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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
In what ways are cities central to the evolution of contemporary global capitalism? And in what ways is global capitalism forged by the urban experience? This book provides a response to these questions, exploring the multifaceted dimensions of the city-capitalism nexus.
Drawing on a wide range of conceptual approaches, including political economy, neo-institutionalism and radical political theory, this insightful book examines the complex relationships between contemporary capitalist cities and key forces of our times, such as globalization and neoliberalism. Taking a truly global perspective, Ugo Rossi offers a comparative analysis of the ways in which urban economies and societies reflect and at the same time act as engines of global capitalism.
Ultimately, this book shows how over the past three decades capitalism has shifted a gear – no longer merely incorporating key aspects of society into its system, but encompassing everything, including life itself – and illustrates how cities play a central role within this life-oriented construction of global capitalism.
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Seitenzahl: 334
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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Table of Contents
Epigraph
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Viewing Cities in Global Capitalism
Conceptualizing Cities in Global Capitalism
Overview of the Book
1: Emergences
Cities in Capitalism: A History of the Present
Conclusion
2: Extensions
Looking for the Global
Structuring Capitalist Globalization
Conclusion
3: Continuities
Neoliberalism as a Living Entity
The City–Neoliberalism Nexus
Urbanizing Neoliberalism
Neoliberalizing the Urban Experience
Conclusion
4: Diffusions
One-dimensional City
Conclusion
5: Variations
Cities in and after the Global Economic Crisis: The Present as History
The Socialized City
The Dispossessed City
The Revenant City
Conclusion
Living in the Age of Ambivalence
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
CHAPTER 1
Index
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‘Ugo Rossi offers a highly original analysis of the current urban condition. The book plays imaginatively on the complex relationships linking cities, neoliberal capitalism and globalization, and extracts from these materials a remarkably informative and incisive diagnosis.’
Allen J. Scott, University of California, Los Angeles
‘Reading contemporary global capital from the perspective of the city, Ugo Rossi's Cities in Global Capitalism presents a critical geography, rich in analysis and haunted with spectral figures. Rossi shows how the city – the site of historical struggle, artistic and social innovations, and revolutionary uprisings – has been shaped by capital and its state partners with new spatial inequalities, potentialities, and peripheries. As the city once again becomes the destination for the global rich, economic innovation becomes a leading edge of gentrification and the abandoned warehouses of Fordist production become the ghost towers haunting the urban sky – vast areas the mega rich own but rarely inhabit as the ever-expanding homeless below pass by.’
Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Columbia University
‘Cities in Global Capitalism presents an impressive tour de force on the mutually reinforcing relationship between cities, on the one hand, and the capitalist system on the other. Sifting through a wide range of work from across numerous disciplines, Ugo Rossi's account of the contemporary global urban condition is conceptually sophisticated, geographically nuanced and historically sensitive!’
Kevin Ward, University of Manchester
‘Ugo Rossi's book is a clear and illuminating overview of the complex relationships between globalized capitalism and urban spaces. A valuable contribution to the project of critically reflecting on our contemporary condition.’
Nick Srnicek, author of Platform Capitalism and Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
Series page
Urban Futures series
Talja Blokland,
Community as Urban Practice
Julie-Anne Boudreau,
Global Urban Politics
Loretta Lees, Hyun Bang Shin & Ernesto López-Morales
Planetary Gentrification
Ugo Rossi,
Cities in Global Capitalism
Copyright page
Copyright © Ugo Rossi 2017
The right of Ugo Rossi to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2017 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
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Malden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8966-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8967-8(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Rossi, Ugo, 1975- author.
Title: Cities in global capitalism / Ugo Rossi.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2017. | Series: Urban futures
Identifiers: LCCN 2016031538 (print) | LCCN 2016047586 (ebook) | ISBN 9780745689661 (hardback) | ISBN 9780745689678 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780745689685 (Epdf) | ISBN 9780745689692 (Mobi) | ISBN 9780745689708 (Epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Urban economics. | Regional economics. | Capitalism. | City-states–Economic aspects. | Globalization–Economic aspects.
