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The Neoliberal City

David Harvey

The city, the noted urban sociologist Robert Park once wrote, is:

"man's most consistent and on the whole, his most successful attempt to
remake the world he lives in more after his heart's desire. But, if the city
is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth
condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the
nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself."1

If Park is right, then the question of what kind of city we want cannot be
divorced from the question of what kind of people we want to be, what kinds
of social relations we seek, what relation to nature we cherish, what style of
life we desire. This parallels Lefebvre‟s conception of the right to the city not
“as a simple visiting right or as a return to traditional cities” but “as a
transformed and renewed right to urban life."2 The right to the city is,
therefore, far more than a right of access to what already exists: it is a right to
change the city more after our heart‟s desire. The freedom to make and
remake ourselves and our cities is one of the most precious yet most neglected
of our human rights. But since, as Park avers, we have hitherto lacked any
clear sense of the nature of our task, we must first reflect on how we have
been made and re-made throughout history by an urban process impelled
onwards by powerful social forces. The astonishing pace and scale of
urbanization over the last hundred years means, for example, we have been re-
made several times over without knowing why, how or wherefore. Has this
contributed to human well-being? Has it made us into better people or left us
dangling in a world of anomie and alienation, anger and frustration? Have we
become mere monads tossed around in an urban sea? And what are we to
make now of the immense concentrations of wealth and privilege in our cities
in the midst of what even the United Nations depicts as an exploding “planet
of slums.”3

The big question, of course, is where to go from here? Is there some way to
exercise this precious right to the city that Park hints at and Lefebvre
advocates? Tinkering with outcomes does not work. All it does, as Engels
once noted, is to move the problem around: a slum gets cleared here only to
re-appear elsewhere. If we object to our current state, then the only radical
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way forward is to confront the root processes that generate that state. 4 This
calls for strong analysis.

I want here to concentrate on one particular macro process that all too often
gets overlooked precisely because it is so macro. This is what I call “the
capital surplus disposal problem.” It works like this. Capitalists begin the day
with a certain amount of money and end the day with more of it. The next day
they wake up and have to decide what to do with the extra money they gained
the day before. They face a Faustian dilemma: reinvest to get even more
money or consume their surplus away. The coercive laws of competition
force them to reinvest because if one does not reinvest then another surely
will. To remain a capitalist, some surplus must be reinvested to make even
more surplus.

The politics of capitalism is driven by the need to find profitable terrains for
capital surplus absorption. If there is a scarcity of labor and wages are too
high then either existing labor has to be disciplined (technologically induced
unemployment or an assault on organized working class power are two prime
methods) or fresh labor forces must be found (by immigration, export of
capital or proletarianization). If there is not enough purchasing power in the
market then new markets must be found by expanding foreign trade,
promoting new products and lifestyles, creating new credit instruments and
debt-financed state expenditures. If the profit rate is too low, then state
regulation of “ruinous competition,” monopolization (mergers and
acquisitions) and capital exports to fresh pastures provide ways out. And if
none of these are possible, then capitalists face a condition of crisis in which
much of their capital gets devalued. The crisis takes the form of a surplus of
capital that cannot be disposed of. And when capital lies idle so typically does
labor.5

Urbanization provides one way to resolve the capital surplus problem.

Consider the case of Second Empire Paris. The crisis of 1848 was one of the
first clear crises of surplus capital and it was European-wide. It struck
particularly hard in Paris and, with capital unemployed, the result was an
abortive revolution on the part of unemployed workers and those utopians
who saw a social republic as the antidote to capitalist greed and inequality.
But the bourgeoisie, having violently beaten back the revolutionaries, could
not resolve the crisis and the result was the ascent to power of Napoleon
Bonaparte, who proclaimed himself Emperor in 1852. To survive politically,
the Emperor knew that he had to deal with the capital surplus problem and this
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he did by announcing a vast program of infrastructural investment both at

home and abroad. Abroad this meant the construction of railroads throughout
Europe and down into the Orient as well as support for grand works such as
the Suez Canal. At home it meant consolidating the railway network, building
ports and harbors. But above all it entailed the reconfiguration of the urban
infrastructure of Paris. He brought Haussmann to Paris to take charge of the
public works in 1853.

