Book Review: “Rebel Cities — From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution”
By: Estéfani Pedrosa
Tags: Urban Revolution, David Harvey, Urban Planning, Right To The City, Rebel Cities

“Rebel Cities — From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution”, by David Harvey, a Marxist geographer and Distinguished Professor of anthropology and geography at the City University of New York, is a book that describes the implications of capitalism in the urbanization process. Harvey attempts to show how neoliberal policies have increased social inequality and worked to create conditions for a more intense exploration of the working classes in the urban space, for removing labor rights — from whom the author calls the “precariat” — and for a greater capital concentration.

He delves into the concept of “right to the city”, created by Henry Lefebvre, is the process of using collective power to shape urbanization, generating more public goods for the population and creating a city that offers shared space for social interactions. Harvey questions the decision-making processes in supposedly democratic societies, and inquires if the minorities are included in these decisions — as if he was asking “who is entitled to the ‘right to the city’?”. The rescue of Lefebvre’s concept to demonstrate cities can be reimagined by ideas and ideals inside a social collective context.

As one of the cities that first experienced capital-intensive growth, nineteenth-century Paris is pointed out as an example to illustrate Harvey’s ideas. Facing a surplus of both labor and capital, the city put in motion a program of urban transformation through public works, such as the construction of boulevards and the annexation of suburbs. Led by the mayor Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the new infrastructures of Paris become profitable destinations for excess capital and a reliable source of employment for the city’s impoverished and often politically destabilizing labor force. As the renovations progressed, Paris came to become “The City of Light”, which included not only technological advancements but also luxury and consumption. For Harvey, the Haussmannian renovation was an early example of a transformation of the urban space in order to better serve the consumerism that was emerging in Western societies.

Throughout his book, Harvey shows that the idea of using the urban space as an arena to reproduce excess capital remains relevant today. In the 2000s, the housing market was flooded, both on the demand and supply sides, with the excess liquidity from the international financial industry, generating a housing bubble in several wealthy nations. once relatively affordable parts of the cities were gentrified, traditional communities were unable to compete with more affluent newcomers and were forced to move to the city’s expanding limits.

The housing bubble that ensued confused a number of scholars, but not Harvey. Adam Levitin and Susan Watcher describe the academic debates on whether the bubble was driven by supply or demand:

Some theories are demand-side theories, meaning that the housing bubble was caused by a growth in consumer demand for housing, which pushed up housing prices. Others are supply-side theories, meaning that the housing bubble was caused by a growth in the supply of housing finance, thereby enabling consumers to make more heavily leveraged bids for housing and bid up home prices. (Levitin and Watcher, 2012)

David Harvey, however, sees beyond this dichotomy, identifying the cause of the bubble not in buyers or sellers themselves, but in the role of capital in the industry, financing supply and demand simultaneously, and profiting from both sides in each transaction.

Brazilian poet and social historian Luiz Antonio Simas portrays the same process in the Global South and describes how “Rio lives the most aggressive gentrification of its recent history”, enabled by the mass media, in terms that are also applicable to London or New York:

The discourse of urban beautification, of the ecologically correct, of the dignity of the resident, is accompanied by the vigorous and purposeful speculation of the urban soil and the criminal rupture of community ties, with the departure of a population that can no longer afford to rent or cannot acquire the property in the embellished area. There is also a hegemonic discourse in the media that glorifies beautification and hides the social contradictions it brings. Social cleansing is silent, while urban cleansing plays its drums, appropriating codes of what it itself destroys and dominates, through advertising, hearts and minds. (Simas, 2012)

As a successful experience of a population exercising their right of activism and resistance, the author mentions the “Participatory Budget” in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. In this policy, the population — organized in regional plenary sessions weighted according to each region’s lack of public services — directly decides on the destination of part of the city budget. The policy is described by Olívio Dutra, the mayor who first implemented it, as follows:

Participatory Budget is an instrument of protagonism of our people for the broad formulation of the socialization of politics; it is the emergence of structures that lead to the struggle for democratic-popular hegemony, signaling the overcoming of the exploitation society, pointing to the possibility of creating a self-managed, humanist, democratic and libertarian society. (Dutra and Benevides, 2001)

Participatory Budget plenary in Porto Alegre

Harvey has a similar view as that of Dutra, describing social movements as a desirable solution to protect urban spaces from being shaped by capitalism and to strengthen cultural autonomy and support for these cities. The concept of “Rebel Cities”, therefore, describe metropolises that rebel against the system and fight for their rights in the form of revolution. Through globalization, these movements spread around the world, gaining greater strength, generating a stronger impact on society.

The book is not without its critics. James Moulding questions the author’s position concerning the urban revolution. “Compared to his solid analysis of the role of capital, his approach and remarks around recent struggles and movements give a sense of confusion and superficiality to his arguments” (Moulding, 2012). Nicolas Graham alternatively, criticizes how the author’s approach focuses on the United States and fails to describe the results of capital accumulation in different countries.

With the exception of a few passages referring to Chile, Bolivia and China (and in spite of his universalizing framework), Harvey focuses primarily on the United States and the ways in which accumulation by dispossession has been felt and resisted there. (Graham, 2013)

Harvey is bunt in describing how neoliberal policies have increased social inequality in urban spaces worldwide. By presenting the history of urbanization as also a history of social struggles for the shared spaces, the author is able to illustrate the transformation of the city from a place of social encounters into a locus of capital growth. If Harvey can be considered successful in convincing the reader of his diagnosis of urban dysfunctions, he is less persuasive when presenting social movements as the vehicles to reverse this transformation. Perhaps, the book suffers from the author’s extreme aptitude in portraying the width and depth of the problem, which may make his proposed way forward — by the means of emerging social movements — seem not much more than a silver lining.

References

Dutra, O., &; Benevides, M. (2001). Orçamento Participativo e Socialismo (1st ed., Vol. 1, Socialismo em Discussão). São Paulo, Brazil: Fundação Perseu Abramo. DOI: http://biblioteca.clacso.edu.ar/Brasil/fpa/20170906051237/pdf_1157.pdf.

Graham, N. (2013). Book review. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, 1–8. DOI: https://antipodeonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/book-review_graham-on-harvey.pdf.

Levitin, A., & Watcher, S. (2012). Explaining the Housing Bubble. Munich Personal RePEc Archive, 1–69. DOI: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/41920/1/MPRA_paper_41920.pdf.

Moulding, J. (2013). Review: ‘Rebel Cities’, by David Harvey. International Community Forum, 1–2. DOI: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266642716_Review_'Rebel_Cities_From_the_Right_to_the_City_to_the_Urban_Revolution'.

Simas, L. (2012). A perversidade do bem. Monitor Mercantil. Retrieved December 26, 2020, from https://monitormercantil.com.br/a-perversidade-do-bem/.