Classification: LCC HT321 .R674 2017 (print) | LCC HT321 (ebook) | DDC 330.9173/2–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031538
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Acknowledgements
While my interest in the transformations of contemporary capitalism – the crisis of Fordism and the transition to post-Fordist societies – dates back twenty years ago now, to the mid-1990s, when I was studying Political Sciences at the University Orientale of Naples, I have been thinking more specifically about the relationship between cities and capitalism over the last six or seven years. I first approached this theme when I received an invitation from the editor of the Encyclopedia of Urban Studies, Ray Hutchison, to write two entries: one on the ‘capitalist city’ and another on ‘Manuel Castells’ (Rossi, 2010a; Rossi, 2010b). While my previous work had dealt with conceptual issues related to the theorization of urban economic development in post-Fordist and neoliberal times, this invitation led me to systematize my understanding of the evolution of critical urban theory from the 1970s onwards. At the same time, during the last ten years in my research I have been dealing with a set of categorizations, such as the creative city, the smart city and the start-up city, which have stimulated my reflections on the urban realities of contemporary capitalism.
Whereas the ideas presented here draw on this long-term engagement with the conceptualization of post-Fordist capitalism and its relationship to the urban phenomenon, this book has been written over a much more concise period of time, approximately one year, starting in the spring of 2015 and ending in the summer of 2016. During this year, I had the opportunity to share my thoughts as well as to discuss drafts of the chapters of the manuscript with different colleagues and students. In April 2015, I organized a session on the ‘urban political in late neoliberalism’ at the annual conference of American Geographers in Chicago along with Theresa Enright, who teaches at the University of Toronto in Canada. Theresa has read drafts of some chapters of my manuscript, providing very useful feedback. Over the last few months, with Theresa I have shared reflections on the ambivalence of post-crisis global capitalism and the urban condition, which I have started presenting in this book and would like to develop further in the coming years. In May 2015, I was invited by Bernd Belina to teach a seminar on ‘Southern European cities in the global recession’ as part of his Master's course on the ‘Geographies of Globalization’ in the Institute of Human Geography at the Goethe University of Frankfurt, in Germany. My conversations with Bernd, with the other members of the department and with the students enrolled in the seminar provided me with a lively intellectual environment which helped me sharpen my ideas, particularly my understanding of the crisis of 2008, which is at the centre of this book. In Frankfurt I also met Sami Moisio, when we were both visiting the human geography department. In April 2016, Sami invited me to lecture in his urban geography course at the University of Helsinki, in Finland, and to present my work to the department when I was in the very final stages of the writing process. This presentation gave me the opportunity to clarify the structure of the book, particularly the meaning of the terms being used as titles of the chapters.
In December 2015, I presented my research at the geography department of the University of Leuven, Belgium, invited by Manuel Aalbers within the framework of his Master's course on ‘the political economy of urban development’, taught along with Chris Kesteloot. The political economy environment of Leuven and the provocative questions posed by Manuel and Chris, and by Stijn Oosterlynck of the University of Antwerp (invited as discussant), as well as by the students, helped me clarify my ideas about an understanding of knowledge-intensive capitalism drawing on political economy approaches but also going beyond them. I also thank Manuel for carefully reading different parts of the manuscript, particularly the drafts of chapters 1 and 3.
I am also grateful to Lisa Björkman, of the University of Louisville in the United States, who took the time to read drafts of different chapters of the book and provided important suggestions. With Lisa, in March 2016 I organized a one-week field trip for graduate students in Naples, which focused on the politics of urban infrastructure in post-recession times, particularly looking at the rise of commons-oriented social movements. Her enthusiasm and her ‘external’ viewpoint on the city in which I grew up and started my academic path have helped me appreciate the importance of studying cities in the South, including the European South, in order to understand contemporary urbanism in today's transitional times. During the field trip in Naples I also exchanged my ideas with Andrea Varriale, who is a PhD student in urban studies at the Bauhaus University of Weimar, in Germany. Andrea generously read my manuscript and provided very useful comments. I also want to thank Lauren Rickards, who teaches at the RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, with whom I share the editorship of the Dialogues in Human Geography journal, particularly its book forum section, for our ongoing conversation about the need for intellectually engaged books in the social sciences and geography most particularly, at a time in which academia increasingly resembles a production line for journal articles.