Haussmann clearly understood that his mission was to help solve the surplus
capital and unemployment problem by way of urbanization. The rebuilding of
Paris absorbed huge quantities of labor and of capital by the standards of the
time and, coupled with authoritarian suppression of the aspirations of the
Parisian labor force, was a primary vehicle of social stabilization. Haussmann
drew upon the utopian plans (by Fourierists and Saint-Simonians) for re-
shaping Paris that had been debated in the 1840s, but with one big difference.
He transformed the scale at which the urban process was imagined. When the
architect Hittorf, showed Haussmann his plans for a new boulevard,
Haussmann threw them back at him saying “not wide enough…you have it 40
meters wide and I want it 120.” Haussmann thought of the whole city on a
grander scale, annexed the suburbs, redesigned whole neighborhoods (such as
Les Halles) rather than just bits and pieces of the urban fabric. He changed
the city wholesale rather than retail. To do this he needed new financial
institutions and debt instruments. What he did in effect was to help resolve
the capital surplus problem by setting up a Keynesian system of debt-financed
infrastructural urban improvements. The system worked very well for some
fifteen years. But then it crashed in 1868. Haussmann was forced from
power, Napoleon III in desperation went to war against Bismarck‟s Germany
and lost, and in the vacuum that followed arose the Paris Commune, one of the
greatest revolutionary episodes in capitalist urban history. The capital surplus
problem does not go away under capitalism, it simply has temporary solutions,
but with huge irreversible impacts upon urban life (Haussmann‟s boulevards
dominate Paris to this day).6

Fast forward now until 1942 in the United States. The capital surplus disposal
problem that had seemed so intractable in the 1930s (and the unemployment
that went with it) was temporarily resolved by the huge mobilization for the
war effort. But everyone was fearful as to what would happen after the war.
Politically the situation was dangerous. The Federal Government was in
effect running a nationalized economy and was in alliance with the communist
Soviet Union. We all know the subsequent history of the politics of
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McCarthyism (abundant signs of which were there in 1942). But what of the
capital surplus disposal problem? In that year there appeared a lengthy
evaluation of Haussmann‟s efforts in an architectural journal. It documented
in detail what he has done that was so compelling and attempted an analysis of
his mistakes. The article was by none other than Robert Moses who after
World War II did to the whole New York metropolitan region what
Haussmann had done to Paris. That is, Moses changed the scale of thinking
about the urban process and through the system of (debt-financed) highways
and infrastructural transformations, through suburbanization and the total re-
engineering of the metropolitan region, he used the urban process as one way
to resolve the capital surplus absorption problem. This process, when taken
nation-wide, as it was in all the major metropolitan centers of the United
States (yet another transformation of scale), played a crucial role in the
stabilization of global capitalism after World War II. This project succeeded
until the end of the 1960s when, as happened to Haussmann, a different kind
of crisis began to unfold such that Moses fell from grace and his solutions
seen as inappropriate and unacceptable. But the suburbs had been built and
the radical transformation in lifestyle that this betokened had all manner of
social consequences, leading first wave feminists, for example, to proclaim the
suburb and its lifestyle as the locus of all their primary discontents. 7

Now fast forward to our current conjuncture. International capitalism has

been on a roller-coaster of regional crises and crashes (East and SouthEast
Asia in 1997-8; Russia in 1998; Argentina in 2001, etc.) but has so far avoided
a global crash even in the face of a chronic capital surplus disposal problem. 8
What has been the role of urbanization in the stabilization of this situation? In
the United States it is accepted wisdom that the housing market has been an
important stabilizer of the economy since 2000 or so (after the high-tech crash
of the late 1990s). It has absorbed a great deal of the surplus capital directly
while the rapid inflation of housing asset prices backed by a profligate wave
of mortgage refinancing at historically low rates of interest has boosted the
internal market for consumer goods and services. The urbanization of China
over the last twenty years has been even more important. Its pace picked up
enormously after a brief recession in 1997 or so, such that China has absorbed
nearly half of the world‟s cement supplies since 2000. The consequences for
the global economy have been significant: Chile booms because of the
demand for copper, Australia thrives and even Brazil and Argentina recover in
part because of the strength of demand from China for raw materials. More
than 100 cities have shot up above the one million mark in China and several
are heading to the 10 million level and vast infrastructural projects – again, all
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debt financed – are transforming the landscape.9 Is the urbanization of China

the primary stabilizer of global capitalism? The answer has to be a partial
yes. But China is only the epicenter for an urbanization process that has now
become genuinely global in part through the astonishing global integration of
financial markets that use their flexibility to debt-finance urban projects from
Dubai to Sao Paulo and from Mumbai to Hong Kong and London. The
Chinese central bank, for example, has been active in the secondary mortgage
market derived from the refinancing boom in the USA while Goldman Sachs
has been heavily involved in the surging property market in Mumbai and
Hong Kong capital has invested in Baltimore. Again, we are here looking at
yet another transformation in scale, one that makes it hard to grasp that what
may be going on globally is in principle similar to the processes that
Haussmann managed so expertly in Second Empire Paris. Urbanization, I
conclude, is a primary vehicle for surplus absorption at ever increasing
geographical scales.

