Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution by David Harvey (2012)

Book Review #1

You can get all of these delivered right to your inbox. Comment, share and sign up today!

David Harvey:

A British-born Marxist economic geographer who teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He has authored well-known books such as Social Justice and the City (1973) and A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005)

Summary

David Harvey has an interesting way of reaching his readers. His English prose takes some getting used to at first. As a Marxist geographer, he’s basically cornered the market on the field. It’s an area of Marxism that I wanted to explore more in recent years. In his 2012 book, Rebel Cities, Harvey threads the needle excellently with technocratic language enveloped in an easy-to-read Marxist essay style. This is the first book, for me at least, where I was able to fully comprehend how capital is unevenly distributed throughout cities and how the urban landscape is shaped by the flow of monopolized capital. To be honest, the title grabbed me as well. In Harvey’s 166 page book, he outlines how urban struggles first came into being during the Industrial Revolution. He uses George Hausmann’s work in mid-19th century Paris, to make a point about the destruction of the commons. He uses the background of the increasing urbanization around the globe to explain to relatively well-read Marxists, that the cities they see before them are changing for the worse. And in his typical way, with often longer sentences and heavy comma usage, lays out the details as to why that is happening before their very eyes. He lays out his ideas and judgments in a unique, old-school essay form that we don’t often see from a lot of experienced Marxists, much less geographers. Throughout the book, Harvey makes sure to put the city front and center in his criticism, often focusing on North American and European capitalism.

Harvey’s Main Points

From the onset, Harvey clearly places the city as the most important and main creator of capital accumulation. He doesn’t just arrive at this assumption though on his own. Early in the book, he gives context as to how the Paris Commune of 1871 ultimately ended up taking place and how Second Empire France basically created the modern blueprint of how to solve the surplus capital absorption problem and unemployment simultaneously. As mentioned earlier, he references Louis Bonaparte’s hiring of Georges Haussmann to remake Paris’s urban core. After the European Revolutions of 1848, the new dictator Bonaparte, needed to remake the commons so as to prevent future gatherings and stomp out revolutionary fervor. Harvey says:

“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.”

This of course wouldn't end up working as the Franco-Prussian War created a vacuum in which socialist workers gained control of Paris and set up their own revolutionary governing council for two months. But the point is not lost on anyone that the groundwork was laid for future Haussmann-inspired city rebuilding during this time. These innovations would later have an effect on American builder, Robert Moses and how he designed postwar America to absorb our surplus capital after the war. Harvey also analyzes “localism” and how state and local municipalities have been ravaged by neoliberal economic reforms that originated in the 1980s. That economic shift and inflection point in American history has had a profound effect on our urban landscape today. He notes:

“Since the mid 1980s, neoliberal urban policy concluded that redistributing wealth to less advantaged neighborhoods, cities and regions was futile and that resources should instead be channeled to dynamic “entrepreneurial” growth poles. A spatial version of trickle down would then, in the proverbial long run (which never comes), take care of all those pesky regional, spatial and urban inequalities.

While many readers of Harvey already understand neoliberalism in the context of today’s world political economy, he decides to break down neoliberalism from an urban planning perspective, one that we don’t often see. Financial elites and developers like Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, have carried on Haussman’s legacy by transforming urban environments into the playgrounds of the rich we see today. Cities like Paris, New York City and Los Angeles are almost unaffordable to the average renter. And this is mentioned by Harvey specifically over and over again. He makes a point to say that the left-wing has not learned how to properly deal with neoliberalism and how it strips inner cities of funds and resources like a vampire drains their victims of blood (hence the popular term “vampire capitalists”). As a response to this, he dips his toe into Murray Bookchin’s proposals such as an association of democratic municipalities (i.e. soviets), a type of “confederalism” that would have resembled the Paris Commune of 1871.

