Inspirational Talk - David Harvey. Right to the City

[Music] you [Music] in when I when I started this good afternoon we want you to start our talk about the right to the city with Professor David Harry I will be very short in my introduction because we don't have too much no so many times so much time and that means that we I just make a very short introduction he's a professor of anthropology and geography at the Javits Center of the City University of New York CUNY and he's very well known for for all his work about capitalism and also in in terms of smart city Congress about urban studies for example one of the I think one of the most important books in the in the last few years is the rebel cities from the right to the city to the urban revolution in 2012 the top today is about right to the city I make just a short you know description of the ideas of David Harry about that in in an article that he wrote in 2008 I think he said the question of what kind of city we won cannot be divorced from the questions of what kind of people we want to be what kinds of social relations we seek what relations to nature we cherish what style of daily life we desire what kinds of technologies we deem appropriate the right to the city is therefore far more than a right of individual access to the resources that the city embodies it's more aware a collective rather than an individual right since changing changing the city inevitably depends on the opened exercise of a collective power over the processes of organization please professor heavy you have the floor we will have a little at the end five minutes for for questions if you want you to make some questions at the end we could we could do that yeah well this is a pretty intimidating scene outside to talk about the right to the city and to talk about those processes that have an ideas that have just been mentioned I just like to say this that the first essay on the right to the city by our Lefevre made very clear that he was not coming out at least out of the history of ideas or history of thinking as he put it the right to the city is a cry and a demand that comes from the streets and he was very emphatic about that and when I became interested in exploring the idea further many years later when I moved to New York in 2001 I was actually surprised to find that there was already a right to the city movement in the city that they had alliances already with Los Angeles and that they had also connections with other groups in various other cities in Florida and Chicago and the like and so it seemed to me that at that time around 2000 2001 there was a cry coming from the streets again to talk about the right to the city and when I inquired a little bit further into what it was that people had in mind with using this idea their answer was well look there's lots and lots of movements in the city there's a movement which is against gentrification there's a movement which is about the homeless there is a movement it's about education there's a movement about the environment there all these different movements in the city but there seems to be no umbrella way to bring them together around a general idea of a transformative politics oriented towards the city as a whole and it was in that context that they had turned to the right to the city idea without even knowing how to pronounce lefebvre's name which I thought was rather an interesting thing so in a way I was following in the fair's footsteps by starting to write about it and to write the essay on the right to the city which came out a new left review as you mentioned and actually I think one of the first times I presented some ideas about this was here in Barcelona in 2004 at the Forum meetings and it struck me then here in Barcelona that of course it wasn't only in the United States that you could sense this cry from the streets and you could also hear it here and you could hear it pretty much everywhere so it seemed to me a good idea to start to talk about this particular way of trying to bring together disparate movements in such a way as to address some of the problems which existed in cities in general since then I want to say this that there have been some massive movements around the world over the last 20 years and most of those movements have actually been concentrated in cities not all of them there's still movements in in other other areas and many of those movements have not been of the classic left kind i movements of workers against capital in the workplace but of being a trying to address something different which is the qualities of daily life in the city and if you kind of think about some of the things that have happened like Ghazi Park uprising in Istanbul this is not a working-class movement this was a discontented citizens saying that actually they wanted to say about what was going to being done with their city they wanted to say about what kinds of things are this should be going on in the city and they actually also talking about trying to construct some alternative way of being in the city and of course a few weeks after KC Park occurred we found found the same kinds of things going on in Brazil on June 20th 2013 about a million people took to the streets of I don't know 200 or more cities in in Brazil to protest what were they protesting about they were protesting about the qualities of urban life they were protesting about the way in which public resources were being used for purposes which were not of a public concern for them but were being used to support the construction industry and of course were oriented to the World Cup and the like so here is a football mad nation which is complaining about what's being done in terms of the investment in new stadiums and things of that kind which is a rather unique situation and that particular movement arose mainly out of a youth movement which was about the problems of transportation in the city the free pass movement of the youth was has been long-standing I'd encountered it about even 15 years before but when they raised fares in 2013 that was the last thing and they took to the streets they were immediately attacked by the police and this is one of the things I think that is significant here immediately attacked by the police and then defended by other groups in the city including the black bloc anarchists and you know not you don't necessarily want to admire anarchists but on in effect confronting police violence they're very good at it and know how to do it and so this then escalated in all sorts of ways so you got this mass move in all Brazilian cities saying we have to do something now what does this all register this registers in effect what I would say widespread situation of alienation super alienation with the qualities of daily life and the lack of any democratic way in which people can express themselves we've all I think experienced the situation of having being consulted about some planning decision this happened to me several times