But what kind of urbanization is this and with what consequences for the
human character? And by what means and by whom has this transformation
of scale been accomplished? In the case of Paris we can clearly see the
figures of Napoleon III and his many advisors as well as Haussmann and the
new geniuses of credit (the Pereire brothers) in the vanguard. But where do
we look today?

Let us go back for a moment to look at the tail end of the Moses urban
revolution in the United States. It had successfully helped stabilize global
capitalism for two decades but at a price. The flood of investment into the
suburbs and the integration of the national economy by the interstate highway
system radically transformed the geography of the US urban system. Central
cities, the traditional core of productive activities, were left behind. New York
City lost jobs to the suburbs and to the South and West (the garment industry
moved to the Carolinas before eventually de-camping to Mexico and now
China). The older central cities became wastelands, increasingly centers of
unemployment and poverty and of racially impacted minority populations.
The economy did well but the central cities did badly. The result was the
unfolding of a distinctive “urban crisis” in the 1960s in the midst of the
postwar “golden age” boom. Social unrest, outbreaks of violence, urban
revolutionary movements, all culminating in a nation-wide inner-city uprising
in 1968 in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, were key
signals of this urban distress.10
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The Federal Government financed a massive effort to solve the urban crisis.
Funds flowed to the impacted cities and a public employment program, largely
but not solely in the hands of the municipal governments, was directed
towards alleviating poverty and racial injustice and bringing the central cities
back to life. In New York City, the empowerment of racial minorities and of
municipal unions went hand in hand with rising expenditures on municipal
services (education, health care). To this the city added its own largesse,
having, with the help of the investment bankers, discovered several ways to
increase indebtedness. The city did what Haussmann in effect did: used tax
anticipation notes (borrowings against estimated future revenues) to fund the
current budget. At the same time the city administration had a complicated
relationship with the urban builders, the grand financiers and speculative
developers. On the one hand it helped them with all kinds of subsidies
(almost certainly lubricated with pay-offs to politicians and construction
unions) but on the other hand neighborhood organization and strong municipal
unions placed political barriers to the development industry‟s designs. A
speculative building boom (which included the financial disaster called the
World Trade Center) in the late 1960s made matters precarious in New York‟s
property market.

Disaster struck in 1973. The global recession began globally in the property
sector sparking serious difficulties in financial institutions with large interests
in REITS (Real Estate Investment Trusts), several of which collapsed. The
property market could no longer absorb the capital surplus. The Federal
Government, in financial difficulty from a decade of “guns and butter”
strategy fighting a war against poverty at home and a military war in Vietnam,
lost international as well as domestic control over its finances. The Bretton
Woods system that had underpinned the international financial order collapsed
and a fiscal crisis ensued at home as inflation and unemployment surged.
Washington‟s response was immediate. In his 1973 State of the Union
Address, President Nixon reassured the nation that the urban crisis was over,
by which he simply meant that aid to the central cities would be cut. The
recession and the property market crash hit tax receipts in New York City. An
already heavily-indebted City government had to borrow even more to cover
its bills. But in March 1975, the New York investment bankers refused to
underwrite and market the City‟s debt forcing the City to stare bankruptcy in
the face.11

