Cities Without Capitalism

Hossein Sadri, Senem Zeybekoglu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000413076
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias físicas
• Subtopic: Geografía

This book explores the interconnections between urbanization and capitalism to examine the current condition of cities due to capitalism. It brings together interdisciplinary insights from leading academics, activists and researchers to envision progressive, anti-capitalist changes for the future of cities.

The exploitative nature of capitalist urbanization, as seen in the manifestation of modern cities, has threatened and affected life on Earth in unprecedented ways. This book unravels these threats to ecosystems and biodiversity and addresses the widening gap between the rich and the poor. It considers the future impacts of the capitalist urbanization on the planet and the generations to come and offers directions to imagine and build de-capitalised and de-urbanised cities to promote environmental sustainability. Written in lucid style, the chapters in the book illustrate the current situation of capitalist urbanization and expose how it exploits and consumes the planet. It also looks at alternative habitat practices of building autonomous and ecological human settlements, and how these can lead to a transformation of capitalist urbanization.

The book also includes current debates on COVID-19 pandemic to consider post-pandemic challenges in envisioning a de-capitalised, eco-friendly society in the immediate future. It will be useful for academics and professionals in the fields of sociology, urban planning and design and urban studies.

1 Cities without capital

A systemic approach

Porus D. Olpadwala

Introduction

The question of cities in a post-capitalist world may be addressed in two ways. Since we do not know what the new world will look like, we investigate capital’s impact on urbanization to identify features that the new society might wish to retain or discard. The second is to examine the experience of cities in the few post-capitalist societies that had a transitory existence in the last century.

Our entry point into capitalist urbanization will be Marx’s laws of motion or movement. These include inter alia growth, commoditization, economic concentration, technological dynamism, internationalization, unemployment, economic and social inequality, recurrent crises, and financialization. Marx formulated these to capture the intrinsic or inherent features of capital defining all aspects of the system. We will use them to study capital’s relationship with urbanization.

We take the tendencies as given, but derive them anew using everyday business propositions instead of the labor theory of value, in hopes of better associating them with contemporary modes of thought (Section II). Next, we consider the practical advantages of incorporating a systemic viewpoint in urban analysis (Section III). A case study follows in applying the tendencies of capital approach to an urban issue, in this case, housing (Section IV). The following section (Section V) considers shortfalls in understanding that can occur when systemic elements are not included. Section VI is a short post-script about post-capitalist urban experience.

Capital

Capitalist enterprise is subject to two mostly immutable laws. One is the drive for private, unlimited, financial, accumulation. The second is unceasing competition. These are imperatives and not choices. Each italicized item is critical, with substantive change in any negating capital’s governing conditions. For example, if the goal is not accumulation, or the accumulation is required to be limited, or it is intended for public and not private good, or if the competition were not all-encompassing, it would not be capitalism as we have known it.

The rules for accumulation are minimal and direct. They require that self-interest drive all decisions, that costs are externalized wherever possible while gains are made internally, and that immediate gratification be preferred to longer-term benefit – the principles of the invisible hand, maximization of returns, and the time value of resources, respectively.

The goal of business is to make money in unlimited quantities. There exists, however, substantial scope in how this can be done as circumstances and preferences intervene to take the process in separate ways. This amply is borne out in capital’s multifaceted history of operating through trade, conquest, production, and usury. However, the nucleus of the system has remained intact even as site and context have metamorphosed and it is possible to deduce a few economic and social general tendencies for capitalist societies.

Table 1 explores the influence of business motivations and behaviors on capital’s tendencies. Production for private gain creates a dissonance between private return and public well-being to the detriment of the latter, for example, in the promotion of harmful products like cigarettes. The dissonance favors social inequality as in the pharmaceutical industry choosing to address the less acute but more profitable demands of the better-off over more urgent but less remunerative needs of the poor. Another result is the constant push for the cost externalizations to shift liabilities from the private to the public sphere, for instance, in dealing with pollution remediation, or by not providing a living wage such that even full-time employees (the working poor) need to be supported from public sources. All these behaviors are benefited by larger size, thus creating also a tendency towards market power and concentration (1.1.a–d). The imperative of unrelenting competition reinforces these socially harmful tendencies and compels firms to operate at the level of the lowest common denominator (1.2). The push of unlimited financial accumulation is an important driver of growth and concentration as there exists no internal system limit to growth, indeed, it is just the opposite (1.3).