in Baltimore consultancy on a planning decision they come along and they tell you what they're going to do you find a hundred people out of a hundred people in the room say we don't want that to happen but they say sorry it's going to happen and you know immediately that this is not a democratic discussion you're just being told informed as it were as to what's going to happen and well maybe you can change something a little bit here a little bit there but basically the decisions are already made and who is making them and for what reason now one of the things that has been very important in my own work recently is to say actually the right to the city is being exercised by capital it's being exercised all of the time that is the right to transform cities to transform cities in ways which are convenient to capital and it turns out that the way that is a most convenient to capital is to produce cities which off of people to invest in not cities for people to live in so that actually what this means is that a lot of effort is now being put to create high-end accommodations for the ultra-rich so that michael bloomberg who was mayor of new york had the great vision of the city which was that this would be a place where every billionaire in the world would want to own a penthouse that was his idea of what a beautiful city was well actually could you imagine what a boring neighborhood that would be to live in a place where there are only billionaires in penthouses to begin with they're only there about two weeks a year the rest of the time they just simply for them this is just a way of storing wealth it's not about living it's about storing wealth and in fact you'll find this going on all around the world that cities are being increasingly built for people to invest in and actually being built in such a way to absorb surplus capital in in effect meaningless forms of urbanization and you know you've seen that here in Spain I mean I remember years ago I think without time 2004 I was passing through Sudan rial and it seemed to me this is one vast vast building site south of Madrid and of course they built this new airport to which no airplanes came and now they tried to auction it off and I cost I don't know a billion or more euros and that can be auctioned it off they can maybe get ten thousand euros for it this is this is a waste of resources an incredible waste of resources now this is the sort of thing that none of this stuff that's going on out here is able to address it is precisely about you know making the things work and the traffic likes work and I'm all in favor of that because the traffic lights can work a little bit better you'll still be in traffic jams but it'll be a little bit better but but the point that I want to make is that there's problems of the cities right now are problems of capital accumulation where the city is being utilized as a vehicle for capital accumulation and capitalist development and disposal of liquid capital into concrete forms and the concreteness of it I mean I can never stop mentioning this but in there in three years China consumed 45% more cement than the United States consumed in the whole of the last century that's the style of urbanization that we're beginning to see under our hyper capitalism that is having great difficulty in finding places to invest other than in urbanization so capital is accumulating in cities at a very fast rate it's remaking cities in its own image at a very fast rate but it's not making cities that are livable cities for the mass of the population so that in New York City we have a building boom for the ultra-rich and the top 1% on average in 2012 was earning something like 3.5 million dollars a year as opposed to 50% of the poppy there's trying to live on less than $30,000 a year you cannot supply affordable housing to that group in the population when all of the resources on house building are being allocated to building high-rise condominiums for the ultra-rich for the billionaires who come from elsewhere where Michael Bloomberg was addressed with the following question how is it that so many people cannot afford to live here I mean not everybody's a billionaire and his answer was if they can't afford to live here they're their kind of people we don't want and at that point you're saying you don't want 50% of the population of New York City that's trying to live on less than $30,000 a year the result of course of this housing policy is we have 60,000 homeless people in New York City alone 60,000 and then you kind of say how are we going to address that well the right to the city is about those 60,000 plus everybody who hasn't got a decent house in a decent living environment to get together and say we want to change this city if necessary we want to actually expel those bankers get rid of them out of here get rid of the billionaires because they are getting in the way of a construction of a decent house and a decent living environment for the mass of the population and that is a political question and it's a political question which is of course associated with things like the distribution of income in society the the allocation of assets and resources to people and as we know since the property market crisis of 2007 2008 not only has there been a revival in the property market so that actually rent some Pryor's house prices are going up everywhere to make them even less accessible to the mass of the population now than they were before but at the same time most people have not recovered the income streams which will allow them decent access to decent housing and instead of which what we've seen is that through the Greens been any growth whatsoever since 2007 2008 it's all gone to the top one percent so actually this is the political process which is connected in terms of consumption of housing production of housing which is reshaping cities and actually most city governments not the one here I hope is involved usually in the construction of mega projects city governments love mega projects get a mega project and then the city government will go for it the banks will come in and support it the construction interests are very happy the construction unions may be very happy and then they have the mega project which is like the ones you would see in many Spanish cities that occur before 2007 2008 and so then you get into these kinds of crazy insane forms of urbanization spectacular forms of urbanization where you say this is absolutely ridiculous you look at the urbanization of the Gulf states you see those huge kinds of wonderful hotels in which you can actually go skiing in the middle of the desert those kinds of ridiculous things and and you know and this is the point that I want to really hammer home actually one of the things that Marx once talked about which comes out of Hegel is the distinction he said between a virtuous infinity which is a circular thing in a reproduction of society and what he called a bad infinity a bad infinity