new, defined by competitive processes accelerated through the algorithmic transformation of market relations in housing, labour and education. Silicon Valley’s noösphere involves an unprecedented and unapologetic planetary colonisation by the West: Facebook’s plans for a fleet of a thousand high-altitude drones flying over 4G LTE terra incognitae to connect the unnetworked savages is code-named Aquila, for the classical-mythology eagle carrying Jupiter’s thunderbolts to the sky. Algorithmic imperialism is reproducing dangerous new frontiers of Turner’s evolutionary logics in dynamic transnational urban networks of class competition. In an essay written not long before his ‘Evolution of Gentrification’ chapter, Neil Smith (2009: 54) challenged the idealism of poststructuralism for ‘engender[ing] the implicit assumption that to change the world it is necessary first and foremost to change the discourse’, as against the structured material inequalities of class in the capitalist mode of production. Yet this distinction has quickly blurred in the years since the global financial crisis, as the most dynamic frontiers of capital accumulation are now pursuing the commodification and monetisation of discourse itself on a planetary scale. Apple first surpassed Exxon in August of 2011 to become the world’s most valuable company in terms of market capitalisation, and is now valued at US$719 billion; Facebook’s market cap, at US$232 billion, recently surpassed JP Morgan; Google posted revenues of US$66 billion last year (2014), 89% from advertising. If we take a broad view of the old and new names in cognitive-cultural capitalism (Scott, 2007, 2011a, 2011b) ranked by market capitalisation, we see Apple, Google, Microsoft, China Mobile, Facebook, Verizon, Oracle, Disney, Amazon, AT&T, IBM, Comcast, Intel, Cisco, Taiwan Semiconductor and Qualcomm; this is a combined market capitalisation of US$3.66 trillion devoted to an informational mode of production in which the human attention span is being assembled into a transnational resource to be dynamically measured, managed and mined. Poststructuralism is the new retail frontier ¹⁴ for Wall Street finance, Silicon Valley venture capital and technological innovation, and a remarkably cosmopolitan global alliance of emergent middle classes, political elites, and energetic, idealistic students in a variegated planetary urbanisation of cognitive capitalism.

In this context, a wider array of individuals, firms, public and private institutions in cities – even the most ‘ordinary’ cities (Robinson, 2006) – are forced to compete and adapt across an increasingly dynamic, insecure and expanding networked noösphere of accelerating measurement and marketisation in housing, employment and education. Urban assets – their real-estate markets, their educational institutions, their ‘human capital’ – are all being mobilised more aggressively, more creatively and more rapidly in the pursuit of endless compound growth and capital accumulation (Harvey, 2014; Smith, 2002). Cognitive capital accumulation, however, is much more agile compared with the old growth-machine urbanism of the industrial age – and it offers alluring images of inclusion, opportunity and diversity in Richard Florida’s globally circulating ‘3T’ formula for urban success: technology, talent and tolerance. ‘In the Creative Age’, Florida (2003: 17) emphasises, ‘the mind itself becomes the mode of production, so to speak’, and the shift from an economy based on material inputs to one driven by intellectual resources elevates the importance of meritocracies – measurable and quickly adaptive meritocracies – in workplace divisions of labour and in the colleges and universities that function as ‘talent machines’ in the ‘new global competition for talent’ (Florida, 2006). Together, all of the interdependent processes by which the ‘basic cognitive-cultural system of production’ is ‘transforming the economic foundations of many large metropolitan areas all over the world’ (Scott, 2011b: 289) are dissolving the relevance of the sharp categorical distinctions and polarising binaries of the gentrification debates: demand-side and supply-side causal explanations (Hamnett, 1991; Ley, 1987; Smith, 1987), the role of ethnoracial and cultural lifeworlds as opposed to the calculative rationalities of profit and loss (Knopp, 1997; Rose, 1984; Taylor, 2003), and the fine-grained morphological differences among residential, retail, and industrial redevelopment, or ‘classical’ versus ‘new-build’ reinvestment (Davidson and Lees, 2010; Lambert and Boddy, 2002). Each of these lineages of theoretical and political debate is important so long as gentrification is understood as a spatially bounded process that happens in specific, localised city neighbourhoods with distinctive histories and built-environment characteristics. These issues matter less when gentrification is understood as a dimension of planetary urbanisation, as Merrifield (2013: 916) frames it: ‘The urban brings everything together, and transforms everything in that coming together: capital and goods, people and information, activity and conflict, confrontation and cooperation’. If we take Lefebvre (2003[1970]: 118–119) seriously, the urban is pure process: ‘a place of encounter, assembly, simultaneity’, but a non-place, a:

