79 Quotes by David Harvey

The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.

The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.

This is an absolutely vital point that cannot be overemphasized: value is immaterial but objective. Given Marx’s supposed adherence to a rigorous materialism, this is, on the face of it, a surprising argument, and we have to wrestle a bit with what it means. Value is a social relation, and you cannot actually see, touch or feel social relations directly; yet they have an objective presence. We therefore have to carefully examine this social relation and its expression.

The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.

There is, in short, no ‘spatial fix’ that can contain the contradictions of capitalism in the long run.

The invocation of social necessity should alert us. It contains the seeds for Marx’s critique of political economy as well as for his dissection of capitalism .

The common-sense notion that ‘there is a time and a place for everything’ gets carried into a set of prescriptions which replicate the social order by assigning social meanings to spaces and times.

The capacity to transform itself from the inside makes capitalism a somewhat peculiar beast – chameleon-like, it perpetually changes it colour; snake-like, it periodically sheds its skin.

The net worth of the 358 richest people in the world was then found to be ’equal to the combined income of the poorest 45 per cent of the worlds population – 2.3 billion people.