Ventilating Cities: Air-flow Criteria for Healthy and Comfortable Urban Living (Springer Geography)

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Firstly there is the failure to shape and mobilize political power into a sufficiently effective configuration to press home a revolutionary transformation in society as a whole. If, as seems to be the case, the world cannot be changed without taking power then what is the point of a movement that refuses to build and take that power? Secondly, there is an inability to stretch the vision of political activism from local to far broader geographical scales at which the planning of major infrastructures and the management of environmental conditions and long distance trade relations becomes a collective responsibility for millions of people.

Who will manage the transport and communications network is the question. The anarchist town planners including Bookchin understood this problem but their work is largely ignored within the anarchist movement. These dimensions define terrains upon which anarchists but not Marxists are fearful of operating which is not to say the Marxists have no failures to their credit. And it is here that the whole history of anarchist influences in centralized urban planning deserves to be resurrected.

This is a complicated topic that I cannot possibly probe into more deeply here. But this is clearly the most obvious point where anarchist concerns for the qualities of daily life and Marxist perspectives on global capital flows and the construction of physical infrastructures through long-term investments could come together with constructive results. Springer prefers insurrectionary to revolutionary politics. Self- liberation through insurrection is all well and good but what about everyone else?

Every revolution, indeed, even every attempt to achieve basic change, will always meet with resistance from elites in power. Every effort to defend a revolution will require the amassing of power — physical as well as institutional and administrative — which is to say, the creation of government.

Anarchists may call for the abolition of the state, but coercion of some kind will be necessary to prevent the bourgeois state from returning in full force with unbridled terror. Only within such autonomous spaces can true democratic practices become possible. From my perspective this means creating a parallel state like the Zapatistas within the capitalist state.

Such experiments rarely work and when they do, as in the case of the paramilitary forms of organization that dominate in Colombia or the various mafia like organizations that exist around the world e. Even left revolutionary guerilla movements such as the FARC in Colombia experienced defaults of this kind and there is no guarantee that any parallel power structure devised by anarchists will not suffer from similar problems.

The critique of radical individualism runs as follows. The concept of the free individual bears the mark of liberal legal institutions even of private property in the body and the self spiced with a hefty dose of that personalized protestant religion which Weber associated with the rise of capitalism. His sort of anarchism has its roots in liberal theory and the Judeo- Christian tradition even as it constructs its anti-capitalism through the negation of the market and a critique of the class and environmental consequences of liberal theory and capitalist practices.

There is nothing wrong with this Marx also constructs largely by way of negation of classical political economy and its liberal and Judeo-Christian roots. But the result is an awkward overlap at times which exists in both Marx and Proudhon in which the critique incorporates and mirrors far too much of that which it criticizes. This is an issue that has to be rationally unpacked because it has had and potentially will continue to have real consequences. Back in , they argued, industrial capitalism faced a moment of technological possibility in its organization in which it could either move towards mass factory production of the sort that Marx predicted and embraced or take the path that Proudhon advocated, which was the linking together of small, independent workshops in which associated laborers could democratically control their work and their lives.

The wrong choice was made after , they claim, and thereafter mass factory production, with all of its evils, dominated industrial capitalism. But in the s new technologies and organizational forms were emerging which posed that same choice anew. Both Piore and Sabel, armed with their reputations, their MacArthur grants and supported by so-called progressive thinkers and institutions of the time, set out to persuade the unions to embrace the Proudhonian vision rather than oppose the new technologies. Sabel became an influential advisor to the International Labour Organization.

Many of us on the Marxist left were deeply troubled by this turn. I added my voice to the critics by arguing in The Condition of Postmodernity ; as well as at the AAG in Baltimore in when Sabel and I clashed fiercely , that flexible specialization was nothing other than a tactic of flexible accumulation for capital. The campaign to persuade or cajole via the International Monetary Fund countries to adopt policies for the flexibilization of labor was a sign of this intent and it still goes on through IMF mandates, as now in Greece. This left nearly all of the newly produced wealth in the hands of the one percent.

