Michael Hardt

Hardt and Negri's thesis about the city is that the metropolis now occupies the place the factory held in the nineteenth century. What generates value today does not come off an assembly line but out of the relations between people: languages, codes, habits, trust, affects, images. All of it is produced by living together, without any firm organising it.

Hence their central charge. That wealth is common, made by the city as a whole, yet appropriated privately: a lively neighbourhood becomes a property pitch, the atmosphere of a street is charged for in the rent, the sociability of a district is sold as a tourist destination. And at the same time the city strikes them as the place where unplanned encounters make a collective response possible.

An American philosopher born in 1960, Hardt is a professor of literature at Duke University. His two-decade collaboration with the Italian philosopher Antonio Negri produced the trilogy Empire (2000), Multitude (2004) and Commonwealth (2009), followed by Declaration (2012) and Assembly (2017). Empire appeared just before the Genoa protests and became the alter-globalisation movement's set text.

Commonwealth is the volume that matters most to anyone thinking about cities: its central part is devoted to the metropolis and the urban common, and it argues with Lefebvre and Harvey from a different position. Against a left that defends the state-public against the private, Hardt proposes a third term, the common, managed directly by those who produce it, with neither state nor private ownership. The commonest criticism of his work is that this third term is better described than explained.