Within the Marxism Reading Group in the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ) at the University of Nottingham we have just finished David Harvey’s Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution [2012]. I started reading this book with great excitement. My expectation was that it might deliver the sort of intervention similar to The New Imperialism [2003]. That book was hugely successful in drawing new readers to the vast corpus of Harvey’s outstanding scholarship and opened up new political and intellectual agendas, not least linked to the political economy of accumulation by dispossession and its inner connection to the appropriation of spaces of exploitation. In Rebel Cities urban transformation is central to the endeavour to recover and understand alternative forms of spatial reorganisation in cityscapes from around the world. The book is a key contribution to rethinking urban social movements and anti-capitalist resistance today, albeit with some rough edges.
