Liberal theories of globalisation and development are put to bed by Harveys relentless focus on capital accumulation as the prime mover of urban development. 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. If labour is scarce and wages are high, either existing labour has to be disciplinedtechnologically induced unemployment or an assault on organized working-class power are two prime methodsor fresh labour forces must be found by immigration, export of capital or proletarianization of hitherto independent elements of the population. The republican bourgeoisie violently repressed the revolutionaries but failed to resolve the crisis. This, of course, urgently raises the question of challenging state power in a very concrete way. 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. The reverse relation also holds. 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). Bonaparte brought in Georges-Eugne Haussmann to take charge of the citys public works in 1853. 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 . Revolutionary and Counter-revolutionary Theory in Geography and the Problem of Ghetto Formation. If any of the above barriers cannot be circumvented, capitalists are unable profitably to reinvest their surplus product. Violence is required to build the new urban world on the wreckage of the old. 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). I here want to explore another type of human right, that of the right to the city. 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. 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. 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.[10]. Vast infrastructural projects, including dams and highwaysagain, all debt-financedare transforming the landscape. However Harvey downplays the question of organisation in favour of in-depth analysis of various forms of radical social institutions. The right to the city includes the freedom to change and remake it as individuals see fit.' (p. 4). 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. In defence of political-strategic clarity", "Grassroots organizing: Right to the city", Proposal for a Charter for Women's Right to the City, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Right_to_the_city&oldid=1148787841, This page was last edited on 8 April 2023, at 09:47. 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. 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. When this was challenged in the us Supreme Court, the justices ruled that it was constitutional for local jurisdictions to behave in this way in order to increase their property-tax base.footnote14. We have yet, however, to see a coherent opposition to these developments in the twenty-first century. While many progressive scholars have embraced the idea of the right to the city, what these scholars mean by rights has often been left unexplored. Rebel cities: from the right to the city to the urban revolution Harvey, David 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. Brief Summary of Book: Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution by David Harvey. The suburbanization of the United States was not merely a matter of new infrastructures. 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. 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. Free delivery for many products! Furthermore, the fact that it can be distributed so widely encourages even riskier local behaviours, because liability can be transferred elsewhere. The result was an abortive revolution and a wave of repression, as well as the ascent of Louis Bonaparte, who came to power in 1852 as Napoleon III. 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). 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. To this end he claims the necessity of a vigorous anti-capitalist movement that focuses on the transformation of daily urban life as its goal (p.xvi). 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. American urban expansion partially steadied the global economy, as the us ran huge trade deficits with the rest of the world, borrowing around $2 billion a day to fuel its insatiable consumerism and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. 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). . 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? 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). Hundreds of newcomers experiment with these forms of co-living and togetherness, often together with local and European activists. In the past three decades, the neoliberal turn has restored class power to rich elites. 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. 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. 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. . 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. 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. 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. A great deal of energy is expended in promoting their significance for the construction of a better world. To do this Haussmann needed new financial institutions and debt instruments, the Crdit Mobilier and Crdit Immobilier, which were constructed on Saint-Simonian lines. 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. 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). Lenins writings on imperialism explain a lot in terms of the relationship between a decaying and parasitic capitalism and financialisation. This global scale makes it hard to grasp that what is happening is in principle similar to the transformations that Haussmann oversaw in Paris. Dharavi, one of the most prominent slums in Mumbai, is estimated to be worth $2 billion. 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. 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 desire. Lefebvre was right to insist that the revolution has to be urban, in the broadest sense of that term, or nothing at all. 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. Privatized redistribution through criminal activity threatens individual security at every turn, prompting popular demands for police suppression. This starting point could make for a short chapter, but he goes on to search for clues in the recent example of the rebellious city of El Alto, a large urban centre in La Paz, Bolivia. Indeed, since foreclosure means debt forgiveness, which is regarded as income in the United States, many of those evicted face a hefty income-tax bill for money they never had in their possession. The politics of capitalism are affected by the perpetual need to find profitable terrains for capital surplus production and absorption (p.5). How, then, has the need to circumvent these barriers and to expand the terrain of profitable activity driven capitalist urbanization? 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. Under these conditions, ideals of urban identity, citizenship and belongingalready threatened by the spreading malaise of a neoliberal ethicbecome much harder to sustain. In 2007, a disastrous year for financial markets by any measure, these added up to $33.2 billion, only 2 per cent less than the year before. [REVIEW] Janet Wolff - 1992 - Theory and Society 21 (4):553-560. In a way, Harvey appears to recognise this. 