A2Interdisciplinar.FLORESR.K.RebelCities-FromtheRighttotheCitytotheUrbanRevolution.CommunityDevelopmentJournal

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Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution
Article in Community Development Journal · March 2013

DOI: 10.1093/cdj/bst010
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Book reviews
Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City

to the Urban Revolution
David Harvey, Verso Books, London, 2012, 206 pages, ISBN:
9781844678822 (hb), US$19.95/£9.99/Can$18.50.
Downloaded from http://cdj.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on May 22, 2013

‘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 cap-
italist 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.
Harvey’s main contribution to Marxism in general is to show how capital
displaces crises through spacio-temporal shifts: fictitious capital-like mort-
gages and micro-finance and fixed assets such as infrastructure are geo-
graphical and temporal displacements which create capitalist spaces.
Urbanization, he argues, has played a crucial role in the absorption of
capital surpluses and has done so at ever-increasing geographical scales,
but at the price of burgeoning processes of creative destruction that entail
the dispossession of the urban masses of any right to the city whatsoever
(p. 22). Capitalism, for Harvey, moves forward through dislocations in
space and time. In order to apprehend its movements, it is necessary to,
analytically, also move in space and time. The richness of the book is
Harvey’s capacity to move in time and thus reveal the capitalist dynamics
of the city, as well as its vibrant political life and possibilities. Harvey
shows how cities have been transformed by the excluding logic of capital
accumulation, the privatization of everything: wealth, life quality in
Community Development Journal Vol 48 No 2 April 2013 pp. 339–346 339

340 Book reviews
general, living spaces. The emblematic example is Haussmann’s planning

in Paris, where entire communities were displaced in order to build the
boulevards and thus engender a greater control of the centre by the bour-
geois. This model, later copied by Moses in New York, has its analogies
with contemporary housing displacements such as entire favelas in Brazil
being displaced in preparation for the World Cup and the Olympic
games. Also, the need to absorb a huge amount of surplus value being cur-
rently produced in China leads to a reshaping of its landscape. Dams, rail-
ways, highways and a variety of mega infrastructural constructions take
place, bringing environmental problems, displacing thousands of people
and enabling bourgeois appropriation of new spaces.
So what are the alternatives? The commons, or practices of ‘commoning’,

could be one possibility. For him, this practice ‘lies in the principle that the
relation between the social group and that aspect of the environment being
treated as a common shall be both collective and non-commoditized’
(p. 73). The commons are at the heart for the struggle to the right to the
city. Nonetheless, many of the already existing alternatives of communing
are a trap, as commons can be, and usually are, privatized. That is why
Harvey takes good care when dealing with the concept of commons and au-
tonomist alternatives. Gentrification and tourism are the clearest examples.
These are processes in which the creation of a common such as a cultural
mode of living related to the space becomes a commodity, being replaced
by a bourgeois homogeneous lifestyle. The book is full of these examples.
Suburbanization, exclusionary practices, racism, health problems and en-
vironmental catastrophes all have to do with these processes and are all
related to ‘the laws of value determination on the world market’ (p. 126).
In a situation where all aspects of human life are organized by the laws of
value, ‘how, then, does one organize a revolution?’ (p. 140). Considering the
diversity of contemporary uprisings, riots, mobilizations and institutional
projects worldwide, Harvey’s main inspiration comes from the South,
and more specifically from the cities of Cochabamba, El Alto and La Paz,
in Bolivia, where communality and labour consciousness came together
to overthrow oppressive neoliberal practices in the last decade. The vision
of Lefebvre that ‘the traditional peasantry was disappearing and that
the rural was being urbanized’ (p. xv) illuminates the recent indigenous up-
rising in Bolivia, a country whose population is mostly indigenous. The
main focus of this uprising is El Alto, a city constituted by a former rural
population displaced by capitalist land concentration, in which the political
conscience of the former mining workers merged in new political subjects,
practices and spaces. Although denying the romantic aspect of the indigen-
ous uprising, Harvey also points to ‘the mobilization of the forces of culture
and of collective memories’ (p. 150) as one of the models provided by
Book reviews 341
the indigenous rebellion. He argues for a necessary ‘generality’ which anti-

capitalist struggle has to achieve at some point – represented in the image
of the citizen and the comrade marching together. For him, ‘the world of citi-
zenship and rights, within some body-politic of a higher order, is not
opposed to that of class and struggle’ (p. 153). That is why urban movements
of all sources who demand better conditions of life and access to privatized
cities and spaces can and must be incorporated in anti-capitalist strategies,
being part of labour class struggle, and thus transforming it into a struggle
to the right to the city.
Despite its own internal contradictions, Bolivia is nowadays a ‘space of
hope’ – to use Harvey’s own term in another book. The Andes region is
one of the main sources of value in capitalist history, through extraction

of metals for the world economy. That is a history of dispossession and op-
pression, and that is why its population has a collective memory of exploit-
ation, and realization of nothing. The position of different spaces in relation
to their position in the global chain of value is not part of Harvey’s schema.
To what extent the Bolivian process can inspire alternatives in cities around
the world and to what extent it cannot (or what are the possibilities of
equating struggles in the South and in the North) is a matter that needs
better understanding. But that does not undermine Harvey’s point in
Rebel Cities, which is inspired by Lefebvre, ‘the revolution in our times
has to be urban – or nothing’ (p. 25).
Rafael Kruter Flores

Universidade Federal Do Rio Grande Do Sul, Brazil;
email: [email protected]
doi:10.1093/cdj/bst010
Advance Access publication 20 February 2013
Resolving Community Conflicts and Problems:

Public Deliberation and Sustained Dialogue
Edited by Roger A. Lohman and Jon Van Til, Columbia University Press,
New York/Chichester, West Sussex, 2011, 384 pages, ISBN 978 0 231
15168 9, $50/£34.50.
This edited volume examines public deliberation and sustained dialogue,

highlighting the need for a ‘critical perspective on practice’ (p. xiii). In its
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Article in Community Development Journal · March 2013

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City

Downloaded from http://cdj.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on May 22, 2013

Community Development Journal Vol 48 No 2 April 2013 pp. 339–346 339

general, living spaces. The emblematic example is Haussmann’s planning

Downloaded from http://cdj.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on May 22, 2013

the indigenous rebellion. He argues for a necessary ‘generality’ which anti-

Downloaded from http://cdj.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on May 22, 2013

Rafael Kruter Flores

Resolving Community Conflicts and Problems:

This edited volume examines public deliberation and sustained dialogue,

View publication stats

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