[Music] I have the great privilege of introducing to the Dickinson community David Harvey distinguished professor of geography in the Department of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the city of New York professor Harvey is one of the most important critical theory social theorists of the past 50 years and the world's most cited human geographer for the sake of brevity I will mention only a few of his works social justice and the city Paris capital of modernity his path-breaking condition of post modernity and a brief history of neoliberalism his immensely informative writing rooted in the cities of Bristol Cambridge Paris Baltimore and currently New York has guided generations of scholars trying to make sense of modernity and the absence of social justice it seems to create Harvey's work suggests the use of reasoning styles and methods capable of bringing a new world into being his writing informs and inspires social activists all around the globe professor Harvey is a giant in the field of geography a man of genius who has shaped the theoretical movements of the fields for several decades he has also been widely info' influential across disciplines distinguishing himself as one of the most important minds of our times his critique of post modernity and his analysis of what he has called time-space compression has moved the field of anthropology and much of the rest of the scholarly community toward new ways of examining why our world is in continual flux and how we might best approach its understanding Sue's art since earning his PhD at Cambridge David Harvey has taught at Bristol Johns Hopkins Oxford and he is currently at the CUNY Graduate Center David Harvey is one of the two geographers who have most influenced my own thought and critical sensibility I will be forever grateful to him for his guidance as a mentor and also because he is one of the most decent human beings I have ever had the pleasure and the good fortune of knowing and now ladies and gentlemen students and faculty members of the community [Applause] you sometimes listen to introductions where you hardly recognize yourself but Thank You Heather for that generous comment one of my favorite quotations about the city comes from a man called Robert Park who was a urban sociologist working in Chicago and in the 1920s he wrote this the city is man's most consistent and on the whole his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart's desire but if the city is the world which man created it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live thus indirectly and without any clear sense of the nature of his task in making the city man has remade himself now of course you'll have to forgive the gendering of that argument but the sense of it I think is very important and I want to offer some reflections on it tonight what this suggests is that when we think about the city we should be thinking about the kinds of people that we have become through the urbanization process and that we should pay attention to the idea that if we wish to construct a city make a different City then the crucial question is not so much about the city but about us what kinds of social relationships do we value what kinds of social relationships do we wish to establish what kinds of relations to nature do we wish to set up how do we want to feel in this world we want to feel tense anxious satisfied or some mix of all of those things so that the notion of the city and making the city is really about remaking ourselves in a different image and in a different way and from that standpoint it always seems to me that we need to be a little bit more conscious about the way in which this park puts it in making the city we have remade ourselves the interesting thing here of course is that when you reflect on what has happened to cities over the last thirty years and then you think about what has happened over the last 300 years what you would I think see is that we've been made several times over by an urban process that is moving very quickly moving very fast at the beginning of the last century only about seven or eight percent of the world's population lived in cities we've now past the point where more half more than half of the world's population very much larger population lives in cities and there was a time when to have a city of five or six million as London was at the beginning of the last century was a huge huge thing we now live in a world where there are several cities over 20 million many many more over ten million and hundreds which have more than a million population so rather than think too much about what we might do in the future I want at this point to reflect first of all in terms of what has happened in the past by what process or processes did this urbanization process occur why did it occur who did it who was responsible and what can we say about its current condition now report came out from the United Nations some four or five years ago which depicted a world in which urbanization was producing what they called a planet of sums and since then a book has come out by Mike Davis called planet of slums which takes that theme and what we see from this way of thinking is a massive movement of populations a massive movement that is bringing people together without adequate employment without adequate healthcare without adequate infrastructure in a world where people are living in huge huge slums if you go to the city of Mumbai in India you'll find that the Indian government actually classifies six million people in that city living in slums so it is therefore very important to look at that part of the process but I want to look at another part because the astonishing thing about Mumbai is that you not only find yourself suddenly plunged into a city where people are sleeping on the streets where there's massive poverty but in the midst of this you suddenly see huge tower blocks emerging a new financial center huge residential blocks in some cases right in the middle of the slums the slums are being cleared in many instances to make way for a huge building boom so I want at this point to look at the other side of urbanization which is the process of building the city and I want to tell I think a very simple story which is something that has taken over and impelled the urban process particularly over the last hundred and fifty years and that is a process of urbanization driven by the necessity to absorb capital surpluses now what this means is this that capitalism is a very complicated system but its essence is very simple and the essence of this system goes like this that in the morning a capitalist starts with a certain amount of money and the end of the day they end up with more of it then the next morning they wake up and they think to themselves what am I going to do with that extra money I made yesterday and they have a choice they can consume it away in pleasure or they can reinvest and try and make even more money what happens under capitalism is that's not a real choice because if they don't reinvest somebody else will and in order to remain a capitalist you have to reinvest a part of that money that you got yesterday in expansion and then the big issue arises where are you going to invest it where is the opportunity to invest it and actually the whole politics of capitalism is about the perpetual attempt to eradicate all barriers to investment for example if the barrier lies in a scarcity of Labor you go find new labor supplies either by migrating people or taking your capital and moving it out or you take people who are not workers peasants children and you bring them into the labor force in some coercive way or if the problem is that the laborers are too well organized they become a barrier so you have to crush the labor movement you have to destroy the trade unions and if you look at the last thirty years I think you would see that all of those elements have been with us but that's not the only problem the other problem is if I make something new where can I sell it where is the market in this case if you can't find your market at home you may find it abroad or you come up with new products you make yesterday's computer immediately obsolete by producing a new and faster one so you do all kinds of things to make sure that the market is always there and that