Capitalism is about producing surplus value (the origin of concrete profit) and this requires the production of surplus product: This means that capitalism is perpetually producing the surplus product that urbanization requires. In New York City, for example, the billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is reshaping the city along lines favourable to developers, Wall Street and transnational capitalist-class elements, and promoting the city as an optimal location for high-value businesses and a fantastic destination for tourists. [20][21] Marcelo Lopes de Souza has for instance argued that as the right to the city has become "fashionable these days", "the price of this has often been the trivialisation and corruption of Lefebvre's concept"[22] and called for fidelity to the original radical meaning of the idea. One only needs to look at the regeneration programme rolled out in East London for the Olympic Games to see this phenomenon in action. The data for all oecd countries show, however, that the states portion of gross output has been roughly constant since the 1970s.footnote17 The main achievement of the neoliberal assault, then, has been to prevent the public share from expanding as it did in the 1960s. This is starkly illustrated by a chart mapping tall buildings constructed in New York City over the twentieth century: The property booms that preceded the crashes of 1929, 1973, 1987, and 2000 stand out like a pikestaff (p.32). The real city, the discursive city, the disappearing city: Postmodernism and urban sociology. The fallout was concentrated in the first instance in and around us cities, with particularly serious implications for low-income, inner-city African-Americans and households headed by single women. Harvey seeks to root the notion in the concrete reality of struggle, telling us that the right to the city does not arise primarily out of various intellectual fascinations and fads It primarily rises up from the streets, out from the neighbourhoods, as a cry for help and sustenance by oppressed peoples in desperate times (p.xiii). Signs of rebellion are everywhere: the unrest in China and India is chronic, civil wars rage in Africa, Latin America is in ferment. 'The Right to the City' should be viewed as a struggle for radical change and transformation, with the objective of removing capitalist tactics of urbanization that will help create a reformed society. Astonishing if not criminally absurd mega-urbanization projects have emerged in the Middle East in places such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi, mopping up the surplus arising from oil wealth in the most conspicuous, socially unjust and environmentally wasteful ways possible. Has the astonishing pace and scale of urbanization over the last hundred years contributed to human well-being? Social Justice and Spatial Systems. It was the nation-wide and regional experience of oppression and economic exploitation that provided the context for El Altos emergent radicalism (p.149). The pressure to clear itfor environmental and social reasons that mask the land grabis mounting daily. The financial system is also more tightly coupled than it ever was before.footnote6 Computer-driven split-second trading always threatens to create a great divergence in the marketit is already producing incredible volatility in stock tradingthat will precipitate a massive crisis, requiring a total re-think of how finance capital and money markets work, including their relation to urbanization. A process of displacement and what I call accumulation by dispossession lie at the core of urbanization under capitalism.footnote12 It is the mirror-image of capital absorption through urban redevelopment, and is giving rise to numerous conflicts over the capture of valuable land from low-income populations that may have lived there for many years. To survive politically, he resorted to widespread repression of alternative political movements. There is no discussion of direct challenges to state power, which would be the obvious consequence of any anti-capitalist uprising in a modern city, as the Arab Revolutions (absent from the book) testify. David Harvey's emphasis is on society having a collective motive where they can knock down all obstacles to produce something radically different. As in all the preceding phases, this most recent radical expansion of the urban process has brought with it incredible transformations of lifestyle. Capitalism needs urbanization to absorb the surplus products it perpetually produces (p.5). They are pulled down and replaced by others. Throughout capitalist history, some of the surplus value has been taxed, and in social-democratic phases the proportion at the states disposal rose significantly. These are of course desirable objects of revolutionary struggle, but we are left with no obvious mechanisms for attaining such control. Harvey concludes on this basis that it is possible to organise a political city out of the debilitating processes of neoliberal urbanization, and thereby reclaim the city for anti-capitalist struggle. The economic situation he dealt with by means of a vast programme of infrastructural investment both at home and abroad. Since they lack