Download. When this was challenged in the us Supreme Court, the justices ruled that it was constitutional for local jurisdictions to behave in this way in order to increase their property-tax base.footnote14. He created an urban form where it was believedincorrectly, as it turned out in 1871that sufficient levels of surveillance and military control could be attained to ensure that revolutionary movements would easily be brought to heel. XML. The reverse relation also holds. David Harvey's emphasis is on society having a collective motive where they can knock down all obstacles to produce something radically different. 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. There is much to be gained from Harveys back to the drawing board approach to Marxist theorising, but one cannot avoid the feeling that certain wheels are being reinvented here. However, if bourgeois economists are oblivious to the nature of contemporary crisis, and view urbanisation as inferior or irrelevant to macroeconomic policy, Harvey argues that Marxists have also largely failed to explain the present crisis: the structure of thinking within Marxism generally is distressingly similar to that within bourgeois economics. Harvey's cen-tral theme is that the demand of the Right to the City can unite di erent struggles. Traditionalists rallied around Jane Jacobs and sought to counter the brutal modernism of Mosess projects with a localized neighbourhood aesthetic. Lefebvre summarizes the idea as a "demand[for] a transformed and renewed access to urban life". The urbanists are viewed as specialists, while the truly significant core of macroeconomic Marxist theorizing lies elsewhere (p.35). Migrants' and refugees' right to the city, Learn how and when to remove this template message, "David Harvey: The Right to the City. 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. As Harvey notes, he effectively set up a Keynesian system of debt-financed infrastructural urban improvements (p.8). The various urban movements discussed in the book tackle the conceptual and practical problems which the slogan evokes, but that seems merely to corroborate the reflexive nature of Lefebvres empty signifier. When the architect Jacques Ignace Hittorff showed Haussmann his plans for a new boulevard, Haussmann threw them back at him saying: not wide enough . One only needs to look at the regeneration programme rolled out in East London for the Olympic Games to see this phenomenon in action. The financial system is also more tightly coupled than it ever was before.footnote6 Computer-driven split-second trading always threatens to create a great divergence in the marketit is already producing incredible volatility in stock tradingthat will precipitate a massive crisis, requiring a total re-think of how finance capital and money markets work, including their relation to urbanization. Capitalism needs urbanization to absorb the surplus products it perpetually produces (p.5). Abstract This essay critically examines the concept of the right to the city. 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. Nonetheless, the battle for hegemony is real and necessary if an anti-capitalist movement is ever to challenge capitalist power in a serious way. On the economic front, there remained the question of how surplus capital could be absorbed. 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. . Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution Consider, first, the case of Second Empire Paris. Financial innovations set in train in the 1980ssecuritizing and packaging local mortgages for sale to investors worldwide, and setting up new vehicles to hold collateralized debt obligationsplayed a crucial role. What was the role of urbanization in stabilizing this situation? It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since the transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. 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. But the urban process has undergone another transformation of scale. From the Right to the City to the Urban . In the town of New Haven, strapped for resources for urban reinvestment, it is Yale, one of the wealthiest universities in the world, that is redesigning much of the urban fabric to suit its needs. 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. 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. 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. Neoliberalism has also created new systems of governance that integrate state and corporate interests, and through the application of money power, it has ensured that the disbursement of the surplus through the state apparatus favours corporate capital and the upper classes in shaping the urban process. The right to the city, as it is constituted, is too narrowly confined, restricted in most cases to a small political and economic elite who are in a position to shape cities more and more after their own desires. The property market directly absorbed a great deal of surplus capital through the construction of city-centre and suburban homes and office spaces, while the rapid inflation of housing asset pricesbacked by a profligate wave of mortgage refinancing at historically low rates of interestboosted the us domestic market for consumer goods and services. As a result, over time, periods of capital expansion correspond with periods of urbanisation. [REVIEW] Janet Wolff - 1992 - Theory and Society 21 (4):553-560.