[D66] Rebel Cities

[Antid Oto]

http://www.guernicamag.com/features/rebel-cities/

Rebel Cities
By Kanishk Tharoor
October 15, 2012

Occupy Wall Street staged a rebellion against corporate corruption and 
economic inequality in Manhattan’s parks and streets, but the battle for 
the city began with nineteenth century electrification of Broadway.


"Today’s New York, where the belief that you are what you buy has been 
taken to an absurd extreme, might be familiar to McCabe. According to 
the CUNY-based urban geographer David Harvey—a contemporary Marxist 
scholar of the city—the “quality of urban life has become a commodity.” 
Ambitious consumption in New York encourages the sort of vacuous pursuit 
of fashion that prompted Ian Schrager, a slick hotelier and developer, 
to write: “Nationality and class have been replaced by lifestyle.” The 
ideal New Yorker has no past and no background, only a wallet and a will 
to buy.

New York recedes for those without ample wallets and appetites. 
According to Harvey, Manhattan has become a “gated community.” In Rebel 
Cities, Harvey sketches a bleak picture of the modern city. New York, he 
explains, is only one example of a universal trend. Growing inequality 
splinters all the major metropolises of the world, separating the 
wealthy from the rest across social and geographic divides. 
Dispossession, as much as consumption, is the logic of the city; the 
general public has a diminishing stake in urban activity and 
increasingly remote access to urban life. A tireless hunger drives this 
process onward. Harvey argues that since the Industrial Revolution, 
cities have been the principal site where capitalism sustains itself, 
used by financiers and developers to “absorb surplus capital.”
"


"Like Paris, New York has largely banished its poor to its extremities. 
Economic inequality long existed in Manhattan, but its staggering scale 
(the top 1% of the city earn 44% of its income) is new, as is the stark 
geographic division of its regions of wealth from those of comparative 
poverty. For most of the history of the city, rich and poor areas 
abutted each other with relative frequency. No longer. New York has its 
hinterlands now. It is almost impossible for a humble middle class, 
never mind working class, family to live anywhere south of 125th Street, 
or to settle west of the Lower East Side projects on the East River.

The process we through gritted teeth call “gentrification”—but should 
rename dispossession—has long preoccupied Marxist thought. A robust 
skepticism of “urban renewal” and attempts at “modernisation” runs 
through Harvey’s work. In the name of public health or beautification, 
people are relieved of their homes and their livelihoods, only to be 
shunted further from the life of the city and to find themselves in 
conditions often no better, if not altogether worse, than those from 
which they came. Harvey quotes Friedrich Engels on Haussmannization: 
“The scandalous alleys disappear to the accompaniment of lavish 
self-praise by the bourgeoisie… but they appear again immediately 
somewhere else… the breeding places of disease, the infamous holes and 
cellars in which the capitalist mode of production confines our workers 
night after night are not abolished; they are merely shifted elsewhere!”

"