The Extractivist City

“Masterfully, McKenzie provides a conceptual toolkit for both researchers and local communities on how to resist wealth chain urbanism.”
— Leonard Seabrooke , European University Institute, Italy

“Drawing on insider knowledge and an internationalist perspective, McKenzie deconstructs the networks of power that shape our present and must be dismantled in order to construct a better future.”
— Samuel Stein , Housing Policy Analyst, Community Service Society of New York (CSSNY), US  

“This book provides a bold and robust analysis that not only puts intersectionality at its centre but recognises the significance of Grenfell.”
— Beverley Bryan , Retired Professor of Language Education, University of the West Indies, Jamaica

“This book offers an intellectual multitool to unlock the inner life of capitalism’s urban investment playgrounds.”
— Rowland Atkinson , Chair in Inclusive Societies, University of Sheffield, UK

This book traces the hidden architecture of urban dispossession. From the ghost neighbourhoods of Kensington and Chelsea to the offshore-controlled student housing in Sheffield, it reveals how cities are being retooled not as homes for their residents, but as nodes in a global network of value extraction.

Wealth chain urbanism is the name for this system: six interlocking mechanisms that convert communities into commodities. McKenzie introduces the concept of "Digital Plantation", showing how algorithmic systems and surveillance infrastructure reproduce the colonial logics of extraction in the twenty-first-century city. But this book also documents the counter-infrastructure being built by tenant unions, community land trusts, and environmental justice campaigners who refuse to be erased. It issues a radical challenge: reform is a trap. The book envisions a strategy of dual power—tactical fights for survival alongside the construction of autonomous alternatives beyond capital's reach. Essential reading for scholars, activists, policymakers, and anyone who wants to understand (and change) the future of our cities.  

Rex McKenzie is a Senior Lecturer in Economics at Kingston University.