The Extractivist City

This book traces the hidden architecture of urban dispossession. From the ghost neighbourhoods of Kensington and Chelsea to the archipelagos of offshore-controlled student housing in Sheffield, he 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 (offshore opacity, institutional portfolio strategies, algorithmic platforms, securitisation, state facilitation, and racial capitalism) that convert communities into commodities. McKenzie introduces the concept of the "Digital Plantation", showing how algorithmic systems and surveillance infrastructure reproduce the colonial logics of extraction in the heart of the twenty-first-century city. But this is also a book about resistance. It 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.