Capitalist anarchism is a real problem. It has its coherent central theory as set out by Nozick, Hayek and others, and a doctrine of market freedoms. It has turned out not only to be the most successful form of decentralized decision making ever invented — as Marx so elegantly demonstrated in Capital — but also a force for an immense centralization of wealth and power in the hands of an increasingly powerful oligarchy. This dialectic between decentralization and centralization is one of the most important contradictions within capital see my Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism and I wish all those, like Springer, who advocate decentralization as if it is an unalloyed good would look more closely at its consequences and contradictions.

As I argued in Rebel Cities a , decentralization and autonomy are primary vehicles for producing greater inequality and centralization of power. Once again, Bookchin sort of agrees: This was, by the way, my main problem with the stance taken by Gibson-Graham in their pursuit of totally decentralized anti- capitalist alternatives. While left anarchism of the Proudhon sort has no coherent theory, right-wing capitalist anarchism has a coherent theoretical structure that rests upon a seductive utopian vision of human freedom.

It took the genius of Marx to deconstruct this theory in Capital. Which brings me to the question of the relations between Marx and Proudhon. I have freely recognized e. What Marx accepted and what he arrived at by negation in his interrogations from any of these people is a complicated question. But to go from this recognition to suggest that Marx plagiarized everything from Proudhon in particular is indeed totally absurd. The idea of the exploitation of labour by capital, for example, was far more strongly articulated by Blanqui than by Proudhon and was completely accepted by the socialist Ricardians.

It was obvious to pretty much everyone and Marx made no claims of originality in pointing to it. What Marx did was to show how that exploitation could be accomplished without violating laws of market exchange that theoretically and in the utopian universe of classical political economy rested upon equality, freedom and reciprocity.

To promote those laws of exchange as the foundation of equality was to create the conditions for the centralization of capitalist class power. This was what Proudhon missed.

When Marx pointed to the importance of the commodification of labor power he may well have been drawing on Blanqui without acknowledgement but even here it was Marx and not Blanqui who recognized its significance for the theory of capital. It is here precisely that Marx points out how theories of justice are not universal but specific, and in the bourgeois case specific to the rise of liberal capitalism. To pursue the aim of universal justice as a revolutionary strategy ran the danger of simply instanciating bourgeois law within socialism.

This is a familiar problem, as everyone working critically with notions of human rights recognizes.

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When Marx appealed, as he often did, to ideas of association he was almost certainly drawing more on Saint-Simon than Proudhon. While Proudhon undoubtedly had important things to say, there are dangers of viewing him as representative of some perfected social anarchism. He had a weak grasp of political economy, did not support the workers in the revolution of , was against trade unions and strikes and held to a narrow definition of socialism as nothing more than the association of workers mutually supporting each other. He was hostile to women working and his supporters campaigned vigorously in the workers commissions of the s in France to have women banned from employment in the Paris workshops.

OK, so Marx was no saint either on such matters. What is really odd is that before the Commune, in the s, Marxists and anarchists were not at logger-heads in the same way as they later became. Reclus did not do so. I do sense, however, that Marx felt that Proudhon was his chief rival for the affections of the French revolutionary working class and in part concentrated his critical fire against him for that reason.

But the clash of ideologies within the Paris Commune was between many factions, such as the centralizing and often violent Jacobinism of the Blanquists and variations of the Proudhonian decentralized associationists. The communists, like Varlin, were a minority. The subsequent appropriation of the Commune by Marx, Engels and Lenin as a heroic if fatally flawed uprising on the part of the working classes does not stand up to historical examination any more than does the story that it was the product of a purely urban social movement that had nothing to do with class.

I view the Commune as a class event if only because it was a revolt against bourgeois structures of power and domination in both the living spaces as well as in the workplaces of the city Harvey, The individualism that lies at its emotional base does not, of course, lead social anarchism to ignore the importance of collective activities, the construction of solidarities or building a variety of organizational forms.

There is, however, something deceptive about such lists. The standard anarchist response to this is to say that this would not be so if the anarchists were in charge. This, of course, begs the question of which organizational forms are truly anarchist as opposed to just convenient for any form of hegemonic power including that of the anarchists. The rule, here, seems to be that all forms of social organization are possible except that of the state. For this reason anarchists are often drawn to adopt indigenous communities as one of their favored forms of association because of their ability to pursue communal forms of action without creating anything that resembles a state.

