But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. 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 . To do this, he tapped into new financial institutions and tax arrangements that liberated the credit to debt-finance urban expansion. It took more than a hundred years to complete the embourgeoisement of central Paris, with the consequences seen in recent years of uprisings and mayhem in those isolated suburbs that trap marginalized immigrants, unemployed workers and youth. 138 reviews. 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]. According to social scientists like David Harvey or Margit Mayer, the Right to the City (R2C) is a demand and request of and for all the residents of a city. For Lefebvre, revolutionary movements frequently if not always assume an urban dimension. Rebel Cities collects recent articles for journals such as New Left Review and Socialist Register with. Author: David Harvey (Author) Summary: 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. 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. Unfortunately the social movements are not strong enough or sufficiently mobilized to force through this solution. 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. The year 1848 brought one of the first clear, and European-wide, crises of both unemployed surplus capital and surplus labour. The lucky ones get a bit. Liberal theories of globalisation and development are put to bed by Harveys relentless focus on capital accumulation as the prime mover of urban development. Capital accumulation through real-estate activity booms, since the land is acquired at almost no cost. What was the role of urbanization in stabilizing this situation? 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). It is when Harvey is analysing the relationship between capital accumulation and urbanisation that the book is most enlightening. . In the United States, it is accepted wisdom that the housing sector was an important stabilizer of the economy, particularly after the high-tech crash of the late 1990s, although it was an active component of expansion in the earlier part of that decade. But while the Indian Constitution specifies that the state has an obligation to protect the lives and well-being of the whole population, irrespective of caste or class, and to guarantee rights to housing and shelter, the Supreme Court has issued judgements that rewrite this constitutional requirement. Fourteen billionaires have emerged in Mexico since then, and in 2006 that country boasted the richest man on earth, Carlos Slim, at the same time as the incomes of the poor had either stagnated or diminished. 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. He drew upon the utopian plans that Fourierists and Saint-Simonians had debated in the 1840s for reshaping Paris, but with one big difference: he transformed the scale at which the urban process was imagined. Throughout capitalist history, some of the surplus value has been taxed, and in social-democratic phases the proportion at the states disposal rose significantly. 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. Fast forward now to the 1940s in the United States. New Left Review 53, September-October 2008", "Competitive Metropolises and the Prospects for Spatial Justice | CISDP", "What Is The Right to the City? Migrants' and refugees' right to the city, Learn how and when to remove this template message, "David Harvey: The Right to the City. 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). 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. David Harvey attempts two main aims in his latest book, Rebel Cities. We need to be sure we can live with our own creations. When taken nationwide to all the major metropolitan centres of the usyet another transformation of scalethis process played a crucial role in stabilizing global capitalism after 1945, a period in which the us could afford to power the whole global non-communist economy by running trade deficits. The alternative visions of democracy that are being produced have reinvigorated national and regional indigenous movements by the ways that they combine class-based and nationalist concerns with identity politics, through the contestation over the ownership of the means of social reproduction and the nature of the state (p.149). [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. 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. Key ideas The recapitulation of Lefebvre's key concept 'the right to the city' is characteristic of Harvey . Photo: World Economic Forum/Ciaran McCrickard, Richard II meeting with the rebels of the Peasants Revolt of 1381 | Jean Froissart | Public Domain | cropped from original, Ramses III | Photo: Miguel Hermoso Cuesta | CC BY-SA 4.0 | cropped from original. Increasingly, we see the right to the city falling into the hands of private or quasi-private interests. To do this Haussmann needed new financial institutions and debt instruments, the Crdit Mobilier and Crdit Immobilier, which were constructed on Saint-Simonian lines. [4] In opposition to this trend, Lefebvre raised a call to rescue the citizen as main element and protagonist of the city that he himself had built and to transform urban space into a meeting point for building collective life. 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. 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. It is perhaps too ambitious to cover both aims in such a short book, and as such Rebel Cities often reads like an extended notebook, with each observation begging to be expanded in further detail. The Right to the City can encompass a variety of demands, including the right to affordable housing, access to public space, participation in urban governance, and protection against displacement and gentrification, all of which aim to address the spatial inequalities that have resulted from the commodification and capitalist control of urban spaces. It struck Paris particularly hard, and issued in an abortive revolution by unemployed workers and those bourgeois utopians who saw a social republic as the antidote to the greed and inequality that had characterized the July Monarchy. He is concerned that there has been little concrete attention paid to the specific nature of the post-2007 crash: there has been no serious attempt to integrate an understanding of processes of urbanization and built-environment formation into the general theory of the laws of motion of capital. Has the astonishing pace and scale of urbanization over the last hundred years contributed to human well-being? 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. 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. Pete Carroll | 12K views, 280 likes, 129 loves, 211 comments, 39 shares, Facebook Watch Videos from Seattle Seahawks: That's a wrap on the 2023 draft! 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. Is the urbanization of China, then, the primary stabilizer of global capitalism today? XML. 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. Surplus commodities can lose value or be destroyed, while productive capacity and assets can be written down and left unused; money itself can be devalued through inflation, and labour through massive unemployment. . 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. Debt-encumbered homeowners, it was argued, were less likely to go on strike. Intent on opening up terrain for the Salim Group, an Indonesian conglomerate, the ruling cpi(m) sent armed police to disperse protesting villagers; at least 14 were shot dead and dozens wounded. The right to the city is a collective struggle to rework the urbanization process itself. The result was the ascent to power of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who engineered a coup in 1851 and proclaimed himself Emperor the following year. get the La Hija Del . Even the idea that the city might function as a collective body politic, a site within and from which progressive social movements might emanate, appears implausible. 