Capitalism and Urbanization (Week 2)

Organization

• The session begins with economic and socio-cultural theories on the modern Western city.
• Cultural representations are referenced as part of a Cultural Studies course.

Capitalism and Emerging Urbanity

• The city is conceived as a market where consumer demand meets producers.
• The city-as-market idea envisions the urban system as self-regulating to achieve supply and demand equilibrium.
• Urban studies equates the market with the marketplace, historically a city site of trade in the market square.
• Focus is on the city as a market in the built-up area and the relationship between the city as a node and the market as the surrounding region.
• Marx contrasts with other theories covering history as class struggle, surplus-value and contradiction, and base and superstructure as root to ideology.
• Marxist ideology critique and analysis of capitalism emerges in post-communist times.
• Class and Marxist analysis of city depictions is useful.
• Marxism emphasizes capital circulation and value in motion for profit accumulation under capitalist competition.
• Value circulation uses the means of production and labor power to accumulate profit.
• The market is a capitalist accumulation system involving a class relation with workers.
• Marxist analysis views the capitalist economy as contradictory and crisis-prone.
• History is class struggle, with unequal distribution leading to contradiction.
• Mode/means of production are related to class struggle.
• Capitalism is a necessary step in history.
• Superstructure serves to obscure or mystify.
• Only capitalism constantly revolutionizes production modes and reveals inequality truths for workers.
• Commodity fetishism involves a definite social relation appearing as a relation between things.
• Marx identifies a major contradiction in capitalism: increasing surplus-value by diminishing the number of workers.
• The capitalist wants to pay workers as little as possible, while other capitalists pay their workers as much as possible.
• Cities encompass capitalist accumulation and class relations operating at different scales.
• Capital circulates through primary commodity production, secondary built form, and tertiary knowledge economy.
• Crisis in one accumulation circuit can be absorbed by activity in another circuit.
• Controlling switching crises is a major city function.
• Crisis in the primary commodity sector can transfer investment to infrastructure and built form, concentrated in cities as an urban fix.
• Cities' class relations show contrasts globally between exploitation and complex class relations.
• Global cities coordinate global class processes.
• Information and knowledge facilitate commodity production or future accumulation through research and development.
• Knowledge production is a value-generating activity, with the seedbed for innovation concentrated in cities.
• Capitalist regulation debates summarized through Asian city lens.
• Economic restructuring with technologies and post-Fordist networked organization occurs through a metropolitan spatial fix.
• Positive externalities arise from hi-tech firms clusters in industrial districts with interlinkages.
• Saskia Sassen states global cities hold a key position in centrality, countering space annihilation.
• Global cities host financial districts where global investment decisions are made.
• Cities also act as producers of services supporting transnational corporations.
• Capitalism has an identity as the economy being the phallus, while women's work and bodies are rendered invisible.
• Downtown is the phallic landscape where male work is done.
• The phases of capitalism and its modes of production ground everything else.
• Cities are nodes springing up/decaying based on resources, power, and knowledge.
• Cities crystallize spatial form to production, which is split between analog materials and digital information.
• Culture envelops accumulation and expansion, providing reasons for meaning, enjoyment, or escape.

Benjamin and Buck-Morss

• Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was part of the Frankfurt School Critical Theory.
• Benjamin was a Jewish-German philosopher/translator with interests from literature and language to Idealism, Kabbalah, and Marxism.
• Benjamin's works include theses, articles, translations, and unfinished projects.
• Fled Germany to Paris, interested in Baudelaire as writer of urban modernity.
• Came up with the idea of the flaneur (dandy strolling the city aimlessly).
• The Arcades Project evolved from architectural form to modernity inventory.
• Technical necessities ennobled through ends.
• Bourgeoisie temples apotheosized within streets.
• Perspectives screened and unveiled like monuments.
• Haussmannization of Paris made phantasmagoria into stone.
• Arcades beam like fairy grottoes onto Paris.

Next Session

• Readings will be available on Moodle.