From Highways to High-Rises: The Urbanization of Capital, Consciousness and Labor Struggle in Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses

To dissect the urban process in all of its fullness is to lay bare the roots of consciousness formation in the material realities of daily life. It is out of the complexities and perplexities of this experience that we build elementary understandings of the meanings of space and time; of social power and its legitimations; of forms of domination and social interaction; of the relation to nature through production and consumption; and of human nature, civil society, and political life.

(David Harvey, The Urban Experience 230)

In explaining the ways in which the production and reproduction of urban space provides material support for consciousness-formation, David Harvey emphasizes the role of the built environment in constructing forms of consciousness that facilitate the reproduction of social relations produced by capitalism. In this way Harvey forces us to become aware of the manner in which the spatial and material organization of social existence is a main factor in structuring our very notion of social reality by fomenting in us particular imaginaries through which we experience the latter as meaningful. However, since the relationship between the built environment and consciousness-formation is dialectical and the influence of the former over the latter is never fully determining, we must also take into account the existence of oppositional forms of consciousness that, through concerted action, may exert a transformative influence back upon the built environment itself (Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference 418–20). Accordingly, to the extent that capitalist accumulation is the driving force behind the production of urban space, this suggests that any struggle against this dominant mode of production must also involve a spatial praxis that challenges its prevailing spatial order.

Central to Harvey’s theorization of urban space, therefore, is the conception of the latter as a site of constant conflict among contending social and economic forces. A central element in the urbanization of capital is thus also the process of “creative destruction” through which capital continually restructures urban space in a manner consistent with its changing accumulation strategies. Consequently, an analysis of the urban environment must necessarily situate its object in relation to larger processes of capitalist accumulation—an approach that also demands a historical perspective. As such, the present essay identifies in the displacement of the Los Angeles highways by its Downtown high-rises as the city’s privileged urban symbol a symptomatic paradigm change in the production of urban space consistent with, and overdetermined by, the transition from Fordist national industrial production towards the post-Fordist intensification of transnational capital flows as the main source of wealth-creation.

Also acknowledging the importance of a historically informed cultural perspective in the analysis of urban space, Harvey asserts:

The spaces of the city are constructed through the mobilization of the sources of power in particular configurations. Once constructed, the spatial organization of the city assumes the qualities of a text that we have to learn to read and interpret correctly.

(The Urban Experience 250)

In other words, the built environment is itself a cultural product into which are inscribed the various social and economic relations constitutive of it. It is thus that by reading the urban landscape we can begin to perceive in it expressions of particular interests, and to see the transformation of urban space across time as a register of interests in conflict.

The particular meanings of the built environment must therefore be interpreted in relation to both the historical processes of creative destruction and the class antagonisms they represent. In accordance with these insights, the present essay analyzes the role of urban space in Ken Loach and Paul Laverty’s filmic narrative in Bread and Roses in order to evince the ways in which the unionization of the workers in the movie depends upon a strategy of spatial appropriation. Moreover, by situating the development of the plot² within the particular history of urbanization in Los Angeles, it also demonstrates the ways in which the film’s formal elements themselves point us towards a reading of space...