Rebel Cities by David Harvey: Right to the City and Urban Revolution

Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (2012) is the book in which David Harvey brought together his theory of the urbanization of capital with the struggles that, from Paris in 1871 to the squares of 2011, have tried to reclaim the city for those who inhabit it. His thesis is twofold. The city is where capitalism absorbs its surpluses by building and rebuilding, and so financial crises, including that of 2008, have urban roots. And the city is also where that process can be contested, because urban life produces a common, collective wealth, that struggles for the right to the city claim as their own.

The right to the city as control over the urban surplus

The first chapter takes up Henri Lefebvre's right to the city and redefines it: not an individual right of access to what the city offers, but a collective right to change the city by changing ourselves, that is, to control the surplus urbanization generates and decide how it is reinvested. Harvey shows that the class that governs that surplus has changed, from Haussmann to today's developers and finance, but the logic is the same: the city is built to absorb capital, not to serve its inhabitants, and whoever wants otherwise has to contest control of that surplus.

The urban roots of crises: from 1848 to 2008

The second chapter, on the urban roots of crises, is the most cited. Harvey traces how the property boom of the 2000s, financed with securitised mortgages, was the mechanism through which surplus capital found an outlet after the dot-com bubble, and how its collapse dragged down the world financial system. He argues that capitalism's crises always manifest in the city, from the crash of 1848 in Paris to 2008, and that ignoring that urban dimension, as conventional economics did, means failing to understand capitalism. Property, rent and construction are not just another sector: they are the heart of accumulation.

The urban common and the art of rent

The chapters on the urban common and the art of rent develop the theory. The common is not a given resource but a social relation produced collectively, the life of a neighbourhood, its culture, its reputation, which capital captures through monopoly rent: the authentic neighbourhood is sold for what its residents created, and that value goes to the owner. Harvey argues that collective management of the common requires institutions and politics, not only occupations, and debates with Elinor Ostrom and with Hardt and Negri over how to scale commons from the local to the metropolitan without the state or the market absorbing them.

El Alto, London, Occupy: anti-capitalist struggle is urban

The second part of the book is political. Harvey analyses the revolts of El Alto in 2003, the London riots of 2011, which he reads as feral capitalism answered with looting, and Occupy Wall Street, and proposes that anti-capitalist struggle must be urban: organised in the territory, in neighbourhoods and the networks of daily life, and not only in the factory, because that is where capital extracts its surplus today and where people live their exploitation. He calls for an alliance between workers and inhabitants, and for rebel cities that serve as laboratories of another form of urbanization.

Rebel Cities is the most accessible synthesis of half a century of Harvey's work and the reference with which housing movements, urban commons and tenants' platforms have thought their struggles over the past decade. Its lesson is that the right to the city is not a catalogue of services but the dispute over the urban surplus, and that this dispute, won or lost, decides for whom the city is built.