A group that often prove elusive to traditional methodologies, Atkinson combines rich (in both senses of the word) ethnographic vignettes and photographs of the city with a bricolage of secondary resources – statistics, wealth reports, investigative journalistic accounts, real estate brochures, advertisings produced by architecture firms, to name but a few. Over the course of 250 pages, Atkinson takes us on a lucid, often uncomfortable, journey around London through the practices, landscapes and routines of the super-rich. A relatively short but nonetheless sharp monograph, the book charts the links between the super-rich and their command, control and capture of urban space.Īlpha City begins with a fundamental geographical imperative: “to really understand such power we need to be able to place it London … the pre-eminent site of the rich” (p. This is an accusation that certainly cannot be leveled at Rowland Atkinson’s Alpha City. Indeed, the tendency of geographers to instead focus their energies on highlighting the existence and experiences of marginalized impoverished populations has run the risk of letting the super-rich “get away with it” (Beaverstock et al., 2004). Despite the urgency of this call, and the growing ability of the super-rich to hoard capital, our critical understanding of this seemingly obscure group remains severely deficient. called upon scholars to expose the geographies of the super-rich. Nearly two decades have passed since Beaverstock et al.
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