The word 'spectral', Lefebvre reminds us, has a dual meaning. It signifies, on the one hand, the influence of the dead over the living, and, on the other, a prismatic analysis, able to decompose a beam of light into its constituent frequencies. Through the prism of the spatial dialectic, the postmodern focus on the presence of the past illuminated a 'blind field' in the critique of urban space. If the practice of architecture abandoned its claim upon the process of modernisation, then what was assuming control over modernity's form? What the spatial dialectic proposed was a close investigation of the relationship between the spatialisation of capital and the capitalisation of space, since at the interface between the geography of accumulation and land speculation it was possible to recognise a social transmutation of the urban power of real estate.

Marx famously described capital in gothic terms, a ghoulish horror show composed of phantasms, vampires, werewolves and animated monsters feasting on the flesh of labour. In this system Frankenstein's monster is out of control and driven through the ‘grotesque corpus’ of capital. Bodies and brains have become mutilated into commodities. A werewolf-like hunger for surplus labour describes the extension of the working day in the nineteenth century. Phantasmal bodies stalk the world while their master sleeps.

Cribbed from biology, the idea that flows of capital can materially regenerate the interconnective tissue of the environment has had a powerful hold on policymakers over the last three decades. But the metaphor of 'urban regeneration' has a range that goes well beyond new postindustrial uses for warehouses, canals and docklands. Urbanisation demonstrates a seemingly infinite capacity to regenerate age-old practices of extortion, usually through the violent exploitation of the social need for space.