Capital Accumulation in the Peripheral City: Socio-Spatial Conflict and Urban Governance

Abstract

This chapter offers a concrete analysis of the spatial conflicts and contradictions that have come out of such changes, focusing on the historical capitalist and urban development of the semiperipheral Colombian city of Medellin. The choice of an analysis based on a Latin American city is four-fold in nature. First, in choosing Medellin for an analysis of the global-local relationship that has come out of the neoliberal post-1970s world order, the author hopes to transcend the implicit academic preference for assuming that it is mainly the core-country ‘financial’ cities (or world cities) that assume agency in this emerging conjuncture (for example, Keil 1998; Jessop 2002; Paul 2002). Second, due to the fact that Medellin, like a number of Latin American cities, developed a relatively endogenous industrial-agricultural productive paradigm for the great part of the twentieth century, the recent changes in productive structure become more explicit as do their uneven class impacts. Third, focusing on a Latin American city allows one tolink the political process of decentralization that took the region by storm in the 1980s and 1990s, with its broader economic dimensions. Lastly, adopting a city-based analysis permits one to capture the link between systemic politico-economic reconfigurations and their manifestations, particularly within the sphere of urban governance and the fight for space in the city.