In Turin, where I am based, I received extensive feedback on the manuscript from Alberto Vanolo and from Anna Paola Quaglia and Samantha Cenere. The latter are my PhD students in the Urban and Regional Development programme of the Politecnico and the University of Turin, where I teach a course on ‘critical and reflexive methodologies in urban studies’. With Alberto, we have never stopped exchanging ideas on cities and urban studies since we wrote a book together more than six years ago, whose English-language version is titled Urban Political Geographies: A Global Perspective (Rossi and Vanolo, 2012). Supervising the work of both Anna Paola and Samantha in a relationship of mutual exchange is an important learning opportunity for me, particularly as regards the technology-led transformations of urban economies and societies on which both their dissertations touch.
During the writing process, I benefited tremendously from the support and advice of my editor Jonathan Skerrett, as well as from the criticism and recommendations of three anonymous referees who reviewed the first version of the manuscript. I am also very grateful to Helen Gray, the copy-editor of this book, for her scrupulous and highly competent work on the manuscript. It goes without saying that I am solely responsible for the final outcome. Last, but obviously not least, I dedicate this book to Rebecca, my daughter, who gives me the energy to think beyond today and tomorrow, and to Elisabetta, whose love and intellectual advice are of incommensurable value.
This book is an original piece of work, but in some parts it draws loosely on my previous texts. Earlier and much shorter versions of chapters 2 and 4 were published in Italian in 2014 as ‘Gli spazi urbani nell'economia contemporanea’ and ‘Geografie del capitalism globale’ respectively, in a book mainly intended for pedagogical purposes (Geografia Economica e Politica), which I co-authored as an individual contributor along with my colleagues at the University of Turin: Sergio Conti, Paolo Giaccaria and Carlo Salone. Chapter 3 in some parts draws on a text entitled ‘Neoliberalism’ (Rossi, forthcoming), included in a book edited by Mark Jayne and Kevin Ward. The paragraph on the dispossessed city in chapter 5 partly reproduces a section of an article that appeared in Progress in Human Geography (Rossi, 2013a).
Introduction
This book explores what is called here the city–capitalism nexus and its political, economic and cultural significance in times of advanced globalization. The close link between cities and capitalism is a relatively recent acquisition. On the one hand, common wisdom has long intuitively described cities as mere physical artefacts, perpetuating the definition dating back to the Enlightenment era, offered by the French Encyclopédie (Farinelli, 2003). On the other hand, economists and social scientists have variously theorized capitalism as an economic system based on profit, on the private ownership of the means of production, on market exchange, on wage labour, on the relocation of production outside the home, and on banking institutions founded on credit–debt relations (Ingham, 2008; Hodgson, 2015), but in general have established few or no connections with the urban phenomenon. In the conventional conceptualization of historical capitalism, cities have indeed occupied a relatively marginal place, their role being limited to the invention of financial and commercial techniques in the pre-industrial age and the concentration of a proletarianized workforce at the time of the Industrial Revolution. Now, on the contrary, cities are at the centre of debates over capitalist globalization and everyday life. The professional news outlets as well as the multitudinous social media are literally overwhelmed by accounts of contemporary capitalist economies and societies that base their evidence on what happens in cities and their living environments. Cities are omnipresent in today's public discourse concerning the present and future of global societies, in positive or negative terms: as places of innovation for some (inspiring new technological applications, creative lifestyles, business experiments, etc.); of exploitation for others (reproducing income and wealth imbalances, phenomena of ethno-racial discrimination, etc.). Ambivalent attitudes towards the urban phenomenon reflect those towards capitalism itself, which is a socio-economic system historically vacillating between hope and despair, between a promise of prosperity and development and an experience of inequity and injustice. As a result, in the current ‘urban age’, as it is customarily defined, cities are no longer viewed merely in relation to, but within capitalism, as its constitutive element.