concrete abstraction, associated with practice. … the urban accumulates all content. But it is more than accumulation. Its content (things, objects, people, situations) are mutually exclusive because they are diverse, but inclusive because they are brought together and imply their mutual presence. The urban is both form and receptacle, void and plentitude, superobject and nonobject, superconsciousness and the totality of consciousness.

What does this mean for the evolution of gentrification? When understood as a dimension of planetary urbanisation, gentrification is no longer confined to a false choice between the chaos and complexity of localised geographical contingency as opposed to the order and simplicity of land, property and class (compare Beauregard, 1986, with Clark, 2005). Gentrification is, as ever, the upward class transformation of urban space. Just as planetary urbanisation redefines the ontology of ‘urban’, however, ‘class’ can and does take on altered meanings in cognitive capitalism. The axes of class analysis are realigned both for Marxian conceptualisations in relation to the means of production of surplus value, and for Weberian orders of class, status and power – as well as the interrelations of ‘class and its others’ (Gibson-Graham et al., 2000) of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual identity, age and other axes of difference. Class inequalities are deeper than ever, but these multiple dimensions are subject to reconfiguration amidst the rising informational content and increasingly algorithmic nature of production, consumption, governance, education and social reproduction in cognitive capitalism. The accelerating scope and pace of these reconfigurations – experienced and threatened shifts in market demands, for instance, and the Silicon Valley ‘disruption’ of various occupations and industries – are returning the concept of ‘class’ to more of the original meanings intended by Galton and Pearson: any system of social ranking, categorisation or classification used to determine hierarchical difference.

It should now be clear that understanding the upward class transformation of urban space requires that we expand our imagination of gentrification (Lees, 2012; Lees et al., 2015a, 2015b) – not to provincialise it to particular neighbourhoods, cities or regions (Maloutas, 2011). The upward class transformation of urban space is manifest in any empirical situation where individual or group differences result in a more powerful group coming to dominate any urban ‘place of encounter’. ¹⁵ In market systems for housing, labour and education, hierarchies of power involve economic competition for urban locations, but of course all societies are also constituted by other inequalities of identity, difference and power. These inequalities come together in varied ways in different cities, but the recognition of postcolonial pluralities, contingent causes and consequences, and de-centred ‘sites of epistemological production’ (Baptista, 2013: 590) should not blind us to the generic power (Clark, 2015: 454) of two universals: (1) competition, and (2) classification systems that distinguish individuals and/or groups. While in capitalism money provides the ultimate classification system, cognitive-cultural capitalism is defined by increasingly diverse pathways from cultural identity and creativity to the valorisation of success through competition. This competition is increasingly mediated through socially networked information technologies and other changes in the infrastructures of observation, measurement and classification that govern the development and certification of human capital, the management of the creative powers of cognitive labour, and the advertising-driven monetisation of human social relations, attention and learning.