These motivations generate a series of business behaviors (1.4–1.11). Making money requires that revenues be maximized (1.4–1.8) and costs minimized (1.9–1.11). To enhance revenues, firms must try to sell more of their existing products at home and abroad (1.4), bring new products to market (1.5), increase sales prices (1.6), speed the turnover of capital, that is, minimize the time between making investments and capturing returns (1.7), and maximize firm influence over public authorities, for example, to reduce regulations and taxes, etc. (1.8).

To lower costs, firms must endeavor constantly to reduce the quantity of inputs, in both labor and material (1.9), pay less for what they use (1.10), and, again, maximize public influence, in this case to reduce external obligations such as duties and taxes (1.11).

The table tracks in the second column the impact of each behavior on the formation of capital’s tendencies. For example, the need to expand market share (1.4), increase selling prices (1.6), lower input prices (1.10), and maximize public influence (1.8 and 1.11) results in a tendency towards economic concentration. The requirement to keep creating new products (1.5), speed turnover (1.7), and decrease the quantity of inputs (1.9) promotes technological dynamism, while market expansion (1.4) and the need to reduce the price of inputs (1.10) stimulates internationalization. (For a detailed derivation of the tendencies with empirical examples, see Olpadwala 2019.)

Table 2 collects and groups the tendencies shown in the second column of Table 1. It shows that a social system based on privately owned resources used for unlimited private accumulation de-linked from social need tends to veer towards increased consumption and growth (2.1), commodification in most aspects of life (2.2), economic concentration (2.3), technological dynamism (2.4), and internationalization in outlook and operation (2.5). Such a system generates simultaneously employment (2.6) and unemployment (2.7) that net regularly in the unemployment that is an important contributor to social inequality (2.8). Finally, the system is prone to economic imbalances that generate regular financial and economic crises (2.9).¹

Capital and a systemic approach to urbanization

Urbanization theories fall into two nested categories, the general and the particular. General schemes analyze urban development using universalist principles of economies of scale, agglomeration economies, and comparative advantage that focus on the minimization of production and transportation costs without regard to historical context.² The analysis of the particular requires supplementing the general with explicit consideration of the essential goals and mores of the society in question. For capital, this means making tendencies of movement a central part of urban analysis.

Gordon’s 1976 study of two centuries of US urbanization illustrates the importance of this duality. He tracked the growth and spread of towns and cities and their internal allocation of spaces for work, residence, and recreation. In Gordon’s schema, the general laws of scale and agglomeration constitute the quantitative efficiencies of urbanization and by themselves are not sufficient to explain all location decisions. A more complete understanding needs also to include systemic elements, in this case pertaining to the capitalist labor process. Business places a premium on access to pliant labor and these qualitative efficiencies are as and sometimes more critical for profit and growth. Location decisions therefore are an amalgam of the two. A site with both types of efficiencies trumps those with only one. Where competing sites have comparable quantitative efficiencies, the decision goes to the one with greater qualitative strengths. In extreme cases, businesses even are willing to sacrifice short-term quantitative efficiencies to consolidate a long-term control over labor.

Hymer’s work on the internationalization of capital offers another window into systemic thinking (1979a, 1979b). Location theory works with geographic and size distributions of towns and cities, the sittings and hierarchies of urban growth. Early Western³ treatments focused on agriculture and the countryside, with transport differentials between town and country counted as the key variable determining spatial outcomes (von Thunen 1966). With the growing importance of production in the economy, attention shifted to the division of labor and scale and agglomeration economies in creating the spatial canvas. Geographer economists Christaller (1966), Losch (1954), and Weber’s (1929) stylized spatial hierarchies are some of the better known examples. Less known, but more relevant because they are less abstract and rooted ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Cities without capital: a systemic approach
• 2 Cities and subjectivity within and against capitalism
• 3 Can urbanization reduce inequality and limit climate change?
• 4 Tent city urbanism
• 5 Transition design as a strategy for addressing urban wicked problems
• 6 Transition pioneers: cultural currents and social movements of our time that “preveal” the future post-capitalist city
• 7 Urban commons: toward a better understanding of the potentials and pitfalls of self-organized projects
• 8 Counteracting the negative effects of real-estate-driven urbanism + empowering the self-constructed city
• 9 What will a non-capitalist city look like?
• 10 Towards democratic and ecological cities
• 11 The coming revolution of peer production and the synthetisation of the urban and rural: the solution of the contradiction between city and the country
• Index