Why have the fates of cities and capitalism become so inextricable in times of globalization? The present book revolves around this key question. The economic crisis of 2008, in which the interlinkage of housing and finance played a central role, brought about a revival of interest in the long-term and strategic interconnectedness of capital accumulation and financialized urbanization, and particularly in its contradictory manifestations. Is it, therefore, a recurrence of history, a return, in a socio-spatially expanded form, to the pre-industrial age when cities became strongholds of trade and financial power? Or are financialization and the recent financial crisis only a symptom, a crucial manifestation of a deeper involvement of cities in global capitalism? Put briefly, the primary purpose of this book is to accomplish the difficult task of disentangling the city–capitalism nexus in the global age, helping the reader to find satisfactory answers to the aforementioned questions.
Viewing Cities in Global Capitalism
The analysis of the capitalist city has been at the heart of the field of critical urban studies since its first appearance between the late 1960s and the 1970s. Along with the political and intellectual fervour sparked by the student protests that erupted in 1968 in universities across the world (from Berlin, Paris and Rome to Berkeley, New York and Mexico City), and the rise of the ‘new left’ over the same years, the seminal contributions of Henri Lefebvre, Manuel Castells and David Harvey in the 1970s marked a decisive turning point regarding the ways in which capitalist cities were dealt with in the social sciences. Lefebvre threw light on the emancipatory potential of cities within late capitalist societies, beyond the confrontation between labour and capital, highlighting the inherently political salience of the urban through notions like ‘the right to the city’ and ‘urban revolution’; Castells – laying the foundations for subsequent critical reflections on urban governance – showed how the contemporary city serves as a key site for the management of the capitalist process of social reproduction, coordinating the relationships between the spheres of production, consumption and exchange; finally, Harvey theorized the way in which finance and land rent act as engines of urban growth and socio-spatial transformation, somehow prophesying the financialization of urban development in neoliberal times.
The empiricism and the implicitly anti-urban ideology of the old Chicago School of human ecology were thus left aside by an emerging generation of urban scholars influenced by these leading figures, who gave rise to the so-called ‘new urban sociology’ and ‘radical geography’. Issues of uneven geographical development and socio-spatial justice became central to this new wave of urban scholarship, at a time in which not only student protests but also social movements of unprecedented intensity had taken shape: the anti-colonial liberation movements in the ‘third world’; the civil rights mobilizations and the black power movement in the USA; the housing struggles in US and European cities; the anti-dictatorship movements in South America and Southern Europe, where cities were hotbeds of resistance and insurrection (from Buenos Aires to Athens, Barcelona and Lisbon). At the same time, the economic crisis of 1974–5 and the subsequent decline of the Keynesian state and of Fordism-Taylorism as the dominant pattern of industrial organization put an end to the so-called ‘golden age of capitalism’ of the second post-war decades. During those ‘thirty glorious years’, as they were also defined (Fourastié, 1979), capitalist societies significantly improved their levels of prosperity, mainly thanks to the process of wealth redistribution brought on by the adoption of welfare-state institutions in Western countries after the end of the Second World War.
The eruption of urban struggles in capitalist cities in the West and beyond, therefore, coincided with the structural crisis of Fordist-Keynesian capitalism in the 1970s. The so-called ‘fiscal crisis of the state’ (O'Connor, 1973) had heavy repercussions for city governments: New York City's declaration of bankruptcy in 1975 defined an era in twentieth-century urban history. The economic crisis paved the way for an age of austerity that particularly hit cities and regions in mature industrial societies. The urban Fordist cathedrals (such as Turin, Glasgow, Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, etc.), along with minor industrial centres, witnessed processes of deep socio-spatial restructuring caused by the closure of factories and the relocation of productive activities in areas where fixed costs (land, workforce, taxation) were lower and where social conflict was unknown. This process of capitalist reorganization, along with the weakening of the labour unions, the crisis of the political left and the shift towards a service-oriented economy, led to widespread disillusionment towards Marxism and socialist ideologies within the social sciences, which also affected the field of urban studies. In the 1980s, previous intellectual leaders of progressive urban scholarship, such as Manuel Castells most famously, abandoned Marxism in favour of agency-oriented approaches. Other leading urban theorists, however, such as David Harvey and Edward Soja, persisted in the critique of capitalism, but at the same time got rid of the economism of structuralist Marxism, seriously engaging with the socio-cultural determinants of capitalist change, their relative autonomy and the novel questions posed by gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality and the so-called postmodern condition.