The gentrification literature has, for entirely understandable reasons, focused heavily on real-estate and land-market dynamics: the rhythms of real-estate capital investment and disinvestment are crucial moments and measures of class transformation. But today’s cognitive capital interweaves real estate capital flows with media and educational discourses and communications circuits in ever more powerful and creative ways. We need to take LinkedIn CEO Jeffrey Weiner very seriously, then, when he outlines the goals of the company’s recent acquisition of the online learning enterprise lynda.com, as part of an effort to expand the ‘addressable market by $30 billion’: ‘We want to digitally map the global economy, identifying the connections between people, companies, jobs, skills, higher educational organizations and professional knowledge and allow all forms of capital, intellectual capital, financial capital, and human capital to flow to where [they] can best be leveraged’ (quoted in MarketWatch, 2015). We also need to take seriously the rapidly changing relations among informational innovation, the accumulation and circulation of capital, and the legal rules of state and corporate surveillance. We know that there is a bizarre, retroviral sort of transnational regeneration underway when Mark Zuckerberg pays US$100 million for a 750-acre parcel on the North Shore of Kauai that includes a former sugarcane plantation (Stone, 2015), while requiring the carpenters and labourers renovating his house in San Francisco to sign detailed non-disclosure agreements (Richtel, 2015), while ostentatiously staging a copy of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China on his desk at Facebook headquarters so that Lu Wei can pause and smile as a photographer captures the moment: ‘One photo taken of the Facebook visit and posted on a site associated with China’s State Council Information Office shows Mr. Lu smiling as he looks down at the book’ (Mozur, 2014). Lu Wei is described in the West as ‘China’s Internet Czar’, but that is a little out of date in an age when Zuckerberg can say with a straight face that he bought Lu Wei’s book so that he and his coworkers ‘understood socialism with Chinese characteristics’ (Mozur, 2014) by carefully studying the wisdom of the Minister of Cyberspace Administration who has worked so hard and so skillfully to measure, monitor and manage (i.e. suppress) online discussion of social movements resisting demolition and relocation in China’s domicide (Shao, 2013; also see Mozur and Perlez, 2014 ¹⁶ ). We have come a long way from John Sexton’s appeal to JFK’s anticommunist ‘new frontier’ as he works to build the Global Network University.

In the age of the ‘stretch-limo optimism’ of the Reagan years, Neil Smith mused:

No one has yet seriously proposed that we view James Rouse – the developer responsible for such maverick downtown tourist arcades as Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, South Street Seaport in New York, or Boston’s Faneuil Hall – as the John Wayne of gentrification, but insofar as such projects serve to anchor the gentrification of many downtowns, the proposal would be quite in keeping with the frontier discourse. (Smith, 1996: xv)

Today, no one has yet seriously proposed that we view Lu Wei or Mark Zuckerberg as the agents of Spike Lee’s Christopher Columbus syndrome. But the proposal would be quite in keeping with a Silicon Valley frontier discourse in which Obama tells a cybersecurity conference at Stanford, ‘This cyberworld is sort of the Wild West’, not long after the PRC’s image of Lu Wei and Zuckerberg scored a photo-op nearly as prominent as the famous February, 2011 White House image of a private dinner in San Francisco where Obama raises a toast to Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and the CEOs of Google, Yahoo!, Twitter, Oracle, Netflix and Cisco Systems. LinkedIn wants to allow all forms of capital – intellectual, financial and human – to flow where they can best be leveraged, but has agreed to censor some of its content in order to gain access to the unprecedented growth frontier of the planet’s largest stock of urbanising human capital (Mozur, 2014).

