79 Quotes by David Harvey

Investments in social and physical infrastructures create geographical concentrations of relative advantage to which capital is inevitably drawn. The free gifts of nature and human nature need to be produced before they can be gifted to capital.

Separating land, labour and capital as independent and seemingly autonomous factors of production had a double advantage for the ruling classes since it permitted them to proclaim 'the physical necessity and eternal justification of their sources of revenue' at the same time as it suppressed any notion of exploitation since the act of production could in principle be portrayed as the harmonious assembly of separate and independent factors of production.

We can't, it seems, live without [capitalism] even as we complain about it.

Fierce, and what capitalists sometimes call 'ruinous' competition tends, therefore, to produce leap-frogging innovations that more often that not lead capitalists to fetishise technological and organisational innovations as the answer to all their prayers

Since the 1970S, financial innova­tions such as the securitisation of mortgage debt and the spreading of investment risks through the creation of derivative markets, all tacitly (and now, as we see, actually) backed by state power, have permitted a huge flow of excess liquidity into all facets of urbanisa­tion and built environment construction worldwide.

...those thoroughly incorporated within the inexorable logic of the market and its demands find that there is little time and space in which to explore emancipatory potentialities outside what is marketed as 'creative' adventure, leisure, and spectacle. Obliged to live as appendages of the market and of capital accumulation rather than as expressive beings, the realm of freedom shrinks before the awful logic and the hollow intensity of market involvements

capital has become very sophisticated about absorbing people's free time because it doesn't want you to have free time because you might THINK...

Empiricism assumes that objects can be understood independendy of observing subjects. Truth is therefore assumed to lie in a world external to the observer whose job is to record and faithfully reflect the attributes of objects. This logical empiricism is a pragmatic version of that scientific method which goes under the name of 'logical positivism', and is founded in a particular and very strict view of language and meaning.

A lição é clara: enquanto nós arquitetos rebeldes não conhecermos a coragem de nossa mente e estivermos preparados para dar um mergulho igualmente especulativo em algum desconhecido, também nós continuaremos a ser objetos da geografia histórica (como abelhas operárias) em vez de sujeitos ativos que levem conscientemente ao limite as possibilidades humanas.