How Capitalism Shapes Cities: David M. Gordon and Harvey

Capitalism shapes cities because it decides where investment goes, who works, what land is worth and who can afford to live in each place, and urban political economy is the current that since the 1970s has studied that relationship. Its founding text in the United States is the economist David M. Gordon's essay Capitalist Development and the History of American Cities (1978), published in the volume Marxism and the Metropolis, in which he argued that each stage of capitalism produced its own urban form: the commercial city, the industrial city and the corporate city. Gordon died in 1996, and his 1978 essay remains the reference of the current.

Commercial, industrial and corporate city: Gordon's three phases

Gordon divides American urban history into three phases tied to accumulation. The commercial city, until the mid-nineteenth century, was a compact port organised around trade and credit. The industrial city, from 1850 to the early twentieth century, concentrated factories and dense working-class neighbourhoods beside them, which eased union organising and strikes. And the corporate city of the twentieth century separated functions: headquarters in downtown skyscrapers, factories dispersed to the periphery and residential suburbs, a geography Gordon reads as capital's response to labour militancy, because dispersing production and workers weakened their capacity to fight.

Suburbanization as strategy: class conflict and Harvey

The central argument is that urban form results not from technology or preferences but from class conflict. Suburbanization, for Gordon, was not only a consequence of the car and the desire for a house with a garden, but a strategy favoured by firms and governments to fragment the working class, sustained with highways, guaranteed mortgages and exclusionary zoning. David Harvey later developed that idea in The Urbanization of Capital (1985), showing how surplus capital switches into land and construction, produces cycles of real estate boom and bust and transforms the city in each cycle.

Segregation and gentrification: downtown land and the peripheries

Segregation and inequality are the direct consequence. In the corporate city, downtown land is valued for offices and consumption, central working-class neighbourhoods are demolished or gentrified, and lower-income families are pushed to peripheries with fewer services and less transport. That mechanism, which Neil Smith formalised with the rent gap and which the financialisation of housing has accelerated since the 1990s, explains why today's metropolises combine luxury centres, precarious peripheries and a growing distance between where wealth is produced and where those who produce it live.

Criticism, nuances and policies of urban political economy

The reading has critics and nuances. It is reproached for determinism, since not all cities followed Gordon's phases, and for insufficient attention to race, gender and the state as actors with their own logic; later studies of the neoliberal city, the global city and financialisation have refined the framework without abandoning its basic intuition. Urban political economy has also grounded policies: public control of land, decommodified housing, capture of land value gains and planning that anticipates the cycles of capital instead of following them.

The lesson of Gordon and of urban political economy is that no urban form is inevitable. If the commercial, industrial and corporate cities were produced by concrete economic relations and conflicts, today's city, with its financial centres and its peripheries, is too, and it can be transformed by changing who decides over land, investment and housing. Understanding how capital shapes the city is the first step toward a city that is not only the product of capital.