Turner’s noösphere

Now we can begin to see the full implications of the Global Network University as a cyborg MOOCification ¹⁷ of Chicago School urbanism, the cosmopolitan patriots as post-Galton-esque, non-hereditary genius descendants of Frederick Jackson Turner, and John Sexton’s ‘tremendous opportunity in the process of global evolution’ in the Teilhardian noösphere mutating into a ruthlessly competitive capitalist colonisation of Dewey’s cognitive Darwinism. ‘We began to create a new industrial revolution inside people’s heads’, Richard Florida proclaimed in a community summit – ‘Innovation: The Shock of the Possible’ – in the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver in the Autumn of 2014, in the same month Pope Francis spoke at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and ‘appeared to endorse two major scientific concepts that have given religious believers big trouble: the Big Bang and evolution’ (Mooney, 2015). Richard Florida’s creative-class capitalists embody the new industrial revolutions going on inside their heads, in the survival-of-the-fittest competition of urban entrepreneurialism in the age of planetary urbanisation. The cognitive revolutions that inspire Florida are also the focus of neoclassical, neoliberal economics ¹⁸ at the nexus with neurobiology, behavioural psychology, Big Data and the thriving ‘neuromarketing’ literature that gives us articles with titles such as ‘Evolutionary Neuromarketing: Darwinizing the Neuroimaging Paradigm for Consumer Behavior’ (Garcia and Saad, 2008). ¹⁹ To really understand the frontiers of accumulation by information, however, Florida’s boosterism – he praises Vancouver as ‘the most beautiful city on the planet’ – was just a warmup act for the main event: Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil is ‘one of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists’, and Forbes has called him ‘the ultimate thinking machine’ (SFU Public Square, 2014). Kurzweil is a cartographer of the new evolutionary frontier of exponential advances in information processing, biotechnology, communications and neuroscience in the ‘law of accelerating returns’–‘the inherent acceleration of the rate of evolution, with technological evolution as a continuation of biological evolution’ (Kurzweil, 2005: 7). Technological advances are speeding up our evolution so fast that we are on the verge of extending life expectancy by more than a year each year – so if you can just hold on a bit longer, he reassures us, we will get to a technologically enabled immortality – the Singularity. ‘Ultimately, everything is going to be information’, Kurzweil emphasises, including our consciousness. Today’s genetic engineering successes on a few of the 23,000 software programs inside us will be ‘a million times more powerful twenty years from now’. The latest generation of Parkinson’s treatments have implants in the brain with software updates delivered from outside the patient’s body, and soon we will ‘basically put our brain on the cloud’. ‘We will be a hybrid of biological and nonbiological thinking’, Kurweil explains. When he is asked a question about education, he answers with an insistent optimism: ‘Nanobots in the neocortex will communicate with the cloud’, and ‘nanobots communicating with neurons’ will serve as ‘brain extenders’ that will become available to more and more people – not just the rich. ‘We are already integrated with our brain extenders’, he observes, and at one point Kurzweil holds out his cell phone and tells the audience, ‘It’s a gateway from my brain to the cloud’. Kurzweil is only the most affable and mainstream ambassador of a diverse ‘transhumanism’ movement that ranges all the way from corporate singulatarians (such as Peter Thiel, co-founder and former CEO of PayPal, Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Sun Microsystems founder Bill Joy) to ‘anarcho-capitalist’ libertarians and DIY biohackers in communes with names such as Cyberpunk Apocalypse (Flatley, 2015). The movement also includes techno-eugenics advocates such as Zoltan Istvan, whose manifesto ‘It’s Time to Consider Restricting Human Breeding’ combines admiration for China’s one-child policy with praise for ‘a new transhuman-inspired birth control device’ developed at MIT and now funded by Bill Gates. It’s an implanted birth-control microchip that lasts 16 years and ‘can deliver hormones into the body via an on-off switch on your mobile phone’, Istvan (2014) explains; ‘It’s not a huge jump to imagine governments seeing opportunity in using this. Many children born into poverty end up costing governments billions. … a high percentage of those same kids will end up on the streets, in gangs, or in prison after they become adults’ (Istvan, 2014). ²⁰

This is what the new urban frontier looks like when today’s informational capitalists undertake a leveraged buyout of the revolutionary urban theories of the 1960s and 1970s. The social movements of Castells’ (1983) City and the Grassroots are now the Networks of Outrage and Hope of ‘connections between networks of neural networks from human brains stimulated by signals from a communications environment through communication networks’ (Castells, 2012: 219). Kurzweil studies brain extenders and the evolutionary hybrid of neocortex and the cloud as director of Engineering at Google, and as co-founder, with Larry Page, of an institution called Singularity University.

