Street level - FT.com
24/03/2012 12:18
March 23, 2012 9:03 pm
Street level Review by Edwin Heathcote
The beginning of a new era in public protest
R
ebel Cities: From Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, by David Harvey, Verso, RRP£9.99, 187 pages
In the past couple of years the squares and streets of the city have reemerged in the most dramatic manner imaginable as a forum for public protest. From Cairo to Athens, from Madrid’s “Indignados” to America’s Occupy Wall Street movement and right up to the recently removed protesters outside St Paul’s Cathedral in London, urban centres all over the world have resonated with the chants of those who feel economically and politically disempowered. Against this backdrop, David Harvey’s Rebel Cities could not be better timed. Harvey is a British-born, New York-based professor of geography and has been a consistent and intelligent voice on the left. His approach is resolutely Marxist – though never less than readably so.
Rebel Cities David Harvey Best Price £7.59 or Buy New £7.59
Privacy Information
He begins with the “right to the city”, a concept formulated by the French sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) that was influential in the Paris événements of 1968. Lefebvre drew inspiration from the way people in the developed world had demanded access to the countryside. How much more important, he argued, was access to the city? By this he meant not just freedom to roam and use public spaces but to exert influence on everything from the types of businesses in city streets to the organisation of communities. Paris also provides Harvey with the best-known case study of urban regeneration for the purpose of controlling the population. Baron Haussmann was commissioned in direct response to the upheaval of 1848 to rebuild the city as a contemporary metropolis capable of facilitating a military response to revolution. The destruction of medieval alleys and markets to make way for broad boulevards was all part of a plan to keep the city under control and allow armies to march quickly, directly and en masse to quell dissent. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/8e94264e-7367-11e1-aab3-00144feab49a.html#axzz1q2I5V3kf
Page 1 of 2