Like other critical social scientists, urban scholars, therefore, started dealing with the intricacies of social and economic life within late capitalist societies, where the economic, the social, the cultural and the political become closely intertwined realms. Marxism, variously understood, was no longer the dominant ideological source of inspiration, but became part of an increasingly pluralistic repertoire of ideas, which comprised a variety of strands of thinking, including feminism, cultural and racial studies, postcolonialism and poststructuralism (from textual deconstruction to the analytics of power), all of them being inspired by ‘continental philosophy’ and particularly by the so-called ‘French theory’ (from Derrida to Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari). In this context, late capitalism came to be understood not only as a mode of production based on the private ownership of the means of production and the extraction of surplus value at the expense of the labour force, but also as an intrinsically contradictory moral and societal order in which the socio-spatial segregation of ethnic minorities and the poor coexists with the celebration of difference, and the adoption of technologies of surveillance coexists with the neoliberal embrace of the ideal of freedom. Along these lines, capitalism has been interpreted in close conjunction with the idea of neoliberalism, which has become central to the understanding of the urban experience along with that of globalization. Since the early 1990s, and during the following twenty-five years, urban scholars have looked at the capitalist city through the lenses of globalization and neoliberalism. Today, the study of the city-capitalism nexus cannot be separated from an analysis of globalization and neoliberalism, understood as pervasive forces exerting influence over potentially any aspect of socio-economic life. The ‘discovery’ of globalization substantially revitalized the field of urban studies from the early 1990s onwards: global-city scholars such as Saskia Sassen, Peter Taylor and Michael Peter Smith helped the field of critical urban scholarship to re-establish a visible presence within not only the social sciences but also within larger debates about the globalizing world in the wider public. The close relationship linking cities to capitalism was now mediated by the consideration of globalization and its capacity to reshape human experience as a whole, including the ways in which capitalism works and is materially organized across the globe. On the other hand, the ‘rediscovery’ of neoliberalism as a multifaceted force in contemporary societies (beyond its narrow economic formulation as a pro-business policy dismantling the Fordist-Keynesian social compact) has become a distinguishing trait of critical urban studies within the social sciences.
At the turn of the millennium, two major events triggered a change in perspective that also affected the imaginary of critical urban studies: the eruption of the anti-globalization movement in Seattle in 1999 and, only two years later, the September 11 terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers in New York. The former led to the conviction that globalization was not simply another stage in the process of capitalist evolution, but was rather a politico-economic project intimately associated with neoliberalism understood as an ideology of freedom and an ‘art of government’ naturalizing the logic of the market. While in previous years neoliberalism was associated almost exclusively with Anglo-American countries, primarily the USA and the UK, where in the 1980s the governments of Reagan and Thatcher imposed the new dogmas of privatization, deregulation and individualism, the anti-globalization movement threw light on the neoliberal constitution of globalization and its geographical reach, largely exceeding the confines of the English-speaking world. Neoliberalism as a global project was reinvigorated by the conservative turn that took shape in US politics and in other Western countries after the terrorist attacks of September 2001. The conservative governments of Bush Jr in the USA, Sarkozy in France, Berlusconi in Italy and Merkel in Germany, but also the centrist New Labour government in the UK, gave pre-eminence to ideas of global security and zero tolerance towards the enemies of the West, as well as advocating ownership ideologies, particularly as regards the increase of homeownership rates and the deregulation of the mortgage market as key goals for advanced capitalist societies. A new generation of urban scholars led by Neil Smith, Bob Jessop, Jamie Peck and Neil Brenner, amongst others, drew attention to the urban dimension of neoliberalism, alternatively termed ‘urban neoliberalism’ or ‘neoliberal urbanism’, as the defining condition of the contemporary capitalist city.