Universities, and their ecosystemic position in global city-regions, play very special roles in the evolving interface between localised urban encounters (in a Lefebvrian sense) and the ‘massive communications systems’ (Webber, 1964) that now shape contemporary class competition on a planetary scale. University towns always seem to present themselves as places of equity, diversity, inclusion and the limitless frontiers of idealism of students working to build new futures; but they are also sites of the exclusivity, instrumental rationality and hamster-wheel competitions for credentials and the narrowing paths towards economic security that reflect and reinforce the inequalities of wider societies. Globally, the ‘tertiary enrollment ratio’ – the ‘proportion of the respective age cohort enrolled in university’ – jumped from 14% to 32% in the two decades up to 2012 (Duncan, 2015: 4). ‘The World is Going to University’, the cover story of The Economist proclaims, and this is where we can see furthest into the future frontiers of how gentrification is evolving, and how evolution is being gentrified. University towns and cities – and indeed all places from which people are aspiring and striving to gain access to the cultural and economic capital symbolised by the idea of ‘University’ – constitute a crucial transnational institutional interface between localised spaces of encounter and competitive processes that are speeding up and becoming more geographically expansive and dynamic. Sexton’s Global Network University is only one of the more explicit brand names for a wider intensification of educational competition driven by a universalising moral discursive momentum: who can oppose the latest strategic plan for a school to be ‘world class’? Who doesn’t want their children to do their best, to get the best opportunities? Not long ago, the publisher James Atlas (2011) read a brochure announcing the year’s winners of a prestigious study-abroad fellowship, and was astonished at the level of achievement: ‘Let’s call this species Super Person’, he suggests, and asks, ‘Do we have some anomalous cohort here? Achievement freaks on a scale we haven’t seen before? Perhaps there’s an evolutionary cause …’. William Deresiewicz, a former English professor at Yale, describes the students of the Ivy League as an ‘alien species’ of ‘bionic hamsters’ (quoted in Heller, 2014: 68). At the University of British Columbia, one of the recently admitted students is a 15-year-old who completed high school in two years; along the way, he invented an environmentally friendly soap made from waste oil and created a handwriting recognition software application, before winning a nationwide competition for a lucrative scholarship (Chan, 2014). At the same time, one of my students too ‘ordinary’ to win a lucrative scholarship struggled while searching for an apartment in Vancouver’s turbocharged rental housing market; she arrived to one viewing only to find 15 other students, all studying application forms pre-printed with a question that transformed the advertised monthly rent into a bidding war: ‘How much more are you willing to pay per month?’. Vancouver has more supercars per capita than any other metropolis in North America, and has the planet’s second-highest home-price-to-income ratio (behind only Hong Kong) (Ian Young, speaking on Brown, 2015). Another student tells me of her narrowly missed traffic accident after being cut off by a young UBC student at the wheel of a Rolls Royce – the kind of encounter that has become sufficiently frequent to inspire an anonymous blogger to create a Tumblr page with crowdsourced images of Ferraris, Maseratis and other trophies at the ‘University of Beautiful Cars’. ²¹ Elsewhere in the city, one of the restaurants in the rapidly gentrifying epicentre of poverty and disinvestment sells tokens that can be given to the local homeless and panhandlers to redeem for a free sandwich; the ‘idealistic’ entrepreneur’s ‘quest to make an impact on the neighbourhood’ is chronicled in a ‘docu-reality’ series featured on the Oprah Winfrey Network (see Aiello, 2014). Another restaurant scrambling to survive in a ruthlessly competitive landscape of ‘ethical entrepreneurialism’ that carefully negotiates the moral rent gap that mediates the relations between ‘culinary authenticity’ and hard-edged poverty (Hyde, 2014; cf. Aiello, 2014; Burnett, 2014) features a Cdn$0.50 menu item with a promise to donate half the proceeds to local charities: ‘misfortune cookies’. On the other side of a downtown transformed by multiple generations of urban renewal, the latest celebrity-architect trophy-tower – Vancouver’s first entry into the world-city club of the ‘super-prime’ building classification – includes today’s trending accessory for the socially conscious condo buyer:

Vancouver House residents will also be connected to the global community through World Housing, which helps build houses for Third World families living in garbage dumps. For every suite purchased at Vancouver House, a new home will be donated to a family in Cambodia. Strengthening the connection, each Vancouver House resident will be able to meet the family it assisted, either on paper or online. (Stone, 2014: G6)

