Privatized redistribution through criminal activity threatens individual security at every turn, prompting popular demands for police suppression. 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. Dan is a writer, broadcaster and campaigner. The neoliberal project over the last thirty years has been oriented towards privatizing that control. 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. 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. 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. 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. Nonetheless, the battle for hegemony is real and necessary if an anti-capitalist movement is ever to challenge capitalist power in a serious 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. I wager that within fifteen years, if present trends continue, all those hillsides in Rio now occupied by favelas will be covered by high-rise condominiums with fabulous views over the idyllic bay, while the erstwhile favela dwellers will have been filtered off into some remote periphery. Lenins writings on imperialism explain a lot in terms of the relationship between a decaying and parasitic capitalism and financialisation. Most movements are messy, uneven and infused with contradictory class consciousness, let alone actual class differentiation in their composition. 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. 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. By the end of the 1960s, a different kind of crisis began to unfold; Moses, like Haussmann, fell from grace, and his solutions came to be seen as inappropriate and unacceptable. How, then, does one organize a city? he asks in chapter 5, reclaiming the city for anti-capitalist struggle. Going against the grain of his previous book Explanation in Geography published in 1970, he argued that geography cannot remain disengaged . . [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. . The overextended system of speculative finance and credit structures crashed in 1868. The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space [Mitchell, Don] on Amazon.com. Haussmann was dismissed; Napoleon III in desperation went to war against Bismarcks Germany and lost. 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 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. Can it really be said that the right to the city is the unifying theme behind these slogans? David Harvey 2007 Symbolik und mythologie der alten Vlker, besonders der Griechen - Georg Friedrich Creuzer This, of course, urgently raises the question of challenging state power in a very concrete way. 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. 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. Capital accumulation is blocked, leaving them facing a crisis, in which their capital can be devalued and in some instances even physically wiped out. A great deal of energy is expended in promoting their significance for the construction of a better world. The concept of the Right to the City has been taken up by a variety of social movements and urban activists around the world, who use it as a rallying cry for greater social justice and democracy in the urban environment. Free delivery for many products! 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. In mid-summer of 2007, the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank poured billions of dollars worth of short-term credit into the financial system to ensure its stability, and thereafter the Fed dramatically lowered interest rates or pumped in vast amounts of liquidity every time the Dow threatened to fall precipitously. But spreading risk does not eliminate it. The result of continued reinvestment is the expansion of surplus production at a compound ratehence the logistic curves (money, output and population) attached to the history of capital accumulation, paralleled by the growth path of urbanization under capitalism. Since slum dwellers are illegal occupants and many cannot definitively prove their long-term residence, they have no right to compensation. 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. 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 . 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. We need to be sure we can live with our own creations. 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. Even the incoherent, bland and monotonous suburban tract development that continues to dominate in many areas now gets its antidote in a new urbanism movement that touts the sale of community and boutique lifestyles to fulfill urban dreams. 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. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself.footnote1. To do this Haussmann needed new financial institutions and debt instruments, the Crdit Mobilier and Crdit Immobilier, which were constructed on Saint-Simonian lines. And for all its limitations the 99% slogan has already raised the spectre of class-based movement politics in a more overt way than the right to the city slogan is capable of without significant qualifications. We live in an era when ideals of human rights have moved centre stage both politically and ethically. [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. Every January, the Office of the New York State Comptroller publishes an estimate of the total Wall Street bonuses for the previous twelve months. Harvey, David. Quality of urban life has become a commodity, as has the city itself, in a world where consumerism, tourism, cultural and knowledge-based industries have become major aspects of the urban political economy. 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. 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. Liberal theories of globalisation and development are put to bed by Harveys relentless focus on capital accumulation as the prime mover of urban development. Commenting on the conections undelying the many grassroots resistance experiences drawn um from social movements, and the. It documented in detail what he had done, attempted an analysis of his mistakes but sought to recuperate his reputation as one of the greatest urbanists of all time. 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. right to collectively reshape the urban process. 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. 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. 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. 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. Standing up for what the person believes is right and having good morals is also important to being a hero. 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. 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. It has, in short, gone global. Through a system of highways and infrastructural transformations, suburbanization and the total re-engineering of not just the city but also the whole metropolitan region, he helped resolve the capital-surplus absorption problem. 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 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. To do this, he tapped into new financial institutions and tax arrangements that liberated the credit to debt-finance urban expansion. 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. By placing data on financialisation and debt creation alongside property booms a remarkable link between urbanisation and crisis emerges. We need to be sure we can live with our own creations. 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. As in Second Empire Paris, it entailed a radical transformation in lifestyles, bringing new products from housing to refrigerators and air conditioners, as well as two cars in the driveway and an enormous increase in the consumption of oil. Haussmann was sacked and, in desperation, Napoleon went to war with Germany. On the economic front, there remained the question of how surplus capital could be absorbed. 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. Har- There seems to be a high level of abstraction to the formulation of the slogan here. Since the urban process is a major channel of surplus use, establishing democratic management over its urban deployment constitutes the right to the city. Alternatively (or, as history transpires, as well as this) new sources of labour need to be found through immigration, outsourcing, or the proletarianization of hitherto independent elements in the population (p.6). The right to the city is a collective struggle to rework the urbanization process itself. Indeed, the anti-capitalist movement centred on the 1999 Seattle protests fractured the World Trade Organisation which has never been quite the same since. 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. 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). 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. 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. Signs of rebellion are everywhere: the unrest in China and India is chronic, civil wars rage in Africa, Latin America is in ferment. Consequently, cities have been the . 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. [5][6] A good proof on how the notion of right to the city has gained international recognition in the last years could be seen in the United Nations Habitat III process, and how the New Urban Agenda (2016) recognized the concept as the vision of cities for all.[7]. 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. They are pulled down and in their stead shops, warehouses and public buildings are erected.footnote11. The right to the city is not merely a right of access to what already exists, but a right to change it. Once occupied, these buildings become novel forms of habitation with strong elements of commoning and cohabitation. The 1848 crisis in Second Republic Paris saw unemployed surplus capital and surplus labour side-by-side (p.7). Fast forward once again to our current conjuncture. 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. Harvey seems down on contemporary movements for change, though this is unwarranted. For Lazar, citizenship in the indigenous city of El Alto involves a mix of urban and rural, collectivism and individualism, egalitarianism and hierarchy. 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). 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. 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. 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. (con secciones acti vas en ciudades como Nueva York y Los Angeles) [Right to the City Alliance] , inspirados en parte . Increasingly, we see the right to the city falling into the hands of private or quasi-private interests. But the suburbs had been built, and the radical change in lifestyle that this betokened had many social consequences, leading feminists, for example, to proclaim the suburb as the locus of all their primary discontents. 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). spring, Bowling Green State University | 3.1K views, 42 likes, 25 loves, 75 comments, 17 shares, Facebook Watch Videos from Bowling Green State University: Join us as we celebrate our spring 2023. To concede that right, says the Supreme Court, would be tantamount to rewarding pickpockets for their actions. 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. If they somehow did come together, what should they demand? 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. [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. 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. 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.
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