O que mais assusta nestas palavras é serem uma simples observação desapaixonada das tendências que modelam o mundo contemporâneo, feita por um professor de urbanismo. Não é um discurso inflamado destinado a galvanizar para acção. É um interligar de dados observados e coligidos:
"Neoliberalization – the reorganization of societies through the widespread imposition of market relationships – provides today’s dominant, if crisisridden, economic order. Within this framework, societies tend to sell off public assets (whether utilities or public spaces) and open up domestic markets to outside capital. Market-based strategies for the distribution of public services undermine and supplant social, health and welfare programmes.
An extraordinary expansion of financial instruments and speculative mechanisms is also crucial to neoliberalization. Every area of society becomes marketized and financialized. States and consumers alike pile up drastic financial debt, securitized through arcane instruments of global stock markets. By 2006, just before the onset of the global financial crash, financial markets were trading more in a month than the annual gross domestic product of the entire world."
Tendo como conclusão lógica a cidade contemporânea, as zonas luxuosas, os bairros degradados e os subúrbios onde sobrevive uma classe média cada vez mais precária:
"The urban landscape is now populated by a few wealthy individuals, an often precarious middle class, and a mass of outcasts.
Almost everywhere, it seems, wealth, power and resources are becoming ever more concentrated in the hands of the rich and the super-rich, who increasingly sequester themselves within gated urban cocoons and deploy their own private security or paramilitary forces for the tasks of boundary enforcement and access control."
Stephen Graham (2011). Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism. Londres: Verso.
Este é um daqueles livros que leio para tentar fazer sentido deste mundo hipermoderno em que estamos mergulhados - um mundo energizado por tecnologia, com fossos profundos de injustiça, ameaçado pelas alterações climatéricas, hiperreal, misto de utopia tecnológica com distopia social.
