Seeing Beyond the Scope
London is considered one of the, if not the most developed city in the World. Highly capitalist with a Neoliberal unregulated market economy, rife privatisation tendencies going right into Healthcare and Education sectors and a global financial hub whose citizens have entered The Era of Mass Consumption. People have access to the top services in the world and can live leisurely. Who would ever think that 27% of London’s citizens live in poverty? That some children in the very heart of this megacity are living in highly unequal conditions when compared to their neighbours? Standards of living, access to healthcare, transportation services, and quality of education vary widely just from one borough to another. Often with changes sometimes visible a few meters apart; for instance, infrastructure and safety issues have proved to be frighteningly deadly in the case of the Grenfell Tower in 2017.
Living in a big city, we don't necessarily focus on everything happening around us. We get used to certain things. Economic inequality is significant in London, where 50% of the city's wealth is earned by 10% of the households. The situation has become more extreme in the last years with the poorest having lost 32% of their wealth while the top 10% have seen their wealth increased by 25%. One question we can ask is: how are people on the 'short end' surviving and adjusting to these drastic fluctuations? Inequality manifests itself all over London and it is certainly not limited to housing. In a capitalist society that behaves like a money-making factory, rising prices aren't seen as negative. Quite the contrary, the people making the decisions just keep getting richer and don't (want to) see the people struggling! Living in London has become a distant dream for many as it becomes too expensive and this is a result of the housing sector being largely deregulated. During the last decade, instead of focusing in solving this problem, it has only gotten worse, with a sharp decline in the model of social housing. True to capitalist fashion, keeping poor people out and making the rich, richer is indeed the London model.
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As a metropolitan city, a common view you can capture across London is of bustling areas such as Kings Cross Saint Pancras station full of upper and upper-middle class citizens scurrying about to catch a (usually) quite expensive train. This is a ‘passing’ point, nobody really stops or looks around, nobody really lives in the area that hosts over 20,000 people every day. Although constantly busy during the day, the neighbourhood changes quite radically at night. The ‘forgotten’ passengers stay roaming at night, with no shelter or form of roof over their heads. The area becomes a hub of depravity with public liquor drinking and violence. The secure feeling of the daytime disappears and insecurity and danger seem to take its place. You can see in these images the stark contrast between the peak times where trains are running and the times where they’re not. Often thought of as an affluent zone of the city, especially since the arrival of the Eurostar train which 'cleaned' the area up, this seems to only be the case when people are passing by to catch their commute. The true inhabitants of the area are masked by this swarm of National Rail and Eurostar consumers and are only visible at night. The difference in human beings there is quite striking, people purchasing £6 Benugo Detox Juices in the day and as night follows, the struggle in buying a £3 ready-meal from the supermarket begins.
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It is most definitely not normal that the prevalent problems we encounter on a daily basis such as poverty and inequality have become normalised in many of our everyday lives. It is imperative we drive towards raising awareness and shedding light on the very things we are increasingly becoming neglectful of. Perhaps Susan Moeller was right. Maybe we have all succumbed to “compassion fatigue” as our attention span of the public shortens and the peripatetic media journalism consuming our time and space aren’t really representing the core issues rightfully. International 'breaking' news goes from being news to just any plain old information. Compassion fatigue leads to editorial frenzy as they attempt to compete with other medias. Important events are rejected if they are not more dramatic than their predecessor's.
Campaigns proposing child sponsoring by the international organisation ‘Save the Children’ corners readers into a box of guilt as they see the ad for the first time. The second time a reader sees the ad in a magazine, they may linger over the photograph and then turn the page. The third time the page is often turned without hesitation. The fourth time we may linger again, but to avoid wallowing in guilt we cynically assess the manipulation of in turning the page we become responsible. Of course, we cannot respond to every crisis or appeal and because of this, we come to believe that we do not care. It becomes a routine to flip the pages and as you know it, we have reached the peak stages of compassion fatigue. Invisible Ends aims at voicing real-life issues Londoners face on a daily basis. Because this is something we don't think of and recognise enough. How can there be shiny high rise buildings in Elephant and Castle, yet a five-minute walk down Camberwell Road brings you to a sea of shabby estates leaving people to live in squalor? Our western governments are quick to criticise the 'undeveloped' sprawling shantytowns pouring out of what they also consider less developed megacities. Maybe it's time they are faced with the inequality in their own so-called 'developed' cities, and we're starting with London.
This city's landscape is constantly evolving and every issue that emerges today is forgotten and left in the past tomorrow.
We become more desensitised to the problems that occur around us, the growing population of homeless people in need and the lack of adequate infrastructure in our local area remains in our peripheral vision- lest we forget! When these problems are normalised in everyday life, the reality of these issues become a blur. Compassion fatigue is a reality that affects us all and we need to break out from these mental barriers. What needs to come forth is a transformation in the way media represents these issues at hand. It is important to take a step back and acknowledge our power as individuals to improve our surroundings because when we make the invisible visible, London can become a more equal place.