The new series of Tina Fey’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt landed on Netflix this week, and with it landlady Lillian’s dirty-nailed war against gentrification. When an abandoned building is turned into a performance space, and she realises that the graffiti she’d welcomed is not a gang’s tag but instead marks to show where new fibre-optic internet is to be laid, she resolves to fight. “They’re gonna make this neighbourhood nicer over my dead body,” she says, her voice that of a boy approaching bar mitzvah age. “Or at least a body that sure looks a lot like me but is burned beyond recognition.”
For a long time I secretly yearned for gentrification, leaning out of the window of my flat and seeing the skyline spike into a chart of skyscrapers and Leons while my road remained stubbornly paved with human shit and one lone chicken shop. Then, a three-minute walk away, the cereal café opened, and with it a kickback against everything it stood for. Locals eyed the queues with admiring bemusement as they zipped into Pret a Manger for a takeaway porridge. I kept my gentrification fantasies quiet. But from the distance of some tube zones, hearing how black and white the arguments sound – they can be filed as either Lillian’s rage, or the “Calm down dear”s of a cold-eyed estate agent – I’m keen to hear the third voice.
This week, the managing director of the Brighton Fringe festival, Julian Caddy, has condemned its pier as “a massive public relations problem”. Daytrippers visit the arcade on the pier “via Sports Direct and Primark on their way back to their coaches”, he wrote in the Argus, describing Brighton as a place of “tacky sideshows” that, he implies, attracts the wrong sort of people. Inland, he suggests, is where the culture is happening. Whereas the beach attracts just trash, washed in on the tide.
It’s 12 years since I lived in Brighton, but once you’ve lived and grown in a place it becomes a part of you, I think. Which is why I might not have noticed if his comments had been about Bournemouth say, or Blackpool, but since they were about a one-time home they pricked me like an open badge. Doesn’t he realise that there is another way? Doesn’t he realise that to make a town grow upwards you don’t need to flatten everything that grew before?
The choices made when attempting to “regenerate” a city needn’t be simply gentrify or die. In between the two – the bulldozing of homes and “tackiness” to make way for the throwing-up of glass offices and white galleries and the choice to let a place crumble and hold on to dying relics out of a skewed nostalgia – are a thousand alternative cities. Caddy exposed the rottenness of gentrification when he spoke so disdainfully of Brighton’s brightly lit attractions. Instead of insulting the noise and fun, he should be embracing the fact that Brighton is one of few cities you can walk from the private view of a feminist performance art collective, through a penis-hatted hen party, to the pier’s doughnut stand in 10 minutes. Fifteen if, like me, you were wearing heels. The pier is not the problem.
To make a city better, it takes more than Caddy’s “Michelin-star restaurant” dream. It takes investment in existing public spaces, especially ones that communities control. It takes better public housing that people are proud of, and accessible education, and a transport system that works. Rent regulation. Safer streets. It takes a sensible step back – an understanding of the way diversity adds “value”, adds meaning. The way a city is formed by the interactions among communities, by the tensions. The whitewashing of Soho is crushingly short-sighted, too. Who will want to visit Brighton if it becomes just another tidy town?
In one last-ditch attempt to protect her beloved neighbourhood, Lillian handcuffs herself to a bulldozer. Except nobody notices. It’s Shark Week. And that’s a union holiday. To protest against gentrification often feels futile in real life, too. Which is why, rather than chaining myself to the pier, I’m so keen to hear about different ways of improving our cities. Ones that make them better for everybody, rather than just the rich and theatre-loving. I want a city with both art and arcade. There should always be a place for a 2p machine.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
