I shall open this review of David Harvey's new book, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, with a quote from the late-20th century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze that concerns something the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza wrote in his book Ethics: "The point of view of an ethics is: of what are you capable, what can you do? Hence a return to this sort of cry of Spinoza's: What can a body do? We never know in advance what a body can do. We never know how we're organized and how the modes of existence are enveloped in [some body]." We do not understand our own opportunities, our own potential—it is hidden by our habits, by our illusion of stasis.
If Spinoza's cry is "What can a body do?" David Harvey's is "What can a city do?" Closer yet: "What can a city do for us?" Harvey, a leading Marxist critic and geographer who teaches at City University of New York and has written extensively on neoliberalism, postmodernism, and urban development, strongly (and correctly) believes that the kinds of cities we live in do less for us—the people, the workers, the unemployed, the homeless, the 99 percent, to use the language of the day—and much more for the capitalist class. What cities do for this powerful class of humans is absorb their surplus capital.
The rich (or the 1 percent) have lots of money that cannot just sit around all day doing nothing. In order for dollars to become more dollars, they must circulate. So instead of helping the poor or raising the living standards of the societies that collectively generate this privatized wealth, the rich build malls, office towers, condominiums, gated communities, and so on. These fixed absorbers of surplus capital do not only make money directly (through rent and mortgages) but also as fictitious capital: mortgage-backed securities and, at a higher level, the insurance policies on those securities and bonds called derivatives, the insane market that is 10 times the global GDP, which is estimated to be $50 trillion.
In the book's first essay, "The Right to the City," Harvey quotes urban sociologist Robert Park: "[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." What a city can do for you makes you who you are. If the city is about making money, then you are about making money. If the city is about the needs of a billionaire, then you are all about the needs of this billionaire.
Harvey adds: "In New York City, for example, we have a billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who is reshaping the city along lines favorable to the developers, to Wall Street and transnational capitalist class elements, while continuing to sell the city as an optimal location for high-value businesses and a fantastic destination for tourists, thus turning Manhattan in effect into one vast gated community for the rich. In Seattle a billionaire like Paul Allen calls the shots, and in Mexico City the wealthiest man in the world, Carlos Slim, has the downtown streets re-cobbled to suit the tourist gaze."
The city is supposed to be a machine that enhances the living conditions of the most social mammal on the planet, but instead it's dedicated to the service of investments, privatized surpluses, or billionaires. The spectacular skylines we see on postcards or in brochures reflect the power of the 1 percent. Their wealth is the steel, glass, and substance of those towers. Harvey's central question, then: How can we transform the city into the image of the public? This question is of the greatest importance because the human animal increasingly lives in cities. Cities are our only future, and so to solve urban problems is to solve the problems of humanity, and solving the problems of humanity means solving the increasingly pressing problems of the planet. The first part of the book states the problems; the second part states the solutions. The third and last part offers a brief look at the recent riots in London and the world-historical occupation of a park near Wall Street.
Harvey, however, is no anarchist. He believes in the state and, again and again, points out the limitations of localism and social systems that aspire to the almost mystical condition of self-organization (emergence, non-hierarchy, horizontality, polycentrism). The main problem with this kind of social formation? There are global problems that local, horizontal social structures cannot address (or possibly see), such as climate change. These kinds of large-scale problems can only be recognized and resolved by large-scale social organizations like the state. Small is not always a good thing. Indeed, the South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang has published a number of papers that expose the uselessness of programs like microfinancing for the economic development of poor countries—they lack the important social resource of a large "institutional memory." There is no way a collection of isolated memories can, on a national scale (a scale that involves vast amounts of time and space), compete with the institutional memory of, say, Boeing or BMW or Mitsubishi.
Harvey writes: "'Horizontality' and 'non-hierarchy'—or visions of radical democracy and the governance of the commons, [can] work for small groups but are impossible to operationalize at the scale of a metropolitan region, let alone for the 7 billion people who now inhabit planet earth." Yes, there are seven billion human inhabitants on this planet. Most of us live in cities. These cities (São Paulo, Madrid, London, Mumbai, Hong Kong, Cape Town, Cairo) need to do more for us. It's a good time for an urban revolution. The book also has a great section (three pages long) on wine production. 