therefore building the market is necessary and in building the market what you frequently do is you start to use all kinds of mechanisms to create a fictitious effective demand if you want to know what that is just look inside your wallet and look at your credit card credit institutions and the credit system has become absolutely crucial to getting rid of that barrier to consumption that lies in demand well the problem may be that there are too many other capitalists around too many of you in the market in which case you have to drive the others out by monopolization buying them out assets mergers all the rest of it so there are all these strategies if you like which are there to try to make a world in which capitalists when they wake up in the morning and they are forced through competition to start to actually reinvest that they find a possibility to do it the market is there the labor is there the raw materials are there if you want and there aren't too many capitalists in the game in all of this I want to pose one I think very interesting question which is what is the role of urbanization and city building in the absorption of those surpluses because if you hit a situation where capitalists cannot find us a place to invest successfully then what you get is a crisis a crisis of devaluation loss of capital destruction of capital in order to avoid that the whole system has to change and one of the ways in which is has changed has been through urbanization now the first case I would like to mention here something I came across when I was studying the transformation of Paris between 1850 and 1870 there had been a revolution in 1848 a revolution that had arisen out of a condition of capital surpluses with nowhere to go and when capital surpluses have nowhere to go they're generally associated with unemployment so in 1848 you had a crisis of the capitalist system in which capital is being lost capital is being destroyed and workers are being thrown out of work the result was a revolutionary movement and an attempt to create an entirely different political economic system founded on utopian ideals of the 1840s and 18 30s the attempt was crushed and then a whole series of peculiar political events occurred which led to the establishment of an authoritarian government a dictatorship in effect the dictatorship of a man who called himself emperor and soon established a formal Empire in France the Second Empire Napoleon the third that was the scene now Napoleon 3rd knew that if he was going to stay into power he had to solve the capital surplus problem and the unemployment problem and one of the first major speeches he made the establishment of Empire in 1852 he said we have to put the country to work and capital to work and we're going to do it by coming up with a whole set of huge projects projects canals roads and ports across France international projects building the railways down into Spain and throughout much of Europe building the Suez Canal but one of the biggest of his projects of all was a completely reshaping of the city of Paris that is they're going to rebuild Paris in a huge huge attempt to absorb surplus capital and surplus labor and for that reason he brought to Paris a particular person called Houseman and what house man did as prefect of the city was to set about reshaping the city in so doing Houseman actually drew upon many of the inspirational plans that had been created by the utopian thinkers of the 1830s and the 1840s but he made one very very significant transformation he changed the scale at which they were thinking and the most famous moment of this was when an architect came into him one day with a set of plans for a new Boulevard and he had these plans in his mind for the last 15 20 years he had it all designed perfectly and he put him on house man's desk and said this is how we should do it and house one looked at the plans and said nonsense your Boulevard is only 40 meters wide I 120 metres wide and to this day when you visit Paris you visit boulevards that are yay wide instead of that wide Houseman rethought the scale at which the city should be cast he built the city as a whole he thought he absorbed all the suburbs into the city he rebuilt the whole city as an entity he put in sewers he put in new road systems he created new Park structures all of those things but in so doing he changed the scale at which the city was thought and in so doing he employed huge amounts of capital and absorbed a lot of labour he solved the capital surplus absorption problem very easily and he did so for about 15 years but then in 1868 suddenly something went badly wrong what went badly wrong was the credit structure because he had used the credit system new credit institutions in order to rebuild the city and that works fine all of the time that somehow or other the system's dynamism kept going but when it paused for a moment suddenly the credit broke and there was a crisis of 1868 Houseman was forced out of power Napoleon the third didn't know what to do went to war with Germany lost and then a disastrous set of events succeeded in France where there was a huge revolution again in Paris in 1871 that was also finally destroyed now fast forward to this country in 1942 in 1942 you would have looked backwards at the 1930s and seen vast quantities of surplus capital that could not be absorbed you would see vast unemployment you saw the Great Depression surplus capital and surplus labor side by side very difficult to put them together Roosevelt had tried with a public works project much as Napoleon the third which built highways in the Blue Ridge and all that kind of thing but it wasn't really absolving the problem what really solved the problem was of course World War two all the surplus capital was suddenly taken up in building ships and planes and tanks the surplus labor either was going into the army or it was working in the factories women were brought into the labor force at the same time at that period you had almost a nationalized economy the whole economy was orchestrated by the federal government it was a planned economy and one of the most successful planned economies that there's ever been and in 1942 not only did you have a planned economy that was absorbing all of the surpluses but you're also in alliance with an evil empire was Ronald Reagan later called it the Soviet Union so in 1942 the owners of capital were terrified at the question what will happen after the war is over their political response was to launch a huge anti-communist program that eventually led into of course McCarthyism and all those other things that occurred after World War two that was the political side but the big big question was where are you going to absorb the surpluses of capital and surpluses of labor when the war is over and you're no longer building tanks and planes and all the rest of it part of the answer as we all know was an armaments race but the other answer was signaled in 1942 in an article that came out in a journal called architectural forum and the article was about Houseman it did a very close study of Houseman what he had done how he had done it what the significance of his works were and the name of the person who wrote that article was Robert Moses and after World War 2 Robert Moses in alliance with big government and an alliance with big corporate capital completely reshaped the New York metropolitan region he did what Houseman had done he changed the scale you no longer looked at simply New York City you looked at the whole New York metropolitan region you built the highways you built the sub suburbs you opened up Fire Island and Long Island too and all of that and you you did all this you re completely re-engineered the whole region and this was not only going on in New York it was also going on around Chicago it was going on in Los Angeles it was going on in the American South in effect what I'm saying is that one of the most important ways in which the surplus was absorbed after 1945 was through a complete restructuring of the urban system and a complete reorganization of urban life around the production of the suburbs with all kinds of social consequences and I think it was no accident that first wave feminism focused on this suburb as the center of its discontents so here too what we see is capital solving its particular problem