In many respects, the advent of these new scenarios has distracted attention from the analysis of the capitalist city as such within critical urban scholarship: the contours of the capitalist regime of accumulation, production and consumption have long been taken for granted within contemporary urban studies and the wider critical social sciences, accepting David Harvey's theorization of the urban experience in post-Fordist times (Harvey, 1989a). While acknowledging the absolute relevance of Harvey's theses, this book aims to provide an updated understanding of the current condition of the capitalist city, particularly in the light of the recent Great Recession and its aftermath. It does so by engaging with other strands of thinking within urban studies and the critical human and social sciences, such as neo-institutionalism, cultural political economy, postcolonial urbanism and contemporary radical thought in Italy, but also showing the continued relevance of twentieth-century critical theory, notably that of the Frankfurt School, as a way to illuminate the continuities of contemporary capitalism.
In this book, capitalism is viewed at one and the same time as a force of exploitation and invention, no longer merely incorporating key aspects of society into its system, but encompassing everything, including life itself. The distinctive contribution of this book lies in this understanding of capitalism in relation to the urban phenomenon through explicitly political lenses. While the classic Marxists and other critical social scientists rightly draw attention to the inequalities associated with economic development in urban capitalist societies and the conflictual dimension of the capitalist city, these authors underestimate capitalism's ability constantly to reinvent itself in innovative ways as a response to economic crises and social demands and transformations. On the other hand, institutionalist social scientists as well as spatial economists recognize the societal and governmental dimension of production and innovation, but they draw a veil over the political-strategic dynamic of capitalist economies. In the following chapters, this book will show how urban transformations arise from governmental projects responding to the changing configuration of the capitalist economy. In a context of neoliberal deregulation, the production and expansion of socio-spatial inequality is an inevitable outcome of these transformations.
The tech boom experienced by economically leading cities in the USA and other advanced capitalist economies after the end of the recession of the late 2000s is illustrative of this dynamic. This boom has taken the form of technology-led entrepreneurial communities (the so-called ‘start-up phenomenon’) particularly concentrating in inner-city areas. This phenomenon has contributed to rejuvenating the capitalist imaginary after the terrible shock of 2008, instilling a renewed sense of entrepreneurial vitality, which is essential for the reproduction of capitalist culture. At the same time, however, this phenomenon has been accompanied by an overheating in housing markets, forcing longtime residents – particularly low-income households of disadvantaged ethnic minorities – to relocate in other cities less exposed to the economic boom but also less attractive in terms of quality of life and job opportunities. Contemporary public policy, as it is premised on neoliberal assumptions of ‘thin’ interventionism, has proven inadequate to address these social contradictions. Novel social movements and political claims have thus arisen, denouncing growing inequalities of income and wealth and related processes of socio-spatial differentiation.
Consider also the related phenomenon of the technology-based, so-called ‘sharing economy’, which in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis has undergone a vertiginous growth within consumption sectors typically associated with urban environments, such as housing, transportation, food and education. These economic activities are intended to offer supplementary income opportunities to an impoverished middle class. Moreover, in cultural terms they convey a sense of humane economy based on face-to-face contact and collaboration, giving the illusion of private property as a shareable entity even within capitalist societies. At the same time, however, this technology-based economy throws light on capitalism's tendency to commodify life as a whole, creating new forms of exploitation and self-exploitation. In this context, there is no longer a rigid demarcation between the working place and the private sphere, as there was at the time of historical capitalism. Rather, the domestic space and the private car become directly subsumed within the capitalist circuit of valorization. This makes it hard to measure labour value and productivity: these notions, which are at the heart of the capitalist logic of economic calculation, seem to lose their relevance. Despite this mutating essence of capitalism, in the workplace we are required as never before to improve our performance in line with targets identified by external management consultants, thus acting as entrepreneurs even when we are hired as employees. At the same time, the possibilities offered by digital technologies lead an increasing number of low-paid workers to take advantage of their spare time as an opportunity for seeking out the thrill of being an entrepreneur. The sharing economy is therefore the ultimate manifestation of the rise of the global ‘enterprise society’ (Lazzarato, 2009). Some cities respond to this burgeoning phenomenon by tightening regulations on temporary rentals and private mobility services, while others adopt a more laissez-faire approach in order to give a boost to their economies. Contradictions, therefore, develop at an intra-urban scale but also at an inter-urban level, reflecting growing inter-regional imbalances within advanced capitalist countries.
