The zone had morphed from manufacturing to office space to three-dimensional bank accounts for the wealthy. A highly visible outcome was the spiking of the skylines of a small number of global metropolises. In New York, the towers were concentrated on Billionaires’ Row, just south of Central Park. The form they took was borrowed from a style popular in Hong Kong in the 1980s: the pencil tower, with a small footprint supporting an impossibly narrow and tall residential skyscraper. The New York twist was that each floor hosted only one apartment. One of the first penthouses was sold to a hedge fund manager with no plans of moving there; he thought he might throw a few parties before he flipped it.76 The penthouse of another building became the most expensive apartment in history when it sold to another hedge fund manager for $238 million in 2019.77 He did not intend to live there either.78 It was a gilded pied-à-terre.

  In 1991, the sociologist Saskia Sassen wrote critically of the rise of what she called “Global Cities,” a small number of “command-and-control centers” for the world economy, where a small number of people, mostly employed in financial services, relied on a large substratum of precarious and underpaid workers to iron their shirts, plate their entrées, mix their drinks, towel off their weight sets, drive their town cars, and clean their homes. She saw this as a new motor of inequality and a decoupling of metropolitan areas from abandoned postindustrial hinterlands, portending future political problems and economic disconnection.79 By the following decade, though, the critique had been rinsed out of the term and Global City had become jargon for brokers’ sales pitches.80

  One of the most notable buildings in this brave new twenty-first-century world of “ultra-prime” real estate was the Shard, designed by Renzo Piano. Proposed in the mid-1990s and ushered into existence by Livingstone himself, the Shard was London’s first “supertall” skyscraper, putting it in the league of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa and the Shanghai World Financial Center.81 The building’s name did not begin as a marketing gimmick but as a slur: English Heritage described the building as tearing through “historic London like a shard of glass.”82 Shard is also a term for the shell of an insect, specifically the crusty bit of exoskeleton over a beetle’s wing, and that definition fits as well. Buildings like the Shard were shells, often hollow repositories for mobile wealth, channeled in many cases through so-called shell companies.83 In the 2010s, it became common for what one critic called “shardettes” to be purpose-built specifically for overseas buyers. Many were sold at real estate shows in China and Hong Kong before they had even been constructed.84 One of two shows for the luxury Maine Tower on Canary Wharf was held in Hong Kong.85 The two hundred units sold out in five hours.86 The Qatari Investment Authority owned 95 percent of the Shard.87

  Thatcher spoke in 1997 about China’s “sinister and so far successful experiment in combining economic freedom with political servitude.”88 It was a grim irony that China and Qatar—two prime examples of capitalism without democracy—became the landlords of what was described as her “legacy,” Canary Wharf.89 The year Thatcher died, London mayor Boris Johnson traveled to Beijing to ink a deal with Chinese developers to build what he billed as “a third financial district in the capital” in the Royal Docks Enterprise Zone next to the Isle of Dogs.90 Chinese private developers acquired thirty-five acres with plans for a $1 billion business park as a foreign investment push encouraged by Xi Jinping brought new money to London.91 Johnson was trying to play back the Canary Wharf tape and run it one more time. “The U.K. is a very small country,” said one Chinese developer, “if you didn’t snatch up the opportunities early enough, there wouldn’t be any opportunities left.”92

  At the beginning of the 1980s, market radicals had set out to turn London into a miniature Hong Kong. Thirty years later, this vision had been achieved to an extent they could never have dreamed of. Scholars call Hong Kong a “tycoon city” because the government is caught in a symbiotic relationship with the city’s billionaires, almost half of whom made their fortunes in real estate.93 The government retains ultimate control of the land in Hong Kong, but it auctions off long-term leaseholds, relying on continually rising property prices to finance its own operations through sales and fees.94 In a bestselling book, Alice Poon described the Hong Kong model as “real estate hegemony”—an economic model built on speculation as property replaced other forms of production.95 Likewise, in Britain’s tycoon nation, one-quarter of the richest people have property as their main source of wealth.96 The global cities of London, Hong Kong, and New York all have two-tier labor markets where most of the gains accrue to a small number of people at the top. The state’s primary role is in safeguarding rising property prices and granting whatever blandishments are necessary for mobile capital to call their city a temporary home.

  In “the plutocratic city,” urban governments see the presence of the super-wealthy as a sign of urban health.97 The result is a city with forces moving in two opposite directions: the rich are sucked in, inflating property values, and the poor are expelled.98 After soldiers returned from the trenches of the First World War, early social housing projects were called Homes for Heroes. In 2013, Boris Johnson called the superrich “Tax Heroes” and suggested the top ten richest should be given an automatic knighthood.99 If the zone was a dagger aimed at the heart of socialism, it seems to have struck its target.

