Politically the situation was dangerous: the federal government was in effect running a nationalized economy, and was in alliance with the Communist Soviet Union, while strong social movements with socialist inclinations had emerged in the 1930s. Ultimately Harvey envisions the right to the city as a driving principle behind a reconstitution of a totally different kind of city than the exclusionary and class-riven kind which exists under capitalism. [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. The suburbanization of the United States was not merely a matter of new infrastructures. Every January, the Office of the New York State Comptroller publishes an estimate of the total Wall Street bonuses for the previous twelve months. . In this 2008 article from the New Left Review, Marxist geographer David Harvey has developed and popularized the term "the right to the city" invented by French Marxist geographer Henri Lefebvre in a 1968 book by that title. The 1848 crisis in Second Republic Paris saw unemployed surplus capital and surplus labour side-by-side (p.7). Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself.footnote1. His arguments will be familiar to those who already know his work e.g. Each fragment appears to live and function autonomously, sticking firmly to what it has been able to grab in the daily fight for survival.footnote9. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since the transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. It also has affected those who, unable to afford the skyrocketing house prices in urban centres, especially in the Southwest, were forced into the metropolitan semi-periphery; here they took up speculatively built tract housing at initially easy rates, but now face escalating commuting costs as oil prices rise, and soaring mortgage payments as market rates come into effect. The urbanists are viewed as specialists, while the truly significant core of macroeconomic Marxist theorizing lies elsewhere (p.35). He is an organiser for Counterfire and a regular contributor to Counterfire site. The idea was first articulated by French philosopher Henri Lefebvre in his 1968 book Le Droit la Ville,[1][2] in which he argued that urban space should not be solely controlled by market forces, such as commodification and capitalism, but should be shaped and governed by the citizens who inhabit it. The Right to the City is a concept and slogan that emphasizes the idea that urban spaces should be inclusive, democratic, and accessible to all residents. Indeed, the anti-capitalist movement centred on the 1999 Seattle protests fractured the World Trade Organisation which has never been quite the same since. Download. But spreading risk does not eliminate it. This of course creates crises of over-production and feeds into market volatility (see the charts on pp.33-34). (2012). According to Harvey, "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. A Financial Katrina is unfolding, which conveniently (for the developers) threatens to wipe out low-income neighbourhoods on potentially high-value land in many inner-city areas far more effectively and speedily than could be achieved through eminent domain. Many city neighbourhoods and even whole peri-urban communities in the us have been boarded up and vandalized, wrecked by the predatory lending practices of the financial institutions. Nevertheless, as Engels pointed out in 1872: In reality, the bourgeoisie has only one method of solving the housing question after its fashionthat is to say, of solving it in such a way that the solution continually reproduces the question anew. 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). David Harvey's emphasis is on society having a collective motive where they can knock down all obstacles to produce something radically different. David Harvey's analysis of the urban dynamics of capitalism has had, over the last four decades, a profound influence both within and beyond his native discipline of geography. 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. That is what makes his theories relevant today, although we are living in a different world (nonetheless, one that more profoundly conforms to his depiction of capital accumulation than did the world in his day). 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 postmodernist penchant for encouraging the formation of market nichesin both consumer habits and cultural formssurrounds the contemporary urban experience with an aura of freedom of choice, provided you have the money. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights. Finally new credit instruments and debt-financed state expenditures arise and monopolization (mergers and acquisitions), and capital exports to fresh pastures provide ways out. 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. 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. Consequently, cities have been the subject of much utopian thinking. Capitalism needs urbanization to absorb the surplus products it perpetually produces (p.5). Meanwhile, some two million people have been or are about to be made homeless by foreclosures. If, finally, the profit rate is too low, then state regulation of ruinous competition, monopolization (mergers and acquisitions) and capital exports provide ways out. Limits of Capital, Condition of Postmodernity, Paris, Capital of Modernity, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, and Social Justice and the City. This population is due no bonuses. 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. Abstract This essay critically examines the concept of the right to the city. Verified Purchase. As Harvey points out, the European Union was a primarily neoliberal formation (constructed, not incidentally, in the wake of Soviet collapse). Because of significant time delays between investment and construction, new builds tend to emerge at the same time that crashes happen. The flip side of this is that his strategic arguments emerge directly from his theoretical focus on urbanisation in particular as opposed to from an assessment of the consciousness, and indeed, immediate concerns, of people in struggle. The other is to construct a strategic approach to building an anti-capitalist movement that can transform urban spaces to the benefit of those that are presently exploited by the class-nature of urbanisation. 15K views 6 years ago The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we. The flip side is that he does not take questions of state power seriously. With notable exceptions like the Paris Commune and the early days of Russian socialism, real life examples of actual rebel cities are few and far between. This, of course, urgently raises the question of challenging state power in a very concrete way. Rebel Cities is most stimulating when engaging with questions of Marxist methodology. This chapter compares urban renewal in Haussmann's Paris in the 1860s with postwar American suburban sprawl, mass consumption, inter-state highway construction, and with more recent forms of urbanization in China, India, Korea, and in the Gulf States . Unlike the fiscal system, however, the urban and peri-urban social movements of opposition, of which there are many around the world, are not tightly coupled; indeed most have no connection to each other. There seems to be a high level of abstraction to the formulation of the slogan here. 