Book notes: David Harvey. Rebel Cities: From the right to the city to The neoliberal project over the last thirty years has been oriented towards privatizing that control. Haussmann clearly understood that his mission was to help solve the surplus-capital and unemployment problem through urbanization. There are, however, urban social movements seeking to overcome isolation and reshape the city in a different image from that put forward by the developers, who are backed by finance, corporate capital and an increasingly entrepreneurially minded local state apparatus. At home, it meant consolidating the railway network, building ports and harbours, and draining marshes. The urban crisis that is affecting millions would then be prioritized over the needs of big investors and financiers. One step towards unifying these struggles is to adopt the right to the city as both working slogan and political ideal, precisely because it focuses on the question of who commands the necessary connection between urbanization and surplus production and use. Bonaparte brought in Georges-Eugne Haussmann to take charge of the citys public works in 1853. . 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. Rebel Cities is most stimulating when engaging with questions of Marxist methodology. A slogan predicated on the ubiquitous nature of urbanisation runs the risk of explaining both everything and nothing. The article was by none other than Robert Moses, who after the Second World War did to New York what Haussmann had done to Paris.footnote3 That is, Moses changed the scale of thinking about the urban process. 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. New Left Review 53, September-October 2008", "Competitive Metropolises and the Prospects for Spatial Justice | CISDP", "What Is The Right to the City? As in all the preceding phases, this most recent radical expansion of the urban process has brought with it incredible transformations of lifestyle. Heroes also show great leadership and courage. Increasingly, we see the right to the city falling into the hands of private or quasi-private interests. Financial powers backed by the state push for forcible slum clearance, in some cases violently taking possession of terrain occupied for a whole generation. 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. You have remained in right site to begin getting this info. Haussmann completely transformed the city on a massive scale. Dan is a writer, broadcaster and campaigner. Without adequate risk-assessment controls, this wave of financialization has now turned into the so-called sub-prime mortgage and housing asset-value crisis. 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). 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. This is at times reformulated as a demand for democratic control over the surplus product and so on. This, of course, urgently raises the question of challenging state power in a very concrete way. The answer to the last question is simple enough in principle: greater democratic control over the production and utilization of the surplus. In the past three decades, the neoliberal turn has restored class power to rich elites. 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. From their very inception, cities have arisen through the geographical and social concentration of a surplus product, he explains. Breadcrumbs Section. 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. 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 collective struggle to rework the urbanization process itself. "The right to the city" | 41 | v2 | from New Left Review (2008) | Davi We need to be sure we can live with our own creations. . As with the financial system, the answer is bound to be much more complex precisely because the urban process is now global in scope. It was finance, not pure military power, which drove forward imperial hegemony on behalf of the Western powers. 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. Lines 630-647 from "Beowulf" shows . 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. 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. 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. . 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. 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. 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. There seems to be a high level of abstraction to the formulation of the slogan here. 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. Verified Purchase. Nonetheless, the battle for hegemony is real and necessary if an anti-capitalist movement is ever to challenge capitalist power in a serious way. In Paris, the campaign to stop the Left Bank Expressway and the destruction of traditional neighbourhoods by the invading high-rise giants such as the Place dItalie and Tour Montparnasse helped animate the larger dynamics of the 68 uprising. 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? 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. For Lazar, citizenship in the indigenous city of El Alto involves a mix of urban and rural, collectivism and individualism, egalitarianism and hierarchy. The politics of capitalism are affected by the perpetual need to find profitable terrains for capital surplus production and absorption (p.5). Nor have these movements yet converged on the singular aim of gaining greater control over the uses of the surpluslet alone over the conditions of its production. 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 splits that emerged within the Commune, between the hierarchical Jacobins and the horizontalist Proudhonists still divide the left between Marxists and anarchists today, he argues. 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. The other is to construct a strategic approach to building an anti-capitalist movement that can transform urban spaces to the benefit of those that are presently exploited by the class-nature of urbanisation. 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 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. This method is called Haussmann . 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. 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. 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. 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. How, then, does one organize a city? he asks in chapter 5, reclaiming the city for anti-capitalist struggle. Harvey seems down on contemporary movements for change, though this is unwarranted. . Click here to navigate to parent product. 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. View David Harvey's business profile as Professor of Anthropology and Geography At the Graduate Center at The City College of New York. Discontented white middle-class students went into a phase of revolt, sought alliances with marginalized groups claiming civil rights and rallied against American imperialism to create a movement to build another kind of worldincluding a different kind of urban experience. Capital accumulation through real-estate activity booms, since the land is acquired at almost no cost. 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. Dharavi, one of the most prominent slums in Mumbai, is estimated to be worth $2 billion. XML. 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). 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. Download. The right to the city is not merely a right of access to what already exists, but a right to change it. 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. Every January, the Office of the New York State Comptroller publishes an estimate of the total Wall Street bonuses for the previous twelve months. 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. 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. It was in this context that Henri Lefebvre wrote The Urban Revolution, which predicted not only that urbanization was central to the survival of capitalism and therefore bound to become a crucial focus of political and class struggle, but that it was obliterating step by step the distinctions between town and country through the production of integrated spaces across national territory, if not beyond.footnote4 The right to the city had to mean the right to command the whole urban process, which was increasingly dominating the countryside through phenomena ranging from agribusiness to second homes and rural tourism.