In some ways this is an odd coupling because for most indigenous populations the radical individualism that underpins much of Western anarchism is meaningless given their relational collectivism and their general appreciation of harmony and spiritual membership as core cultural values. Unfortunately in the case of the Mapuche, the penetrations of commodification, money and merchant capitalism are currently doing far more damage than either Spanish colonialism or the Chilean state ever did to their core cultural values.

While these social orders and their value systems are of great merit, I fear that a political program that argued for the populations of North America and Europe to live like the Mapuche, the highland tribes of Asia or the Zapatistas would not go very far and in any case would do little or nothing to curb the avaricious practices of capital accumulation through dispossession that are currently at work in Amazonia and other hitherto relatively untouched regions of the world.

And in some instances, such as Otavalo in Ecuador or even more spectacularly in El Alto in Bolivia with more than a million people mostly indigenous Almara , the embrace of the market produces a vibrant indigenous culture with entrepreneurial merchant capitalist characteristics. This is, however, a good point to take up the question of the state as perhaps the conceptual rubicon that neither side is prepared to cross. For most anarchists and many non-anarchists, opposition to and rejection of the state and of the hierarchical institutions that support and surround it like parliamentary democracy and political parties is a non-negotiable ideological position.

Ventilating Cities : Air-flow Criteria for Healthy and Comfortable Urban Living

This is not to say that anarchists do not on occasion engage with the state they often have no choice in the face, for example, of repressive police actions or even vote as many did in the Greek election for example. But after his break with anarchism, Bookchin continued to view the state as a structure set up from the very first in the image of hierarchical domination, exploitation and human repression, and therefore unreformable.

I disagree with that view. The state was the subject of a huge and divisive debate in which Holloway was a major protagonist within Marxism for two decades or more. I still think Gramsci and the late Poulantzas worth reading for their insights and Jessop nobly continues the struggle to adapt the Marxist position to current realities.

My own simplified view is that the state is a ramshackle set of institutions existing at a variety of geographical scales that internalize a lot of contradictions, some of which can potentially be exploited for emancipatory rather than obfuscatory or repressive ends its role in public health provision has been crucial to increasing life expectancy for example , even as for the most part it is about hierarchical control, the enforcement of class divisions and conformities and the repression violent when necessary of non-capitalistic liberatory human aspirations.

But the state has and continues to have a critical role to play in the provision of large-scale physical and social infrastructures. Any revolutionary or insurrectionary movement has to reckon with the problem of how to provide such infrastructures. Society no matter whether capitalist or not needs to be reproduced and the state has a key role in doing that.

In recent times the state has become more and more a tool of capital and far less amenable to any kind of democratic control other than the crude democracy of money power.

This has led to the rising radical demand for direct democracy which I would support. Yet even now there are still enough examples of the progressive uses of state power for emancipatory ends for example, in Latin America in recent years to not give up on the state as a terrain of engagement and struggle for progressive forces of a left wing persuasion. The odd thing here is that the more autonomistas and anarchists grapple with the necessity to build organizations that have the capacity to ward off bourgeois power and to build the requisite large-scale infrastructures for revolutionary transformation, the more they end up constructing something that looks like some kind of state.

This is the case with the Zapatistas, for example, even as they hold back from any attempt to take power within the Mexican state.

All of this looks to me like a reconstruction of a certain kind of state but this may be nothing more than semantics. Hardt and Negri have also recently recognized the limitations of horizontalism, the importance of leadership, even suggesting that the time may be ripe to reconsider the question of taking state power.

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In the course of this, Negri has publically noted a certain evolution and convergence between his and my views on some of these questions Let me conclude with a commentary on how Springer misrepresents my critique of certain forms of organization that anarchists currently advocate. The message rings through loud and clear.