Financial mismanagement and greedy municipal unions were widely blamed

by the capitalist press. While there was more than a grain of truth in both
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claims, the investment bankers had long encouraged the city to borrow since
this had been great business for them and the difficulties in the property sector
and the drain of decent private sector jobs from the central city were not of the
City administration‟s doing. The big question is why the investment bankers
refused to lend and thereby risk the bankruptcy of what was then one of the
largest public sector budgets in the world with potentially catastrophic
consequences for the global financial system (the West German Chancellor
appealed to Washington not to let the city go bankrupt for fear of total
collapse of global finance).
The answers to this question are complicated. To begin with there was more
than a hint of racism in the decision since the white financial establishment (as
opposed to Leonard Bernstein who hosted a chic party for the Black Panthers)
clearly feared the rise of black power in the city. The recession and fiscal
crisis provided an opportunity to put a check on that by stressing who really
held the purse strings and the power. Secondly, the financiers feared the
power of the municipal unions and their ability to force favorable pay and
benefits packages for their members. Thirdly, they objected to municipal
expenditures on services such as free education (including at the City
University of New York with some 330,000 students) as well as expanding
employment in health care, transport and sanitation. Fourthly, the power of
community organizations to hold up large development projects (the site at
what later became Battery Park City had been fought over since the mid
1960s) was considered a serious barrier to their ambitions. Finally, the
financial sector was itself in difficulty with the collapse of the property market
and of the REITS. The class power of financial elites was threatened and they
needed to find a way to re-establish their position. The grand financiers and
politicians, such as the Rockefeller brothers, undoubtedly loved their city.
They just wanted to re-make it more after their own heart‟s desire and secure
their wealth and power while doing so. The fiscal crisis of 1975 was seen and
seized by them as their grand opportunity to do just that.

What was set in motion in 1975 was a process of remaking New York City
that only came to full fruition in the Bloomberg Administration after 2001.
The whole of Manhattan island has become a virtual gated community for the
ultra-rich, for the doyens of financial services (like the head of Goldman
Sachs who this year received a bonus of $52 million), for the managers of
hedge funds (the most important of whom received personal compensation of
over $250 million in 2005), for transnational capitalist financiers and
merchants, for media moguls and sports and movie stars, for cultural
institutions (like MOMA cultivated so assiduously by Nelson Rockefeller
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during the 1970s as part of his personal crusade to civilize the city by culture).
New York City has become a tourist destination that has been systematically
sold to the rest of the world as a must-see place (including now, of course, the
ghoulish site where David Rockefeller‟s financially failed World Trade Center
once stood). The boroughs, once sad and poor relations to Manhattan, are also
now feeling the development heat as major projects unfold in Brooklyn,
Queens and even the Bronx.

But all of this must have seemed a dream in the dark days of 1975. The city,
with nowhere else to go, appealed to the financially strapped Federal
Government, but President Gerald Ford, anxious to bolster his conservative
credentials in the face of a gathering movement that soon became known as
Reaganism, and surrounded with financial advisors (like the ultra-conservative
Secretary of the Treasury William Simon who had taken the lead in
encouraging New York City‟s indebtedness as a leading financier in the
1960s) and political advisors (like that great urbanist Donald Rumsfeld as
Ford‟s chief of staff), said “no” (“Ford to City: Drop Dead” said the
newspaper headline). The city was faced with not being able to pay its
workforce or its maintenance bills. The solution, arrived at through tense
negotiations between the investment bankers and the governor of the State of
New York (with the mayor an increasingly nominal participant) was first to
set up something called the Municipal Assistance Corporation later supplanted
by the Emergency Financial Control Board.

The City Government lost control of its budget. The structure that emerged
was simple. Tax revenues flowed into „Big MAC‟ or into the EFCB and
whatever was left over after the financial institutions were fully paid off was
given to the city to fund its services. Catastrophic cuts in municipal
employment (as well as in pay and benefits) followed and the delivery of city
services in education, health care, sanitation and transportation was severely
curtailed. The Rockefellers achieved one of their key objectives: the
imposition of tuition on the City University of New York (why, they said,
should New Yorkers pay for such a massive and free university system when
Chicago had none, conveniently forgetting how many future Nobel Prize
winners were nurtured through the city system). The municipal unions lost
much of their power. The community associations were disciplined (the site at
Battery Park City soon became available). Democratic New York City was in
effect overthrown and rising black power curbed by a financial coup that was
every bit as effective in economic terms as the military coup in Chile of
1973.12
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But the investment bankers also needed to re-make the city in a different
image and the big question was how and with what. They had one external
significant advantage. The oil price hike after the Arab-Israeli war of 1973
put vast quantities of petro-dollars at the disposal of the Gulf States. We now
know that the US was preparing to invade Saudi Arabia in 1973 in order to
occupy the oil wells and bring the oil price down. We do not know how
serious these plans were, but we do know that the US ambassador to Saudi
Arabia negotiated an agreement that the petrodollars would all be recycled
through the New York investment banks. US imperial power procured the
lion‟s share of the global business of financial services for New York City.
This industry (coupled with the necessary supportive legal and information
services) has boomed out of all proportion since and provided a strong
economic base for the city as well as a major means for a political-economic
elite to restore and confirm its class power.13

