Capitalism in the City

No amount of technological innovation or small design fixes can ensure that extreme cities and their residents survive, so long as they follow capitalism's founding principle of "grow or die" on a planet with finite resources, according to Ashley Dawson, professor of English at the City University of New York, and the author of Extinction: A Radical History,  in his book 'Extreme Cities', an extract of which has been published on the Truthout website

"...Today, more than 50 percent of the world's population lives within 120 miles of the sea; by 2025, it is estimated that this figure will reach 75 percent. In addition, urbanites all over the world are particularly vulnerable to deadly heat waves, whose intensity and frequency are increasing as a result of global warming, because of the "heat island" effect that makes urban areas hotter than their rural surroundings. Several decades of evidence suggests that people are migrating out of drought-prone areas in the developing world and into coastal cities that are prone to floods and cyclones. '

Climate change is happening right now.

Take São Paolo, the Brazilian metacity of over 20 million. São Paolo lies in a region that typically receives four times as much rainfall as Los Angeles, in a country that, with more than 12 percent of the world's renewable fresh water, is often referred to as "the Saudi Arabia of water." Yet São Paolo has suffered from a deep drought in recent years that is tied to anthropogenic climate change. The city's main water reserves are perilously low, and in recent years the authorities have introduced water rationing. The origin of São Paolo's water crisis is no mystery. Since 1984, researchers have linked potential declines in precipitation in southern Brazil to the deforestation of the Amazon. The rain forest transformed what would otherwise have been a desert into a lush environment, by releasing massive quantities of water vapor into the air. Yet 224,000 square miles of the rain forest -- an area nearly one-and-a-half times the size of California -- have been clear-cut since 1980. This unchecked deforestation, which disrupts the rain forest's ability to recycle precipitation from the Atlantic, is one of the primary causes of São Paolo's drought. Without adequate supplies of water, a city shuts down in a matter of days, and São Paolo has seen an exodus of "water refugees" as well as the proliferation of wildcat drilling for water that is polluting groundwater, a development that worsens the drought's long-term impact. There is still much that the city can do to conserve water, but São Paolo's plight makes the crisis tendencies of the extreme city dramatically evident.

Urban growth is driven at bottom by capitalism. The city is where capitalism's central contradictions play out. Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey have emphasized, the city plays a central role in solving the economic crashes that periodically wrack the capitalist system. The shiny new buildings and spiffy developments that are constantly popping up in cities are a fantastic sink for the surplus capital that builds up in this economic system. In other words, profits are not left idle in bank accounts; they are always reinvested in other profit generating schemes, like urban development.  The city is also the primary site for the feckless depletion of natural resources that characterizes this economic system, which is founded on unbridled compound growth.

Climate change will unleash the greatest havoc in cities, but cities will also produce the most ferocious struggles against the inequalities of our urban age. Cities are  where revolutionary movements have often been pushed into existence. This means that the movement for climate justice, which builds on anti-imperialist, antiracist, and feminist movements of the past, will necessarily grow through solidarities forged in urban terrain.

There is no green capitalist exit from the extreme city, when capitalism is founded on the principle of "grow or die." The world does not have a limitless supply of resources for humans to exploit. Urbanization and climate change are the two great products of this dysfunctional system..."