World Development today is a contested concept, and one that provokes debate across the board. Culture Wars is bringing together reviews of books and the arts, to engage with everything from globalisation to slum cities, from consumerism to international aid.

Questions dealt with throughout these reviews include: following massive economic growth from China and India, are we seeing a new distribution of power on the world stage? How should we respond to the perceived costs of development such as global warming and the erosion of communities? And what are the best models for growth?

Putting the hippies on the payroll

Green Capitalism: Manufacturing Scarcity in an Age of Abundance, by James Heartfield

Everyone has gone green. Even reprobate oil corporations have stopped funding the ‘global warming sceptics’, as they retool their operations to cash in on the bonanza of carbon-trading. Bewildered by the sudden desertion of their corporate allies, a few isolated libertarians fight a rearguard action against the green tide.

Cynical capitalism, cynical anti-capitalism

How an unloved system survives by default, and how its would-be critics condemn us to more of the same

In the run-up to Christmas last year, German churches and trades unions joined forces to protest against the loosening of the country’s traditionally restrictive opening hours for shops. Berlin’s city administration, run by Social Democrats and reformed Communists, had passed an amendment allowing shops in the capital to open every Sunday in December, despite objections in terms of both religious tradition and the perceived interests of shop staff.

Is there a new global working class?

ICA, London, 20 November 2007

The answer to the title of a debate at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) ‘Is there a new global working class’ is ‘yes.’ So you can stop reading now!

We’re all part of the Machine

Fast Food Nation (2006), directed by Richard Linklater

Despite the film’s didacticism, it isn’t a left-wing polemic. It’s a riff on the book - not a celluloid equivalent of it. It’s not an expose, jumping up and down and shouting. In fact it’s a film whose argument has more in common with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis than with the work of Michael Moore.

The universe or nothing

Things to Come (1936), directed by William Cameron Menzies

The film is heavy on ideas and obviously didactic. I feel it gets away with it, mainly because its ideas are interesting. They are clearly the issues that concerned HG Wells and the novel on which the film is based was his means of dramatising them.

‘The Rise of China Spells the Decline of the West’

Intelligence Squared Debate, London, 1 November 2005

China may be able to export its way to prosperity, but whether it will forge the political movements and ideas of the future is still an open question, and one worth considering in debates such as these.

From dystopia to myopia: Metropolis to Blade Runner

Future Vision: Future Cities, London, 6 December 2003

From the late nineties on, there has been a marked retreat into the inner world, into childhood and away from dirty, complicated reality.