ie how to dispose of the capital surplus successfully through a reshaping of the urban process across the Americas now during that time the United States was the center of the global economy the Soviets and the Communists were over there and the United States was the powerhouse and in fact the United States as a powerhouse absorbing and solving many of the problems of capitalist development in the rest of the world helped absorb not only surpluses within the United States but surpluses being generated elsewhere so here too I would want to argue that the transformation of urban life had everything to do with this whole kind of process of capital of absorbing the capital surpluses fast forward now to our contemporary condition and ask yourself the question where are the capital surplus is being absorbed and how are they being absorbed well one of the places they're being absorbed big time and you become acutely aware of it as soon as you land there is China the urban process in China is astonishing in the last 30 years forgotten the exact number but over 50 cities have risen from almost nothing to being over a million and there are several cities now and complexes of 10 15 20 million China absorbed 50 percent of the world's cement supplies over the last five years they're pouring concrete everywhere there's a huge boom in urbanization going on and it has powerful effects around the rest of the world you go to Chile and suddenly you find Chile is booming why because the demand from copper for China is huge Australia is booming why because the demand for raw materials from China is huge even in this country we find some things booming because the demand for huge moving equipment from China is huge so suddenly what we see is an urban process going on in China but it's not only going on in China because when you start to look around you you find that urban reconstructions are going on everywhere at a very very fast pace in Santiago in Chile one end of the town you see the planet of slums at the other end of town you see an area called little Manhattan which is a huge building area huge building site same is true in South parlor same is true in Lagos the same is true in Mumbai and it's even true in New York City there are more projects going on in New York City right now than has been true since Robert Moses time and in fact just last week there was an article about Robert Moses in the New York Times which was actually paralleling what is being done under Bloomberg and what Robert Moses was got up - got up - and it even talked about well we should rehabilitate Robert Moses and take him out of that negative connotation which often is associated with him because now we are going to do another Robert Moses in New York City so my thesis then the first part of my thesis is to say look you cannot divorce what has happened in our urbanizing world without attaching it to this dynamic of the capital surplus absorption problem and if we wish to create an alternative kind of city not like contemporary sauer Paulo or Shenzhen Shanghai Mumbai if we want to do something different then one of the things we have to do is to address straight on that capital surplus absorption problem and that dynamic which lies at the heart of the urban process now backtrack just a little bit I mentioned about the way in which Moses was transforming the world like house when he came unstuck in the late 1960s early 1970s he ran into trouble the urban process was not working as well as it was before things were turning difficult Robert Moses fell from power was ousted and was generally criticized for his destructive behavior in relationship to the city he had engaged in that process that Schumpeter called creative destruction he had destroyed much of the aspect of urban life he had destroyed whole communities he had destroyed a way of life and replaced it with something else he had remade the city not after my heart's desire or your heart's desire but around the necessity to create a city that would absorb the surplus this led into a whole set of difficulties within the urban crop in within the urban process because what Robert Moses also did was by creating the suburbs he had created a hollowed-out centre of the cities so you had a fascinating period in the 1960s when the economy in general was doing very well the capital surpluses were being absorbed hand over fist through suburbanization but you were leaving the central cities behind and the result was you were getting surging discontent in the central cities particularly discontent increasingly associated with minority populations that were not benefiting from the ways in which the surpluses were being absorbed so in the 1960s you had something called the urban crisis there was no general crisis there was a crisis of the central cities and the issue then became how can you actually stabilize this situation deal with the urban crisis was fascinating go back to that time and read the literature is all about the urban crisis no general crisis the urban crisis what are we going to do and of course there are many reasons why it was called an urban crisis there are uprisings in watts there were problems in Harlem after the assassination of Martin Luther King something like 30 or 40 major cities in the United States witnessed considerable outbreaks of violence attacks it looked like the cities were falling apart there to call out the National Guard and bring in the National Guard into cities like Baltimore they had to bring them in in order to protect the fire services putting out the fire that were burning all around the city it was an urban crisis all right it was almost an urban revolution and urban uprising and the answer became was well we can do something about this by creating a whole set of federal programs which are going to address the urban crisis urban politics became crucial vast amounts of money started to flow into central cities in order to cure the urban crisis reorganize rebuild rebuild communities create employment but at the same time you were creating that employment in an environment where there was a lot of continuing instability and in particular one of the big consequences and one of the big reasons why the central cities were hurting could be best identified in a city like New York where the new transport systems in effect allowed and helped business relocate either to the suburbs or to go to the American South so that throughout the 1960s what you had within New York City was deindustrialization you are losing manufacturing jobs they're either going to the suburbs or they're going to the Carolinas or they're going to Alabama or wherever so that the job structure was not there so what happened was that got displaced by public employment and the public employment structure in a city like New York focused on municipal services so that during the 1960's and 1970's you had a tremendous buildup of employment in education health care transport garbage disposal all the rest of it municipal services this became as it were one of the solutions but in 1973 the federal government suddenly found it was running out of money it couldn't fight poverty and a Vietnam War at the same time and the parallels here to the present are rather interesting and so what happened in 1973 was that President Nixon came on the radio or was one I listen to him on the radio giving his State of the Union address and in his State of the Union address he wanted to reassure everybody in the United States he said that the urban crisis is over it was a wonderful moment I was in Baltimore and I looked out the window and I thought hey we should be all dancing in the streets the urban crisis is over wonderful it's all you know but it looked the same miserable grimy decaying place that it had been for some considerable time so what Nixon meant was not that the urban crisis was over he meant simply that we're not going to give you any more money and so suddenly the cuts started to come from the federal government New York City found itself suddenly losing jobs losing federal monies and then in 1973 there was a global crash in property markets suddenly the urban process was no longer able to absorb because the credit system just as what happened to Houseman the credit system couldn't bear the burden anymore banks started going bankrupt things were bad and