  Another place where the original dream of the enterprise zone—a frictionless place for attracting investment—came to fruition was courtesy of “America’s first developer president,” Donald Trump.100 Trump was an early devotee of the zone. As a developer, he put up buildings only if he received massive tax breaks. His breakthrough was the Grand Hyatt on Forty-Second Street in New York City, which opened in 1980, glittering with gold inside and out. Trump made use of the Urban Development Corporation, a New York agency similar to the London Docklands Development Corporation that controlled Canary Wharf. In his case, he nominally sold the property for one dollar to the state agency, which then leased the property on the cheap back to Trump. The arrangement cost the city more than $360 million in tax revenue.101 And as in London, the corporation could glide over land use laws and building codes.102 Three years later, Trump cut the ribbon on another golden pile named after himself: Trump Tower. He sued the city successfully to secure a tax break worth tens of millions more.103

  In the 1990s, Trump bought an island off New Rochelle for $13 million, hoping to fill it with two thousand condominiums as a safe haven for Hong Kong millionaires fleeing the city before the colony’s return to China.104 Trump’s island, sparkling with crystal towers whose residents would be shuttled to the financial district by hydrofoil, never materialized, but his debt to the zone was clear. A British journalist observed that the “central formula of his success” was the same one that Thatcher used in Britain’s inner cities.105

  As president, Trump remembered his fellow developers when he slipped something called “Opportunity Zones” into his massive tax cut in 2017. The zones were designed, like Thatcher’s, to encourage investors to put their money into distressed areas long-term by eliminating taxes there. People who sold stocks or other investments and put their capital gains into designated zones could lower their taxes to what Trump called “a very big, fat, beautiful number of zero” if they left them there for ten years.106 They were miniature tax havens, pockets of offshore territory.

  Opportunity zones cut requirements for all oversight, approval, and reporting. Trump’s own inner circle, including his former press secretary and his son-in-law, cashed in immediately. Zones were used to build luxury housing in Miami and condo towers in Westchester County complete with doggie spas.107 A consultant active in designing the program and choosing the zones gave a grim verdict on them before Congress in 2021. The fact that zones were costing $1.6 billion in foregone tax revenue every year was bad, but even worse was what they represented: the final reneging on the role of government in community development. It was planning by tax break, development by profit-minded developers alone, a vacuum in the place of a vision.108

  A New York councilor complaining of the state of affairs said that “billionaires shouldn’t be able to buy the sky and cast the rest of the city in shadow.”109 But in the first decades of the new millennium, this was simply how things were done. When Amazon put out the call for a new headquarters in 2017, New York City offered $3 billion in tax breaks and government assistance. When Hudson Yards, the largest mixed-use private real estate venture in US history—a jumble of housing towers and office buildings, a 720,000-square-foot shopping mall, and a climbable sculpture nicknamed the Shawarma—opened on Manhattan’s West Side two years later, it had received nearly $6 billion in tax breaks and other government assistance.110

  The New York Times architecture critic called it a “neoliberal Zion” but it was also a novel spin on the neoliberal zone.111 Although built in one of the most high-rent districts in the world, the complex was funded through a special program that sells visas to overseas investors who put money in economically distressed areas. To secure this funding, developers had traced a serpentine line of census tracts from genuinely economically depressed areas of Harlem south through Central Park to the edge of one of the most high-rent neighborhoods in the city.112 There, Hudson Yards sprouted like “glass shards on top of a wall,” as the Times put it.113 A gerrymandered enterprise zone helped make it happen.

  In London, the city in shards was given a far more gut-wrenching counter-icon in 2017. That June, a small fire turned into an inferno that engulfed Grenfell Tower, a social housing building in the middle of one of the city’s “golden postal codes”—an area where 10 percent of properties were purchased through offshore “secrecy jurisdictions,” and where the average salary was £123,000 but one-third of the inhabitants earned below £20,000.114 The fire left seventy-two people dead. The council had ignored concerns from residents about the building’s inexpensive cladding, which ended up acting as a vacuum, pulling up the flames through the gap between the material and the exterior walls. Sprinklers and other potentially lifesaving measures had been omitted because of a drive to reduce requirements for new buildings. The “bonfire of regulations” so often celebrated to lure in developers had led directly to the inferno.115 The tower stood like a charred gravestone for a defunct version of the social contract.116

  4.

  In The Long Good Friday, Shand seems to meet his end at the hands of Irish guerrillas. The Docklands were the site of an IRA bombing in 1996, which killed two and caused over a hundred million pounds of damage. In its wake, a “mini ring of steel” was built around Canary Wharf, with controlled road access, closed-circuit cameras, and a police cordon.117 Some of these features, like the cameras, would soon be familiar sights across the country. By 2015, there were a half million installed in London alone.118 As a privately owned public space—a POP, in the jargon—Canary Wharf is not subject to the usual rights of assembly and free speech. The Transport and General Workers Union found this out when it sought to protest the low wages of cleaning staff and was stopped by a high court injunction.119 There was a bitter irony to the exclusion. The union—once the largest in the world—had formed after a sequence of events beginning with a strike on those very docks in 1889.120

