Bulldozed! Dispossession and the Homogenised Mind

For much of humanity’s existence, our traditional worldview or cosmos was based on sacred, reciprocal relationships with the land and governed by natural seasons and localised community rhythms. What we are currently seeing, however, is an accelerated shift from a physical universe rooted in seasons and community to a virtual one mediated by screens and platforms.

In this new world order, human experience is mediated by mobile apps and predictive algorithms that convert human actions into data points. At the same time, spontaneous ‘messy’ human interaction is engineered away in favour of a sterile, predictable environment. This system encloses both urban and rural life, replacing the sacred and reciprocal relationships between humans and the land with a computational universe where creativity is harnessed to serve corporate extraction.

The changing city: Amsterdam

Change is inevitable. But how much change occurs and who drives the changes in society is another question. Take the Amsterdam of the 1970s and 80s, for instance. It was a bit seedier, rawer, more unpolished and more spontaneous. It seems much less so today. Cash has been pushed to the periphery, with most transactions now monitored. Mass tourism has led to a more sanitised environment. And a previous spirit of spontaneity on the street appears dampened.

The transformation of Amsterdam from the gritty, countercultural epicentre of the 1970s and 80s to the polished, hyper-managed city of today is a case study in the tension between radical social experimentation and the pressures of global capitalism. The decline of the raw Amsterdam and the rise of the current sanitised version is the result of a deliberate shift in urban governance and economic strategy.

The late 60s—notably the Provo movement, a shortened form of provoceren (to provoke) —bequeathed to Amsterdam a culture of dissent and anti-authoritarianism. This spirit fuelled the squatting movement (kraakbeweging) of the 70s and 80s. Squatting was a political project. By occupying derelict buildings, squatters created autonomous zones that bypassed the market. These spaces, like Vondelpark or the many legalised squats, acted as incubators for the art, music and social spontaneity that defined the city’s unpolished character.

The state eventually viewed these autonomous zones as threats to public order and private property. The late 70s and early 80s were marked by intense, often violent, clashes between police and squatters (the kroningsoproer or Coronation Riots of 1980 are a prime example).

The authorities gradually shifted from a hands-off approach to one of rigorous legal containment. New laws, culminating in the criminalisation of squatting, effectively dismantled the physical infrastructure that allowed ‘raw’ countercultural life to thrive.

While the heroin crisis of the 70s and 80s hit Amsterdam hard, it also provided the state with the necessary justification to ramp up policing and surveillance. ‘Unpolished’ street life became synonymous in the public imagination with danger and decay. The subsequent ‘cleanup’ of the city centre was the beginning of the end for spontaneous street culture.

In the earlier decades, the city’s cultural energy was organic and self-generated. It wasn’t planned by urban developers, but it emerged from the spaces the authorities had either lost control of or ignored.

Aside from residences, squats were DIY art galleries, experimental theatres and underground venues. The legacy of the 60s meant that being an artist often meant being an activist. There was an inherent link between the raw state of the city and the raw art it produced. Because rent was low or non-existent in the margins, artists could afford to take risks and experiment without needing commercial viability.

The scenes outside Amsterdam Central Station back then, with musicians playing without permits, was a manifestation of a city where the streets belonged to the public. It was a chaotic, bottom-up vibrancy.

Today, that vibrancy has been largely replaced by professionalised, commercial and often temporary cultural outputs designed for a global audience. Much of this is now curated through city-sanctioned events, designated nightlife zones and high-end museums. It is ‘professional’ and ‘accessible’, but it lacks the unpolished soul that came from the lack of oversight.

As the city became a global tourism brand, real estate prices skyrocketed. The spaces that once housed artists and countercultural collectives are now high-end residential apartments, luxury hotels or concept stores.

Modern ‘vibrancy’ is often packaged. Where once you had a spontaneous band, you now have a ‘street theatre festival with a budget and an itinerary. This is safer for tourism, but it effectively kills the serendipity that defined the older, rawer Amsterdam.

Back in the day, bands with guitars and amps pitched up outside Amsterdam Central Station. In the 80s, the station area was a chaotic, organic public space. Today, it is a transit-oriented highly managed hub optimised for throughput and tourism. Street performers now require permits and are often regulated to specific zones.

The disappearance of cash and the rise of digital tracking reflect a transition toward a ‘smart city’ model, where unpredictability is viewed as a systemic inefficiency rather than a cultural virtue.

