Abstract
In a time when many are praising the city as an economic growth machine, Harvey’s book emphasizes a different sort of urban potential, one very much at odds with the capitalist growth coalition. Glaeser’s 2011 book, Triumph of the City, provides an example of the dominant capitalist reasoning that Harvey critiques. Glaeser celebrates the city as an engine that magnifies human potential to produce innovation and economic prosperity. However, while Glaeser’s future extols the promise of the growth coalition, it largely ignores the inevitable dispossession and inequality associated with his brand of urban economic development. While modern urbanization has been dominated by the neoliberal ideology that Glaeser praises, Harvey argues that cities can also serve as sites of revolutionary change. In Harvey’s vision, we have the power to imagine an alternative urban life—one that confronts inequality and environmental degradation. He believes that reclaiming our right to the city depends upon an anti-capitalist movement focused on transforming daily urban life. This urban transformation is not solely a reinvention of the city but a remaking of ourselves: “the question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from the question of what kind of people we want to be, what kinds of social relations we seek, what relations to nature we cherish, what style of life we desire, what aesthetic values we hold” (3).
The book begins with a discussion of the commons, and the commodification of urban spaces. Harvey discusses urban development as a means of capital absorption, aided by the financial innovations of fictitious capital, and introduces the social practice of commoning as a means of combatting the domination of cities by the capitalist growth machine. Commoning involves organizing to capture externalities and moving some aspects of the environment outside of the market. In the second part of the book, he speaks to the potential of “rebel cities” as catalysts for a larger anti-capitalist struggle. He looks at several examples of urban uprisings—the Paris Commune, Occupy Wall Street, and El Alto, Bolivia—examining their organization and their connection to a broader, globalized class struggle. Harvey bases his argument on the idea that the perpetuation of capitalism is dependent upon the continuous absorption of surplus, which is generated by its perpetually compounding growth. Urban development soaks up this excess capital like a sponge, often at the expense of labor and the environment.
Harvey asserts that urban restructuring takes advantage of poor and vulnerable populations in a process of creative destruction, which reinvents urban spaces through dispossession. He argues that displacement and gentrification are not new phenomena. He quotes a passage that Friedrich Engels wrote in 1782, discussing how cities create artificially high land values, driving capitalist land speculation that inevitably leads to the destruction of housing for the poor and their continual displacement to less desirable, generally more peripheral, locations. Harvey gives examples of violent displacements from around the world, showing how even property rights do not offer ample protection against eminent domain, special economic zones, and other legal frameworks, which are used to facilitate large-scale projects of capital absorption.
Financing such urbanization requires new organizations of credit such as the securitization and packaging of mortgages, which encouraged the risky behavior that contributed to the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008. Harvey reveals how predatory market practices strengthen inequitable economic structures through a process of accumulation by dispossession. He outlines how the mechanisms behind subprime lending and the subsequent foreclosure crisis were not only irresponsible but also fraudulent in many cases.
While those who help build and sustain the city are marginalized and excluded, the rich are subdued into blissful ignorance by artisanal markets and boutiques, a process Sharon Zukin (1995) describes as “pacification by cappuccino” (28). This process, fueled by neoliberal individualism, leads to fragmentation and uneven geographies of wealth and power. As an economic strategy, cities market themselves as destinations for consumption and tourism, investing in shopping malls, hotels, and stadiums. As they lure the rich into cultural or shopping districts, they push the poor out to the periphery and the city becomes accessible only for those with money.
The book offers a powerful, multifaceted critique around the commodification and control of urban spaces. It stretches from New Urbanism, which he deems “the sale of community and boutique lifestyle as a developer product to fulfill urban dreams” (14), to the gated communities of the developing world, which have essentially become microstates that provide golf courses and exclusive schools for their residents while preventing access by anyone from the surrounding informal settlements. These examples show how urban spaces can be segmented, controlled, and sold as a market commodity, creating cities that lack a true public commons. Harvey asserts that this fragmentation undermines ideals of citizenship, community, and collective identity.
This idea also relates to Purcell’s (2008) critique of market logic. In his book Recapturing Democracy, Purcell argues that through neoliberalism, urban life has become increasingly subjected to free market ideology, making cities more segregated, unhealthy, and oppressive environments. He believes that such processes are rationalized through an insidious link between capitalism and democracy. For a solution to these problems, Harvey and Purcell both draw on the work of French Marxist Henri Lefebvre, who promotes city dwellers’ “right to the city.” This concept holds that citizens decide what kind of city they want to live in by exercising their rights of participation and appropriation (Lefebvre 1968). Harvey reworks conventional Marxist theory, claiming that the anti-capitalist revolution does not have to originate in the workplace but that cities themselves can be sites of political and social change. He insists that class struggle and exploitation are not confined to the workplace but pervade all aspects of urban life. Revolution must not only reorganize labor processes but also find an alternative framework of urban relations. However, Harvey does not convincingly show how these transient social practices can have any real power against the capitalist growth coalition.
Harvey presents culture as another form of commons that can be co-opted and commoditized by private interests. He explains this dilemma in his discussion of monopoly rents. Monopoly rents result from the exclusive control over a tradable good, resource, or location that is unique and nonreplicable. Monopoly rents can be extracted from works of art, prime real estate sites, or wine. Despite their uniqueness, these items are commodified, and as they are traded at a market, they often lose their distinctiveness. Like the commons, private interests also have co-opted the symbolic capital of cities. Harvey urges his readers to take back their culture, aesthetics, and history from multinationals and utilize these expressions of collective identity in the struggle of anti-capitalist resistance. However, Harvey’s discussion of monopoly rents lacks clarity, leaving the reader with an ambiguous notion of how they affect equity and the environment. Furthermore, he does not provide a substantial framework for reclaiming the cultural commons in a world where “authentic” manifestations of art and culture remain ever vulnerable to commodification.
Harvey’s book provides a very rich and readable account of how the forces of global capitalism have reshaped our cities. He shows how these forces have led to displacement, gentrification, and the commodification of public spaces. His account is bleak, but he also offers potential for change through the reclaiming of the city for anti-capitalist struggle. He draws on examples from urban uprisings around the world to show how radical political action can push back against social and economic marginalization. His most powerful example is that of El Alto, Bolivia, where diverse social processes came together as a rebellious front to create substantial political change. Though Harvey acknowledges the city’s unique social and geographic context, he does not mention the disillusionment that many in Bolivia now feel with revolutionary president Evo Morales’s second term. Harvey dedicates his last two chapters to the 2011 London riots and Occupy Wall Street. In the case of London, he points out the irony of describing protesters as “feral” when the same sort of savage behavior is taken for granted among politicians, CEOs, and hedge fund managers. In his celebration of Occupy Wall Street, he characterizes the reaction of the capitalist-minded state—expelling the protesters and claiming exclusive rights to public spaces—as absurdly presumptuous, but he does not convincingly establish the importance of the protests beyond their symbolic value. He asserts that the struggle for our future has begun and it is up to us to build a new future on the ruins of the failure of the capitalist hegemony.
The book’s writing style makes the material accessible and exciting for younger audiences, who likely have not read Harvey’s other, more theoretically dense works. However, he does not effectively tie together his celebrations of individual “rebel cities” or connect these movements to the broader idea of structural economic and political reorganization. Furthermore, the explicit mechanisms for commoning and decommodification remain unclear. He also offers little in terms of a vision for what a post-capitalist future would look like. By strongly opposing capitalist structures without providing a substantive vision of alternatives, Harvey’s argument risks being interpreted a purely reactionary response.