Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution

Abstract

‘Citizens and comrades can march together in the anti-capitalist struggle’ argues David Harvey in his newest book, Rebel Cities (2012, p. 153). This image represents its main argument: cities are the locus of surplus value absorption and are themselves an ongoing process of value creation. As a capitalist process of value creation, cities are cleaved by class struggle. On the one side, the bourgeois who seeks conquering spaces and control through property; on the other side, a wide variety of workers who actually build cities but are confronted with different forms of exclusionary practices and dispossessions. Harvey would argue that these processes are also revolutionary seeds. The right to the city is ‘a right to change and reinvent the city more after our hearts' desire’ (p. 4), and this requires the achievement of ‘greater democratic control over the production and use of the surplus’ (p. 22). In this book, Harvey offers some theoretical analyses on potential liberating alternatives.