The shift to a tourism-heavy economy necessitated this change. To attract high-spending international tourists, the city rebranded itself as a safe, clean and predictable destination. The gritty, unpredictable nature of the 70s was seen as an obstacle to this economic pivot.

Universal cities

What was once a city of spontaneity is becoming a laboratory of control. But this is not unique to Amsterdam. The same can be said about most modern cities.

While the centre of Amsterdam retains its traditional architectural sparkle, universal steel, glass and concrete multi-storey structures are making their mark especially on the sprawling outskirts but also in and around the centre.

On the surface, the creeping homogenisation of the global urban landscape (Starbucksidation) is about glass façades, ‘placeless’ spaces and corporate signage. From new-build residential projects in Amsterdam Noord to commercial real estate in Toronto or Bangalore, everything seems to increasingly resemble the sterility of an airport terminal—impersonal and contactless.

This universal architecture is a blend of functionalism and brute-force scale. It strips away the ornamentation of traditional architecture, replacing it with the sterile, ‘frictionless’ surfaces of glass and steel designed for ‘efficiency’.

But this functionalist veneer disguises a monolithic brutalism of scale—massive structures that communicate power by literally and figuratively towering over the human-scale vitality of the street. Unlike the idealistic modernism of the past, this is a postmodernism of branding: a uniform, placeless aesthetic that reduces the rich, localised identity of a city to a blandness, paving the way for corporate logos to be projected to tell us that we are in a place of ‘progress’, while we are actually in a space of total state-corporate enclosure.

However, this visible architecture is symbolic of a system that converts land, places, spaces, labour, food and data into manageable units of profit. It dismantles the decentralised, the sacred and the sovereign and replaces them with a uniform reality calibrated for extraction.

In the context of this article, the sacred is a reciprocal, spiritual relationship between humans, the land and the cosmos. The sacred is found in the traditional rhythms of life that are being eroded by a (post-)industrial capitalism with its cold and calculated rationale of instrumentalism.

The spiritual is not necessarily confined to formal religious institutions. It is tied to the everyday practices, rituals and cultural continuities that provide people with a sense of identity, strength and community. These essential human dimensions help individuals maintain a sense of self and social cohesion. The spiritual is the recognition that we are part of a greater whole and our thoughts and actions have consequences that ripple far beyond the immediate, the material and the visible: something that gives living and being ultimate value.

Both the sacred and the spiritual are lived realities. They represent the endurance of human culture and community-based resilience against systems that would otherwise reduce people to mere consumers or cogs in a global economic machine.

In the traditional urbanism of the Global South, the tight-knit lane, with its markets, shrines and workshops, embodies a rhythm of life that operates beyond state or corporate control. These winding ‘messy’ spaces host informal economies where trade is often untaxed and unmapped and where religion and ritual intertwine with everyday commerce and life. What appears ‘messy’ to modern planners is, in fact, a living system of decentralised resilience.

But what we are seeing is a move towards the universal city. A city that is zoned, monitored, predictable and ‘safe’ and is designed to host global brands. For planners, this is ‘progress’ and ‘development’, an aesthetic preference that symbolises the status of modernity. Dig a little deeper, however, and it is ultimately a structural requirement of global capital.

Zoning, eviction and gentrification transform the lane’s autonomous vitality into the controlled, bland environment of the corporate plaza. The street market, for instance, once the urban outlet for rural producers, is displaced by standardised retail hubs sustained by the global agribusiness supply chain.

The spatial enclosure of the city mirrors the enclosure of the countryside where farmers lose their right to seed, soil and price autonomy. The universal city is simply the urban face of a universal countryside. Both are redesigned so that land, labour and life can be rendered into data and debt, the ultimate enclosure of dependency.

The same enclosure of spontaneity we see in the transformation of Amsterdam’s street culture is the blueprint for the enclosure of the rural landscape—where local seed sovereignty is replaced by the sterile predictability of agritech data centres.

The gleaming mall in Delhi and the agritech data centre in Hyderabad are two faces of the same operation: the concentration of sovereignty within corporate systems. The most obvious examples are the cameras monitoring our every move on the street and in the mall to the cloud-based systems of Microsoft or Bayer designed to manage, predict and control every aspect of the farm and the farmer.

The rhetoric of ‘development’ tries to convince people that the replacement of small marketplaces by supermarkets and malls is progress, just like the replacement of agricultural diversity by patented seed monoculture is passed off by Bayer as the ‘modernisation’ of agriculture. Yet this great lie conceals dependence on imported inputs and infrastructural systems owned elsewhere.