is a spiral of growth a spiral of growth that gets out of hand and that's what you see in that cement statistic that is what you're seeing in this insane forms of urbanization and these are the kinds of questions that need to be addressed and the terrifying thing is there can be a huge habitat conference in Ecuador in Quito and none of this is mentioned none of this is discussed instead we're told you've got to be resilient we should have resilient cities sustainable cities all those kinds of language hot air language which actually disguises what the real nature the problem is now to me I mean it's great that you know maybe our sewers might work in a garbage disposal it might be better taken care of by all of these sensors and all those kinds of things but if that is what you think is going to be the answer to the questions of mass alienation of whole populations from the qualities of daily life in urban environments and their capacity for revolt which we see occurring again and again and again then it seems to me we have to actually start to rethink what is the real problem here and that's why I would want to say let's continue to talk about the right to the city even though it's problematic because actually capital is now reasserting it's right to the city but right to the city gets stuck into UN documents attached to NGO politics and all the rest of it and in other words it becomes kind of emasculated as a real political position and again it comes back to me that the the important foundation for any right to the city thinking is the streets what is the cry from the streets what was the cry in 2013 from the street what was a cry in gays Park what was the cry when London blew up as a result of a you know just a particular kind of incident what's the cry on the streets of the United States right now in many of the big cities with the black lives matter movement what is the cry that exists and if we're not prepared to listen to that cry if we cannot hear that cry because we will listen to so much of this you know glorious technological solutions to everything then it seems to me that we're in a very very dangerous and very difficult situation so that's I guess what I would want to say tennis thanks very much [Applause] well we have some time for for questions the the floor is open if you some one of you one question make some question one two three okay they would it's nice to hear you after studying you many decades ago probably like many people here in the room if democracy has led to the situation where city leaders see well-being as an equation with growth and growth being an equation with private sector interest and that's the system we've had and this is the position we're now at what do you think of democracy in cities and the future going forward good evening first of all thank you very much for the very interesting talk you mentioned that the chronology is not the solution to many of those challenges but I agree with that in general but many of the protests that you mentioned were organized on some level on social media and on digital platforms wouldn't you say that technology could also act as a amplifier or as a tool to battle the challenges that you see and maybe some of these technologies could actually help that fight against the capitalism Thank You professor you talked about the problems of big cities and you go to New York San Francisco Chicago which I was recently the amount of homelessness and and inequality that you see in the cities issues really gets to you so they but just talk about the problems but can you give a twelve-step solution at least three things that that we that that the world should start looking at to change that could be technology solutions that could be changing the way we apply democratic systems how we treat participate citizens participe in a different way just give us talk about minding the gap closing that gap between where we are and where we need to be thank you hi my question is in a 21st century capitalist order do you believe going forward they can be an economic case for equity or inclusivity thank you a question on democracy I don't think we've had a real democracy at all we've had certainly maybe this is my bias coming from the United States that there the democracy of money rules so that the sense of having a true democracy a true democratic system it's never been organized as such it's been basically corrupted by money power legally supported over the years by Supreme Court decisions that say that the expenditure of personal money on electoral activities is of is guaranteed by the freedom of free freedom of the expression so so I think that the whole kind of question you're posing would say that are there different ways to start to structure democratic procedures within cities and we're seeing some of that here in Barcelona with the assembly structures and things of that kind we seeing experiments with that sort of thing in rojava under very very difficult and extremely oppressive circumstances so there are there are ways to reconstruct democratic action and these ways can in fact be supported of course by social media about this idea that somehow other social media is the advantage of a Left Opposition when in fact most of the social media lies in the hands of a monopoly capitalist class which tolerates certain kinds of things and of course as you know governments can then switch it all off but will and control it we see enough of that quite a bit of that in China but we've also seen it in Egypt we've seen it in Turkey we've seen it in many parts of the world so yeah social media yeah I mean we're obviously we you know in past time we would use a telephone or something of that kind now we use the Internet means a communication but as even the most privileged people find in in New York it's still better to deliver stuff by hand because it's more secure and if you think by putting it on the internet it's not secure then obviously you've seen some very good examples in recent times well that's not the case when even they've got Obama's internet correspondence on the equity thing you know clearly you know clearly the societies become incredibly unequal far far more so now than was the case yeah maybe 40 years ago and clearly capital capitalism could survive with much lower levels of inequality then currently exist in other words it is possible to imagine a social democratic but not anti-capitalist movement that would reduce social inequalities in such a way that may actually be advantageous to the continued expansion of capital but there's a problem there which is the continued expansion of capital is itself part of the problem right now that compound rates of growth when capital was saying the state he was was in 1850 perfectly sustainable around the world compound rate of growth now given that everything that's going on in the world and we're going to sort of look forward to a 3% compound rate of growth for the next 50 years then you would wonder how