Each year after Notting Hill Carnival there is debate in media columns and talkback radio about whether the Carnival has outgrown its current site. ‘The streets of gentrifying Notting Hill can no longer accommodate Europe’s largest street party’, is one argument. ‘The Caribbean community has moved on and so should the carnival’ is another. On reflection, there are two deep-seated fears being presented here: first, fear of the crowd, its sheer size and unpredictability; and second, the fear of the stranger and his/her ambiguity.

Notting Hill crowd.
[image © copyright scottroberts, some rights reserved]

The popular belief is that crowds are volatile and can equal trouble. Such impressions have ultimately led to crowd control tactics such as ‘kettling’. However, psychologists at St Andrews University, researching how people behave at demonstrations, large sporting or music events, have found that there is wisdom embedded in crowds which nearly always act in highly rational ways, and are more likely to cooperate than panic in an emergency. The findings pointed to an ‘identity shift’ which drives people in a crowd to act in the best interests of themselves and those around them. Decades earlier, Elias Canetti wrote of similar sensations when he described the individual’s transcendence when subsumed into a crowd, now free of the burden of distance from others.

Trying to make my way up Ladbroke Grove during Carnival it is hard to feel this transcendence. At first there is a sense only of discomfort; then a feeling of suffocation as my 5’ 2” frame is squeezed on all sides, pulled back, loses sight of my partner, and becomes surrounded by strangers.

According to Canetti, ‘there is nothing that man (sic) fears more than the touch of the unknown … It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched’. Not just any crowd though. A crowd in which we lose our fear of being touched by the unknown is a crowd that is already dense with familiarity. This is a closed crowd; a crowd that sets its boundaries and desires permanence at the expense of disorderly growth.

The open crowd, a Notting Hill crowd, is another experience altogether. It is potentially limitless and exists so long as it grows, pulling people, barbeque smoke and sequins into its wake as it roils its way through the neighbourhood, disintegrating as quickly as it began when it reaches sunset.

Perhaps then the tensions that infiltrate Notting Hill Carnival are not generated in the diversity of people per se, but in the dynamics of closed and open crowds, order and spontaneity. Their meeting can be fraught as incursion into each other’s territory is unwittingly made. The closed crowd may not even appear on the streets. Its adherents appear silent, invisible in cultural frameworks dominated by established social hierarchies (for example, men, capital, Englishness). Its boundaries are of course always contested (for example, by women, youth, or other cultural frames of reference) and sometimes breached by the open crowd. But the open crowd’s impermanent nature may not provide any lasting infrastructure on which to build equality and can block a thoroughfare as easily as any gated community.

On a daily basis then we must negotiate with either crowd, sometimes going with the flow, sometimes stepping to the side to avoid collision; watching, always watching. These negotiations are inflected by personal dispositions of, as Bauman puts it, mixophilia and mixophobia: the love of the city and all its crowds, and its inverse proposition, the fear of the city with all its strangers.

Adding to our repertoire of skills that as individuals we deploy to navigate the city, we find a means to move. Holding hands, forming a human chain, and like water, sliding between the cracks of space that mysteriously open up once some unseen pressure of presence is applied to the crowd, we make our way up Ladbroke Grove.

About the author

Melissa Butcher is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the Open University. Her research and teaching focuses on managing change in culturally diverse urban spaces.

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It’s the season for an overstretched seaside metaphor: with around three months to go I’m beginning to sense a gathering swell of interest in the Copenhagen climate talks later this year. We’ll all be hearing plenty more about ‘COP 15’ (the Fifteenth Conference of the Parties in the UN climate policy negotiations) in the weeks to come. Tempting to bring in plenty more storm (teacup?) surf (opportunity?) and shipping analogies but I’ll resist. Enough now just to note down a few thoughts about what I anticipate about the conference and its significance. I’ll be going as a member of an OU team that will be working to make sense of the event and to analyse and communicate day by day.

2008 UNFCCC conference in Poznan.
[Image © copyright Oxfam International, some rights reserved]

COP 15 is going to have some people crying from the rooftops that this meeting decides the fate of all humanity and others sniping about another pointless UN junket. The truth is that this meeting does matter - a great deal - but it needs to be put in perspective. This is a significant moment in the development of an international political process that started in the early 1990s, and is set to go on for many years into the future. The Copenhagen meeting aims to set the next bundle of targets, timetables and mechanisms when those outlined in the Kyoto deal of 1997 run their course in 2012.

Many things are different this time around. International climate politics is more complex but also more mature. It is no longer simply a matter of the rich North admitting 'mea culpa' and obsessing about mitigating their own emissions and funnelling some 'clean tech' cash to the developing world. The booming manufacturers and sprouting middle classes of the developing world giants of India and China have made them major CO2 polluters. Political leaders and publics in the South are also much more aware of the potentially huge consequences of climate change for their societies.

