Harvey La ciudad Neoliberal / El derecho a la Ciudad

[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 theater 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 in the city paris capital of modernity his path-breaking condition of post-modernity and a brief history of neo-liberalism 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 infra 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 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 how 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 david harvey [Applause] you uh sometimes listen to introductions where you hardly recognize yourself but uh thank you heather for that generous comment uh 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 as 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 three hundred years what you would i think see is that we have 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 passed 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 10 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 is 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 psalms 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 health care without adequate infrastructures 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 150 years and that is a process of urbanization driven by the necessity to absorb capital surpluses now what this means is this the 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 at 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 in 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 30 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 or the problem may be that there are too many other capitalists around too many of you are 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 capitalist cannot find 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 it 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 1830s 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 iii that was the scene now napoleon iii 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 of 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 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 the complete reshaping of the city of paris that is they were going to rebuild paris in a huge huge attempt to absorb surface capital and surplus labor and for that reason he brought to paris a particular person called house man and what house man did as prefect of the city was to set about reshaping the city in so doing hausmann actually drew upon many of the inspirational plans that have been created by the utopian thinkers of the 1830s and the 1840s but he made one very very significant transformation he changed the scale of which they were thinking 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'd 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 houseman looked at the plans and said nonsense your boulevard is only 40 meters wide i want it 120 meters 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 labor 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 worked 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 system broke and there was a crisis of 1868 houseman was forced out of power napoleon iii 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 the public works project much as napoleon iii which built highways in the blue ridge and all that kind of thing but it wasn't really of solving the problem what really solved the problem was of course world war ii 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 nationalised 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 as 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 ii 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 hausmann it did a very close study of house man 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 ii 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 to 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 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 the suburb as the center of its discontents so here too what we see is capital solving its particular problem i.e 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 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 that 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 surpluses 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 is true in sao paulo 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 to got up to 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're 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 sao 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 houseman 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 center 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 it's 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 were many reasons why it was called an urban crisis there were 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 they had 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 fires 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 that came 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 de-industrialization 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 1960s and 1970s you had a tremendous build up 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 was when i listened 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 house man 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 it doesn't start 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 restored president ford with his two chief aides one donald trump 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 dropped 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 urged 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 in 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 rebuild it in their way according to their criteria not my criteria criteria the people so they said about this at this particular moment because they 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 corporation 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 in municipal services huge cuts in fire police sanitation education transportation and 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 30 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 that in chile a democratically elected government socialist salvador allende was overthrown in part with the backing of the united states and instead there came a man called general pinochet who died just last year and pinochet set about reorchestrating the economy crushing the unions crushing all 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 too what we see is a restructuring which has 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 riston and felix reihaten this group of bankers wanted to rebuild the city in a different image according more to their hearts 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 rockefeller 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 oil 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 whether it 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 petro 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 us imperial politics which was 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 rather 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 global finance a privilege center through u.s imperialist practices there was a great difficulty for the eu investment bankers in 1975 or so where are we going to lend the money where are the opportunities for this capital surplus to be lo you know to go the urban process can't absorb it anymore a lot of corporate america is in difficulty the answer was given by one of the in bankers called walter riston 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 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 had made up and the 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 it 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'm sure you've all see i love new york first city to do this of course when you go to paris you'll see i love paris i love tokyo 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 no we're going to counter that with something called a fear city campaign they created pamphlets they took them 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're bound to get mugged and there'd be nobody to protect you you can travel on the buses maybe from nine til about five 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 there's a fire there's no fire service to protect you so they came up with this well this scared the rockefeller gang no end so they renegotiated the fire and police unions and they actually renegotiated that they'd re-hire a bunch of fire people and a bunch of police people if they cut and stop 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 many states and you privileged this many 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 privileging financial sector it's also about creating a good business climate that 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 governments 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 you 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 dictate the 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 da da da 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 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 neo-liberalized city emerging around these large projects and in the midst of all of this bloomberg made one very important and i think significant statement he said he was going to discontinue the practice of some of his predecessors like ed 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 we're seeing 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 we'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-neo-liberal politics we're beginning to see even in the interstices of the kind of bloomberg project a sudden concern where the low-income people gonna 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 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 that these inequalities are very difficult to actually suppress without serious political disruption just to give you some examples a few years ago well in 2005 the leading hedge fund managers many of whom were in new york city earn 250 million dollars a year one of the hedge fund managers this last year earned 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 and 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 communi 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 the kind of city and the kind of world i want to live in is it the kind of city 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 park's 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 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 the 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 their impulsions even their desires and that is not a world of liberty and freedom for us that 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]