Rebel Cities-David Harvey

THE RIGHT TO THE CITY 25against the neoliberal ideological rule that, in the event of a conflictbetween the well-being of financial institutions and that of the people,then the people should be left to one side. It would also have gone againstcapitalist class preferences with respect to income distribution and neoliberalnotions of personal responsibility. But just look at the price thatwas paid fo r observing such rules and the senseless creative destructionthat resulted from it. Surely something can and should be done to reversethese political choices?But we have yet to see a coherent oppositional movement to all ofthis in the twenty-first century. There is, of course, a multitude of diverseurban struggles and urban social movements (in the broadest sense ofthat term, including movements in the rural hinterlands) already inexistence. Urban innovations with respect to environmental sustainability,cultural incorporation of immigrants, and urban design of publichousing spaces are observable around the world in abundance. Butthey have yet to converge on the singular aim of gaining greater controlover the uses of the surplus (let alone over the conditions of its production).One step, though by no means final, towards unification of thesestruggles is to focus sharply on those moments of creative destructionwhere the economy of wealth-accumulation piggy-backs violently on theeconomy of dispossession, and there proclaim on behalf of the dispossessedtheir right to the city-their right to change the world, to changelife, and to reinvent the city more after their hearts' desire. That collectiveright, as both a working slogan and a political ideal, brings us back tothe age-old question of who it is that commands the inner connectionbetween urbanization and surplus production and use. Perhaps, after all,Lefebvre was right, more than forty years ago, to insist that the revolutionin our times has to be urban-or nothing.