By Louis Catterick, Socialist Alternative Greater Manchester
Recently it has emerged that a £2.5 million penthouse at one of Manchester’s Deansgate Towers has been named after the 19th century revolutionary socialist Friedrich Engels. It does not take much effort to see the disconnect between calling a multi-million pound luxury duplex penthouse ‘The Engels’ and what the man actually stood for – and many articles have been published raising this irony – but the reasons behind this naming decision highlight wider problems with the city’s ongoing property boom in relation to its population and the disregard for the history of Manchester that accompanies it.
For developer Renaker, Engels’ ideas are irrelevant; only the fact that Manchester has a storied history and has been home to notable figures (another penthouse is named after Alan Turing). Engels’ name here has been expropriated by ‘Brand Manchester’, hollowed out and converted into a buzz-word to signal a sanitised version of history conducive to selling luxury apartments, a tenuous attempt at reconciling the faceless rentier capitalism of contemporary Manchester with the radical history of its past.
Manchester City Council have enabled rampant development by the private sector ever since its abandonment of the strategy of ‘municipal socialism’, adopted by many northern cities during the Thatcher regime, in favour of a market driven-model of attracting private investment. As an architectural worker in Manchester, I see first-hand the attitudes of developers towards building in the city. There is constant pressure for additional ‘units’, for ‘better efficiencies’, for multiple rounds of ‘value engineering’ and a general aversion for going beyond the minimum. The motivation is plain to see, and unsurprising – the pursuit of maximum capital accumulation. This is the mechanism that has stimulated the building boom of the last two decades – private profit, with little regard to the people that these projects affect.
Any talk by development companies of ‘providing quality homes’ or ‘real communities’ in this ‘city of history and heritage’ is a veneer. It is insincere lip-service concocted by marketing teams to sell a product – luxury apartments and overpriced student accommodation – and perhaps assuage the conscience of those in local authority. This is what naming the Deansgate Tower penthouse after Friedrich Engels is; a marketing exercise and nothing more.
We recognise the need to regenerate cities, but capitalism does not have a solution to the housing crisis and never will – it was the same in Engels’ day as now. The system is not fit for purpose. The only road to affordable, quality, abundant housing is through a socialist reorganisation of society and democratic planning; a reorientation towards the things that matter to the majority rather than vehicles of profit for the minority capitalist class.
