Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution

David Harvey in conversation with David Graeber

Wednesday, April 25th, 2012 at 6.30 pm
Proshansky Auditorium, CUNY Graduate Center

Long before the Occupy movement, modern cities had already become the central sites of revolutionary politics, where the deeper currents of social and political change rise to the surface. Consequently, cities have been the subject of much utopian thinking. But at the same time they are also the centers of capital accumulation and the frontline for struggles over who controls access to urban resources and who dictates the quality and organization of daily life. Is it the financiers and developers, or the people?

Rebel Cities places the city at the heart of both capital and class struggles, looking at locations ranging from Johannesburg to Mumbai, and from New York City to São Paulo. Drawing on the Paris Commune as well as Occupy Wall Street and the London Riots, Harvey asks how cities might be reorganized in more socially just and ecologically sane ways—and how they can become the focus for anti-capitalist resistance.

DAVID HARVEY is the director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center.

DAVID GRAEBER is Reader in the Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of London. He has also worked extensively on value theory, and has recently completed a major research project on social movements dedicated to principles of direct democracy, direct action, and has written widely on the relation (real and potential) of anthropology and anarchism. He is currently working on a project on the history of debt.