because there was a property market crash suddenly New York City found itself with less and less money coming in in terms of taxes so suddenly the tax system is in trouble the federal money is in trouble the deindustrialization is continuing so New York City starts to do well doesn't star it continues and accelerates the only way in which it can stabilize its economy which is through borrowing you go to the credit system then in 1975 something very interesting happened suddenly the investment bankers in New York City decided they were not going to lend any more money to the city they were not going to underwrite any more loans what this did was in effect create a financial coup against the city government and it worked like this the city government was about to be in a situation where it could not pay its workforce it could not maintain even basic services what was it to do first off it appealed to the federal government there's a wonderful picture in the newspaper I saw just a couple of months ago actually it occurred when President Ford died because in April of 1975 there stood President Ford with his two chief aides one Donald Rumsfeld whose assistant was Dick Cheney now they have a great urban record as you know from Baghdad and actually the precursor to that was what they did to New York City because Ford sent a message just around the time that picture was taken to New York City having requested aid and rejected it and a great headline appeared in the New York Daily News that said Ford to City drop dead the city had no money the federal government was not going to help this was a serious issue because at that time New York City had one of the biggest public budgets in the world and there was huge international concern that the whole financial system of the world was going to crash if New York City went bankrupt the West German Chancellor of the time actually pleaded with Ford to bail the city out but they didn't they took the risk so what was going on here why did the investment bankers suddenly decide not to play ball and why did the investment bankers one of whom had become secretary of the Treasury urge the federal government not to help the answer here I think has to do partly with economics and partly with politics the politics of it was that the investment bankers did not like the way in which New York City was governed and in particular they did not like the rising power of black politicians and the Black Power movement and they didn't like the power of municipal unions the labor force they didn't like the fact that community organizations could block some of their pet designs for what they were going to do in Battery Park what became Battery Park City or some other site they wanted the city to be disciplined and they wanted it to be disciplined in a way that would allow them to read build-it in their way according to their criteria now my criteria the criteria the people so they said about this at this particular moment because I figured they had the power to discipline the city and in effect what they did was to take away all budgetary power from the elected government and relocate it first in something called the municipal assistance cooperation and then in something called the emergency financial control board what those institutions did was to take all of the tax income due to New York City including residual federal grants put it in one pot then what they did with that money was to pay off the debt pay off the investment bankers and whatever was left over could be used for municipal services the result was drastic cuts of municipal services huge cuts in fire police sanitation education transportation an incredible disciplining of the city and this created a completely new urban environment completely new urban situation so the bankers then were doing that and in doing this they came up I think with what for me is one of the key elements of what has guided politics globally over the last thirty years and it's a simple rule it says if there's a conflict between the well-being of a financial institution and the well-being of the people you choose the well-being of the financial institution that is what the International Monetary Fund does when it engages in structural adjustment it saves the bankers and sucks it to the people this is what they did in Mexico in 1982 this is what they've done again and again and again and again around the world this simple principle was something that the investment bankers established without any doubt whatsoever in 1975 in New York City now this attack upon the city essentially a financial coup you took it over paralleled something that happened in Chile around this time through a military coup there in Chile a democratically elected government socialist Salvador Allende was overthrown in part with the backing of the United States and in its stead there came a man called General Pinochet who died just last year and Pinochet said about reor castrating the economy crushing the union's crushing or left opposition and doing it in such a way that it was almost impossible to recuperate any kind of left opposition in that country even to this day he also restructured the economy along exactly the kinds of lines which the neoliberal bankers wanted to happen here to what we see is a restructuring which is affected for instance the way in which a city like Santiago looks to this day slums at one end little Manhattan at the other but the bankers then had a problem because the bankers didn't simply want to destroy the city they also wanted to create something new and the big issue for the bankers and the Rockefellers were central in this and Walter Wriston and Felix rotten this group of bankers wanted to rebuild the city in a different image according more to their heart's desire to some degree and their heart's desire was to have a city which was open to capital accumulation but which is also would have a vibrant economic base I would accept entirely that the rock of brothers loved New York City but they wanted it to be their city the kind of city they felt comfortable in the kind of world that they could operate in freely and openly in this they had a huge piece of luck the huge piece of luck was this that in 1973 there was a huge all oil price rise tremendous increase through OPEC and the arab-israeli war that oil price rise deposited immense quantities of dollars in the hands of the Saudi government Iranian government and other governments in the Middle East and the big question was what were they going to do with that money if they didn't recycle it into the economy if they just stuck it in their mattress that would have been the end of capitalism there and then the big issue was how to get that money recycling back into the global economy we now know from British intelligence reports which came out last year that in 1973 the United States was prepared to invade Saudi Arabia and occupy the oil wells in order to bring the oil price down we don't know from those reports how far the planning went weather was just contingency planning or whether it was kind of really serious we just don't know but what we do know is that in 1975 the US ambassador to Saudi Arabia negotiated an exclusive agreement with the Saudis and that exclusive agreement said that the Saudis will recycle all of their petrol dollars through the New York investment banks now we often think of New York City as somehow rather naturally the global financial capital not natural at all this was u.s. imperial politics which has played to keep the control of the financial system in New York rather than let it go elsewhere and to this day of course there is this fear that somehow or other all the oil come all the oil countries are going to start using euros rather than dollars and things of that sort to designate the price of their product so the New York investment bankers then secured a new financial basis for New York City it was going to be the center of global finance a privileged center through us imperialist practices there was a great difficulty for the investment bankers in 1975 or so where are we going to lend the money where are the opportunities for this capital surplus to be low you know to go the urban process can't absorb it anymore lot of corporate America is in difficulty the answer was given by one of them in bankers called