Rebel Cities

From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution

David Harvey

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781781684054
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Stadtplanung & Stadtentwicklung

Long before Occupy, cities were the subject of much utopian thinking. They are the centers of capital accumulation as well as of revolutionary politics, where deeper currents of social and political change rise to the surface. Do the financiers and developers control access to urban resources or do the people? Who dictates the quality and organization of daily life?
Rebel Cities places the city at the heart of both capital and class struggles, looking at locations ranging from Johannesburg to Mumbai, from New York City to So Paulo. Drawing on the Paris Commune as well as Occupy Wall Street and the London Riots, Harvey asks how cities might be reorganized in more socially just and ecologically sane ways-and how they can become the focus for anti-capitalist resistance.

Section I:
The Right to the City

CHAPTER ONE

The Right to the City

We live in an era when ideals of human rights have moved center-stage both politically and ethically. A lot of political energy is put into promoting, protecting, and articulating their significance in the construction of a better world. For the most part the concepts circulating are individualistic and property-based and, as such, do nothing to challenge hegemonic liberal and neoliberal market logics, or neoliberal modes of legality and state action. We live in a world, after all, where the rights of private property and the profit rate trump all other notions of rights one can think of. But there are occasions when the ideal of human rights takes a collective turn, as when the rights of workers, women, gays, and minorities come to the fore (a legacy of the long-standing labor movement and, for example, the 1960s Civil Rights movement in the United States, which was collective and had a global resonance). Such struggles for collective rights have, on occasion, yielded important results.

Here I want to explore another kind of collective right—that to the city in the context of a revival of interest in Henri Lefebvre’s ideas on the topic, and the emergence of all sorts of social movements around the world that are now demanding such a right. How, then, can this right be defined?

The city, the noted urban sociologist Robert Park once wrote, is “man’s most consistent and on the whole, his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart’s desire. But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself.”1 If Park is correct, then 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. The right to the city is, therefore, far more than a right of individual or group access to the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change and reinvent the city more after our hearts’ desire. It is, moreover, a collective rather than an individual right, since reinventing the city inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power over the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake ourselves and our cities is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights. How best then to exercise that right?

Since, as Park avers, we have hitherto lacked any clear sense of the nature of our task, it is useful first to reflect on how we have been made and remade throughout history by an urban process impelled onwards by powerful social forces. The astonishing pace and scale of urbanization over the last hundred years means, for example, that we have been remade several times over without knowing why or how. Has this dramatic urbanization contributed to human well-being? Has it made us into better people, or left us dangling in a world of anomie and alienation, anger and frustration? Have we become mere monads tossed around in an urban sea? These were the sorts of questions that preoccupied all manner of nineteenth-century commentators, such as Friedrich Engels and Georg Simmel, who offered perceptive critiques of the urban personas then emerging in response to rapid urbanization.2 These days it is not hard to enumerate all manner of urban discontents and anxieties, as well as excitements, in the midst of even more rapid urban transformations. Yet we somehow seem to lack the stomach for systematic critique. The maelstrom of change overwhelms us even as obvious questions loom. What, for example, are we to make of the immense concentrations of wealth, privilege, and consumerism in almost all the cities of the world in the midst of what even the United Nations depicts as an exploding “planet of slums”?3

To claim the right to the city in the sense I mean it here is to claim some kind of shaping power over the processes of urbanization, over the ways in which our cities are made and remade, and to do so in a fundamental and radical way. From their very inception, cities have arisen through the geographical and social concentration of a surplus product. 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 (such as a religious oligarchy, or a warrior poet with imperial ambitions). This general situation persists under capitalism, of course, but in this case there is a rather different dynamic at work. Capitalism rests, as Marx tells us, upon the perpetual search for surplus value (profit). But to produce surplus value capitalists have to produce a surplus product. This means that capitalism is perpetually producing the surplus product that urbanization requires. The reverse relation also holds. Capitalism needs urbanization to absorb the surplus products it perpetually produces. In this way an inner connection emerges between the development of capitalism and urbanization. Hardly surprisingly, therefore, the logistical curves of growth of capitalist output over time are broadly paralleled by the logistical curves of urbanization of the world’s population.

Let us look more closely at what capitalists do. They begin the day with a certain amount of money and end the day with more of it (as profit). The next day they have to decide what to do with the surplus money they gained the day before. They face a Faustian dilemma: reinvest to get even more money or consume their surplus away in pleasures. The coercive laws of competition force them to reinvest, because if one does not reinvest then another surely will. For a capitalist to remain a capitalist, some surplus must be reinvested to make even more surplus. Successful capitalists usually make more than enough both to reinvest in expansion and satisfy their lust for pleasure. But the result of perpetual reinvestment is the expansion of surplus production. Even more important, it entails expansion at a compound rate—hence all the logistical growth curves (money, capital, output, and population) that attach to the history of capital accumulation.

