Several ideas come to mind when I think about privatisation and its obviously adverse effects: the housing market and how cruelly inaccessible it has become; the health sector (though mostly not in the UK) to the detriment of its publicly accessible equivalent; and, while treated as a public body, the University of Edinburgh, which has fallen victim to a greedy and self-destructive corporate model of maintaining an educational institution.
These are all massive takeovers by the private sector, increasingly barricading and breaking apart what should arguably be the most cared for social sectors, each of which could have several articles written about their distinct mismanagements, and consequences. But altogether, they reflect a fundamental social problem of how our economic systems, and their orientation around a socially-disconnected view of market competition, have distorted our understandings of progress, keeping us from recognising its more meaningful potentials.
A notably controversial local case is the planned partial demolition of Summerhall, an arts and cultural centre and venue in Edinburgh. Though it was purchased to be privately owned in 2011, it has been free for public access as a creative and social hub. However, as it inevitably happens when private interests control such processes, it is now planned to “include a hotel and retail facilities as well as a venue space and co-living and student residences,” that are bound to be gut-wrenchingly expensive, like nearly all other accommodations in the city.
There’s this oddly entrenched idea — likely stemming from the brilliant policies introduced under Thatcher and Reagan’s neoliberalisms — that the private sector is an excellent professional tool to make wanted services more efficiently available, rather than the profit-obsessed and society-devolving parasite it inevitably reveals itself to be. To view progress through this lens only serves to rob the public of local, community-building sites like Summerhall, rather than embrace their less grandiose, yet more socially significant meanings, and locally-developmental potentials, which the government should involve itself in preserving.
Privatisation is indeed extremely efficient, though only at individualising everything it touches; it destroys more organic means of building crucial social networks and relations, replacing them with the cold logics of insufficiently-regulated monetary transactions. And our societies, more broadly speaking, support this. We perceive our national progress as dependent on the unchecked growth of private entities, which we then term ‘innovative.’ Instead, they only buy out spaces which hold communal meaning, and replace them with the architectural equivalent of a corporate shill.
No, Edinburgh does not need yet another student accommodation and hotel — it needs affordable, public housing. Private investments like these bring no social benefit, because they only serve to make a select few individuals profit. And what makes cases like Summerhall particularly perverse is the neglect of a deemed-lesser arts sector, only further engraining flawed perceptions of its unimportance.
Instead of promoting a progress that builds on existing communal spaces, privatisation embraces a destructive individualisation of the public, leaving it susceptible to malicious efforts to divide the population, and deepen social tensions. These are openly-discussed issues about proliferating polarisations, yet we facilitate them by rejecting a more socially-engrained understanding of progress that could build a reparatory social cohesion.
Image by Isobel Barker for The Student.
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Summerhall: How privatisation warps our vision of progress
Several ideas come to mind when I think about privatisation and its obviously adverse effects: the housing market and how cruelly inaccessible it has become; the health sector (though mostly not in the UK) to the detriment of its publicly accessible equivalent; and, while treated as a public body, the University of Edinburgh, which has fallen victim to a greedy and self-destructive corporate model of maintaining an educational institution.
These are all massive takeovers by the private sector, increasingly barricading and breaking apart what should arguably be the most cared for social sectors, each of which could have several articles written about their distinct mismanagements, and consequences. But altogether, they reflect a fundamental social problem of how our economic systems, and their orientation around a socially-disconnected view of market competition, have distorted our understandings of progress, keeping us from recognising its more meaningful potentials.
A notably controversial local case is the planned partial demolition of Summerhall, an arts and cultural centre and venue in Edinburgh. Though it was purchased to be privately owned in 2011, it has been free for public access as a creative and social hub. However, as it inevitably happens when private interests control such processes, it is now planned to “include a hotel and retail facilities as well as a venue space and co-living and student residences,” that are bound to be gut-wrenchingly expensive, like nearly all other accommodations in the city.
There’s this oddly entrenched idea — likely stemming from the brilliant policies introduced under Thatcher and Reagan’s neoliberalisms — that the private sector is an excellent professional tool to make wanted services more efficiently available, rather than the profit-obsessed and society-devolving parasite it inevitably reveals itself to be. To view progress through this lens only serves to rob the public of local, community-building sites like Summerhall, rather than embrace their less grandiose, yet more socially significant meanings, and locally-developmental potentials, which the government should involve itself in preserving.
Privatisation is indeed extremely efficient, though only at individualising everything it touches; it destroys more organic means of building crucial social networks and relations, replacing them with the cold logics of insufficiently-regulated monetary transactions. And our societies, more broadly speaking, support this. We perceive our national progress as dependent on the unchecked growth of private entities, which we then term ‘innovative.’ Instead, they only buy out spaces which hold communal meaning, and replace them with the architectural equivalent of a corporate shill.
No, Edinburgh does not need yet another student accommodation and hotel — it needs affordable, public housing. Private investments like these bring no social benefit, because they only serve to make a select few individuals profit. And what makes cases like Summerhall particularly perverse is the neglect of a deemed-lesser arts sector, only further engraining flawed perceptions of its unimportance.
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Instead of promoting a progress that builds on existing communal spaces, privatisation embraces a destructive individualisation of the public, leaving it susceptible to malicious efforts to divide the population, and deepen social tensions. These are openly-discussed issues about proliferating polarisations, yet we facilitate them by rejecting a more socially-engrained understanding of progress that could build a reparatory social cohesion.
Image by Isobel Barker for The Student.
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