ancient cities

110 Capitalist City
Manchester meant for Engels, Chicago was
approached by twentieth-century urban sociologists
as a paradigmatic example of the contemporary
capitalist city. The rapid and massive
population growth that had taken place in the city
of Chicago during the last decades of the nineteenth
century had shed light on a number of
social problems and related deviant behaviors such
as deprivation, poor living conditions, alcoholism,
and homicides, which were associated with the rise
of capitalism. The members of the Chicago School
empirically investigated these phenomena and
linked their rise and characteristics to the specific
environmental conditions of the urban areas in
which they appeared and developed. Urban social
problems were thus described by Chicago urban
scholars in terms of environment and human ecology
rather than social structure and the capitalist
mode of production. In this context, not only the
crucial relationship between capitalism and the
city but also related issues such as the role played
by the state and other political agencies in the evolutionary
paths of capitalist urbanization remained
overlooked and undertheorized. The capitalist city
was approached merely as a spatial context in
which social problems had to be investigated and
analyzed (starting from the assumption that the
environment of large industrial cities intensifies
such problems) rather than as an object of study
itself and thus as an ontologically autonomous
social entity.
Albeit strongly questioned in more recent times,
as shown later in this entry, the empiricist orientation
in urban studies has survived over the years, in
part as a reaction to the critiques of the more theoretically
engaged urban scholars and in part as a
consequence of a specific demand for applied
research coming from the social policy sphere. In
the 1980s the “empiricist” position was explicitly
defended by sociologist Peter Saunders, who contended
that investigation of urban social issues
ought not to entail approaching the capitalist city
as an independent social entity. In more recent
times, the tradition of more conventional social
inquiry on the capitalist city has been continued by
those (not only sociologists but also epidemiologists
and other public health scholars) concerned
with issues relating to the capitalist urban environment
but not necessarily interested in providing a
critical interpretation of the capitalist city as such.
The Mature Capitalist City: Theorizing the
Capitalism–Urbanization Nexus
The Marxist interpretation and critique of the
capitalist city gained ground since the early 1970s
when a rising generation of radical urban scholars
based particularly in France and other western
European countries (in contrast to the predominantly
Anglo-American origin of classical urban
sociology), led by Manuel Castells and the other
founders of the so-called new urban sociology,
spelled out their dissatisfaction with the empiricist
approach of the existing urban scholarship.
The historical context in which emerging ideas
and research directions about the capitalist city
appeared and took shape is particularly relevant.
At the time, capitalist cities in the West and beyond
were experiencing the formation of new urban
social movements and related urban struggles
along with, particularly in the United States, the
surge of ethnoracial riots in the deprived and segregated
neighborhoods of the larger cities. This
exceptional sociohistorical context provided
emerging Marxist urban scholars with the moral
and political justification for the advocacy of a
more politically engaged and theoretically informed
urban social science. In his now classic book on the
“urban question,” Manuel Castells was the first
scholar to systematically engage with a theoretical
explanation of the urban-capitalist process.
Drawing on Althusserian structuralist Marxism,
Castells suggested looking at the urbanization
process in terms of relationship between society
and space, whose form is determined by the contingent
organization of the means of production
and the reproduction of the labor force. Elaborating
on this conceptual framework, Castells identified
four basic elements of a capitalist urban structure:
(1) production, which takes the form of the spatial
outcomes deriving from the social process of
reproduction of the fixed capital; (2) consumption,
represented by the spatial outcomes arising
from the social process of reproduction of the
labor force; (3) exchange, which appears as a spatial
manifestation of the transfers between production
and consumption; and finally (4) management,
that is, the institutional process (in the form of
urban planning schemes and regulations) coordinating
the relationships among the former three
elements of the urban structure. In the subsequent