GEOG 347: Public Space & Cultures of DemocracyThe right to the city is far more than the

individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. -David Harvey

Harvey (2008) The Right to the City

• "Urbanization has always been a class phenomenon". (p. 24)

• Urbanization as solution to economic crisis:

Surplus absorption through urbanization...has entailed repeated bouts of urban restructuring through "creative destruction" which nearly always has a [violent] class dimension.

• Paris, 1850s; New York, 1950s

Haussmann's Plan for Paris (1850s)

• "His mission was to solve the surplus capital and unemployment problem through urbanization." (p. 26)

• "A transformation of urban infrastructures (boulevards, demolition, etc)"

• Slum clearance-- removal of working class and underclass from city center

• "the construction of a new way of life and urban persona (consumption, tourism, pleasure)".

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2012/02/paris-ification-hanoi/1286/

Moses' Plan for New York City (1940s-50s)

• New metropolitan scale for thinking of the urban process

• Highways, bridges, tunnels

• Suburban home ownership for the middle classes

• Cars, appliances

• Individualized identity tied to property

Capitalist Urbanization Today

• Lefebvre post-1968: urbanization central to the survival of capitalism and thus a crucial focus of class struggle

• Neoliberal era post-1970s

• 2008 Crash- housing bubble

• Urbanization of China

• Urban life as a commodity

• Cities fragmented, divided, unequal, conflict-prone

• Accumulation by dispossession: capture of valuable land from low-income populations

Urban social movements for the Right to the City

• Right to the City is restricted to small elite who can shape cities after their own desires

• Demand for "greater democratic control over the production and utilization of the surplus"

• Global urban struggle

Paris 1848

Paris 1871

Oaxaca 2006