Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution

By David Harvey

Manifesto on the urban commons from the acclaimed theorist.

Long before the Occupy movement, modern cities had already become the central sites of revolutionary politics, where the deeper currents of social and political change rise to the surface. Consequently, cities have been the subject of much utopian thinking. But at the same time they are also the centers of capital accumulation and the frontline for struggles over who controls access to urban resources and who dictates the quality and organization of daily life. Is it the financiers and developers, or the people?

Rebel Cities places the city at the heart of both capital and class struggles, looking at locations ranging from Johannesburg to Mumbai, and from New York City to São Paulo. Drawing on the Paris Commune as well as Occupy Wall Street and the London Riots, Harvey asks how cities might be reorganized in more socially just and ecologically sane ways—and how they can become the focus for anti-capitalist resistance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verso
• Release date: Apr 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9781781684054

David Harvey

David Harvey is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has written extensively on the political economy of globalisation, urbanisation, and cultural change. His recent books include Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Profile Books, 2014) and The Ways of the World (Profile Books, 2016). He contributed the foreword to the Pluto Press edition of The Communist Manifesto (Pluto, 2008; 2017).