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. This method is called Haussmann . The problem is that the poor, beset with income insecurity and frequent financial difficulties, can easily be persuaded to trade in that asset for a relatively low cash payment. 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 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. 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 answer has to be a qualified yes. It was in this context that Henri Lefebvre wrote The Urban Revolution, which predicted not only that urbanization was central to the survival of capitalism and therefore bound to become a crucial focus of political and class struggle, but that it was obliterating step by step the distinctions between town and country through the production of integrated spaces across national territory, if not beyond.footnote4 The right to the city had to mean the right to command the whole urban process, which was increasingly dominating the countryside through phenomena ranging from agribusiness to second homes and rural tourism. Download. However, the opportunities are multiple because, as this brief history shows, crises repeatedly erupt around urbanization both locally and globally, and because the metropolis is now the point of massive collisiondare we call it class struggle?over the accumulation by dispossession visited upon the least well-off and the developmental drive that seeks to colonize space for the affluent. Most movements are messy, uneven and infused with contradictory class consciousness, let alone actual class differentiation in their composition. Bonaparte brought in Georges-Eugne Haussmann to take charge of the citys public works in 1853. 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. Its pace picked up enormously after a brief recession in 1997, to the extent that China has taken in nearly half the worlds cement supplies since 2000. It also presents the capitalist with a number of barriers to continuous and trouble-free expansion. On the economic front, there remained the question of how surplus capital could be absorbed. The danger is that Marxists continue to operate at a generalised level of abstraction that fails to provide concrete explanations for todays crisis: We cannot hope, therefore, to explain actual events (such as the crisis of 2007-09) simply in terms of the general laws of motion of capital (this is one of my objections to those who try to cram the facts of the present crisis into some theory of the falling rate of profit). 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. Maximizing its yield has driven low or even moderate-income households out of Manhattan and central London over the last few years, with catastrophic effects on class disparities and the well-being of underprivileged populations (p.29). The splits that emerged within the Commune, between the hierarchical Jacobins and the horizontalist Proudhonists still divide the left between Marxists and anarchists today, he argues. The Chinese central bank, for example, has been active in the secondary mortgage market in the us while Goldman Sachs was heavily involved in the surging property market in Mumbai, and Hong Kong capital has invested in Baltimore. This is also the case in India, where the central and state governments now favour the establishment of Special Economic Zonesostensibly for industrial development, though most of the land is designated for urbanization. Rebel cities : from the right to the city to the urban revolution. According to Harvey: "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. The result was the ascent to power of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who engineered a coup in 1851 and proclaimed himself Emperor the following year. To do this he brought in the civic planner Baron Haussmann who clearly understood that his mission was to help solve the surplus capital and unemployment problem by way of urbanization (p.7). The crisis gathered momentum at the end of the 1960s until the whole capitalist system crashed, starting with the bursting of the global property-market bubble in 1973, followed by the fiscal bankruptcy of New York City in 1975. We cannot see the credit system as a free-floating entity unrelated to real economic activity on the ground, but nonetheless much of the credit system is fundamental and absolutely necessary to the functioning of capital (p.39). To concede that right, says the Supreme Court, would be tantamount to rewarding pickpockets for their actions. Harvey seeks the integration of credit into the general theory in such a way that maintains albeit in a transformed state, the theoretical insights already gained. The neoliberal project over the last thirty years has been oriented towards privatizing that control. The pressure to clear itfor environmental and social reasons that mask the land grabis mounting daily. Some sort of intermediary, transitional, political argumentation is presumably needed if a truly mass movement is to be created. International capitalism has been on a roller-coaster of regional crises and crashesEast and Southeast Asia in 199798; Russia in 1998; Argentina in 2001but had until recently avoided a global crash even in the face of a chronic inability to dispose of capital surplus. [3], In his first inception of the concept, Lefebvre paid specific emphasis on the effects that capitalism had over the city, whereby urban life was downgraded into a commodity, social interaction became increasingly uprooted and urban space and governance were turned into exclusive goods. David Harvey The Right to the City. Nonetheless, the battle for hegemony is real and necessary if an anti-capitalist movement is ever to challenge capitalist power in a serious way. Above all, it entailed the reconfiguration of the urban infrastructure of Paris. XML. get the La Hija Del . [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. Rebuilding Paris absorbed huge quantities of labour and capital by the standards of the time and, coupled with suppressing the aspirations of the Parisian workforce, was a primary vehicle of social stabilization. Brief Summary of Book: Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution by David Harvey. David Harvey's biggest lecture yet! 