Walter Wriston who said lend to countries because countries cannot disappear you can always go find them so they started lending big time to Mexico to Brazil even to Poland and in 1982 none of those countries could pay back we went through a rerun of the New York City thing what is going to happen to the New York investment bankers if Mexico defaults on its bank on its loans in order to prevent that the Reagan administration reinvented the International Monetary Fund along exactly the lines that I've already talked about which is you find a way to restructure the debt so that you extract surpluses from a poor impoverished population in order to make sure the investment bankers do okay but financial services was not enough you needed something else and around this time the downtown business partnership which have made up and and the business roundtable institutions that formed around this time redesigned what New York City should be about it should be a center of tourism there should be a center of consumerism it should be a cultural center it should be a media center now in order for that to happen you had to have adequate city services and in order for that to happen you had to counter the idea that the New York City economy was completely collapsed this is when for the first time they came up with the idea of selling the city actually selling the city as a commodity as an image this is when they invented the famous logo I move from sure you've all see I Love New York first in you to do this of course we know you go to Paris you'll see I love Paris I love Tokyo another but New York did that market the city but in order to market the city you had to say this is an attractive environment to which you can come but when you have garbage piling up all over the place it's not a very attractive place so they had a problem and it was made even worse by the fact that the fire and the police unions did something interesting they looked at this I Love New York campaign and come to the city and be a great tourist and said no no we're going to counter that with something called a fear city campaign they created pamphlets they took em out to Kennedy Airport and they gave them to tourists saying don't go into Manhattan or if you do don't ever go on the subway because you get bound to get mugged and there'd be nobody to protect you you can travel on the buses maybe from 9:00 till about 5:00 but after that don't certainly never go on the street and by the way in the hotel make sure you're on a lower floor because if if there's a fire there's no blue fire service to protect you so they came up with this well this scared the Rockefeller gang no end so they renegotiated with the fire and police unions and they actually renegotiated that they'd rehire a bunch of fire people and a bunch of police people if they cut and stopped this campaign they agreed guess where the rehired police and fire folk were assigned they were assigned to Manhattan the Bronx could burn down and it did Queens could burn down a crime wave could crush Brooklyn and the Bronx didn't matter what you did was he started to secure Manhattan as a privileged place for tourism cultural activities and the likes of the Rockefellers to have their lives in peace you started to create something which is absolutely critical to what has happened to the urban world over the last 30 years you created a mini state within the city a series of mini states and you privileged this mini state and let the others fall apart this is this Universal structure we're now looking at a fragmented City a fragmented city which is islands of privilege in the midst of tremendous areas of decay now this second event which was in effect redesigning the city in a certain kind of way also carries with it I think a crucial aspect of the policy of what neoliberalism is about it's not only about privilege in financial sector it's also about creating a good business climate but what you do is you say yes there is a role for municipal services not to serve the people but they should create a good business climate that is it should be oriented to business and in order to make sure that we even reinvent the whole structure of government we no longer call it government we call it governance because the corporations are implicated so much within the urban process political process stakeholders are incorporated so you get a complete transformation in the way in which we think about how a city should be governed we start to think of public-private partnerships the mayor talks closely with the corporates corporate heads they do things together and now of course we have this wonderful situation where one of those corporate heads is now mayor of the city and how much more integrated could you get and if you look at a city like Seattle and they look at the role of somebody like Paul Allen in Seattle you'll see very much the same sort of thing except he's not mayor but he can pretty much dictated terms of development and redevelopment in the city now here is another principle then which says this that the mission of government is to create a good business climate and if there is a conflict between creating a good business climate and the well-being of the people you create a good business climate and you do it with the following argument that a good business climate creates good businesses and the businesses will employ people and a rising tide will float or boats and dorada never does but that is the argument so here you have these two new neoliberal principles which are really designed around the urban process as it has been transformed over the last 30 years in order to find more space in which you can absorb the surpluses and that in effect is what we're now seeing the Bloomberg administration I mentioned blue line has more projects now than ever before something like 28 major projects and it's not only in Manhattan now large chunk of Brooklyn large areas of Queens even re-engineering of parts of the Bronx so that you're getting now a completely neoliberal eyes city emerging around these large projects and in the midst of all of this blue Berg made one very important and I think significant statement he said he was going to discontinue the practice of some of his predecessors I get Koch and so on who would effectively subsidize businesses to come to town he would say I am no longer prepared to subsidize businesses to come to New York City as far as I'm concerned he said if a business needs to be subsidized to be in New York City then it does not belong here we only want the kinds of corporations which are of such high quality with such high income that they can bear the costs of being in the superior location which we are creating here now he hasn't said that about people that would be too crass but actually when you look at what the consequences are this is what's happening with respect to people if you're not rich enough then you don't belong in Manhattan if you can't really pay the huge real estate prices the vast rents then you don't belong and by the way those places that were once relatively low income or middle income and now being sold off Stuyvesant Town all the rest of it and suddenly was feeling the whole city is being turned over I mean we've had gentrification going on all along but now it's become absolutely massive buying out huge parts of the city just at one shot in order to transform it into something else now there's an interesting kind of question here is how long this process can go on I mentioned that Houseman came unstuck about 15 years later Moses ran into real deep trouble what you're beginning to see in many parts of the world is a tremendous increase in urban unrest you'll find this particularly in Latin America and you're beginning to see the consequences of that in cities like Buenos Aires in cities like Santiago and of course in Caracas and we're beginning to see the emergence of a different kind of politics and anti neoliberal politics we're beginning to see even in the interstices of the kind of Bloomberg project a sudden concern where the low-income people going to come from who are going to service this city shouldn't we be a little bit more concerned with low-income housing shouldn't we really be concerned with moderating if you like some of the elements that are going into the system but here is the problem