private-property rights, the state can simply remove them by fiat, offering a minor cash payment to help them on their way before turning the land over to developers at a large profit. He is an organiser for Counterfire and a regular contributor to Counterfire site. Financial powers backed by the state push for forcible slum clearance, in some cases violently taking possession of terrain occupied for a whole generation. As a result, over time, periods of capital expansion correspond with periods of urbanisation. Rebel cities : from the right to the city to the urban revolution. Unfortunately the social movements are not strong enough or sufficiently mobilized to force through this solution. For the global urbanization boom has depended, as did all the others before it, on the construction of new financial institutions and arrangements to organize the credit required to sustain it. The urbanization of China over the last twenty years has been of a different character, with its heavy focus on infrastructural development, but it is even more important than that of the us. Consider, first, the case of Second Empire Paris. . Download. In the cases of Paris and New York, once the power of state expropriations had been successfully resisted and contained, a more insidious and cancerous progression took hold through municipal fiscal discipline, property speculation and the sorting of land-use according to the rate of return for its highest and best use. To be sure, the political task of organizing such a confrontation is difficult if not daunting. . Code, Content, Control, and the Urbanization of Information", "The refugees' right to the centre of the city: City branding versus city commoning in Athens", "From basic needs towards socio-spatial transformation: coming to grips with the 'Right to the City' for the urban poor in South Africa", "Which right to which city? This rather sweeping statement is never fully elucidated and there is no mention made of the strategy of the united front, advocated by major figures like Gramsci, Trotsky and Lenin. Summary Intermediate Accounting; Gaskell 6th - Solutions; Trending. Along with the 68 revolt came a financial crisis within the credit institutions that, through debt-financing, had powered the property boom in the preceding decades. THE RIGHT TO THE CITY David Harvey "CHANGE THE WORLD" SAID MARX; "CHANGE LIFE" SAID RIMBAUD; FOR US, THESE TWO TASKS ARE IDENTICAL (Andr Bretton) - (A banner in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the City of Mexico, site of the student massacre in 1968, January, 2008) The politics of capitalism are affected by the perpetual need to find profitable terrains for capital surplus production and absorption (p.5). The right to the city, as it is now constituted, is too narrowly confined, restricted in most cases to a small political and economic elite who are in a position to shape cities more and more after their own desires. Capitalists must also discover new means of production in general and natural resources in particular, which puts increasing pressure on the natural environment to yield up necessary raw materials and absorb the inevitable waste. DAVID HARVEY The city, the noted urban sociologist Robert Park once wrote, is: man's most consistent and on the whole, his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart's desire. get the La Hija Del . [8][9] David Harvey described it as follows: The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. [REVIEW] Janet Wolff - 1992 - Theory and Society 21 (4):553-560. At this point in history, this has to be a global struggle, predominantly with finance capital, for that is the scale at which urbanization processes now work. With the attempt to turn Mumbai into a global financial centre to rival Shanghai, the property-development boom has gathered pace, and the land that squatters occupy appears increasingly valuable. As Harvey points out, the European Union was a primarily neoliberal formation (constructed, not incidentally, in the wake of Soviet collapse). Our streets!; Thats not what democracy looks like!; Stop the war; Occupy!; We are the 99%; No cuts. Given these characteristics, we argue that the Lefebvrian concept of the right to the city is most appropriate for understanding and explaining the refugees self-organised housing practices."[19]. There are, however, urban social movements seeking to overcome isolation and reshape the city in a different image from that put forward by the developers, who are backed by finance, corporate capital and an increasingly entrepreneurially minded local state apparatus. Debt-encumbered homeowners, it was argued, were less likely to go on strike. However, the situation is far more complex now, and it is an open question whether China can compensate for a serious crash in the United States; even in the prc the pace of urbanization seems to be slowing down. The parallels with the 1970s are uncannyincluding the immediate easy-money response of the Federal Reserve in 200708, which will almost certainly generate strong currents of uncontrollable inflation, if not stagflation, in the not too distant future. As Harvey explains, it was here that rebellious movements arose to force the resignation of the pro-neoliberal president, Sanchez de Lozada, in October 2003, and to do the same to his successor, Carlos Mesa, in 2005. The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space [Mitchell, Don] on Amazon.com. Social theorists David Harvey and Margit Mayer outline the demand for the Right to the city as a kind of request for all the people who live in the city. Lefebvre was right to insist that the revolution has to be urban, in the broadest sense of that term, or nothing at all. But the right to remake ourselves by creating a qualitatively different kind of urban sociality is one of the most precious of all human rights. Harvey identifies an inevitable paradox in Marxs theory. 