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Throughout his distinguished and influential career, David Harvey has defined and redefined the relationship between politics, capitalism, and the social aspects of geographical theory. Laying out Harvey´s position that geography could not remain objective in the face of urban poverty and associated ills, Social Justice and the City is perhaps the most widely cited work in the field.

Harvey analyzes core issues in city planning and policy--employment and housing location, zoning, transport costs, concentrations of poverty--asking in each case about the relationship between social justice and space. How, for example, do built-in assumptions about planning reinforce existing distributions of income? Rather than leading him to liberal, technocratic solutions, Harvey´s line of inquiry pushes him in the direction of a ´revolutionary geography,´ one that transcends the structural limitations of existing approaches to space. Harvey´s emphasis on rigorous thought and theoretical innovation gives the volume an enduring appeal. This is a book that raises big questions, and for that reason geographers and other social scientists regularly return to it.



Table of Contents:
Introduction 9
part one liberal formulations
Chapter one: Social processes and spatial form:
(1) The conceptual problems of urban planning 22
The geographical versus the sociological imagination 23
Towards a philosophy of social space 27
Some methodological problems at the interface 37
1 Individuation 38
2 Confounding 40
3 Statistical inference 41
Strategy at the interface 44
Chapter two: Social processes and spatial form:
(2) The redistribution of real income in an urban system 50
The distribution of income and the social objectives for a city system 52
Some features governing the redistribution of income 55
1 The speed of change and the rate of adjustment in an urban system 55
2 The price of accessibility and the cost of proximity 56
3 Externality effects 57
The redistributive effects of the changing location of jobs and housing 60
Redistribution and the changing value of property rights 64
The availability and price of resources 68
Political processes and the redistribution of real income 73
Social values and the cultural dynamics of the urban system 79
Spatial organization and political, social and economic processes 86
1 The provision and control of impure public goods in an urban system 87
2 Regional and territorial organization in an urban system 91
A concluding comment 94
Chapter three: Social justice and spatial systems 96
A just distribution 99
Territorial distributive justice 101
1 Need 101
2 Contribution to common good 105
3 Merit 106
To achieve a distribution justly 108
A just distribution justly achieved: territorial social justice 116
part two socialist formulations Chapter four: Revolutionary and counter-revolutionary theory in geography and the problem of ghetto formation 120
A further comment on revolutionary and counter-revolutionary theories 147
Chapter five: Use value, exchange value and the theory of urban land use 153
The use value and exchange value of land and improvements 157
Urban land-use theory 160
Micro-economic urban land-use theory 162
Rent and the allocation of urban land to uses 176
Use value, exchange value, the concept of rent and theories of urban land use a conclusion 190
Chapter six: Urbanism and the city an interpretive essay 195
Modes of production and modes of economic integration 196
Modes of production 197
Modes of economic integration 206
1 Reciprocity 207
2 Redistributive integration 209
3 Market exchange 210
Cities and surplus 216
The surplus concept and urban origins 216
Surplus value and the surplus concept 224
Surplus labour, surplus value and the nature of urbanism 229
Urbanism and the spatial circulation of surplus value 237
Conclusions 238
Modes of economic integration and the space economy of urbanism 240 Variation within a mode of economic integration 241
The circulation of the surplus and the balance of influence between the modes of economic integration in the urban space economy 245
1 Patterns in the geographic circulation of the surplus 246
2 The cities of medieval Europe 250
3 The market exchange process and metropolitan urbanism in the contemporary capitalist world 261
4 Redistribution and reciprocity as
countervailing forces to market exchange
in the contemporary metropolis 274
part three synthesis
Chapter seven: Conclusions and reflections 286
On methods and theories 286
1 Ontology 288
2 Epistemology 296
On the nature of urbanism 302
The right to the city (2008) 315
Bibliography 333
Index of authors 345
Index of subjects 348