The ‘one-for-one real estate gifting model’ of World Housing connects Vancouver’s ever-escalating property market – as well as its growing community of professionals committed to the ‘social sustainability’ and ‘ethical architecture’ movements – to a garbage dump outside Phnom Penh through the philanthropist Scott Neeson, a former president at Twentieth Century Fox International involved in more than 200 films over a decade (Bellett, 2014). Bjarke Ingels, the young starchitect of Vancouver House who has advised that his profession should be properly understood as ‘Worldcraft’ – turning ‘surreal dreams into inhabitable space’ – has gone on to submit one of the designs under consideration for Google’s new headquarters campus in Mountain View, California. The plan would replace an existing patchwork of 7.5 million square feet of leased office space with a new landscape for which Google will be its own developer, creating the equivalent of four Empire State Buildings’ worth of office space in large, transparent canopies that will be movable, ‘like furniture’ (Dougherty, 2015).

Google’s furniture future provides a unique perspective on the ‘furniture of the mind’ that so fascinated Dewey in the Darwinian revolution a century ago. The Googleplex is just across the highway from the old NASA Ames Research Park, where we now find Singularity University. Part of the Singularity – that wonderful convergence of people, creativity and code that reminds John Sexton of Teilhard’s noösphere – involves what Marc Andreesen (2011) has described as ‘software eating the world’, as code replaces conscious, embodied human labour. ‘Technology changes, and it changes more quickly than human beings change’, Nick Carr (2014: 40) warns. ‘Where computers spring forward at the pace of Moore’s law, our own innate abilities creep ahead with the tortoise-like tread of Darwin’s law’. Carr’s (2014) review of the history makes it clear that those words could have been spoken by the pioneers of cybernetics (such as the child prodigy who entered Tufts University at age 11 and earned a PhD from Harvard at age 18, Norbert Wiener); but read those words again, and consider how each of these figures might respond: Herbert Spencer, John D Rockefeller, Patrick Geddes, John Dewey, Robert Park, Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles Galton, Ed Glaeser, John Sexton, Richard Florida and Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil’s ‘brain extenders’ and ‘nanobots’ connecting individual brains to the cloud promise to resolve the speed differential between Moore’s law and Darwin’s law – like the ‘genetic surgeon’ described by Sir Charles Galton Darwin back in 1955 – creating a new cognitive Darwinism that adapts to the stepped-up pace of competition in today’s survival-of-the-fittest worlds of social Darwinism. This is the future. For only US$12,000 (US$1,000 down) you can take the week-long Executive Program at Singularity University to learn how to adapt, compete and survive in an urbanising world where Silicon Valley’s update of Geddes’ ‘neotechnic order’ has intensified the urbanisation of social-Darwinist competitive evolution: the new planetary urban frontier.

Or you could try to get into Stanford, or Berkeley, or Harvard or MIT, or perhaps NYU’s Global Network University. Compete with the best. As we consider the accelerating race between technology and education – as humans compete on ever more planetary scales with other humans, with robots and with code – we get a glimpse of the future of measurement, classification and the competitive transformation of the urban. The view from Silicon Valley is clear. There is no need to put on the Google Glass headset to see Turner’s noösphere. You see it in the rage over the tech industry’s turbocharged gentrification of San Francisco, and the protests over the private Google Buses taking tech workers out from the San Francisco neighbourhoods they have invaded to the suburban Valley. You see it in the recombinant innovations of capital, property, creativity and information amongst entrepreneurs, developers and homebuyers racing to survive in their particular ecosystemic urban niches in cities around the world. You see it in every year’s class of hopeful students around the world struggling to get into the very best universities, even as those universities scramble furiously to work their way up in all the various rankings. You see it in the multitudes who apply to institutions such as the Global Network University, Singularity U, or a growing number of elite university divisions and franchises that all, taken together, bear a striking resemblance to Galton’s (1910) final fantasy – the cosmopolitan patriots of his utopian novel The Eugenic College of Kantsaywhere. Look at the cosmopolitan pioneers of the noösphere on the Singularity frontier. You can see the evolution of gentrification, and the gentrification of evolution.