If, finally, the profit rate is too low, then state regulation of ruinous competition, monopolization (mergers and acquisitions) and capital exports provide ways out. 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. . This general situation persists under capitalism, of course; but since urbanization depends on the mobilization of a surplus product, an intimate connection emerges between the development of capitalism and urbanization. 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. 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-. 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. Consider, first, the case of Second Empire Paris. 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. 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. Lefebvre summarizes the idea as a "demand[for] a transformed and renewed access to urban life". Abstract This essay critically examines the concept of the right to the city. One problem with the right to the city slogan is that it feels a very abstract concept compared to the slogans that stand out in recent decades: Whose streets? Haussmann clearly understood that his mission was to help solve the surplus-capital and unemployment problem through urbanization. Capital accumulation is blocked, leaving them facing a crisis, in which their capital can be devalued and in some instances even physically wiped out. 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 answer to the last question is simple enough in principle: greater democratic control over the production and utilization of the surplus. These conditions lead to the Paris Commune, one of the greatest revolutionary episodes in capitalist urban history (p.8). 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. 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. 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. The flip side is that he does not take questions of state power seriously. In 1942, a lengthy evaluation of Haussmanns efforts appeared in Architectural Forum. Nevertheless, this theoretical gift is a double edged sword. 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. . THE RIGHT TO THE CITY David Harvey "CHANGE THE WORLD" SAID MARX; "CHANGE LIFE" SAID RIMBAUD; FOR US, THESE TWO TASKS ARE IDENTICAL (Andr Bretton) - (A banner in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the City of Mexico, site of the student massacre in 1968, January, 2008) 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. We now have, as urban sociologist Sharon Zukin puts it, pacification by cappuccino. According to Tsavdaroglou and Kaika (2021) in the case of Athens "the refugees practices for collective production of alternative housing (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. 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. To be sure, the political task of organizing such a confrontation is difficult if not daunting. 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. The right to the city - Harvey - 2003 - International Journal of Urban Therefore, though precarious, vulnerable and ephemeral, these new forms of cohabitation produced by refugees claim a right to the city; they act, cry and demand (Lefebvre, 1996 [1968]: 173) freedom of movement, appropriation of housing, cohabitation and collective participation in a renewed urban life (Lefebvre, 1996 [1968]: 158). For Lefebvre, revolutionary movements frequently if not always assume an urban dimension. Revolutionaries will not make much impact by simply chanting revolutionary slogans. 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). Lefebvre was right to insist that the revolution has to be urban, in the broadest sense of that term, or nothing at all. . Nannan Dong, Lang Zhang & Stefanie Ruff - 2010 - Topos: European Landscape . Limits of Capital, Condition of Postmodernity, Paris, Capital of Modernity, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, and Social Justice and the City. The Right to the City - parCitypatory Capitalism needs urbanization to absorb the surplus products it perpetually produces (p.5). His arguments will be familiar to those who already know his work e.g. Dan is a writer, broadcaster and campaigner. He is an organiser for Counterfire and a regular contributor to Counterfire site. 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. Indeed, the anti-capitalist movement centred on the 1999 Seattle protests fractured the World Trade Organisation which has never been quite the same since. 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. 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. 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. Can it really be said that the right to the city is the unifying theme behind these slogans? 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. As a consequence, many Marxist theorists, who love crises to death, tend to treat the recent crash as an obvious manifestation of their favoured version of Marxist crisis theory (p.35). The consequences for the global economy and the absorption of surplus capital have been significant: Chile booms thanks to the high price of copper, Australia thrives and even Brazil and Argentina have recovered in part because of the strength of Chinese demand for raw materials. 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. To do this Haussmann needed new financial institutions and debt instruments, the Crdit Mobilier and Crdit Immobilier, which were constructed on Saint-Simonian lines. Lines 630-647 from "Beowulf" shows . 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. 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. 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. Any of these revolts could become contagious. 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. From their inception, cities have arisen through geographical and social concentrations of a surplus product. In the developing world in particular, the city, is splitting into different separated parts, with the apparent formation of many microstates. The honest answer he tells us, is we simply do not know (p.140). 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. 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. In Bolivia, Harvey notes, it was resistance to violent neoliberal measures that led to the election of leftist Evo Morales to power in 2005. In Brazil the 2001 City Statute wrote the Right to the City into federal law. Harvey concludes on this basis that it is possible to organise a political city out of the debilitating processes of neoliberal urbanization, and thereby reclaim the city for anti-capitalist struggle. 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. From their very inception, cities have arisen through the geographical and social concentration of a surplus product, he explains.
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