But the political-economic business elite needed something else. They

recognized that industrial manufacturing was in trouble and sought to rebuild
New York City as a tourist destination (this was the famous moment of the “I
(love) New York” logo and marketing campaign) and to this end they
cultivated what later became known as the “cultural industries” of theater,
museums, and graphic arts. They sought to boost New York‟s traditional role
as a media center. But they here faced a contradiction. The cuts in municipal
services made New York of the late 1970s and 1980s a difficult and even
dangerous urban environment. The crime wave and the crack epidemic that
emerged in response to the attack on working class New York and the
suppression of black power militated against the realization of the financial
elite‟s goals. Nor did working class New York succumb without a battle.
Strikes left garbage rotting in the streets, subway maintenance deterioriated
and the police and fire unions launched a “Fear City” campaign that stressed
the dangers to tourists of lack of security in the city. The response was to re-
invent urban government as “governance” – as a partnership between the city
administration and key “stakeholders” in the city‟s future, the crucial
stakeholders being the downtown business partnership, the tourist industry,
the real estate interests and (where appropriate) sectors of labor (the
construction unions in particular). The strategy was to secure Manhattan
through gentrification, superior services, police repression (that reached a high
point with the revanchism of the Giuliani administration) and upscale
development projects while letting the boroughs deteriorate (even let much of
the Bronx burn down in a wave of landlord inspired arson). 14
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None of this occurred without a struggle. But this re-shaping of the urban
process in New York City was a pioneering moment in what turned out to be a
global strategy that rested upon two basic principles. First, in the event of a
conflict between the well-being of a population and the rate of return of the
investment banks the latter shall be privileged. This became the credo of the
International Monetary Fund‟s structural adjustment strategies after 1982,
when the Reagan Administration, initially interested in abolishing the IMF as
inconsistent with the neoliberal principle of free markets, reinvented the IMF
in order to bail out a crisis-riven Mexico that had been the recipient of all
those petro-dollar loans from the New York investment banks in the 1970s.
The advantage of lending to countries, the leading banker Walter Wriston
observed at the time, is that countries cannot disappear. The IMF became the
key instrument to protect the New York investment banks from a Mexican
default. The impoverished people of Mexico were forced to pay up to save the
New York bankers much as the citizens of New York had been squeezed by
the EFCB. The second principle is that governments (of whatever stripe) must
dedicate themselves to the creation of a good business climate. To do so they
have to integrate business into government in a new system of governance.
This, too, has become the mantra of both the IMF and the World Bank in their
international dealings. But again we hit the golden rule, that in the event of a
conflict between the well-being of a population and the creation of a good
business climate, then the latter shall be privileged. The justification is that a
“rising tide lifts all boats” even though it rarely does so. In fact, opening the
doors to free financial flows is more likely to create a speculative tsunami that
crashes across the economic landscape destroying all boats (as in East and
SouthEast Asia in 1997-8 or in Argentina in 2001) before withdrawing leaving
scenes of total social devastation behind.15
But, recall, the initial impetus for all this urban restructuring was for the
political-economic elite of New York City, as represented primarily by the
investment bankers, to restore and secure their power at a time when the
capital surplus was threatened with devaluation. If New York City‟s so-called
fiscal crisis was one key epicenter of the political economic transformation
towards neoliberalism, the shock waves have been global. The neoliberal
revolution, in the form of the financialization of everything, accompanied by
structural adjustments (through privatizations, the disciplining of labor forces,
and withdrawal of the state from social provision) the opening of global
markets and the creation of good business climates everywhere, has swept
around the world. Class power has everywhere been restored to or newly
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conferred upon (as in Russia and China) rich elites. 16 Cities have increasingly
become cities “of fortified fragments.” The city is everywhere:

“splitting into different separated parts, with the apparent formation of

many “microstates.” Wealthy neighborhoods provided with all kinds of
services, such as exclusive schools, golf courses, tennis courts and
private police patrolling the area around the clock intertwine with illegal
settlements where water is available only at public fountains, no
sanitation system exists, electricity is pirated by a privileged few, the
roads become mud streams whenever it rains, and where house-sharing
is the norm. Each fragment appears to live and function autonomously,
sticking firmly to what it has been able to grab in the daily fight for
survival.”17