Things have moved on in the North too. Levels of awareness of the science have increased, but along with this an awareness of the awkward questions raised by it (wind farms and more nuclear waste in your backyard? Higher electricity and fuel bills?). These changes and challenges North and South are neatly summarised in the shifting US and Chinese positions. The financial crash is significant too: it has revived a sense that the state has both responsibility for and can have some power over the economy and it has breathed life into phrases like 'green new deal'. Hence these talks are going on in the context of a much more cautious and critical view of unfettered markets.

But with climate change going up the public agenda around the world government ministers are now working in the full glare of media attention. The media want conflict, event and personality, and in looking for these they can distort the (dull but important) work of international policy development. Bluntly, the talks are about who cuts emissions by how much and when. Every move has consequences and it’s no longer enough to talk glibly about 'low hanging fruit' of easy emissions cuts. To meet climate change with the kind of energy and imagination that will be required will need us to rethink and rewire almost every aspect of contemporary life. The 24/7 short attention span world of the media may not allow much political space for this.

Nevertheless we are helped by the fact that plenty of new people have joined the climate change story since the talks that produced the Kyoto Protocol in the 1990s. Lord Stern is one of them. This respected economist was commissioned by Gordon Brown and Tony Blair to lay out the options for a mainstream western government. Stern found that early action to cut emissions and avoid warming ends up much cheaper than delaying action and paying big bills later to cope with the effects of climate change. And cutting emissions later is also tougher.

So the arguments have been piling up in favour of a robust deal this year. But we shouldn't raise expectations too high: as one wise head noted how people always overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in a decade. Also, focusing on the international politics can distract us from the fact that there are many other creative and determined responses to environmental change in play. On that note, my next post will be about a new Open University project - Creative Climate - that will work to capture the human story of environmental change from 2010 to 2020. We’ll be hoping that plenty of people in the OU community – students, associates, staff – will contribute to that work. More on that soon.

About the author

Joe Smith is a lecturer in the environment at the Open University and chair of Interdependence Day. He has written books on climate change and sustainability, the media and global issues, and the green movement.

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After watching recent news images of Afghani refugees climbing razor-wired fences around a Greek port, I prepared myself for the tabloid headlines screaming ‘invasion’ that would inevitably come the next day and for the government to announce yet more measures to sure up the borders of Great Britain. It seemed impossible to imagine a time when politicians in Europe actually encouraged ‘free’ movement, and discouraged the use of passports. Writers in the 16th century extolled the virtues of travel just for the sake of ‘curiosity’, and the onus was on receiving territories to extend a sense of hospitality to the traveller.

Of course, this is an idealised description: then as today, some travellers were more welcome than others. But reading Adam McKeown’s new book, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalisation of Borders, reminded me that our current web of migration regulations has a history, one embedded in the 19th century exclusion of Asian migrants from white settler colonies in the Pacific. His detailed research raises several paradoxes which perhaps point to why, even with the intense focus given to migration control by successive governments, we still have a situation that the International Organisation of Migration (2003) has called a ‘migration governability crisis’.

The first paradox is that contemporary border controls evolved from regulations developed by settler nations such as the United States and Australia, which were ostensibly founded on the premise of egalitarianism by pioneers of political freedoms despite the obvious racism in ‘white only’ migration policies and the decimation of indigenous populations. As a result, over time, discrimination has become acceptable at borders but not overtly within the state itself.

A boat crowded with Cuban refugees arrives in Key West, Florida, during the 1980 Mariel Boatlift
[image in the public domain, from United States Coastguard Service, sourced from Wikimedia]

Second, while neo-liberal globalisation is premised on an idea of free trade between countries, migration control is an obstacle to mobility. As a result, we have seen increasing separation between regulations relating to commerce and those relating to migration. Border control is now designed to facilitate some kinds of mobility, and migrants, and block others. Attempting to guarantee freedom, for some at least, through the imposition of regulations, transformed migration for others into an act of evasion and criminality. The meaning of ‘free’ has become ambiguous and opaque as a result.

The third paradox raised in McKeown’s research is that while migration laws coerce and exclude, interrogate, evaluate and attempt to quantify migrants, they are also considered as vehicles of justice, fairness, the ‘rule of law‘, and ‘efficiency’. They reflect normative ideals of how things should be, including the international order of states. It is impossible not to reflect on these distinctions and the right to be mobile when arriving at Heathrow Airport with an EU passport that only needs to be held up for a cursory glance by an immigration officer. To the left Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe queue up and wait. I am classified as a professional migrant, incorporated into a legal, formal administration, probably disappearing from the category of migrant altogether. In contradistinction are the ‘others’, those that work in 3D (domestic, dirty and dangerous jobs) who face resistance to their formal recognition within national labour regimes.

State institutions appear unable to resolve the inherent tensions in these paradoxes so the migrant continues to find their own way through red tape and over razor-wire. The kafka-esque world of immigration bureaucracy and rigid state regulations is met by the resilient human abilities of evasion and obfuscation in the hope of a better life.

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Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalisation of Borders
Adam McKeown, published by Colombia University Press

About the author

Melissa Butcher is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the Open University. Her research and teaching focuses on managing change in culturally diverse urban spaces.

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