David Harvey and Economics
May. 10th, 2015 06:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogA discussion of William Jennings Bryan and the cross of gold speech elsewhere on Facebook makes me think, tangentially, of the book I'm reading now, David Harvey's "Rebel Cities."
Harvey is a leftist geographer at CUNY. Rebel Cities is a look at the place of cities within the global economy through a Marxist lens. They are, he argues, places where the creative destruction of the built environment is a sink for surplus value extracted from labor. That they have served this function, at increasing scales, essentially since the rise of capitalist economies. He uses Haussman's reconstruction of Paris as an example, which is really interesting to me because I just read Robert Fishman's "Bourgeoise Utopias," wherein he devotes an entire chapter to exploring Haussman's Paris as a counter-suburban example but doesn't talk at all about its role in the French national economy of the time. (Which makes sense, as that's not really his point; he's writing a social history of suburbanization.)
But anyway, the long and short of it is that I feel the same way about reading Harvey as I did learning about William Jennings Bryan and the Populist movement of the late 19th century and the contention over the gold and silver standards in the United States. There's more economy here than I feel comfortable with. I wish I knew more about economics. I actually kind of wish I had![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
murstein here with me to have a mini-book club with. *grins*
Maybe I need to read some good Economics 101-type stuff over the summer. Any suggestions?
Harvey is a leftist geographer at CUNY. Rebel Cities is a look at the place of cities within the global economy through a Marxist lens. They are, he argues, places where the creative destruction of the built environment is a sink for surplus value extracted from labor. That they have served this function, at increasing scales, essentially since the rise of capitalist economies. He uses Haussman's reconstruction of Paris as an example, which is really interesting to me because I just read Robert Fishman's "Bourgeoise Utopias," wherein he devotes an entire chapter to exploring Haussman's Paris as a counter-suburban example but doesn't talk at all about its role in the French national economy of the time. (Which makes sense, as that's not really his point; he's writing a social history of suburbanization.)
But anyway, the long and short of it is that I feel the same way about reading Harvey as I did learning about William Jennings Bryan and the Populist movement of the late 19th century and the contention over the gold and silver standards in the United States. There's more economy here than I feel comfortable with. I wish I knew more about economics. I actually kind of wish I had
murstein here with me to have a mini-book club with. *grins* Maybe I need to read some good Economics 101-type stuff over the summer. Any suggestions?