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. 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. Haussmann clearly understood that his mission was to help solve the surplus-capital and unemployment problem through urbanization. Consider the case of Seoul in the 1990s: construction companies and developers hired goon squads of sumo-wrestler types to invade neighbourhoods on the citys hillsides. But, conversely, we cannot attempt such an explanation without reference to the general laws of motion of capital (p.39). In the town of New Haven, strapped for resources for urban reinvestment, it is Yale, one of the wealthiest universities in the world, that is redesigning much of the urban fabric to suit its needs. XML. Property-market booms in Britain and Spain, as well as in many other countries, have helped power a capitalist dynamic in ways that broadly parallel what has happened in the United States. Brief Summary of Book: Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution by David Harvey. However Harvey downplays the question of organisation in favour of in-depth analysis of various forms of radical social institutions. have argued that the right to the city needs to be understood in gendered terms. Nonetheless, the battle for hegemony is real and necessary if an anti-capitalist movement is ever to challenge capitalist power in a serious way. Harveys apparent desire (implied throughout the book) for the left movement to coalesce around a single Marxist approach to radical action, bolstered by the appropriate approach to interpreting Marx, is of course, wishful thinking. In Brazil the 2001 City Statute wrote the Right to the City into federal law. 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). However political repression was not enough. 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 Private property rights in this case provided no protection. A number of popular movements, such as the shack dwellers' movement Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa,[11] the Right to the City Alliance in the United States,[12] Recht auf Stadt,[13] a network of squatters, tenants and artists in Hamburg, and various movements in Asia and Latin America,[14] have incorporated the idea of the right to the city into their struggles. In effect, he helped resolve the capital-surplus disposal problem by setting up a proto-Keynesian system of debt-financed infrastructural urban improvements. 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. Of course urban life is the main battlefield of most political struggles in the developed west, but most slogans cannot be reduced to such a general level without losing their ability to mobilise masses of people reacting to the myriad political and social problems of the day. Achieving "more democratic control over the surplus's development and utilization" is required (p. 22). Download. 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. The huge mobilization for the war effort temporarily resolved the capital-surplus disposal problem that had seemed so intractable in the 1930s, and the unemployment that went with it. [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. It has, in short, gone global. We now have, as urban sociologist Sharon Zukin puts it, pacification by cappuccino. As in Louis Bonapartes era, a hefty dose of political repression was evidently called for by the ruling classes of the time; the subsequent history of McCarthyism and Cold War politics, of which there were already abundant signs in the early 40s, is all too familiar. From Expo City to Sustainable City-Shanghai:" Better City, Better Life" is the motto of the World Expo 2010. There are, of course, already a great many diverse social movements focusing on the urban questionfrom India and Brazil to China, Spain, Argentina and the United States. Consequently, cities have been the . Under these conditions, ideals of urban identity, citizenship and belongingalready threatened by the spreading malaise of a neoliberal ethicbecome much harder to sustain. 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. The real city, the discursive city, the disappearing city: Postmodernism and urban sociology. Bonaparte brought in Georges-Eugne Haussmann to take charge of the citys public works in 1853. 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). [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. 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. 5.0 out of 5 stars David Harvey on the 'right to the city' Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 22, 2012. 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. Social Justice and Spatial Systems. 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. But at the same time they are also the centers of capital accumulation and the . . 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. If they somehow did come together, what should they demand? But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. 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. Sir Keir Starmer at Davos, January 2023. 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). Despite his assertion that, due to a rapid process of urbanisation over many years, the mass of humanity is thus increasingly being absorbed within the ferments and cross-currents of urbanised life, nonetheless the right to the city is an empty signifier, which socialists must struggle to advance along class lines and in opposition to the equal rights of the capitalist class (he reminds of us Marxs adage that between equal rights force decides (p.xv). 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. XML. The phrase was coined by the Marxist intellectual Henry Lefebvre in 1968 in response to the upsurge of urban struggle that exploded in France during May of that year. But then the overextended and speculative financial system and credit structures crashed in 1868. As Harvey notes, he effectively set up a Keynesian system of debt-financed infrastructural urban improvements (p.8). Consequently, cities have been the subject of much utopian thinking. David harvey the right to the city summary Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution is a book that draws on the very interesting idea, initially proposed by Henri Lefebvre in 1968, about the need for a renewed and transformed urban life. The rich typically refuse to give up their valued assets at any price, which is why Moses could take a meat axe to the low-income Bronx but not to affluent Park Avenue. The system worked very well for some fifteen years, and it involved not only a transformation of urban infrastructures but also the construction of a new way of life and urban persona. 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. We live in an era when ideals of human rights have moved centre stage both politically and ethically. From their inception, cities have arisen through geographical and social concentrations of a surplus product. The flip side is that he does not take questions of state power seriously. In the developing world in particular, the city, is splitting into different separated parts, with the apparent formation of many microstates. 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. 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. Only when politics focuses on the production and reproduction of urban life as the central labor process out of which revolutionary impulses arise, we are told in the preface, will it be possible to mobilize anti-capitalist struggles capable of radically transforming daily life. Later he observes that, to claim the right to the city in the sense I mean it here is to claim some kind of shaping power over the processes of urbanization and to do so in a fundamental and radical way (p.5).
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