much cement we're going to be producing and consuming in 50 years time compound compounding is that part of that bad infinity which we're running into so that actually one of the things we've got to start to really think about is how to redistribute how to redistribute wealth and income and power in a situation of low if not zero growth in the long run and that is going to be very difficult now I've always been told since I was quite young that you can only redistribute wealth out of growth now we've had a lot of growth over the last and I've been around rather a long time but if we haven't redistributed it except in the wrong direction so the idea that somehow rather growth is a condition of the redistribution seems to me the wrong way around in fact redistribution is the way in which we can withdraw from this this crazy kind of growth process which is taking over many of what urban ization is about now that then leads me to to the kinds of solutions we want to look at well we would look at it piecemeal or at least one or two principles for instance there's been a tremendous push over the last 30 or 40 years to come out by everything higher education education healthcare all of those things that should be human rights have been turned into commodities and they're delivered through the market and the market is excellent at delivering to those who have the effective demand those that have the money power it's terrible at delivering to people who don't have that power so there we find the one of the things that we have to do which is to D commodify as much as we can I think free access to education healthcare free access to to basic services such as water and things of that kind these should not be commodities delivered through a market system dependent upon people having the effective demand to pay for it these should be delivered as rights as free goods and we should extend that free good area step by step and that could be done at even local level so you can begin upon that with with questions of housing for example you start to set up non market forms of housing it's sometimes within the capacity of individual city administrations to in fact start to do questions of that kind what is interesting is how much people are weighted to the private property individual kind of system but again there has to be a way of thinking out what are the alternatives to that and that is not hard to do because there are many forms of you know for instance community land Trust's limited equity coops those kinds of things in other words you can D commodify large areas of housing provision and do it in such a way that you actually cut off large segments of the city from speculative activity and the more you can cut down on the speculative activity in housing the bigger the impact is likely to be on the general standard or the general price and cost of housing in other words that's the only way you're going to get anywhere close to finding affordable housing for those 60,000 people currently you know homeless in in New York City that's the only way you can do it unfortunately New York does have an affordable housing program but it's for the lower middle class rather than for the homeless people in other words it's for people who have incomes up to $80,000 so if you have $80,000 a year you can get into get into the affordable housing so between sixty and eighty thousand dollars of the people who are being served by the affordable housing leaving out half of the population which is on thirty thousand dollars a year and this is the problem with the kinds of policies which are being implemented so there are lots of solutions that can be pursued decommodification is one general strategy and it should be applied to education it should be applied to many of these other areas and and actually the fact that that that increasingly students are having to pay for higher education is also needs to be rolled back all sorts of questions of that kind can reasonably be addressed these are well in the category of what I would call sort of revolutionary reforms that is reforms which are understandable in the terms of the current system but at the same time have the capacity once they start to get in motion to actually engage more and more members of the population in a different kind of political project and the insane project we are currently engaged on which is accumulation for accumulation sake at 3% forever we have a last question do you think this Mar City can contribute in any way to increase the right to the city well I think that's your problem assuming you're part of what's going on out here you know I mean that's know there are people obviously and it's the same as social media there are possible ways in which this can be used progressively I'm sure and and I think it's great if that happens like I said if you we can find better ways to distribute water disposed of sewage disparities you know deal with environmental questions and energy and things of that kind yeah I'm all in favor of it but don't imagine that some herre that we can go away from a conference like this and somehow or other all of the problems are going to be solved other technologies out there because the Technos aren't the key problems that need to be looked at and what is really upsets me immensely is that we don't discuss the key problems for the most part we go to conferences and we do this sort of thing and you know and and and and discuss all kinds of other things but we don't discuss a lot of the key things which are why our city's becoming centers for actually people storing savings and investments and this kind of thing rather than cities being built as reasonable living environments for the mass of the population I mean that's a very simple question why are we continuing to do that why are we doing these insane urbanization projects in the Gulf region or even in New York City where we're building all of these high-end condominiums and it's great to walk around at night you know you go around and you look see how many how many of those places have lights on and the most of them are dark nobody's living there so on the one hand you've got 60,000 homeless people and you've got all these empty apartments because people are just coming there for a couple of weeks that is insane I mean if you said that's the way society should be I mean what what sort of answer would you get but when you say that's what society is then one of the things we have to do is obviously to change it and that's what the politics of the right to the city is about well thank you very much professor they will have it to be here in this mass City Congress [Applause]

Channel: Smart City Expo World Congress

Views: 12,599

Rating: 4.911602 out of 5

Keywords: Smart City, Smart Cities, Smart City Expo, Smart City Expo World Congress, Society, Governance, urban resources, Inspirational Talk

Id: 4cL5c600R3o

Length: 34min 43sec (2083 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 14 2016