I make common cause on this with Bookchin who writes: Springer and many other anarchists and autonomistas consider the only legitimate form of organization to be horizontal, decentered, open, consensual and non-hierarchical. I cited both Murray Bookchin and David Graeber in support of this point. I was interested in taking up what some of those endless compromises might have to be. And I thought it important to state what these might be. I ended up with a fairly utopian sketch of intersecting organizational forms — both vertical and horizontal — that might work in governing a large metropolitan area such as New York City a: It is this exclusive and exclusionary dogma that stands in the way of exploring appropriate and effective solutions.

These have contributed significantly to the repertoire of possible left political organizational forms and of course I agree who could not that the critical aim of reinventing democracy should be a central concern. But the evidence is clear that we need organizational forms that go beyond those within which many anarchists and autonomistas now confine themselves if we are to reinvent democracy while pursuing a coherent anti-capitalist politics.

I support Syriza, for example, as did Negri and several Greek anarchists I know, and Podemos not because they are revolutionary but because they help open up a space for a different kind of politics and a different conversation. The mobilization of political power is essential and the state cannot be neglected as a potential site for radicalization. On all these points I beg to differ with many of my autonomist and anarchist colleagues.

But this does not preclude collaboration and mutual aid with respect to the many other common anti-capitalist struggles with which we are engaged. Honest disagreements should be no barrier to fertile collaborations. So the conclusion I reach is this: Social movements in and beyond capital, the state and development. Social Movement Studies 9: Bookchin M The Next Revolution: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life.

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Clark J and Martin C, eds. Corcoran P Before Marx: Socialism and Communism in France , Ealham C Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Barcelona, A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. University of Minnesota Press. Harvey D Class structure and the theory of residential differentiation.

Harvey D Labor, capital and class struggle around the built environment. Politics and Society 7: Harvey D On the history and present condition of geography: An historical materialist manifesto. The Professional Geographer Harvey D Three myths in search of a reality in urban studies.

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 5: Harvey D The Condition of Postmodernity: Harvey D Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom. Harvey D a Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. Hyams E Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: His Revolutionary Life, Mind and Works. Johnston R J and Claval P, eds. Negri A An interview with Toni Negri: From the refusal of labour to the seizure of power.

Roar Magazine January, http: Smith N History and philosophy of geography: Real wars, theory wars. Progress in Human Geography Smith N American Empire: University of California Press. Springer S Why a radical geography must be anarchist. Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Reading Marx's Capital with David Harvey. In part in response to these attacks, Bookchin ultimately severed his links to the anarchist tradition, but he was also troubled and frustrated by the fact that anarchism, unlike Marxism, has no discernable theory of society: The result, David Graeber suggests, is that: Bookchin M Post-Scarcity Anarchism.

Fleming M The Geography of Freedom. Folke S Why a radical geography must be Marxist. Graeber D The new anarchists. New Left Review Graeber D Direct Action: Harvey D Spaces of Hope. Harvey D Paris: Nozick R Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Scott J Two Cheers for Anarchism. Princeton, Princeton University Press. Los Angeles, Semiotext e. Facebook Twitter Tumblr Reddit. He has been teaching Karl Marx's Capital for over 40 years. Dispatched from the UK in 3 business days When will my order arrive?

Home Contact Us Help Free delivery worldwide. Description The majority of the world's population live in environments with artificially weakened wind as buildings in urban areas form wind-breaks and reduce wind speeds. Anthropogenic heat is also generated and during the summer dense urban areas suffer from the urban heat island effect, a known urban climate problem. This book discusses how to evaluate the urban wind environment, including ventilation performance and thermal comfort.

It includes chapters on sea breeze in urban areas; thermal adaptation and the effect of wind on thermal comfort; health risk of exposures; pollutant transport in dense urban areas; legal regulations for urban ventilation and new criteria for assessing the local wind environment. The Best Books of Check out the top books of the year on our page Best Books of Product details Format Paperback pages Dimensions x x Illustrations note X, p. Looking for beautiful books? Visit our Beautiful Books page and find lovely books for kids, photography lovers and more. Other books in this series.

Cultural Territorial Systems Francesco Rotondo. The Philippine Archipelago Yves Boquet. Ventilating Cities Shinsuke Kato. The Andes Christoph Stadel.

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