3099067. It is unclear why Harvey is so keen on structuring a mass movement around a slogan that he himself admits is abstract, when so many concrete slogans are vying for attention. XML. . Haussmann completely transformed the city on a massive scale. In their appeal for their right to the city, local mobilizations around the world usually refer to their struggle for social justice and dignified access to urban life to face growing urban inequalities (especially in large metropolitan areas). clandestine squats) share many characteristics in common with what Lefebvre identified as claiming the right to the city: namely, freedom and socialisation, appropriation against private property, habitation. Johns Hopkins is doing the same for East Baltimore, and Columbia University plans to do so for areas of New York, sparking neighbourhood resistance movements in both cases. In Bolivia, Harvey notes, it was resistance to violent neoliberal measures that led to the election of leftist Evo Morales to power in 2005. Harvey, David. To do this Haussmann needed new financial institutions and debt instruments, the Crdit Mobilier and Crdit Immobilier, which were constructed on Saint-Simonian lines. The reverse relation also holds. To concede that right, says the Supreme Court, would be tantamount to rewarding pickpockets for their actions. Sir Keir Starmer at Davos, January 2023. . I argue here that urbanization has played a particularly active role, alongside such phenomena as military expenditures, in absorbing the surplus product that capitalists perpetually produce in their search for profits. Because of significant time delays between investment and construction, new builds tend to emerge at the same time that crashes happen. Harveys non-dogmatic approach to Marxist analysis means that he avoids some of the pitfalls of orthodoxy. The growing popularity of the concept has nonetheless raised some criticism and concerns on how the original vision of Henri Lefevbre could be reduced to a citizenship vision, focused on the mere implementation of social and economic rights in the city leaving aside its transformatory nature and the concept of social conflict behind the original concept. Financial innovations set in train in the 1980ssecuritizing and packaging local mortgages for sale to investors worldwide, and setting up new vehicles to hold collateralized debt obligationsplayed a crucial role. Vast infrastructural projects, including dams and highwaysagain, all debt-financedare transforming the landscape. Verified Purchase. Going against the grain of his previous book Explanation in Geography published in 1970, he argued that geography cannot remain disengaged . However Harvey downplays the question of organisation in favour of in-depth analysis of various forms of radical social institutions. For Lefebvre, revolutionary movements frequently if not always assume an urban dimension. As Harvey notes, he effectively set up a Keynesian system of debt-financed infrastructural urban improvements (p.8). Raising the proportion of the surplus held by the state will only have a positive impact if the state itself is brought back under democratic control. Finally new credit instruments and debt-financed state expenditures arise and monopolization (mergers and acquisitions), and capital exports to fresh pastures provide ways out. Download. He created an urban form where it was believedincorrectly, as it turned out in 1871that sufficient levels of surveillance and military control could be attained to ensure that revolutionary movements would easily be brought to heel. They are pulled down and in their stead shops, warehouses and public buildings are erected.footnote11. More than a hundred cities have passed the one-million population mark in this period, and previously small villages, such as Shenzhen, have become huge metropolises of 6 to 10 million people. The planet as building site collides with the planet of slums.footnote16 Periodically this ends in revolt, as in Paris in 1871 or the us after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968. For China is only the epicentre of an urbanization process that has now become genuinely global, partly through the astonishing integration of financial markets that have used their flexibility to debt-finance urban development around the world. Engels understood this sequence all too well: The growth of the big modern cities gives the land in certain areas, particularly in those areas which are centrally situated, an artificially and colossally increasing value; the buildings erected on these areas depress this value instead of increasing it, because they no longer belong to the changed circumstances. The 1848 crisis in Second Republic Paris saw unemployed surplus capital and surplus labour side-by-side (p.7). 