Anna Minton

Minton asked the simplest and most uncomfortable question about public space: who owns the ground you are standing on? In London the answer is surprising. A large share of the squares opened in the last thirty years, from Canary Wharf to the forecourts of King's Cross or More London, is privately owned public space. It looks like street and it is not.

The consequence is not abstract. Inside those precincts there are rules no council approved and nobody publishes: no photography, no leafleting, no gathering, no sleeping. Private security staff enforce them, not the police, and there is no appeal, because the right of admission belongs to the owner. Minton put it plainly: we have traded public space for clean, watched space, and surveillance does not produce trust, it produces fear.

A British journalist trained at the Financial Times, Minton is a professor of architecture at the University of East London, where she runs the MA Reading the Neoliberal City. Her 2006 report for the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors on the privatisation of public space opened the debate in Britain, and Ground Control (2009) turned it into a book that reads like reportage: it walks the gated precincts, the guarded developments and the regenerated centres to show who gains and who is left outside.

Big Capital: Who Is London For? (2017) moved the argument to housing. Minton documented the demolition of council estates, the international money buying flats nobody lives in, and the displacement of thousands of London families to other cities. Her method, part reporting and part analysis, has shaped British housing activism more than many academic papers.