that the way this system has evolved is producing such immense inequalities now these inequalities are very difficult to actually suppress without serious political disruption just to give you some examples few years ago well in 2005 the leading hedge fund managers many of whom were in New York City earn two hundred and fifty million dollars a year one of the hedge fund managers this last year and a billion dollars in one year just personal income these numbers are of course obscene you wonder what it is they do that's so valuable that they are worth a billion dollars but that billion dollars starts to go a long way in terms of political influence and so what we see is a vicious cycle in which the extraction of immense wealth at the end of the day not only leads people who have a billion dollars to ask the question where can I put my billion dollars tomorrow but also maybe I can use some of it to essentially buy out the political process and you see what is so interesting now about the big philanthropy the Soros and the gates from the buffets and so on is what you find them doing is actually compensating for the mess that they have helped to create you do not find any of them supporting any activities that are going to actually challenge the means by which they gained their wealth in the first instance in other words they're interested in the reproduction of the system that allows these immense community concentrations of wealth to be developed that allows not only that but also the urban process to be transformed in the way that it's been transformed but they simply at the end of the day want to use their money to modify the outcomes now the big question I think is is this a kind of City and the kind of world I want to live in is it the kind of city in the kind of world you want to live in and the point of my talk is this that if it is not and if you want as it were to take parks argument very seriously and you want to say I want to become conscious of my task here I want to create a city more after my heart's desire the kind of place I want to live kind of relation to nature I want to have the kind of social relations that I'm anxious to sustain and and construct if that is the case then one of the things you have to one of the questions you have to answer is how are we going to confront this simple problem we started out with which is the capital surplus absorption problem if you cannot confront that if you can't deal with that then it seems to me we're pretty much doomed to keep on that process that Houseman Moses Bloomberg now represents that we are going to be reconstructed according to their needs they're impulsion z-- even their desires and that is not a world of liberty and freedom for us there is a world in which we are condemned to live in other people's image and from that standpoint what we need to do is to start to become conscious of the nature of the problem there are no easy solutions there are many social movements now that are battling around this question to be found at the world Social Forum and other places many movements which are pushing in this direction and I think what we have to do is to think about our relationship to those movements become conscious of our task instead of being led along by this process that's gone on for the last 150 years or more whereby in order to solve the capital surplus problem we have to reconstruct our cities this way and only this way rather than that way we like to think we are a society in which we have choices this is not a choice of brands of toothpaste this is a real choice about the kind of city we want to live in that it seems to me is what we have to think about thanks very much [Applause] we have some time for comments and questions I think it's a mic there that you hello do you think that with the Enron scandal and with and basically many many many different types of documentaries coming out within the past few years that people are beginning to become more cognizant more aware of the extent to which corporations directly or indirectly happen to be in their lives in this fashion to be to be very much in control I'm you know I'm not haven't done any polls on the subject and I I think that there are many incidents of that kind which would suggest that there's a certain suspicion of where corporate America has been going but what you will see is actually a movement in the other direction there is a great nervousness in New York City about the fact that the regulatory environment in New York City financial activities and Stock Exchange and all the rest of it has become too strict and in particular Eliot Spitzer and so on has been doing too good a job so the big fear in New York City is that financial services are going to move to London where the regulatory regime is easier and is also going to make movement in particular to Shanghai and Hong Kong and one of the consequences of that was the report that just came out which suggested that the best thing they can do in order to retain financial services in New York City is to deregulate even more in other words all of the regulatory things that were put into place after Enron are going to be dismantled because of the competitive need now this is the kind of thing you read on the business pages and I'm not sure people will quite see it but what was interesting to me was with somebody like Eliot Spitzer who had been a very strong campaigner against corporate malfeasance on Wall Street immediately came out and agreed with this report because he's now governor and he has to back whatever it is that's going to keep New York as a global financial center so I think there's a certain awareness but I don't think there's a very deep awareness of the kinds of complexities of doing this so my feeling here was where we learned something from the Enron at least I hope we did or hope a lot of people did but now it's being absolutely reabsorbed by partly by these kinds of mechanisms which by the way explain something to me why did Henry Paulson who could have earned something like fifty two million dollars a year a goldman sachs moved to be treasury secretary a lot of what his work as Treasury secretary is about deregulating the economy even more and deregulating financial services in particular and of course opening up the China trade and all that all of that sort of thing so we're seeing that and in addition I get worried by these munificent kinds of gestures that we see from people like Soros and gates and Buffett and so on which makes it seem like the corporate guys the good guys the big issue for me is well it's very nice they're giving away their money like this but on the other hand the big question for me is what kind of system is it allowed them to make that kind of money in the first place and I think that what would do it what we're seeing is much as we saw in the 1970s a corporate campaign a collective corporate campaign to try and re-establish the credibility and the goodness of what corporate America is about and I'm not saying it's inherently bad I'm just saying there's an our corporate campaign to try to do that to counter what might be seen as the Enron effect and the fallout from the Enron thing both technically in terms of the regulatory environment but also I think in terms of image of what corporations are about yeah I agree with that very much one of the big problems I have with a lot of the thinking on the left is that a lot of other thinking on the left in these times says that the solution to our difficulties is a local solution that you go local and I just don't think that's feasible I think that plays into the hands of investment bankers and capitalist class interests and all the rest of it and there's a whole kind of movement that kind of says well if we can go to some sort of communitarian solution if we can go to some local solution if we can delink from the global economy that the solutions lie in that so a lot of political thinking on the left is small scale and the seeks an answer to the big problem by going small-scale this was actually a problem that emerged in the 1830s and 1840s I mean the utopian movements of the 1830s and 1840s were thinking about small communities and that was the answer what Houseman said was no that's not the answer at all I take your plans and I expand them and do it so I think the left should