At the heart of the system lies a digital brain. Just as big agritech platforms harvest data from the farmer, the soil and the seed, urban infrastructures harvest the data of citizens as they move through the city landscape and exchange. Cashless systems, sensors, facial recognition cameras, biometrics and predictive algorithms turn citizens into consumers who become data points within a managed economy.

The logic is that what cannot be measured cannot be permitted to exist. Informal exchange, local customs or sacred practice are marked as inefficiency or disorder to be engineered away.

The smart city and smart agriculture

The smart city is ultimately a metaphysical project. It replaces a cosmos shaped by ritual, season and mystery with a computational universe where unpredictability is a design flaw.

This is the logic of the smart city—a world where humanity is reduced to a calculated formula of efficiency. If we are stripped of our chaos, our intuition and our spontaneity, we are no longer human.

Soviet filmmaker Alexander Dovzhenko and Kentucky farmer-poet Wendell Berry both capture a living cosmos of land and community that the modern world has lost.

Berry’s Port William (1977) honours farmers trading seeds they have grown themselves, free of corporate enclosure. This is the authentic, increasingly bulldozed by smart agriculture’s control grid and the smart city’s metrics and malls.

While Berry is quite well known in the West, it is worth saying a few words about Dovzhenko’s silent film Earth (1930). The film opens and closes with sweeping, almost worshipful shots of Ukrainian wheat fields and orchards. The land is portrayed as a living entity, fertile and abundant. Dovzhenko focuses on the cycles of life and death, portraying the death of an old farmer as a peaceful return to the soil, surrounded by ripe fruit.

While the film supports collectivisation, its heart lies in the communal spirit of the villagers, encapsulated by shared labour, singing and the collective mourning of Vasyl, the old farmer referred to above.

The film is noted for its slow pacing and emphasis on visual poetry. It captures the rhythms of nature—seasonal changes, wind in the wheat, the slow ripening of fruit—as a spiritual force that binds humanity to the cosmos.

The traditional lane, village or market is a place to assert our freedom precisely because it is unmapped, unpredictable and ‘inefficient’. And these locations integrate the sacred with the everyday: a roadside shrine, a banyan tree or a conch shell hanging outside a kirana store in India.

But universal architecture and infrastructure require a blank slate on which it can inscribe its logos and networks. Capital erases community, the sacred and tradition and reinvents the landscape so that property can be listed, branded and monetised.

The same principle governs the global food system: a few corporations increasingly dictate what seeds are grown, what foods are marketed and what transactions are visible. The smart city is the urban endpoint of that chain, a controlled consumption zone fed by a controlled production landscape.

Both farmer and citizen become dependents of a system too integrated to defy.

The Starbucksed city doesn’t just look empty but feels empty. It is a sensory desert designed to dull the mind, to homogenise thought and being. By replacing ‘messy’, loud and vibrant streets and lanes with sterile glass, concrete and steel, this architecture forces us into a state of permanent displacement.

We increasingly reside in non-places where we are never truly home. The sheer scale of these corporate spaces smothers the local, making human connection feel superficial and rootless and traditional rhythms feel obsolete.

The universal city is the final enclosure. It mirrors uniform patented seeds and soil stripped of its natural vitality due to corporate-led cropping patterns. The same logic that binds the farmer to debt now binds the citizen to data. We see corporate-led systems planted in environments of control and surveillance, branded as smart cities and smart agriculture.

What is being dismantled is a cosmic order that sustained human life for millennia. The rhythms of reciprocity, the sanctity of the seed, the moral economy of the lane—these were the foundations of civilisation until they became defined as ‘inefficient’.

The smart city, like the agritech platform, is a corporate-designed cosmology. It denies the sacred and the unpredictable pulse of life. It replaces the world with a simulation of the world, a managed reality where nothing exists unless it can be measured, indexed and owned.

To defend the lane is to defend the seed—see my open access books on the global food system, the agrarian imagination and India’s farmers’ resistance to corporate enclosures, which make clear that it is not about nostalgia but about resistance against a system that seeks to extinguish the very conditions that make humanity possible.

Colin Todhunter specialises in food, agriculture and development and is a research associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization in Montreal. His open access books on the global food system can be accessed via Figshare (no sign in or sign up required).

SUPPORT OFFGUARDIAN

If you enjoy OffG's content, please help us make our monthly fund-raising goal and keep the site alive.

For other ways to donate, including direct-transfer bank details click HERE.