The politics of capitalism are affected by the perpetual need to find profitable terrains for capital surplus production and absorption. In this the capitalist faces a number of obstacles to continuous and trouble-free expansion. If there is a scarcity of labor and wages are too high, then either existing labor has to be disciplined (technologically induced unemployment or an assault on organized working class power—such as that set in motion by Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s—are two prime methods) or fresh labor forces must be found (by immigration, export of capital, or proletarianization of hitherto independent elements in the population). New means of production in general and new natural resources in particular must be found. This puts increasing pressure on the natural environment to yield up the necessary raw materials and absorb the inevitable wastes. The coercive laws of competition also force new technologies and organizational forms to come on line all the time, since capitalists with higher productivity can out-compete those using inferior methods. Innovations define new wants and needs, and reduce the turnover time of capital and the friction of distance. This extends the geographical range over which the capitalist is free to search for expanded labor supplies, raw materials, and so on. If there is not enough purchasing power in an existing market, then new markets must be found by expanding foreign trade, promoting new products and lifestyles, creating new credit instruments and debt-financed state expenditures. If, finally, the profit rate is too low, then state regulation of “ruinous competition,” monopolization (mergers and acquisitions), and capital exports to fresh pastures provide ways out.

If any one of the above barriers to continuous capital circulation and expansion becomes impossible to circumvent, then capital accumulation is blocked and capitalists face a crisis. Capital cannot be profitably reinvested, accumulation stagnates or ceases, and capital is devalued (lost) and in some instances even physically destroyed. Devaluation can take a number of forms. Surplus commodities can be devalued or destroyed, productive capacity and assets can be written down in value and left unemployed, or money itself can be devalued through inflation. And in a crisis, of course, labor stands to be devalued through massive unemployment. In what ways, then, has capitalist urbanization been driven by the need to circumvent these barriers and to expand the terrain of profitable capitalist activity? I argue here that it plays a particularly active role (along with other phenomena such as military expenditures) in absorbing the surplus product that capitalists are perpetually producing in their search for surplus value.4

Consider, first, the case of Second Empire Paris. The crisis of 1848 was one of the first clear crises of unemployed surplus capital and surplus labor side-by-side, and it was Europe-wide. It struck particularly hard in Paris, and the result was an abortive revolution on the part of unemployed workers and those bourgeois utopians who saw a social republic as the antidote to capitalist greed and inequality. The republican bourgeoisie violently repressed the revolutionaries but failed to resolve the crisis. The result was the ascent to power of Louis Bonaparte, who engineered a coup in 1851 and proclaimed himself emperor in 1852. To survive politically, the authoritarian emperor resorted to widespread political repression of alternative political movements, but he also knew that he had to deal with the capital surplus absorption problem, and this he did by announcing a vast program of infrastructural investment both at home and abroad. Abroad this meant the construction of railroads throughout Europe and down into the Orient, as well as support for grand works such as the Suez Canal. At home it meant consolidating the railway network, building ports and harbors, draining marshes, and the like. But above all it entailed the reconfiguration of the urban infrastructure of Paris. Bonaparte brought Haussmann to Paris to take charge of the public works in 1853.

Haussmann clearly understood that his mission was to help solve the surplus capital and unemployment problem by way of urbanization. The rebuilding of Paris absorbed huge quantities of labor and capital by the standards of the time and, coupled with authoritarian suppression of the aspirations of the Parisian labor force, was a primary vehicle of social stabilization. Haussmann drew upon the utopian plans (by Fourierists and Saint-Simonians) for reshaping Paris that had been debated in the 1840s, but with one big difference: he transformed the scale at which the urban process was imagined. When the architect Hittorf showed Haussmann his plans for a new boulevard, Haussmann threw them back at him, saying “not wide enough … you have it 40 meters wide and I want it 120.” Haussmann thought of the city on a grander scale, annexed the suburbs, and redesigned whole neighborhoods (such as Les Halles) rather than just bits and pieces of the urban fabric. He changed the city wholesale rather than piecemeal. To do this, he needed new financial institutions and debt instruments constructed on Saint-Simonian lines (the Crédit Mobilier and Immobilière). What he did in effect was to help resolve the capital surplus disposal problem by setting up a Keynesian system of debt-financed infrastructural urban improvements.