should learn from this and think about having very much larger plans then but that is not the characteristic mode of thinking within many of the oppositional movements many of the social movements that exists globally though there are of course international links which are which are building you will see this in the environment move environment environmental movements you'll see it in the feminist movements you'll see it in in some of the human rights movements but but the you know so there is a dichotomy if you like but you're in the oppositional movement between those that have a kind of a global perspective and are seeking and are ready and willing to think about global issues and those that see the answer simply being saying forget it you can't is too big it's too huge we can't deal with it all we can do is go find our corner and reconstruct our corner in the way we wish to cook we wish to reconstruct it and I understand that that urge but what I don't think is really there is a kind of sense of how that easily that can be co-opted into the dynamics of a capitalistic system so I agree with you entirely that the thinking of this in terms of scale and the scale at which the system is working and the scale at which we have to construct responses that there is a if you like a mismatch between the scale at which we're thinking of responses I said we you know in general the left is thinking responses and the scale at which the the capitalist movement is is working it seems that there are two big I mean it seems that as neoliberalism advances and and that is a current that goes towards this all sort of financial pattern instability and all those things you talked about and at the same time there's that focus of resistance right as you were talking on that American in other places and so now they I mean the the neoliberalism has been more applied feast fits off into that resistance and so how do you foresee the possible escalation or not or those of those two forces kind of opposing each other well I don't have a crystal ball if I did I don't use it I don't know the answer to that I mean the dynamics of i I mean for example I'm I'm very surprised there's not being more resistance in this country I mean if you look at things like what's been happening to pensions and people's pension rights many people are being dispossessed they're losing you know and the system we there's a sort of connection in my mind between the fact that there's this incredible concentrations of wealth going on and you know I mean okay a head of Goldman Sachs got fifty two million dollars last year ask yourself the question where did that fifty two million dollars come from where did it come from what production underlay it what what know what what what activity and then you then you look at something and you say well actually one of the things has happened over the last three years just give an example is that actually United Airlines declared bankruptcy and then reneged on all its pension obligations and then the federal government picked up that has got an Insurance Scheme but only at about half rate so actually all United Airlines employees have lost about half or two-thirds of their pension rights in the last five years now in my calculus I think well maybe they're you know maybe that's partly where go you know where the head of Goldman Sachs got he's fifty two million from and if people would think of that as connected people would say hey I want some of my money back and actually there's some very scary things going on because actually where Goldman Sachs is getting his money from are from some new markets which didn't exist in nineteen ninety I mean this is sort of game that gets played in 1990 they came up with some new markets sort of currency rate derivatives and credit swaps and so on completely new markets and they started to trade in those markets and the volume of trade in those markets right now comes to two hundred and thirty two trillion dollars was the figure I saw now if you add up the gross domestic product of the United States Canada Europe Japan and China you get 32 trillion dollars so you have 232 trillion dollars worth working we around in these markets against 32 trillion dollars of real output you kind of say what on earth is going on here this is a fictitious system but it's out of that fictitious system that people like Goldman Sachs are actually getting all their money they're extracting it from that and then it's real because then they can go off and buy them at mansions and you know buy the Democratic Party and a few other little things like that so when you when you look at this he's gonna say what's going on and then I I was very comforted by the fact that well okay somebody who was writing about this kinda said well actually the real liabilities in these markets is only ten percent ten percent and you can't say oh that's very nice that means it's you know twenty three trillion dollars and that's only two thirds of the gross domestic product of all of those countries and you can't go you see one of the things from one of the things that we need we really have to do is to start to think about the mechanisms by which incomes are being redistributed wealth and power is being redistributed through the construction of markets of this kind who constructed these markets how these markets actually actually work and let us look therefore at the connections and when I kind of say if all United Airlines employees suddenly thought that their money was disappearing into the hands of goldman sachs it would probably be pretty annoyed and maybe want to do something about it instead of which people say oh it's terrible this thing happened now there was a saying back when when people would say only connect and there is this big question for me where is all this wealth which has been piled up at the top of the ladder coming from who is losing goldman sachs for example is active in mumbai in the property market in mumbai one of the things that's happening in Mumbai I said was you were dispossessing you're throwing out people from the slums the slums are being cleared to make way for property development and there's been a lot of legal argument about the right to compensation of people who've lived in slums for many many years and had a productive life there and they're being cleared out of there they're illegal they have no property rights they're being cleared out and so a lot of court cases were brought about well they should have property rights because they've been there for a long time and the Indian Supreme Court recently decided it is probably a Supreme Court which is about as good as our Supreme Court it recently decided that no you should not compensate slum dwellers who have been thrown off their property because they were illegal and they actually used the following language they said to compensate them would be like rewarding a pickpocket for their actions and this is the kind of thing that's going on and they're hardly surprisingly there is a good deal kind of critical social movement in India around these kinds of dispossession swisherd going on now I don't know how this is going to work out I mean I mean the bit one of the big issues it seems to me is the awareness and and here I think academics have a real real real big problem we have not gone far enough in cultivating an awareness of these issues and how it works and a lot of the time the academic world has become neoliberal there you're supposed to be an entrepreneur you're not to preneur of ideas and that's all it's about you know and there's jockeying for power and position and all the rest of it and by the way who provides all the research money I mean I essentially lost my position at Johns Hopkins because I didn't bring in enough research money and when I suggested I said well that is a bit hard I mean I can't imagine me setting up an Institute of Marxist studies courtesy of General Motors and the Dean looked at me he said well no I think that would be very good idea I mean the biases that are now exist in academia around what it is you can study and how you can study it over are being set in these kinds of ways so there are all sorts of as it were ideological barriers misunderstandings there's a tremendous amount of work to be done it seems to me in terms of trying to get people to