ancient cities

ole of competition between rival blocks of capital
located in different regions to establish an indirect
link between state decision making and capital
accumulation.
Although contemporary urbanization in eastern
Asia appears to conform to the classical
relationship between industrial growth and rural–
urban migration described by Marx and Engels,
in many other third world cities, the dynamics of
urbanization have become increasingly detached
from processes of economic development. The
American Marxist, Mike Davis, attributes this to
the effects of the debt crisis of the late 1970s and
the structural adjustment programs that were
implemented during the 1980s. The effect of
these programs, together with the deregulation of
international trade, was to render peasant families
particularly vulnerable to the effects of
drought, inflation, sickness, and civil war, giving
rise to an exodus of surplus labor from rural
areas. As a result, the number of people living in
slums exceeded 1 billion in 2005, leading Davis
to conclude that the principal role of these areas
is to provide a dumping ground for an excess
population that has little chance of being drawn
into the primary circuit of global capital.
Arguably, the main contribution of Marxist
theory to the study of cities is its capacity to
explore changes in work, the built environment,
and everyday urban life through the categories of
political economy. This entails uncovering the
ordering principles underlying patterns of accumulation
and investment, as well as the ways in which
capitalist social relationships are embedded in the
fabric of urban society. But Marxists also emphasize
the role of resistance to exploitation and
oppression, viewing this as an active force in shaping
cities.
In recent years, attempts have been made to
extend Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation
to a range of ongoing processes involving the
appropriation of assets that are bound by collective
property rights or produced outside the capitalist
economic system. Relevant examples include
the privatization of public resources, the commodification
of new forms of labor power, the suppression
of alternative forms of production and
consumption, the appropriation of assets using
military force, and the extraction of rents via the
“debt trap” or using patents and intellectual property
rights. Many urban social movements, in the
Medieval Town Design
489
advanced capitalist countries as well as in the developing
world, arise in response to this form of accumulation
by dispossession. Marxists seek to explore
the determinants of this process and to link these
individual struggles in a generalized critique of
capitalism that is rooted in the working class.
Jonathan Pratschke
See also Benjamin, Walter; Capitalist City; Castells,
Manuel; Davis, Mike; Divided Cities; Harvey, David;
Lefebvre, Henri; Right to the City; Uneven Development
Further Readings
Benjamin, W. 1999. The Arcades Project. Edited and
translated by H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Castells, M. 1977. The Urban Question: A Marxist
Approach. London: Edward Arnold.
Davis, M. 2006. Planet of Slums. London: Verso.
Engels, F. [1845] 1993. The Condition of the Working
Class in England. Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press.
Gotham, Kevin Fox. 2006. “The Secondary Circuit of
Capital Reconsidered: Globalization and the U.S. Real
Estate Sector.” American Journal of Sociology
112(1):231–75.
Harvey, D. 2001. Spaces of Capital: Toward a Critical
Geography. New York: Routledge.
———. 2005. Toward a Theory of Uneven Geographical
Development. New York: Routledge.
Katznelson, I. 1992. Marxism and the City. Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press.
Lefebvre, H. [1974] 1991. The Production of Space.
Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Lojkine, J. 1977. Le Marxisme, l’État et la Question
Urbaine. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Merrifield, A. 2002. Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of
the City. New York: Routledge.
Tabb, W. and L. Sawers. 1978. Marxism and the
Metropolis: New Perspectives in Urban Political
Economy. New York: Oxford University Press.
Me d i e v a l to w n de s i g n
Most of the towns and cities of Europe owe their
origins and early development to the period between
the ninth and fourteenth centuries AD. This time of
population growth and commercialism saw the