Even the so-called “global” cities of advanced capitalism are divided between
financial elites and great swaths of lower paid service workers melding into
the marginalized and unemployed. In New York City during the boom years
of the 1990s, Manhattan median incomes rose at the hefty rate of nearly 12 per
cent but those in the boroughs fell between 2 and 4 per cent. Cities have
always been sites of uneven geographical developments (sometimes of a
wholly benevolent and exciting sort) but the differences now proliferate and
intensify in negative, even pathological ways that inevitably sow seeds of civil
strife. The contemporary struggle to absorb the capital surplus in a frenetic
phase of city building (just watch the skylines of Shanghai, Mumbai, Sao
Paulo, Mexico City grow) contrasts dramatically with an evolving planet of
proliferating slums. Are these the cities that match our heart‟s desire? Do they
construct the kind of people we want to be? Are these the relations to nature
to which we aspire?

These are the neoliberal cities that capital has built in its desperate attempt to
absorb the surpluses it itself creates. Within such cities, we see “the fullness
of freedom for those whose income, leisure and security need no enhancing,
and a mere pittance of liberty for the people, who may in vain attempt to make
use of their democratic rights to gain shelter from the power of the owners of
property.” 18 The freedom of the city has been appropriated by a financial elite
capitalist class in its own self interest. It has yet to be countermanded by
popular movements. Is it too late ever to imagine such a possibility. Can
urban social movements emerge that are of the city rather than lost within the
city‟s fragments? If so, then one condition for the success of such movements
is to confront the capital surplus disposal problem at its root. And that means,
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quite simply, that the accumulation of capital cannot continue on its current
trajectory, abstractly determine our fates and fortunes, dictate who and what
we are and what our cities must be. The right to the city is worth fighting for.
It should be considered inalienable. The freedom of the city has yet to be
achieved.

Notes
1. Park, R., On Social Control and Collective Behavior, Chicago, Chicago
University Press, p.3.
2 Lefebvre, H., Writing on Cities, Oxford, Blackwell, 1996, p.158.
3. Davis, M., Planet of Slums, London, Verso, 2006.
4. Engels, F. The Condition of the Working Class in England, New York,
Oxford University Press, 1999 edition.; Harvey, D., Social Justice and the
City, London, Edward Arnold, 1973.
5. The general theory of all this may be found in Harvey, D., The Limits to
Capital, London, Verso, 2006 edition.
6. The preceding account is based on Harvey, D., Paris, Capital of
Modernity, New York, Routledge, 2003.
7. Moses, R., “What Happened to Haussmann,” Architectural Forum, 77,
1942, 1-10; Caro, R., The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New
York, New York, Vintage, 1975.
8. Brenner, R., The Boom and the Bubble: The US in the World Economy,
London, Verso, 2003.
9. See Harvey, D., A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 2005, chapter 5.
10. Kerner Commission, Report of the National Advisory Commission on
Civil Disorders, Washington, Government Printing Office, 1968.
11. Ferretti, F. The Year The Big Apple Went Bust, New York, Putnam,
1976; Tabb, W. The Long Default: New York City and the Urban Fiscal
Crisis, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1982.
12. I cover this idea more fully in Harvey, D., A Brief History of
Neoliberalism, op.cit, chapter 2.
13. Alvarez, L. “Britain Says US Planned to Seize Oil in ‟73 Crisis,” New
York Times, 4th Jan, 2004, A6: Gowan, P. The Global Gamble: Washington’s
Faustian Bid for World Dominance, London, Verso, 1999.
14. Smith, N. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist
City, New York, Routledge, 1996.
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15. Wade R. and Veneroso, F., “The Asian Crisis: the High Debt Model
Versus the Wall Street-Treasury-IMF Complex, New Left Review, 228, 1998,
3-23: Petras, J. and Veltmeyer, H., System in Crisis: The Dynamics of Free
Market Capitalism, London, Zed Books, 2003.
16. This is the primary thesis of Harvey, D., A Brief History of Neoliberalism,
op.cit.
17 Balbo, M. cited in National Research Council, Cities Transformed:
Demographic Change and Its Implications in the Developing World,
Washington, D.C., The National Academies Press, 2003, p.379.
18 Polanyi, K., The Great Transformation, Boston, Beacon Press, 1954, p.
257.