understand what the connections are now I and here of course there's also difficult because I can't actually prove that the money from United Airlines employees ended up in goldman sachs pocket i can't actually prove that all I can do is infer that if they made a lot and they lost they most probably some relationship between what was lost and what was gained but I can't actually show it and so people will immediately say well you can't show it so why are you saying such ridiculous things until you can show it I'm not gonna but it's interesting about capitalism they have all kinds of data about things which are largely irrelevant and the things you really want to know you could never find unless they really want to know it and it was fascinating to me you know they used to say they couldn't track money it's impossible they'd say then all of a sudden you find after 9/11 they're tracking every bank transaction through Swift Bank everywhere they can do it if they want they just don't want because we might find out too much so here too I think there's a there's a real set of issues about about our awareness our knowledge of the how the system is working and there's a tremendous amount of work to be done and a lot of the time it's not it's not being done and and not being communicated so there's an awareness issue of that sort but also at the same time there's always an instability always a volatility even in this country there are possibility of very strong political movements in this country is inherently rather volatile I've lived through moments when this country was really roiled up right now it seems to be pacified by cappucino and and you know Starbucks is it and and and so you know but you never know I mean these things that are very volatile and I think what we've seen for instance in Latin America is a volatility of political culture and a political movement and you also see it in many other parts and many other parts of the world so I can't predict I just have no idea but what I do know is that the S there's a lot of discontented people out there and the problem is putting all those discontents together and finding some way to think about an alternative and also to make the connections to see what the nature of the real problem is this sort of dovetails with what you were just saying some may be festive and in your own way but accompanying this transfer this transformative shift to neoliberalism in the 1980s 1970s and 1980s into the 1990s present was a shift or always the ascendancy of a new kind of discourse which had been present but I think it's it seems to me become more solidified and that's a discourse of this economy between being something as efficient or inefficient or productive versus wasteful and I think there's especially for younger generations of students coming up who even even as activist students and certainly for middle classes around the world there's a certain intuitive understanding that when something is something can be productive or unproductive which is very much tied into the broader discourse of what capitalism is about a sound investment versus an unsound investment and part of the question is how how do we go forward beyond that that discourse which in many ways was made real or acceptable even in Clinton administration when Gore goes on and he breaks his little box or whatever you did on David Letterman and said you know the era of big government is over right it's sort of basically accepting this idea that government should be efficient capital should be efficient how do we go beyond that discourse to return to I think what you're saying of re-envisioning how capitalism could work or at least how to harness capitalism in a different way and just a kind of related question is if we sort of know where the money is how do you get the money steal it you know it's it's the question raises there are two steps I would take in relationship to your first question the first is it's it's a myth that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector if you ever traveled on the French train system or the Japanese train system and then you try traveling on Amtrak you'd see a huge world of difference there's nothing more inefficient than the way in which health care is organized in this country I mean Paul Krugman for example has been pointed out endlessly it is the most inefficient thing you could possibly become about the amount of the amount of overhead in administrative overhead in in Britain or Canada or where the National Health Systems is I don't know what it is about five seven percent something like that and and and and in America or something likes 15 to 18 percent I mean in other words I this this this idea that somehow the public is inefficient by definition and corporate is efficient by definition is entirely false the evidence does not does not add up to that at all there are certainly public systems that are inefficient and but then there are also public systems that are highly efficient and and actually you know you know you use the use that use the French French case I'm in the French case at Anna French social service administrative system and and it's highly efficient doesn't always work perfectly but but so I the first step would be to challenge this kind of mythology that somehow the public is inefficient private is is is efficient it's just not just not true and I think one of the scary things in this country as I mentioned about World War two was you had a sort of centrally administered economy that was working extremely efficiently and and this is what you know really so this mythology but the second the second thing is even if there is a certain even if even conceding if there may be some sort of truth to the fact that but government bureaucracies can become highly inefficient over time then the big big question is well are there different ways of delivering public service and if so how what kind of structures do you need I don't know how you feel but you know I've been living in the United States now for thirty years but it's much more bureaucratized now than it's ever been as far as I can tell I mean the number of forms have filled out and a number of things you have to do and and the complexity of your income tax forms and all that kind of stuff I mean it's just astonishing so so there's absolutely no attempt it seems to me to deal with I mean it seems to me also a conspiracy to make all aspects of the public sector so inefficient that you will never ever believe that there could ever be efficient at all and and and so there's a lot of a lot of that going on but at the same time we clearly need to deal with with some of the the inherent problems of bureaucratized systems and and and state structures clearly need ways or ways to deal deal with that and that means again being inventive and this is where some of the new social movements it seems to me do have some are some some very specific ways of starting to think this through and here you do find local structures of delivery of service and so on sometimes are much more accountable and much more more easily that the much less opaque so that so that there may be there may be alternative methods of delivery and from that standpoint I think some of the ideas that have come up out of social anarchism and so on sometimes have it has some very makes make very good sense in terms of how politics should be organized how democracy should be organized I mean beyond what you're talking about we also have this kind of problem of how to reconstruct democratic government government structures because right now I don't think we live in a democracy I mean Bush is delivering democracy to Iraq or to maybe start here because we got a real real serious problem of a democratic deficit in this in this country in terms of of exactly how the the political system is working and the efficiency with which that is actually able to represent a political opinion within within the country I mean there are all kinds of biases within there so this I mean so there's there are many many issues here so I think that but I would really want to I would really want to go after this mythology that somehow other efficiency is here and inefficiency is there I mean it's just not the case remembering tonight svenne thank you thank you very much thank you [Applause] you you [Music]