As these examples show, the global economic crisis that followed in the wake of the housing crisis and the financial crash of 2007–8 occupies a central place in this book. The late 2000s crisis is important not only as an economic and societal event, but also in intellectual terms, as it has sparked renewed interest in the understanding of the general mechanisms of capitalism, understood as an incessantly evolving entity in the globalized world. The late 2000s crisis, equated by all experts with the major crises in recent capitalist history, particularly with those of the 1930s and the 1970s, has revived classic debates about capitalism and its contradictions, but also about its structural transformations, diversified modes of functioning, and its ability constantly to reinvent its culture as a forward-looking social system. Scholars and commentators seem to agree on the fact that this has been the first truly global crisis in the era of globalization since the regional crises that affected the world economy during the previous fifteen years – to name just the most significant episodes: the economic recession and the currency crisis that hit US and Western European economies (especially Italy, the UK and Spain) respectively in the early 1990s; the Asian and Russian crises of the second half of the 1990s; the bust of the dot-com bubble in the USA in 2000–1; the Argentine default in 2000–1. However, to paraphrase the title of a book on the financial crises of historical capitalism (Reinhart and Rogoff, 2009), ‘this time has been different’, as the so-called ‘great contraction’ has involved the world economy as a whole. At the time of writing, in the summer of 2016, the global economy appears a long way from the attainment of macroeconomic stability. Some leading capitalist countries such as the USA and Germany have seemingly left the recession behind, resuming an acceptably positive growth rate, but a persistently stagnant situation continues to characterize the vast majority of advanced economies, especially in Europe. At the same time, non-Western emerging economic powers (the so-called BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) have significantly reduced their previous performances, while other previously fast-growing economies are now stuck in recessive spirals, particularly hit in recent years by the burst of the commodities bubble after the boom of the 2000s when the price of raw materials such as fuel and metals constantly rose. It is no surprise, then, that about seven years after the financial crash, Nobel Prize economists of different theoretical orientations (from post-Keynesian Paul Krugman to more mainstream Jacob Hacker and Edmund Phelps) have drawn on former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers's thesis about the likely advent of an era of ‘secular stagnation’ caused by insufficient investment demand (Summers, 2014).
The so-called Great Recession, therefore, has been the first structural and global crisis since the advent of neoliberal globalization, understood as a hegemonic politico-economic strategy. However, compared with previous crises in the twentieth century, the recent global recession has apparently not opened the way for a substantial change, neither within capitalism nor within its mode of socio-economic regulation: the crisis of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s marked the crisis of classical liberalism, leading to the advent of Keynesianism, while the crisis of 1974–5 is commonly associated with the start of the post-Fordist transition. Even so, this text will show how, in a context marked by the persistent dominance of neoliberalism, despite its evident failures, contemporary capitalism is not the same as it was back in the time before the Great Recession. The book looks at the way in which, following the ‘global recession’, capitalism has shifted its focus from the incorporation of society within its value chain to the incorporation of life as such. Cities play a key role in this process, as a consequence of a set of interrelated phenomena taking form in post-recession urban environments: namely, as mentioned earlier, the rise of the so-called sharing and experience economies where the boundaries between production and consumption become increasingly blurred; a second wave of city-based high-tech boom conveying a renewed sense of prosperity and happiness; and the growing exploitation of the cognitive capital of urban societies within the emerging economies of the South at a time of global urbanization. All these phenomena have taken form or intensified since 2009 – the annus horribilis of the Great Recession – showing how capitalist urban societies are achieving a ‘new normal’ after the shock of the financial crisis.