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. Urbanization has always been, therefore, a class phenomenon, since surpluses are extracted from somewhere and from somebody, while the control over their disbursement typically lies in a few hands. Heroes also show great leadership and courage. In China millions are being dispossessed of the spaces they have long occupiedthree million in Beijing alone. 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. As Harvey acknowledges, one of the major barriers to understanding how a city might be organised along radical, anti-capitalist lines is a lack of available data. 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. David Harvey attempts two main aims in his latest book, Rebel Cities. The pressure to clear itfor environmental and social reasons that mask the land grabis mounting daily. David Harvey 2007 Symbolik und mythologie der alten Vlker, besonders der Griechen - Georg Friedrich Creuzer 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. 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. The ever growing expansion of capital not only necessitates geographical expansion in itself but leads to the opening of new markets once existing ones have been exhausted, leading to the creation of new lifestyles and product promotion. We now have, as urban sociologist Sharon Zukin puts it, pacification by cappuccino. 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. 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. 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. . 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. To be sure, the political task of organizing such a confrontation is difficult if not daunting. Their many benefits included spreading risk and permitting surplus savings pools easier access to surplus housing demand; they also brought aggregate interest rates down, while generating immense fortunes for the financial intermediaries who worked these wonders. 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. [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. Consider, first, the case of Second Empire Paris. Finally new credit instruments and debt-financed state expenditures arise and monopolization (mergers and acquisitions), and capital exports to fresh pastures provide ways out. As in all the preceding phases, this most recent radical expansion of the urban process has brought with it incredible transformations of lifestyle. 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. You can read this before Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to . Increasingly, we see the right to the city falling into the hands of private or quasi-private interests. No matter how different the reasons may be, the result is always the same; the scandalous alleys and lanes disappear to the accompaniment of lavish self-praise from the bourgeoisie on account of this tremendous success, but they appear again immediately somewhere else . The answer has to be a qualified yes. From Expo City to Sustainable City-Shanghai:" Better City, Better Life" is the motto of the World Expo 2010. 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). In the ensuing vacuum arose the Paris Commune, one of the greatest revolutionary episodes in capitalist urban history, wrought in part out of a nostalgia for the world that Haussmann had destroyed and the desire to take back the city on the part of those dispossessed by his works.footnote2. you have it 40 metres wide and I want it 120. He annexed the suburbs and redesigned whole neighbourhoods such as Les Halles. The post 89 period of globalisation, driven by and largely beneficial to US hegemony, entailed the opening up of the formerly state capitalist economies of the Soviet bloc to a specifically neoliberal form of imperial expansion. 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 right to the city is a collective struggle to rework the urbanization process itself. 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. . We need to be sure we can live with our own creations. Examining the link between urbanization and capitalism, David Harvey suggests we view Haussmann's reshaping of Paris and today's explosive growth of cities as responses to systemic crises of accumulationand issues a call to democratize the power to shape the urban experience. 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 sad point here, of course, is that what Engels described recurs throughout history. 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). 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. Any of these revolts could become contagious. Private property rights in this case provided no protection. 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. Apart from meeting housing needs, these housing forms become significant tools for refugees to participate in the urban social and political life. This is most apparent in his raising of the slogan the right to the city, one of the key themes of the book. You have remained in right site to begin getting this info. We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us. Most movements are messy, uneven and infused with contradictory class consciousness, let alone actual class differentiation in their composition. Throughout capitalist history, some of the surplus value has been taxed, and in social-democratic phases the proportion at the states disposal rose significantly. 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. For instance in So Paulo, one in every three women over the age of 16 has experienced some sort of sexual violence. Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Vintage 1900's DAVID CUDWORTH ALEXANDER (1911-1971) Harvey Illinois PHOTO N2 at the best online prices at eBay! 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. 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. 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. Though this description was written in 1872, it applies directly to contemporary urban development in much of AsiaDelhi, Seoul, Mumbaias well as gentrification in New York. But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. The various urban movements discussed in the book tackle the conceptual and practical problems which the slogan evokes, but that seems merely to corroborate the reflexive nature of Lefebvres empty signifier. Paris became the city of light, the great centre of consumption, tourism and pleasure; the cafs, department stores, fashion industry and grand expositions all changed urban living so that it could absorb vast surpluses through consumerism. This asymmetry cannot be construed as anything less than a massive form of class confrontation. 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. 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).
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