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Rebel Cities: From The Right To The City To The Urban Revolution (2012)

by David Harvey(Favorite Author)

3.84 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

1844678822 (ISBN13: 9781844678822)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Verso

review 1: No era exactamente lo que esperaba cuando lo compré (buscaba más una perspectiva de urbanismo) pero da nuevas ideas. No es un libro como tal si no una recopilación de artícuos del autor poniendo el enfoque en teorías capitalistas y marxistas desde una perspectiva urbana y cómo nada es blanco ni negro ni el libre mercado buen gestor ni lo comunal siempre práctico. La última parte se centra en los movimientos de los últimos años (PortoAlegre, Occupy Wall-Street) y está hecho en los primeros meses del 15M lo que le da una visión esperanzadora de cosas que hoy sabemos no se cumplieron. Interesante y bastante amenos si te interesan estos temas.
review 2: I figured the general idea Harvey was trying to get across in Rebel Cities should be commonsense to m... moreost people: The forces of capitalism and neoliberal debt design our cities to where we are just pawns in the non-stop 'creative destruction'; and in being played we still depend upon it's ongoings just as much as we hate to bear the brunt of it. Harvey spends most of the book going into detail about how this works with some explicative histories of it; including the recent housing crisis. He also offers some case studies of worker revolts when capitalism ceased to work in their benefit and the few won pro-people effects of their actions. Harvey states that the best way to fight the capitalist monopoly of the city is to organize bottom-level workers that are essential to capitalist growth and accumulation, like construction workers and delivery drivers, into anti-work protests. In the past, this has worked within the capitalist framework in the short-term for the advancement of that industry's workers and often to the detriment of everyone else within the capitalist supply chain. But to be effectively anti-capitalist and simultaneously pro-city it needs to evolve into a universal anti-work protest and at the same time make sure that the welfare of those it affects(everyone) is looked after. Also, bottom-level workers being uneducated, desperate for bare essentials and hence short-sighted will likely 'go with the flow' of working within the system for the advancement of capital instead for it's immediate and recognizable, albeit meager, benefit of a steady paycheck.This utopic strategy for the people to reclaim the city is no doubt something hard, if not impossible to pull off just on an ideological level; much less a tactical one. How do we 'convince everyone to stop working without the whole society collapsing into something worse than what it was to begin with' is a question mentioned in the book itself. I can only envision something like this being successful in the long-term when work itself becomes more temporary and erratic and resources more scarce to encourage people to concede to such a trying movement.This book is only valuable if you want to understand and analyze the destructive workings of capitalism on a city's majority poor population and is a stepping stone on how to guide it's 'creative' aspects for the betterment of it's denizens; within a quasi-capitalist framework but it's not worth the 19.00 cover price for someone already familiar with such a premise. less

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