Will I love Rebel Cities?

David Harvey has been writing about how capitalism shapes city life since the global revolutions back in 1968.

What I learned from his book Rebel Cities is that we need a laser-like focus on how capitalism makes and remakes urban life, normally for the worse. Unless we realise this we don’t know what we are up against and what effective solutions look like.

What I really like about this book is that it encourages us to see that cities and their citizens are rebelling all over the world – and this means building alternatives to corporate capitalism power that is… show more.

I am inspired by David Harvey’s impassioned Marxist perspective, which makes clear that people not only have a right to the city on its own terms but that this demand must be a political waystation to a much broader anti-capitalist movement. The city functions as a critical site of political revolt (think Paris Commune or the protests against the murder of George Floyd) but Harvey persuasively argues that such protests will be reabsorbed into dominant capitalist practices of displacement, decline, and dispossession unless they are organized on an anti-capitalist platform.

Harvey is one of the most prominent scholars on capitalism and the city. He has shown how capital regularly takes recourse to urban ‘renewal’ plans to overcome crises of capital accumulation. In the form of gentrification, rising rents, and housing shortage, such plans directly affect the lives of those who live and work in the city, and they have repeatedly united to resist such developments and reclaim the city. In Rebel Cities, Harvey explains how enduring conflicts between capital and labor have turned the city into a contested space and how these struggles influence the development of cities.… show more.