ABSTRACT
A centerpiece of my academic concerns these last two decades has been to unravel the role of urbanization in social change, in particular under conditions of capitalist social relations and accumulation (Harvey 1973; 1982; 1985a; 1985b; 1989a). This project has necessitated deeper enquiry into the manner in which capitalism produces a distinctive historical geography. When the physical and social landscape of urbanization is shaped according to distinctively capitalist criteria, constraints are put on the future paths of capitalist development. This implies that though urban processes under capitalism are shaped by the logic of capital circulation and accumulation, they in tum shape the conditions and circumstances of capital accumulation at later points in time and space. Put another way, capitalists, like everyone else, may struggle to make their own historical geography but, also like everyone else, they do not do so under historical and geographical circumstances of their own individual choosing, even when they have played an important and even determinant collective role in shaping those circumstances. This two-way relation of reciprocity and domination (in which capitalists, like workers, find themselves dominated and constrained by their own creations) can best be captured theoretically in dialectical terms. It is from such a standpoint that I seek more powerful insights into that process of city-making that is both product and condition of ongoing social processes of transformation in the most recent phase of capitalist development.
