Rebel Cities

February 6, 2012
Taking Henri Lefebvre’s 1967 essay, “The Right to the City,” as his jumping-off point, Harvey (Social Justice and the City) examines real estate booms and busts and predation on vulnerable populations; commodification of culture; neo-liberal capitalist dominance; and urban uprisings, from the Paris Commune to the massive 2006 protest against U.S. anti-immigrant policies to urbanized peasants and mineworkers in El Alto, Bolivia, who organized themselves and instigated a progressive Bolivian government. He asks: “Is there something about the urban process and the urban experience... under capitalism, that, in itself, has the potential to ground anti-capitalist struggles?” In the process, he considers what a collective right to the city could mean to those who create and revivify it, and defines problems for which any viable anticapitalist movement must have answers: the material impoverishment of much of the world’s population; the dangers of environmental degradations and ecological transformations; and the “sheer impossibility” of endless capital accumulation and compound growth. Academic Marxists and other social critics are the book’s likely primary audience, but intellectuals in the Occupy movement may appreciate its descriptions of historic and international parallel urban struggles to reclaim public space and build culture, and they may be intrigued by Harvey’s musings on how to grow a lively, resilient revolutionary anticapitalist movement beyond the local.