The system worked very well for some fifteen years, and it entailed not only a transformation of urban infrastructures but the construction of a whole new urban way of life and the construction of a new kind of urban persona. Paris became “the city of light,” the great center of consumption, tourism and pleasure—the cafés, the department stores, the fashion industry, the grand expositions all changed the urban way of life in ways that could absorb vast surpluses through crass consumerism (which offended traditionalists and excluded workers alike). But then, in 1868, the overextended and increasingly speculative financial system and credit structures on which this was based crashed. Haussmann was forced from power. In desperation, Napoleon III went to war against Bismarck’s Germany, and lost. In the vacuum that followed arose the Paris Commune, one of the greatest revolutionary episodes in capitalist urban history. The Commune was wrought in part out of a nostalgia for the urban world that Haussmann had destroyed (shades of the 1848 Revolution) and the desire to take back their city on the part of those dispossessed by Haussmann’s works. But the Commune also articulated conflictual forward-looking visions of alternative socialist (as opposed to monopoly capitalist) modernities that pitted ideals of centralized hierarchical control (the Jacobin current) against decentralized anarchist visions of popular control (led by the Proudhonists). In 1872, in the midst of intense recriminations over who was at fault for the loss of the Commune, there occurred the radical political break between the Marxists and the anarchists that, to this day, still unfortunately divides so much of the left opposition to capitalism.5

Fast-forward now to the United States in 1942. The capital surplus disposal problem that had seemed so intractable in the 1930s (and the unemployment that went with it) was temporarily resolved by the huge mobilization for the war effort. But everyone was fearful as to what would happen after the war. Politically the situation was dangerous. The federal government was in effect running a nationalized economy (and was doing so very efficiently), and the United States was in alliance with the communist Soviet Union in the war against fascism. Strong social movements with socialist inclinations had emerged in response to the depression of the 1930s, and sympathizers were integrated into the war effort. We all know the subsequent history of the politics of McCarthyism and the Cold War (abundant signs of which were there in 1942). As under Louis Bonaparte, a hefty dose of political repression was evidently called for by the ruling classes of the time to reassert their power. But what of the capital surplus disposal problem?

In 1942 there appeared a lengthy evaluation of Haussmann’s efforts in an architectural journal. It documented in detail what he had done that was so compelling and attempted an analysis of his mistakes. The article was by none other than Robert Moses, who after World War II did to the whole New York metropolitan region what Haussmann had done to Paris.6 That is, Moses changed the scale of thinking about the urban process and—through the system of (debt-financed) highways and infrastructural transformations, through suburbanization, and through the total re-engineering not just of the city but of the whole metropolitan region—he defined a way to absorb the surplus product and thereby resolve the capital surplus absorption problem. This process, when taken nation-wide, as it was in all the major metropolitan centers of the United States (yet another transformation of scale), played a crucial role in the stabilization of global capitalism after World War II (this was a period when the United States could afford to power the whole global non-communist economy through running trade deficits).

The suburbanization of the United States was not merely a matter of new infrastructures. As in Second Empire Paris, it entailed a radical transformation in lifestyles and produced a whole new way of life in which new products—from suburban tract housing to refrigerators and air conditioners, as well as two cars in the driveway and an enormous increase in the consumption of oil—all played their part in the absorption of the surplus. Suburbanization (alongside militarization) thus played a critical role in helping to absorb the surplus in the post-war years. But it did so at the cost of hollowing out the central cities and leaving them bereft of a sustainable economic basis, thus producing the so-called “urban crisis” of the 1960s, defined by revolts of impacted minorities (chiefly African-American) in the inner cities, who were denied access to the new prosperity.

Not only were the central cities in revolt. Traditionalists increasingly rallied around Jane Jacobs and sought to counter the brutal modernism of Moses’s large-scale projects with a different kind of urban aesthetic that focused on local neighborhood development, and on the historical preservation, and ultimately gentrification, of older areas. But by then the suburbs had been built, and the radical transformation in lifestyle that this betokened had all manner of social consequences, leading feminists, for example, to proclaim the suburb and its lifestyle as the locus of all their primary discontents. As had happened to Haussmann, a crisis began to unfold such that Moses fell from grace, and his solutions came to be seen as inappropriate and unacceptable towards the end of the 1960s. And if the Haussmannization of Paris had a role in explaining the dynamics of the Paris Commune, so the soulless qualities of suburban living played a critical role in the dramatic movements of 1968 in the United States, as discontented white middle-class students went into a phase of revolt, seeking alliances with other marginalized groups and rallying against US imperialism to create a movement to build another kind of world, including a different kind of urban experience (though, again, anarchistic and libertarian currents were pitted against demands for hierarchical and centralized alternatives).7

Along with the ’68 revolt came a financial crisis. It was partly global (with the collapse of the Bretton Woods agre...