ancient cities

834 Uneven Development
few while impoverishing and alienating the many.
Hence, we get the well-known observation from
the end of Part I of The Communist Manifesto that
the bourgeoisie has produced its own gravediggers
in the shape of the international proletariat. That
is, the contradictions of uneven development provide
the basis for social struggle leading to social
change, ultimately revolutionary in character.
Later, deployment of the precise term uneven
development was similarly political in the beginning.
For example, in Leon Trotsky’s analysis in
the early twentieth century, the process of uneven
and combined development is seen as the basis for
permanent revolution leading to the eventual creation
of a new society. In this formulation, the
geopolitical dynamics of capitalism are understood
in relation to noncapitalist factors (e.g., ecological
and natural variations, primitive social formations,
etc.) as well as the general historical fact of uneven
social development at every scale, including global,
national, urban, and local. Again the general process
(capitalist development) and local expression
(unevenness) act one upon the other as a result of
the inherent contradictions and tensions attendant
to unequal social formations, an observable historical
fact.
Recent Theoretical Advances:
Respatializing Critical Social Theory
The most important contributions to the contemporary
understanding and analysis of uneven
development have come since the 1970s, especially
within the fields of critical geography and sociology.
This has included recent efforts to respatialize social
theory and to achieve more convincing understandings
of the geographies of capital accumulation and
social inequality. It is also over these recent decades
that the theory has been deployed more explicitly
and fruitfully in urban studies as well as related
fields of economic geography and international
geopolitics.
David Harvey’s approach, which highlights the
social construction of places in the flux and flow
of capital circulation, encapsulates many of the
advances. Capitalism requires continual economic
growth and is subject to periodic crises of overaccumulation
(idle productive capacity and labor
power). One solution to both problems is what
Harvey terms a spatial fix, that is, geographical
expansion. Excess capital may flow to alternate
geographic places (e.g., the deepening incorporation
of East Asia and Southeast Asia into the
industrial production system consequent to the
1970s crises and the simultaneous deindustrialization
of Western cities). Capital can also be
“switched” overseas in property development or
other speculative investments. This results in the
creative destruction of places, which are reembedded
in a restructured global spatial division of
labor. Importantly, this new landscape is highly
differentiated, each place being affected differently
by an uneven process of capital investment and
disinvestment, while maintaining (and sometimes
winning or losing out because of) a unique
historical–cultural identity. Geographic difference
and otherness are thus produced in the process of
uneven development, though there are also many
tensions, uncertainties, setbacks, and advances
linked to the possibility of class struggle and resistance
and the vagaries of state intervention and
political philosophies. Such an analysis provides a
powerful tool for understanding something of the
dynamics of international economic restructuring
and local patterns of urban social change. Richard
Walker covers some similar territory in his explorations
of the dynamics of convergence and geographic
unevenness, which he connects to spatial
differentiation and capital mobility. This leads to
issues such as labor disempowerment, dependency,
boom–slump cycles in urban development and the
creation of stagnant places.
Elsewhere, Harvey has emphasized what he
calls the three circuits of capital. The primary circuit
involves commodity production (manufacturing
or services); the second circuit involves
investment in the built environment; the tertiary
circuit involves scientific knowledge and investments
in the reproduction of labor power (health,
education, etc.). Put simply, the point is that capital
can be switched between these circuits (as well
as geographically) in response to crises of overaccumulation.
In this way, the processes of urban
development can be connected to broader processes
of uneven development and economic
restructuring. Investment in suburbanization or
the redevelopment and revalorization of older
inner-city environments can be understood within
this general theory of the circulation of capital
through different sectors and across space.