Editorial: 'We are not the dirt. We clean.'

'First, the working classes and bohemians were priced out...That was gentrification.Now comes plutocratisation: the middle classes and small companies are falling victim to class cleansing. Global cities are becoming patrician ghettos...Global cities are turning into vast gated communities where the one per cent reproduces.' Seen as a series of accumulating stages, this characterisation-gentrification followed by plutocratisation followed by a third stage in which patrician ghettos are moving towards domination - is, to say the least, alarming. Concluding their careful analysis in this issue of London's changing class structure and residential mosaic, David Manley and Ron Johnston turn to the tripartite characterisation by Saskia Sassen of recent urban developments(s). The source in which they came across this formula was an article by the anthropologist and journalist Simon Kuper, in which concentrating on Paris he equates changes there with London, New York and Tokyo-super-2.This characterisation and its implications are considered here on the basis of the studies assembled. Does the tripartite model stand up in this light? Or could it be that the various situations and analyses assembled point to a condition that is much more alarming? Whatever the intensity of this condition, is or are there a way or ways out? What do different analytic approaches have to contribute to understanding the situations and their possibilities? Are there any signs of emergence?That the condition is much more than alarming, in fact terminal, is argued in Adrian Atkinson's paper in which he looks at urbanisation as 'a brief episode in history', as it speeds into decline and self-destruction. Moving on to one of our three special features, 'Cities in the Arabian Peninsula', and taking up a paper on environmental costs of coastal urbanisation in the Arabian Gulf, one can see the biological dimension of this possibly terminal condition.The signs of an emerging alternative to decline and eventual collapse are discerned and documented in Atkinson's article and in the introductions to and papers in the other two special features. In both 'Assembling Istanbul' and 'Labour Resistance across Global Spaces', new directions are identified in, for example, the paper that each includes on Romani struggles, one in Istanbul and the other in Italy. Returning to London, a further paper from the Labour Resistance feature, on 'Precarious Workers', there are in the struggles of the cleaners signs of an alternative to Sassen's charted course of mounting progression/regression for urbanisation.