The last few years have been characterized not only by the Great Recession and the subsequent economic impasse, alongside the shaping of novel pathways of capital accumulation, particularly centred on the intensive use of technology, knowledge and communication devices, but also by the resurgence of cities as sites of collective mobilization. From the Arab Spring in Cairo to the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York and the Indignados movement in Madrid and Barcelona, from the anti-austerity struggles of Athens to the urban protests in Brazil, from the Gezi Park resistance in Istanbul to the umbrella movement in Hong Kong and the most recent Nuit Debout camps in Paris, these movements have brought to the fore issues of social justice, substantive democracy and wealth redistribution with unprecedented strength in the era of globalization. At the same time, contemporary cities offer a rich repertoire of ‘minor’ contentious geographies, centred on issues in one way or another related to the functioning of capitalist societies and their recent transformations, such as consumption, housing, food and public space. This ‘living politics of the city’, as Raj Patel has termed it (Patel, 2010), reflects the life-oriented construction of contemporary capitalism as well as its increasingly global scope, in both geographical and societal terms.
Conceptualizing Cities in Global Capitalism
As a consequence of the perceived heightened globalization of the urban experience at a time in which the demographic growth of cities worldwide transforms humans into an ‘urban species’ (Reba et al., 2016), a more global approach to urban studies is gaining ground in the field. Postcolonial urban scholars specializing in cities located in the southern hemisphere, such as Ananya Roy and Jennifer Robinson amongst others, have provided a decisive contribution in this direction, openly challenging the West-centrism informing existing urban scholarship. This book largely accepts postcolonial criticism, but it also calls attention to the role of capitalism as the driving force behind global urbanism. In doing so, it suggests looking at the contemporary urban phenomenon through the lens of ‘global capitalism’, a term that is intended to emphasize in a geographical vein the increasingly planetary reach of the capitalist city, but also in a more qualitative way its tendency to penetrate an ever-growing number of societal realms, constantly deepening the commodification and entrepreneurialization of society.
The evolution and expansion of global capitalism must not be conceived as a linear succession of stages of economic development. This historicist view still permeates influential branches of critical Marxism (Tomba, 2009). Even post-dialectical thinkers like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (whose work is a key source of inspiration for this book) overlook capitalism's inconsistencies and historical continuities, presupposing a mono-directional trajectory of development where ‘real subsumption’ is seen as ‘the tendency’ of capital. Rather, global capitalism, as understood here, is an intricate process of spatio-temporal stratification, characterized by the juxtaposition of a variety of development pathways, hegemonic projects, forms of life and historical temporalities. At the same time, the engagement in this book with the increasingly global dimension of urbanization and urbanism is not intended to uncritically embrace universalism in the analysis of the contemporary city–capitalism nexus – the account provided here is inevitably situated, forged by the author's positionality. As Benedetto Croce once wrote about the impossibility of universal history: ‘history is thought, and, as such, thought of the universal, of the universal in its concreteness, and therefore always determined in a particular manner’ (Croce, 1921: 60).
This book, therefore, aims to highlight the central contribution provided by cities to the multifaceted experience of ‘global capitalism’ in the contemporary world. It does so by embracing a narrative strategy that requires dealing with the past in close relationship to the present (the Foucauldian idea of the ‘history of the present’) and with ‘the present as history’, in order to make sense of the living dimension of the city-capitalism nexus at a time of biopolitics where life is central to the dynamics of cities, capitalism and their mutual dependence. To put it with Roberto Esposito, the proposed analysis is based, on the one hand, on a deep engagement with ‘the unfolding of the most pressing current events’ and at the same time on the identification of ‘dispositifs that come with a long or ancient history’ (Esposito,