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. . Consequently, cities have been the . But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. . Summary Intermediate Accounting; Gaskell 6th - Solutions; Trending. The politics of capitalism are affected by the perpetual need to find profitable terrains for capital surplus production and absorption (p.5). But the urban process has undergone another transformation of scale. As with the financial system, the answer is bound to be much more complex precisely because the urban process is now global in scope. Wealthy neighbourhoods provided with all kinds of services, such as exclusive schools, golf courses, tennis courts and private police patrolling the area around the clock intertwine with illegal settlements where water is available only at public fountains, no sanitation system exists, electricity is pirated by a privileged few, the roads become mud streams whenever it rains, and where house-sharing is the norm. Nevertheless, this theoretical gift is a double edged sword. In some instances, people move willingly, but there are also reports of widespread resistance, the usual response to which is brutal repression by the Communist party. Shopping malls, multiplexes and box stores proliferate, as do fast-food and artisanal market-places. 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. The results are indelibly etched on the spatial forms of our cities, which increasingly consist of fortified fragments, gated communities and privatized public spaces kept under constant surveillance. By relating the specific to the general he was performing a necessary act of theoretical abstraction. But at the same time they are also the centers of capital accumulation and the . However political repression was not enough. The task of Marxists today, as Harvey explains, is to relate the specific features of capital peculiar to our times to the general understanding of capital that Marx provided. [18], Last year, inspired by the migrants' and refugees' squats in the center of the cities (like Athens refugee squats and other european cities) created a renewed interest on the right to the city. Key ideas The recapitulation of Lefebvre's key concept 'the right to the city' is characteristic of Harvey . In Bolivia, Harvey notes, it was resistance to violent neoliberal measures that led to the election of leftist Evo Morales to power in 2005. From their inception, cities have arisen through geographical and social concentrations of a surplus product. Sir Keir Starmer at Davos, January 2023. 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. His brilliantly simple observation that the development of parklands directly correlates to rising rents is an invaluable tool for understanding some of the more insidious aspects of gentrification. . 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, as conceptualized by Lefebvre (1968, 1996) and Harvey (2008, 2012) is a collective right to change the city and shape the process of urbanization. One is to integrate his Marxist theory of urbanisation into the 'general laws of motion' of capital, and to provide a framework for analysing the current crisis and the development of neoliberal trends in globalisation. The urban form of cities is gendered,[citation needed] and feminist scholars[who?] At home, it meant consolidating the railway network, building ports and harbours, and draining marshes. There is much to be gained from Harveys back to the drawing board approach to Marxist theorising, but one cannot avoid the feeling that certain wheels are being reinvented here. He also had to solve the capital surplus absorption problem (p.7). Any of these revolts could become contagious. Once occupied, these buildings become novel forms of habitation with strong elements of commoning and cohabitation. This is an uneven, at times problematic, but often insightful book, and its essential affirmation of the potential of radical anti-capitalist struggle in the neoliberal era is very welcome at a time when the stakes have never been higher. View David Harvey's business profile as Professor of Anthropology and Geography At the Graduate Center at The City College of New York. How, then, does one organize a city? he asks in chapter 5, reclaiming the city for anti-capitalist struggle. 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. Not only affluent individuals exercise direct power. The urban crisis that is affecting millions would then be prioritized over the needs of big investors and financiers. 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. The local experience of the marginalisation of various indigenous social groups, fused with class-based solidarity, created El Altos unique radical identity, Harvey argues, citing various academic works including Sian Lazars book, El Alto: Rebel City. Signs of rebellion are everywhere: the unrest in China and India is chronic, civil wars rage in Africa, Latin America is in ferment. | RioOnWatch", "After Habitat III: a stronger urban future must be based on the right to the city", "S'bu Zikode & Richard Pithouse debating Pallo Jordan on the Record of the ANC Oslo, 22 November 2012", "The Right to the City Alliance: time to democratize urban governance (blog)", "Implementing the Right to the City in Brazil", "An Informational Right to the City? 138 reviews. 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. It has entailed repeated bouts of urban restructuring through creative destruction, which nearly always has a class dimension since it is the poor, the underprivileged and those marginalized from political power that suffer first and foremost from this process. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The slogan was used by French Marxist Henri Lefebvre in 1968 in response to the urban explosion in Paris in that year. As Harvey notes, he effectively set up a Keynesian system of debt-financed infrastructural urban improvements (p.8). Manifesto on the urban commons from the acclaimed theorist.Long before the Occupy movement, modern cities had already become the central sites of revolutionary politics, where the deeper currents of social and political change rise to the surface. Without adequate risk-assessment controls, this wave of financialization has now turned into the so-called sub-prime mortgage and housing asset-value crisis. . The honest answer he tells us, is we simply do not know (p.140). As a result, over time, periods of capital expansion correspond with periods of urbanisation. Harvey also draws the link between gentrification and rising rent prices. In effect, he helped resolve the capital-surplus disposal problem by setting up a proto-Keynesian system of debt-financed infrastructural urban improvements. In the latter case, this meant the construction of railroads throughout Europe and into the Orient, as well as support for grand works such as the Suez Canal. Liberal theories of globalisation and development are put to bed by Harveys relentless focus on capital accumulation as the prime mover of urban development.
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