ancient cities

488 Marxism and the City
alongside the sensory experiences provided by
Parisian street life. Later Marxists, such as Henri
Lefebvre and David Harvey, took up Benjamin’s
invitation to develop a culturally rich and dynamic
reading of the economic, political, and aesthetic
aspects of the expansion of new forms of consumption
within the space of the city.
Postwar Marxism and the Capitalist City
The wave of students’ and workers’ struggles that
erupted in the advanced capitalist countries during
the late 1960s and early 1970s had a far-reaching
impact on urban studies. A new generation of
geographers, urbanists, and sociologists, radicalized
by their contact with these movements, looked
to Marxism for the theoretical tools to explain the
transformations that were taking place. This
engagement led to a number of accounts of spatiality
and scale, taking Marx’s analysis of the accumulation
and circulation of capital as a point of
departure. The resulting theories, while remaining
relatively abstract, played a key role in shifting
debates within urban studies away from the evolutionist
and functionalist theories that previously
dominated this field.
Marxists study cities in terms of concentrations
and flows of people, commodities, capital, means of
production, and information. Two aspects—the
relative stability that inheres within particular urban
configurations, as well as the contradictions, tensions,
and dynamics that they manifest—are deemed
essential to providing a satisfactory theoretical
account. In the following paragraphs, we will provide
a brief overview of three distinct elements of
Marxist theory in relation to the city, namely the
concentration of capital, the role of the secondary
circuit, and the role of the capitalist state.
The Marxist theory of accumulation, as outlined
above, implies that regional structure emerges
spontaneously from the accumulation process,
along with increasing quantities of capital that cannot
be invested profitably within the regional system.
The Marxist theory of uneven development is
based on this insight: that the competitive, profitseeking
behavior of individual capitalists gives rise
to a systemic tendency toward overaccumulation
and crisis. Contemporary Marxists argue that these
crisis tendencies can be temporarily offset by a range
of strategies—diverting surplus capital toward the
financial and property markets, investing in the
social and physical infrastructure, exporting capital
to new locations—although the result is to
further intensify the initial contradictions.
Second, Marxist urban scholars have drawn
attention to the importance of the secondary circuit
of capital accumulation, which relates to the commodification
of land and the extraction of monopoly
rents. The diversion of capital from the
productive sector to this sphere, it is argued, has the
potential to generate substantial short-term profits,
while setting in motion a complex set of processes
that include the accentuation of scarcity in housing
markets, the generation of speculative property
“bubbles,” and the displacement of profitability
problems to the financial sector. These phenomena
have been studied in relation to the emergence of
the neoliberal city, gentrification processes, and the
expulsion of poor residents from central areas.
These considerations regarding the relationship
between capital accumulation and physical space,
which have made a decisive contribution to urban
studies, have also brought about a considerable
renewal within Marxist thought. David Harvey
has been at the center of this debate, developing
the concept of the spatiotemporal fix, which
describes the (temporary) displacement of crisis
tendencies within a given region, at a specific time,
either into the future or toward other regions, as
capital engages in the “creative destruction” of
urban landscape and space.
Third, Marxists argue that accumulation strategies
increasingly depend on the role of the state as
a vehicle for fixing productive resources and infrastructure
in specific locations. The state plays an
important role in coordinating urban labor markets,
organizing private and collective consumption,
elaborating strategies for infrastructural
investment, and defusing resistance to exploitation.
The development of the transport infrastructure
is particularly central, as the construction of
canals, railways, motorways, airports, and, increasingly,
information, communication, and technology
networks, is a key factor in explaining the
historical development of urban space. Because of
the scale of investment required to construct these
infrastructures and the length of time required to
recover the initial investments, the state typically
plays a key financial role. Although Marxist
scholars have, on occasion, lapsed into functionalist
accounts of the state, attempts have been
made to overcome this limit by focusing on the