Abstract
This is one of the most engaging texts on urban and global capitalism. It explores the nexus between capitalism and cities in the phase of contemporary globalization. The book is essentially centered around the question of the 2008 economic crisis and its interlinkage with housing and finance and how this has brought about a long - term strategic inter-connectedness between capital accumulation and financial urbanization, and particularly its contradictory manifestation.
The key objective of the book is to accomplish the difficult task of disentangling the city-capitalism nexus in the global age. While analyzing different theoretical strands, including Harvey’s thesis, Rossi tries to provide an undated understanding of current condition of the capitalist city, particularly in the light of recent Great Recession and its aftermath. It is furthermore engaged with other various elements of thinking within urban studies, critical human studies, and social sciences, such as neo-institutionalism, cultural political economy, post colonial urbanism, and contemporary radical thought in Italy, while also showing the continued relevance of Frankfurt School.
Rossi argues that capitalism is a force of exploitation and invention, but has no longer merely incorporated key aspects of society into its system; instead encompassing everything including life itself. Another distinctive contribution of this book lies in its understanding of capitalism in relation to the urban phenomenon.
The book also explores the way in which urban transformations arise from governmental projects, responding to the changing configuration of the capitalist economy, including the technological boom experienced by economically leading cities in the United States and other advanced capitalist economics after the end of recession of the late 2000s. This boom has taken the form of technology-led entrepreneurial communities (the so-called ‘start-up phenomena’) particularly concentrating in inner-city areas. This phenomenon has contributed to a rejuvenation of the capitalist imaginary after the terrible shock of 2008, instilling a renewed sense of entrepreneurial vitality that is essential for the reproduction of capitalist culture. In addition, it develops a post-colonial critique.
The book consists of five fascinating chapters. Each chapter is elucidative of a specific social dynamic through which cities become enmeshed in global capitalism. The first chapter of this book is constructed/designed around the idea of ‘emergence’ and it primarily identifies three ‘emergences’ within the ‘city-capitalisms’ long-term relationship: financial power, entrepreneurialism, and cognitive capital. All these distinctive features are the products of the historical trajectory of capitalist urbanism: they are not creation of the contemporary age, but have to be viewed as long-standing feature of capitalist cities resurfacing and becoming generalized in a context of globalization.
The second chapter considers various debates concerning the relationship between cities and globalization. It also focuses on the way that scholars have gradually shifted their attention from the structural determinants of the global city phenomenon toward an extended conceptualization of the global dimension of people’s urban experience.
The third chapter is devoted to a consideration of the second component of neo-liberalism and its relationship of immanence with the capitalist city.
The fourth chapter focuses on how homogenization processes resulting from the global phenomena of capitalist colonization, such as McDonaldization, Disneyfication, and Guggenheimization, are not merely to be understood as straightforward uniformization of the urban experience. Instead the book draws on the insights of postcolonial sub-urbanists – as a continuous overlapping of unique and repetitive processes at the same time reflecting place-specific hegemonic projects as well as changing capitalist configurations. The chapter reconstructs the geographies of global capitalism as seen through the lenses of these culturally hegemonic forces and the place-sensitive receptions of global processes. The chapter further offers an interpretation of the global geographies of contemporary capitalism from an urban perspective, viewing the defining feature of the process of globalization and neo-liberalization, particularly in its constitutive stages, as the production and diffusion of a ‘one-dimensional city’ based on forms of mass consumption derived from dominant Western cultures and especially those of the American lifestyle.
The fifth chapter of the book analyzes the ‘variations’ of the global capitalist city under conditions of neoliberal dominance. This chapter further offers an illustration of the rapidly evolving nature of contemporary capitalism in its urban form, identifying three subjective figures of the capitalist city before and after the global economic crisis of the late 2000s: the socialized city, the dispossessed city, and the revenant city. The socialized city reflects the process of subsumption of society characterizing the post-Fordist transition within globalizing capitalist societies: this involves the formation of a ‘socialized’ workforce, particularly epitomized by the rise of urban creative economics. The dispossessed city is understood as a normalized ‘state of exception’ brought about on one hand by the global expression of capitalism and on the other hand by the global financial crisis and the subsequent wave of austerity. The revenant city, a term he has borrowed from Alejandro G. Inarritu’s recent film, The Revenant, is the outcome of process of societal re-enlivenment within the latest phase of post-recession capitalist development, in which life as such has been increasingly subsumed within the capitalist value chain. The advent of the web 2.0 and of the experience economy is particularly illustrative of these trends.
On the whole this is an interesting and highly informative book suitable for scholars of sociology, urban studies, and the social sciences more generally.