David Harvey and the City – An Antipode Foundation film

you know there's a geological world that I'd like to use which is palimpsest with layers of different eras and whenever you hit on an urban landscape you nearly always see the product of various eras of development layered on top of each other what we're standing on here of course is the High Line which delivered goods to all sorts of small factories and manufacturing and industries and warehousing and all the rest of it fell into disrepair rather badly in the 1970s and 1980s and then comes the big question of how is this going to be redeveloped and the big fight then ensues as to who is going to get the rights to it what they're going to build there and so you what you see now is the outcome of a struggle [Music] I'm David Harvey and I'm here in the Graduate Center of the City University of New York right at caddy corner from the Empire State Building teaching Marx's capital in the shadow of the iconic Imperial Building of international capitalism I moved to the United States in 1969 and I went to Baltimore and I got there the year after there have been uprisings in all of the cities of the United States after the assassination of Martin Luther King so I moved to a city where quite a significant chunk of it had burned down then became involved immediately in the kind of questions as to what went on that led to that corruption but then also proactively how would I organize myself and other people to change it there was a lot of what was called at the time blockbusting going on in the city which was the introduction of a african-american family into a white neighborhood and then the deliberate pushed by real-estate interest to generate white flight one of the questions which was coming up all the time was who profits from the segregation who profits from this turnover in the in the housing market and that of course gets me back to the kind of questions I nearly always end up asking these days like ok show me the money where the money's flowing who's getting you know or a real benefit out of it this this is like a scene from The Fountainhead this is an R and an R and country I think the idea of the Hudson Yards all along was to be the western extension of Midtown what an effect has happened is that this has now been seized upon and so you've got this pole of development here and this there gap now between this and the Midtown so I guess this is sort of thing that Neil Smith used to talk about about the rent gap and that almost certainly is a huge pressure now for a redevelopment and you already see some of the buildings being refurbished and redone some way end up being knocked down and high-rises put in the original population for the 1980s is completely disappeared from here city is a concentrated space in which many different functions can coexist and can work together in such a way as to facilitate social reproduction unfortunately that social reproduction has to include in our case a reproduction of capital as well as reproduction of people and so what we see is a concentration of resources to build the city which is going to facilitate capital accumulation and there is therefore functioning for capital accumulation [Music] one of the things that it's crucial to understand about capital is that it has to expand in order to survive historically the rate of growth has always been positive in a healthy capitalist economy and usually people look to three or four percent rate of growth as being you know adequate but zero growth is a crisis so you've got to grow now where do you grow and where do you grow into okay I'm investing on a city and I am built up and the city's built up how and where do I do well okay if the city's built up I've got to sort of expand it somehow but I then build the suburbs then I you know how do we get to the suburb and back again you've got to have the new transport and communications structures so there's a spatial growth aspect to this which is always there this process is is about capital which is expanding at a compound rate of 3% forever having harder and harder time finding sensible and serious things to do in a world which obviously needs a great deal in terms our facilities and services and the rest of it we've got a politics of austerity which cuts back on all of the things that you really need and at the same time goes off and builds these crazy monuments - I don't know what in Dubai and here in New York with all the condos and all the rest of it going up so this was what I call a special fix which is about the fact that you have to grow at a compound rate and I think we're facing that as a one of the big contradictions of contemporary capitalist life it's very interesting reading the IMF reports over the last 20 or 30 years again and again they come back and say there's a surplus of liquidity the world is awash with circles the quiddity looking for someplace to go looking for something to do and so this is what you do and then you hope it works but in order for it to work you probably need another round of this somewhere else in order to make this the small version of this when I was looking at Baltimore we used to call it feeding the downtown monster that the first bunch of investment downtown was not paying off but in order to make it pay off you built another ring and then the first round did start to pay off because the second but then the second one wasn't paying off so you needed a third the result was that all the public money is in Baltimore went less and less to schools and neighborhoods and all those kind of stuff it was going to feeding the downtown monster and I grew up in a sort of a respectable working-class and neighborhood in Britain where the way in which housing was thought of was essentially in what marks are called use value terms and you might have a place to live and a decent place to live and it was very important about 20 years later suddenly you find people really less and less thinking about the use value they're more and more thinking about the exchange value and then there comes a point in the 1990s it started to become much more like this where actually housing became an instrument of speculative gain where people instead of just thinking about this exchange value started to think about the house as a form of capital accumulation by getting a house fixing it up flipping it going down to somewhere else so on there you go through it kind of been a very interesting history in my own lifetime of a housing from a use value to an exchange value to a form of capital accumulation through speculation but you'll find right now in a city right in New York that it's being built in terms of the housing construction and all the rest of it is for people to invest in not not for people to live in and the result is you've got starvation at one end of the housing scale and you've got oversupply had the other end how things go I think the idea of a socialist future would be to say that we could come on this spot in you know 30 years time I mean world has become totally socialist and we would look at all of this and say that was all done in that crazy period where finances kind of ruled the world and now they've all been sort of overcome and and these are now kind of monuments if you like to stupidity of a certain era in which the ultra-rich were so so rich but I didn't know what to do with their money except to build things like this I have to say it since I moved to New York I thought more and more as many people I now think about New York as a city and they think about it as a political entity and that Civic sense is what I would say forms the heart of a body politic and a body politic doesn't pre-exists it has to be created then it has to be nurtured and the like so something relational about being in this space which is New York which makes it in New York [Laughter] [Music] I think the city stands for something other than simply a physical artifact it is a political concept and there's something that connects the idea of city with citizenship and belonging and belonging to something which is different from you know just a local neighborhood and it means something and it means something politically [Music] [Music]

Channel: antipodeonline

Views: 21,259

Rating: 4.9803681 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: iPGvXhicF2M

Length: 12min 37sec (757 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 01 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/jaminbob]

I remember reading his book 'Spaces of Capital' at university. I need to catch up with him! Thanks.