3099067 5 Howick Place | London | SW1P 1WG 2023 Informa UK Limited, Registered in England & Wales No. Capital accumulation through real-estate activity booms, since the land is acquired at almost no cost. It is a fictitious form of capital that derives from expectations of future rents. Kent-born, Baltimore-based geographer David Harvey has long been an exception to both. Find contact's direct phone number, email address, work history, and more. Click here to navigate to parent product. The lucky ones get a bit. There is perhaps not a gaping chasm between orthodox Marxist theorising and convincing answers to todays global conjuncture, it is just that Marxists have to up their game and cannot afford to be complacent on key issues. However political repression was not enough. Lengthy discussion of the pitfalls of various forms of municipal socialist governance structures, infused with philosophical explication of notions of the commons are interesting but seem many steps removed from the present state of anti-capitalist struggle. In 2001, a City Statute was inserted into the Brazilian Constitution, after pressure from social movements, to recognize the collective right to the city.footnote18 In the us, there have been calls for much of the $700 billion bail-out for financial institutions to be diverted into a Reconstruction Bank, which would help prevent foreclosures and fund efforts at neighbourhood revitalization and infrastructural renewal at municipal level. The right to the city is, therefore, far more than a right of individual access to the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city . Here is a quick description and cover image of book Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution written by David Harvey which was published in 2012-. The city, in the words of urban sociologist Robert Park, is: mans most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his hearts desire. The right to the city, as it is constituted, is too narrowly confined, restricted in most cases to a small political and economic elite who are in a position to shape cities more and more after their own desires. In Mumbai, meanwhile, 6 million people officially considered as slum dwellers are settled on land without legal title; all maps of the city leave these places blank. As with the financial system, the answer is bound to be much more complex precisely because the urban process is now global in scope. (con secciones acti vas en ciudades como Nueva York y Los Angeles) [Right to the City Alliance] , inspirados en parte . According to David Harvey his thought on what Right to city meant was more than how much individuals have freedom to access resources in the city. Shopping malls, multiplexes and box stores proliferate, as do fast-food and artisanal market-places. As William Tabb argued, the response to the consequences of the latter effectively pioneered the construction of a neoliberal answer to the problems of perpetuating class power and of reviving the capacity to absorb the surpluses that capitalism must produce to survive.footnote5. Not only affluent individuals exercise direct power. In the midst of a flood of impoverished migrants, construction boomed in Johannesburg, Taipei, Moscow, as well as the cities in the core capitalist countries, such as London and Los Angeles. The republican bourgeoisie violently repressed the revolutionaries but failed to resolve the crisis. By placing property rights above all other rights and pushing for fluid land and property markets the seeds are sown of future class division (p.28): But land is not a commodity in the ordinary sense. A slogan predicated on the ubiquitous nature of urbanisation runs the risk of explaining both everything and nothing. This policy has led to pitched battles against agricultural producers, the grossest of which was the massacre at Nandigram in West Bengal in March 2007, orchestrated by the states Marxist government. The right to the city is far more than the indi-vidual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. Key ideas The recapitulation of Lefebvre's key concept 'the right to the city' is characteristic of Harvey . New Left Review 53, September-October 2008", "Competitive Metropolises and the Prospects for Spatial Justice | CISDP", "What Is The Right to the City? In the prc it is often populations on the rural margins who are displaced, illustrating the significance of Lefebvres argument, presciently laid out in the 1960s, that the clear distinction which once existed between the urban and the rural is gradually fading into a set of porous spaces of uneven geographical development, under the hegemonic command of capital and the state. In the past three decades, the neoliberal turn has restored class power to rich elites. [4], Due to the inequalities produced by the rapid increase of the world urban population in most regions of the world, the concept of the right to the city has been recalled on several occasions since the