David Harvey - Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution

bristol | globalisation | opinion/analysis Friday May 11, 2012 23:12 by Syder

Cities have long been the pivotal sites of political revolutions, where deeper currents of social and political change are fleshed out. Consequently, they have been the subject of much utopian thinking about alternatives. But at the same time, they are also the centres of capital accumulation, and therefore the frontline for struggles over who has the right to the city, and who dictates the quality and organization of daily life. Is it the developers and financiers, or the people? David Harvey’s Rebel Cities places the city at the heart of both capital and class struggles, looking at locations ranging from Johannesburg to Mumbai, and from New York City to Sao Paulo. By exploring how cities might be reorganized in more socially just and ecologically sane ways, Harvey argues that cities can become the focus for anti-capitalist resistance.

Here’s a link to the audio from Harvey’s Festival of Ideas talk in Bristol this evening. It covers issues around cities, capital accumulation, sub-prime mortgages and the financial crash, Occupy, and how a coalition of the urban dispossessed can form a meaningful alternative to neoliberal hegemony.