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. Above all, it entailed the reconfiguration of the urban infrastructure of Paris. 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). 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. 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. We now have, as urban sociologist Sharon Zukin puts it, pacification by cappuccino. Under these conditions, ideals of urban identity, citizenship and belongingalready threatened by the spreading malaise of a neoliberal ethicbecome much harder to sustain. 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). On the economic front, there remained the question of how surplus capital could be absorbed. As a result, over time, periods of capital expansion correspond with periods of urbanisation. You can read this before Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to . 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. (con secciones acti vas en ciudades como Nueva York y Los Angeles) [Right to the City Alliance] , inspirados en parte . get the La Hija Del . 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. The data for all oecd countries show, however, that the states portion of gross output has been roughly constant since the 1970s.footnote17 The main achievement of the neoliberal assault, then, has been to prevent the public share from expanding as it did in the 1960s. To do this Haussmann needed new financial institutions and debt instruments, the Crdit Mobilier and Crdit Immobilier, which were constructed on Saint-Simonian lines. 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 economic situation he dealt with by means of a vast programme of infrastructural investment both at home and abroad. The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space [Mitchell, Don] on Amazon.com. uation, 'the city and the urban process it produces become major sites of political, social and class struggles'. Capital accumulation is blocked, leaving them facing a crisis, in which their capital can be devalued and in some instances even physically wiped out. 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. Right to the City by David Harvey But the urban process has undergone another transformation of scale. Traditionalists rallied around Jane Jacobs and sought to counter the brutal modernism of Mosess projects with a localized neighbourhood aesthetic. These are of course desirable objects of revolutionary struggle, but we are left with no obvious mechanisms for attaining such control. The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space 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 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. Lefebvre summarizes the idea as a "demand[for] a transformed and renewed access to urban life". 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. Indeed, the anti-capitalist movement centred on the 1999 Seattle protests fractured the World Trade Organisation which has never been quite the same since. The 1848 crisis in Second Republic Paris saw unemployed surplus capital and surplus labour side-by-side (p.7). 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) have argued that the right to the city needs to be understood in gendered terms. By relating the specific to the general he was performing a necessary act of theoretical abstraction. 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. 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. "The right to the city" | 41 | v2 | from New Left Review (2008) | Davi 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. Our streets!; Thats not what democracy looks like!; Stop the war; Occupy!; We are the 99%; No cuts. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution Rebel cities : from the right to the city to the urban revolution 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. Some sort of intermediary, transitional, political argumentation is presumably needed if a truly mass movement is to be created. 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. By placing data on financialisation and debt creation alongside property booms a remarkable link between urbanisation and crisis emerges. 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. 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. Harvey reveals that the World Bank continues to push neoliberal policies despite the devastating crash of 2007/8 which was of course predicated on the extensive period of deregulation and marketisation of the past three decades. 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. He does not want to be characterised as a specialist but his political arguments conform too closely to his academic field of urban geography for his denial to be entirely convincing. The honest answer he tells us, is we simply do not know (p.140). Registered in England & Wales No. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself.footnote1. . Social Processes and Spatial Form:: (2) The Redistribution of Real Income in an Urban System. 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. 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. 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. NLR 53, September-October 2008 - New Left Review He deliberately engineered the removal of much of the working class and other unruly elements from the city centre, where they constituted a threat to public order and political power. This can be done by using technology to displace workers or by assaults on organised labour as orchestrated by Thatcher and Reagan in the 80s. 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). Furthermore, the fact that it can be distributed so widely encourages even riskier local behaviours, because liability can be transferred elsewhere. 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 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. 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. Marx was deliberately generalising the specific features of capitalism and crisis of his era in order to give an insight into the laws of motion of capital in general. 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. We need to be sure we can live with our own creations. "The Right to the City" | 35 | v7 | New Left Review (2008) | David Har Nevertheless, this theoretical gift is a double edged sword. [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. The reverse relation also holds. 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. The hunt for new means of production and resources puts increasing pressure on the natural environment. [REVIEW] Janet Wolff - 1992 - Theory and Society 21 (4):553-560. 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. 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. 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. 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. Liberal theories of globalisation and development are put to bed by Harveys relentless focus on capital accumulation as the prime mover of urban development. However Harvey downplays the question of organisation in favour of in-depth analysis of various forms of radical social institutions. The current crisis, with vicious local repercussions on urban life and infrastructures, also threatens the whole architecture of the global financial system and may trigger a major recession to boot. 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. 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. Revolutionary and Counter-revolutionary Theory in Geography and the Problem of Ghetto Formation. Harvey, David. 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. The Right to the City | 20 | Citizenship Rights | David Harvey | Taylo I here want to explore another type of human right, that of the right to the city. Most movements are messy, uneven and infused with contradictory class consciousness, let alone actual class differentiation in their composition. [PDF] [EPUB] Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban 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. A great deal of energy is expended in promoting their significance for the construction of a better world. This project successfully absorbed the surplus and assured social stability, albeit at the cost of hollowing out the inner cities and generating urban unrest amongst those, chiefly African-Americans, who were denied access to the new prosperity. This population is due no bonuses. Haussmann was dismissed; Napoleon III in desperation went to war against Bismarcks Germany and lost. Harvey Smith Sacrifice - 473 Words | 123 Help Me . 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 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. The growing popularity of the concept has nonetheless raised some criticism and concerns on how the original vision of Henri Lefevbre could be reduced to a citizenship vision, focused on the mere implementation of social and economic rights in the city leaving aside its transformatory nature and the concept of social conflict behind the original concept. PDF S They need to open up terrains for raw-material extractionoften the objective of imperialist and neo-colonial endeavours. 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. 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. But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. It is the rst . 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). 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. One only needs to look at the regeneration programme rolled out in East London for the Olympic Games to see this phenomenon in action. Dan is a writer, broadcaster and campaigner. His most recent documentary was The New Scramble For Africa and his documentaries have appeared regularly on the Islam Channel. 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.