publication of Lefebvres book as a call to action by social movements and grassroots organizations. Limits of Capital, Condition of Postmodernity, Paris, Capital of Modernity, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, and Social Justice and the City. If there is not enough purchasing power in the market, then new markets must be found by expanding foreign trade, promoting novel products and lifestyles, creating new credit instruments, and debt-financing state and private expenditures. This method is called Haussmann . Apart from meeting housing needs, these housing forms become significant tools for refugees to participate in the urban social and political life. Nonetheless, Harvey adds, it is still the case that much of the traditional left has had trouble grappling with the revolutionary potential of urban social movements, which are often dismissed as reformist (p.xiii). There is a lot to stimulate thought, and much that is provocative and useful, but it must be said that there is an unevenness about the book; in particular the theoretical does not relate to the strategic in an entirely convincing manner. Will the people who are displaced get compensation? Urbanization has always been, therefore, a class phenomenon of some sort, since surpluses have been extracted from somewhere and from somebody, while control over the use of the surplus typically lies in the hands of a few This general situation persists under capitalism, of course, but in this case there is a rather different dynamic at work (p.5). Harvey's latest book, Rebel Cities, is a useful synthesis of his work in Marxist theory, geography, and social justice. The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space: Mitchell, Don: 9781572308473: Amazon.com: Books Skip to main content .us . Violence is required to build the new urban world on the wreckage of the old. Dharavi, one of the most prominent slums in Mumbai, is estimated to be worth $2 billion. Nannan Dong, Lang Zhang & Stefanie Ruff - 2010 - Topos: European Landscape . For Harvey, then, the 'right to the city' is his proposal for what traditionally would be called a 'transitional demand': a political form of struggle and a way of organizing which is not anticapitalist per . However, if bourgeois economists are oblivious to the nature of contemporary crisis, and view urbanisation as inferior or irrelevant to macroeconomic policy, Harvey argues that Marxists have also largely failed to explain the present crisis: the structure of thinking within Marxism generally is distressingly similar to that within bourgeois economics. The result was investment in railroads in Europe and the Orient (and support for the Suez Canal), and railway, port and harbour construction and so on at home. The sad point here, of course, is that what Engels described recurs throughout history. [15], More recently, scholars have proposed a 'Digital Right to the City',[16][17] which involves thinking about the city as not just bricks and mortar, but also digital code and information. From their very inception, cities have arisen through the geographical and social concentration of a surplus product, he explains. The coercive laws of competition also force the continuous implementation of new technologies and organizational forms, since these enable capitalists to out-compete those using inferior methods. We need to be sure we can live with our own creations. In search of alternative forms of habitation, they enact appropriation against private property institutions and practices, which often take the form of squats of abandoned buildings in the city centre in collaboration with local solidarity groups. This takes place above all with workers houses which are situated centrally and whose rents, even with the greatest overcrowding, can never, or only very slowly, increase above a certain maximum. The right to the city is not merely a right of access to what already exists, but a right to change it. This may explain some of the books lengthy philosophical digressions into the right to the commons (chapter 3), nested hierarchical governance structures (chapter 5) and so on. Harvey seems down on contemporary movements for change, though this is unwarranted. They sledgehammered down not only housing but also all the possessions of those who had built their own homes in the 1950s on what had become premium land. A great deal of energy is expended in promoting their significance for the construction of a better world. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Most movements are messy, uneven and infused with contradictory class consciousness, let alone actual class differentiation in their composition. Innovations define new wants and needs, reduce the turnover time of capital and lessen the friction of distance, which limits the geographical range within which the capitalist can search for expanded labour supplies, raw materials, and so on. It also altered the political landscape, as subsidized home-ownership for the middle classes changed the focus of community action towards the defence of property values and individualized identities, turning the suburban vote towards conservative republicanism.
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