In discussions of the modern city the voice of Engels resounds equally powerfully. Perhaps his most faithful acolyte today is Mike Davis, whose 2006 book, Planet of Slums, constitutes a searing update of The Condition. Davis recounts with equal vituperation the sanitary state of the modern mass conurbations ("Today's poor megacities - Nairobi, Lagos, Bombay, Dhaka and so on - are stinking mountains of shit that would appal even the most hardened Victorians"), and points to the power relationships underpinning spatial inequality. A chapter entitled "Haussmann in the Tropics", investigating squatter and working-class clearances in contemporary Africa, China and central America, is pure Engels. "Urban segregation is not a frozen status quo, but rather a ceaseless social war in which the state intervenes regularly in the name of 'progress', 'beautification', and even 'social justice for the poor' to redraw spatial boundaries to the advantage of landowners, foreign investors, elite homeowners, and middle-class commuters." In the sprawling, slum and suburb conurbations of India, the main axis of social separation has reverted from race back to class as economic inequality now defines the nature of urban exclusion from Chenai to Mumbai. Behind this process of economic segregation, in Davis's template, are the forces of modern international capitalism - the IMF and World Bank - determined to carve out islands of "cyber-modernity" amid unmet urban needs and underdevelopment.
Similarly, in the developed world, much of Engels's analysis of the urban form reads as a telling critique of the gentrification programmes which entail the demolition of working-class neighbourhoods and curtailing the informal space of the city. Of course, the language has changed: policy-makers talk now of "sink estates" rather than "slums", of "worklessness" rather than "the residuum" and in Britain the forces of progress come in the guise of "New Deal for Communities" or "Housing Market Renewal Funds". Even Engels's adopted city has not been unaffected. While Manchester's revitalised city-centre glistens, Moss Side and Garton have somehow failed to prosper.
The Condition of the Working Class in England is far more than the work of an angry young man confronting the iniquities of industrial capitalism. It is a brilliant polemic by a sensationally gifted 24-year-old applying German philosophy to existing conditions with a sure eye on the revolution to come. As the experiment of 20th-century state communism recedes into memory, like Marx we can at last return to The Condition of the Working Class and appreciate the work on its own terms. To do so is to discover in its economic critique of unfettered markets, condemnation of capitalism's social injustices, angry reportage, and analysis of politics, poverty, feminism and urbanism all the power, passion and incisiveness which Marx rightly heralded.
• Tristram Hunt introduces The Condition of the Working Class in a new Penguin Classics edition.
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