The Alternatives

Harvey would be remiss not to mention his alternatives to the surplus capital absorption problem and how we can build a cohesive and egalitarian urban environment. They fall into three basic categories. He uses China as a prime example for his first two alternatives. The first is the less attractive appeal for Marxists. The city of Shenzen has moved towards free-market liberalism, thus making the city extremely expensive to rent property in. The second is right up the ally for Marxists. The city of Chongqing on the other hand, which taxed private capitalists in order to pay for housing and social programs, has taken the more social-democratic approach and made the city more affordable for the lower classes. Harvey makes sure to highlight the fact that although China has absorbed surplus capital in record setting fashion since the 2008 recession (thus helping the world make some sort of recovery), they are far from perfect. The third alternative is increased homeownership rates and an elimination of monopoly rents. He makes remarks on this in the context of the 1947 GI Bill and the subsequent “Golden Age of America”:

Homeownership was widely promoted as central to the “American Dream”, and it rose from just above 40% of the population in the 1940s to more than 60% by the 1960s and close to 70% at its peak in 2004 (as of 2010, it had fallen to 66%). Homeownership may be a deeply held cultural value in the United States, but cultural values flourish remarkably when promoted and subsidized by state policies".”

This is the beginning of a critique in which Harvey would later explain why homeownership has been in decline for the last fifteen years and why the “American Dream” has long been a distant memory (Note: homeownership at the time of this writing has fallen to 64% in 2019, making these remarks even more relevant to the reader today). Linking urban disinvestment to homeownership and the monopoly of rents, is a leap Harvey feels comfortable making. He cites large cities like Cleveland, Detroit, Lille, Liverpool and Baltimore as examples for where surplus capital is stripped out and austerity measures are used to keep urbanization in the hands of the elite. These are cities that had a blue-collar, industrial worker base and have since been abandoned by the capitalist elites by outsourcing jobs overseas. For Harvey, generally the more skyscrapers you see, the more surplus capital is being absorbed through those buildings. He insinuates that the cities of finance capital are completely different than the Detroits and Baltimores of the world. This is true aesthetically and economically if you look hard enough. In fact, he references other world cities like Mumbai, Sao Paulo and Madrid where this dynamic is also occurring:

“But China is only one epicenter for an urbanization process that has now become genuinely global, in part through the astonishing global integration of financial markets that use their flexibility to debt-finance urban projects from Dubai to Sao Paulo and from Madrid and Mumbai to Hong Kong and London. The Chinese central bank, for example, has been active in the secondary mortgage market in the US, while Goldman Sachs has been involved in the surging property markets in Mumbai and Hong Kong has capital invested in Baltimore.”

The globalization process has made every part of the earth reachable for capitalists who prey on vulnerable urban environments with cheap land. He continues to reference emerging markets and makes predictions on what inequality will mean for homeownership globally and what market controls can be put in place in the meantime as we enter the last stages of capitalist development. As capitalism reaches an inflection point, compound growth becomes a sheer “impossibility.” And thus, anti-capitalist movements will need to abolish the power of the capitalist law of value. For Harvey, this is a scary but welcome sight because it means that humans have maxed out capital’s potential and need to design post-capitalist economic systems.

Conclusion

Harvey concludes the book with some basic commentary (still in essay form) on the way the 2011 London riots, Occupy Wall Street and the Communards of 1871 were portrayed by the media. He makes sure to assign most of the responsibility of political agency to the government officials in these locations and not to to those protesting structural wealth inequality. This makes sense since the entire text is essentially a classist opinion on capitalist urbanization methods. A few more references to Bookchin’s confederalist approach are brought up again as a way to supplement inegalitarian urban development. For Harvey, the time is now to stop gentrification, monopoly rents and other predatory practices that financial elites hoist upon the shoulders of urban dwellers. It’s time to retake the urban communal space, according to Harvey. People need to be able to move freely and gather democratically to discuss political affairs. Social mobility is important to a healthy society, especially one that functions within the economic confines of a city space. I enjoyed reading this book and its geographical Marxist approach to modern urbanization. It’s readable for Marxist beginners and those who appreciate an essay form of writing.

4.5/5