Friday, March 19, 2010

A good urban-focused article

Here's an article by David Harvey from the New Left Review on urbanization and capital. It is urban-focused like an article I recently criticized on this blog. However, the point of this article is not to naively advance the urban model of living as the best way to live, but rather to analyze the economic and social processes that drive and are driven by the city. And in a context of increasing worldwide urbanization, the processes Harvey describes stretch beyond the city and affect the entire planet.

Obviously the historical and economic trends described are too wide-reaching and complex for me to be able to comment too intelligently on Harvey's treatment of them, but it seems like the author paints an interesting, coherent picture of urbanization processes in the modern era. I can certainly say from my childhood in the most rapidly-gentrifying area of 1990s Chicago that I have seen firsthand many of the realities that Harvey describes--displacement of workers and low-income people from neighborhoods, construction of ever more homogeneous spaces with the illusion of ever-increasing variety and niches, a business-driven attitude in local government.

I also like about the article that it ends with some practical recommendations for action, namely democratizing control over capital.

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