citythreepointzero

There’s a hint of opportunism about this volume, a collection of essays on capitalism and the city dating from 2008. It gives Occupy something to feed on, and arrives nicely for the one-year anniversary of Britain’s riots, and the Olympic Games. No matter: we need people like Harvey to articulate an alternative to the capitalist city and its tendency to turn it into a relentless parade. There is much to like here: a critical introduction to the relationship between ‘fictional’ capital and real estate development; some commentary on the Left’s anxieties about social organisation, especially the problem of ‘horizontality’ (p. 70); a fascinating encounter with the ‘rebel city’ of El Alto, near La Paz. Much alludes to Harvey’s gloomy but compelling work on Baltimore, in which that small American city comes to represent the destructive power of capital, and the emptiness of its attempts at economic revival. ‘Revitalisation’ so often…

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2 new music remixes on urban topics

Still trying to figure out garage band’s higher level functionality, but I’ve added two more songs to the list (in addition to the previous one “Capital, Time and the City [featuring David Harvey]:

“Under the paving stones the beach/beat” drawing from podcasts on Guy Debord/The Society of the Spectacle and a slogan sometimes attributed to him associated with 1968.

“In Manchester” mixing Joy Division and a lecture on F. Engels.

Check all three of them here. [where there are 5 more songs on non-urban topics drawn from Spanish Lit./Cult.]

Capital, Time and the City audio remix

How would an audio remix (3’30”) featuring David Harvey incorporated into a yo la tengo song along with some Steve Reich, Radiolab and a history lecture-podcast on the 19th-century city sound?

[the video got pulled from youtube, but you can listen to the audio on my homepage; click on the music tab on the top menu–there are some other remixes there drawing from lectures by/about Spanish authors.]

“Ways of being urban in Latin America”

For a brief intro of sorts to urbanculturalstudies and Latin American cities [in English, references to works in English translation as well as David Harvey, and Doreen Massey] see the article by Alejandra García Vargas (Department of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universidad de Jujuy, Argentina) and Patria Román Velázquez (Department of Sociology, City University, London) titled

Latin American Urban Cultural Studies: Unique Texts, Ordinary Cities

available online here.

[the post’s title is a phrase taken from the above essay]

David Harvey lecture archive: Reading Marx’s Capital

Urban scholar David Harvey has an online video course/archive discussing Marx’s Capital (lectures are available as audio files as well)–accompanying his own book A Companion to Marx’s Capital with Verso (which is a good read I’ve heard great things about his lectures themselves as well).

David Harvey is a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), Director ofThe Center for Place, Culture and Politics, and author of numerous books. He has been teaching Karl Marx’s Capital for over 40 years.