righttothecity.pdf

THE RIGHT TO THE CITY

David Harvey

“CHANGE THE WORLD” SAID MARX; “CHANGE LIFE” SAID RIMBAUD; FOR US, THESE TWO

TASKS ARE IDENTICAL (André Bretton) - ( A banner in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the City of

Mexico, site of the student massacre in 1968, January, 2008 )

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 fundamentally challenge hegemonic liberal and neoliberal market logics

and 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 labor, women, gays and minorities

come to the fore (a legacy of the long-standing labor movement and the 1960s Civil Rights movement in

the United States that was collective and had a global resonance). These struggles for collective rights

have, on occasion, yielded some results (such that a woman and a black become real contestants for the US

Presidency). I here want to explore another kind of collective right, that of the right to the city. This is

important because there is a revival of interest in Henri Lefebvre’s ideas on the topic as these were

articulated in relation to the movement of ’68 in France, at the same time as there are various social

movements around the world that are now demanding the right to the city as their goal. So what might the

right to the city mean?

The city, as 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 daily life we desire, what kinds of technologies we deem appropriate, what aesthetic

values we hold. The right to the city is, therefore, far more than a right of individual access to the resources

that the city embodies: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city more after our heart’s desire. It

is, moreover, a collective rather than an individual right since changing 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.

But since, as Park avers, we have hitherto lacked any clear sense of the nature of our task, we must

first reflect on how we have been made and re-made 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, we have been re-made several times over without knowing why, how or

wherefore. Has this 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 Engels and 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 in the midst of even more rapid urban transformations. Yet we seem to lack the

stomach for systematic critique. 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 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 re-made and to do so in a

fundamental and radical way. From their very inception, cities have arisen through the geographical and

social concentrations of a surplus product. Urbanization has always been, therefore, a class phenomena of

some sort, since surpluses have been extracted from somewhere and from somebody (usually an oppressed

peasantry) while the control over the disbursement of the surplus typically lies in a few hands. This general

situation persists under capitalism, of course, but in this case there is an intimate connection with the

perpetual search for surplus value (profit) that drives the capitalist dynamic. To produce surplus value,

capitalists have to produce a surplus product. Since urbanization depends on the mobilization of a surplus

product an inner connection emerges between the development of capitalism and urbanization.

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. The next day they wake up and have to decide what to do with the extra

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. To remain a capitalist, some surplus must be reinvested to

make even more surplus. Successful capitalists usually make more than enough surplus to reinvest in

expansion and satisfy their lust for pleasure too. But the result of perpetual reinvestment is the expansion of

surplus production at a compound rate - hence all the logistical growth curves (money, capital, output and

population) that attach to the history of capital accumulation. This is paralleled by the logistical growth

path of urbanization under capitalism.

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 barriers 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

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 also be found. This puts increasing pressure on the natural

environment to yield up the necessary raw materials and absorb the inevitable wastes. Terrains for raw

material extraction have to be opened up (imperialist and neo-colonial endeavors often have this as their

objective). 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, reduce the turnover time of capital through speed up and reduce

the friction of distance that limits the geographical range within which the capitalist is free to search for

expanded labor supplies, raw materials, etc. If there is not enough purchasing power in the market then

new markets must be found by expanding foreign trade, promoting new products and lifestyles, creating

new credit instruments and debt-financed state and private 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 re-invested. Capital 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 the 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 here

argue that it plays a particularly active role (along with other phenomenon 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 European-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 the capitalist greed and inequality that

had characterized the July Monarchy. The republican bourgeoisie violently repressed the revolutionaries

but failed to resolve the crisis. The result was the ascent to power of Napoleon 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 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 of 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 re-shaping 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, redesigned whole neighborhoods (such as Les Halles) rather than just bits and

pieces of the urban fabric. He changed the city wholesale rather than retail. To do this he needed new

financial institutions and debt instruments which were constructed on Saint-Simonian lines (the Credit

Mobiliér and Credit Immobiliére). What he did in effect was to help resolve the capital surplus disposal

problem by setting up a Keynesian-like 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 and frivolous consumerism (that

offended traditionalists and excluded workers alike). But then the overextended and increasingly

speculative financial system and credit structures on which this was based crashed in 1868. Haussmann

was forced from power, Napoleon III in desperation went to war against Bismarck’s Germany and lost, and

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

organization (led by the Proudhonists), that led in 1872, in the midst of intense recriminations over who

was at fault for the debacle of the Commune, to the radical and unfortunate break between the Marxists and

the Anarchists that to this day still plague all forms of left opposition to capitalism. 5

Fast forward now to 1942 in the United States. 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, was in alliance with the communist Soviet Union and strong social movements with socialist

inclinations had emerged in the 1930s. We all know the subsequent history of the politics of McCarthyism

and the Cold War (abundant signs of which were already there in 1942). Like Louis Bonaparte, a hefty

dose of political repression was evidently called for by the ruling classes of the time. 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 has done, attempted an analysis of his mistakes but sought to recuperate

Haussmann’s reputation as one of the greatest urbanists of all time. 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 absorbed the

surplus product and thereby helped resolve the capital surplus absorption problem. For this to happen, he

needed to tap into new financial institutions and tax arrangements (subsidies to homeownership) that

liberated the credit to debt-finance the urban expansion. 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 US

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 happened in

Second Empire Paris, it entailed a radical transformation in lifestyles and produced a whole new way of life

in which new products from 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. It also altered the political landscape as subsidized homeownership for the middle classes changed

the focus of community action towards the defense of property values and individualized identities (turning

the suburban vote towards conservative republicanism). In any case, it was argued, debt-encumbered

homeowners are less likely to go on strike. This project succeeded in absorbing the surplus and assuring

social stability, albeit at the cost of hollowing out the central cities and generating a so-called urban crisis

of revolts in many US central cities of impacted minorities (chiefly African-American) who were denied

access to the new prosperity.

This lasted until the end of the 1960s when, as happened to Haussmann, a different kind of crisis

began to unfold such that Moses fell from grace and his solutions came to be seen as inappropriate and

unacceptable. To begin with the central cities were in revolt. Traditionalists rallied around Jane Jacobs and

sought to counter the brutal modernism of Moses’ projects with a localized neighborhood aesthetic. But 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. And if the Haussmanization 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

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