  The journalist Anna Minton observes that the secured and surveilled spaces of Canary Wharf became a template for public and private building projects in the early twenty-first century.121 Thatcher moved briefly into a gated community in South London, taking part in a piecemeal return of the walled city.122 By the 2010s, there were gated communities in the sky. In what one geographer calls “vertical secession,” people were retreating upward to “luxury cocoons of uber-wealth and fortressed security.”123 The popular “podium building” arrangement, pioneered in Vancouver, places a second-floor courtyard—featuring amenities such as artificial ponds and outdoor bars—above the ground floor, an ersatz street above the street.124 When the Shard was completed as London’s tallest building in 2011, the critic Owen Hatherley reflected on how impossible it was to imagine a “block of council housing or an NHS hospital as one of the pivotal objects on its skyline.”125 From a penthouse ninety floors up, the city is reduced to a backdrop.

  The last forty years are often described as a time of capitalism unfettered or set free. It is common to speak of the inability to govern finance. It moves too fast to catch, we are told. The zone shows how this quality is built in by design, multiplied in business improvement districts and many other forms of land being given to developers outright, on the model of what some call “incentivized urbanization” and others call “geobribery.”126 As geographers have shown time and again, gentrification is not what happens when the market is set free. It happens when the state leads it by the hand.127

  Canary Wharf is the most famous example of the use of the zone in the late twentieth century.128 By 2012, it housed more bankers than the City of London.129 To its champions, it tells the story of a stirring vision of untrammeled entry and experimentation—the seductive tale of economic freedom. But it cashed out as the concentration of power moved upward and outward. The enterprise zone and development corporation showed themselves not as features of an experimental free-for-all but as a one-way conveyor belt delivering British land to the balance sheets of the world’s wealthiest oligarchs and sovereign wealth funds. One of Thatcher’s greatest policy victories was her Right to Buy program, which sold council housing to tenants at a deep discount. When she came into office, about one-third of dwellings in Britain were publicly owned council housing. A few years into the twenty-first century, roughly half of that public housing stock—around 2.7 million homes—had been sold.130 The goal of this massive transformation of public into private property was to expand a homeownership society. Yet after peaking in 2003, homeownership actually began to decline.131 Moving housing from state ownership into the market had helped turn homes into a speculative asset. The fable of small shareholder democracy turned into the reality of private capture of public wealth.

  The limits of the state’s power can be seen in the Canary Wharf of the 2020s, where new shards have stalled and Boris Johnson has watched his super-prime real estate knights ride away. The Royal Docks project, which had been one of the key triumphs of his mayoralty, has become a “ghost town,” with foliage repossessing the fences.132 Another of his putative victories was a Chinese-backed development on Canary Wharf with the lackluster nickname “the Spire” slated to be the tallest building in western Europe. Construction of the Spire was slowed by uncertainty after Brexit, the pandemic, and the Chinese crackdown on overleveraged real estate investment. The developer lobbied the council to purge the ninety-five affordable units from the plan to preserve its profit margin.133 As of 2022, the Spire was a hole in the ground. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the moral quandary of being an offshore piggy bank for oligarchs also became more pressing. Abramovich sold Chelsea, and politicians tried to figure out how to untangle the rat’s nest of blind trusts and blandly named offshore shell companies that effaced the identity of property owners—while wondering what the effect on the city’s economy would be if they did.134

  As the government went from seeing its role as facilitating an industrial or agricultural base to attracting mobile buyers, the city of shards appeared as a natural consequence—and so did the city of holes when the money dried up and the city of aliases when the money became too tainted. All the more reason to remember the defeated versions of an alternative city. Progressive proposals of recent years draw inspiration from the policies of the 1980s GLC. Programs like Health Emergency and the London Black Women’s Health Action Project, focusing on preventive care and responding to community needs, as well as technology networks for “socially useful production” and efforts to discourage single-rider automobiles now look like cutting-edge ways of dealing with risks and opportunities in the modern city.135 The revival of municipalism as well as ideas of community land trusts and the urban commons propose a different relationship between property, community, and the role of the state than the city of shards.136

  In 1994, the geographer David Harvey described Canary Wharf as “floating like a lost ark downstream from the City on the tide of the Thames.”137 It is worth finishing the story with a counterimage. When a group called Democracy for Docklands was trying to figure out how to publicize their alternative plan for developing the area, one resident mentioned that he owned and operated a small barge. Local artists came up with a logo for the movement, a dragon whose sinuous body was in the shape of the river Thames running through the docks, and affixed a large red poster of it to the barge. In April 1984, with the barge at the head of a large procession of boats, a thousand people took part in the first People’s Armada to Parliament. Copies of the People’s Charter for the Docklands were delivered to every member of Parliament.138 More armadas would take place over the following years. Their route to Parliament took a little more energy than the “lost ark” from the City imagined by Harvey. Unlike Canary Wharf, the people’s fleet had to travel against the current.