The Urbanization of Capital and the Production of Capitalist Natures

Oxford Handbooks Online

The Urbanization of Capital and the Production of
Capitalist Natures
Erik Swyngedouw
The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx
Edited by Matt Vidal, Tony Smith, Tomás Rotta, and Paul Prew

Subject: Sociology, Social Theory, Economic Sociology Online Publication Date: Sep 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695545.013.30

Abstract and Keywords

In the corpus of Marxist thought as well as in mainstream socialist strategies and politics,
the theoretical and politically strategic position and role of space, nature, and the
urbanization process in the expanded production and reproduction of capitalism, and in
the transformation to socialism, remains—with a few notable exceptions—largely
marginal and residual. Nonetheless, cities are hotbeds of anti-capitalist struggles and
socio-ecological conflict, offer experimental spaces for emancipatory socio-ecological
transformation and action, and remain pivotal for the organization and management of
the creative destruction that animates a continuously revolutionizing capital circulation
process. This chapter explores how emancipatory-egalitarian political movements, in
conjunction with urban political-economic and political-ecological transformation,
demonstrate the vital role of space, urbanization, and socio-ecological processes both in
sustaining the expanded reproduction of capitalism and in choreographing the dynamics
and configuration of class struggle.

Keywords: Marxism and cities, urbanization, political ecology, radical cities, cities and politics

In the corpus of Marxist thought as well as in mainstream socialist strategies and politics,
the theoretical and politically strategic position and role of space, nature, and the
urbanization process in the expanded production and reproduction of capitalism, and in
the transformation to socialism, remains—with a few notable exceptions—largely
marginal and residual. Such neglect has come with an extraordinary theoretical and
political cost and requires urgent attention. This is particularly acute in an age of
planetary urbanization. Not only does the majority of the world population live in
urbanized environments, but cities have become core hubs that connect to and affect the
remotest places on Earth, both socially and ecologically, while embodying the
contradictions and perversities of contemporary capitalist dynamics. Cities are also
hotbeds of anti-capitalist struggles and socio-ecological conflict, offer experimental
spaces for emancipatory socio-ecological transformation and action, and remain pivotal
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The Urbanization of Capital and the Production of Capitalist Natures

for the organization and management of the creative destruction that animates a
continuously revolutionizing capital circulation process. Indeed, as David Harvey pointed
out, “Any political movement that does not embed itself in the heart of the urban process
is doomed to fail” (Harvey 1989:255). However, despite the recurrent political
significance of urban political and social movements, the urban question remains on the
backburner of mainstream Marxist theory. This chapter explores how emancipatory-
egalitarian political movements, in conjunction with urban political-economic and
political-ecological transformation, demonstrate the vital role of space, urbanization, and
socio-ecological processes both in sustaining the expanded reproduction of capitalism
and in choreographing the dynamics and configuration of class struggle.

We will develop three interrelated arguments that have infused Marxist urban thought
over the past century and a half. First, we will argue how the urban process has been and
still is vital in both the production and reproduction of capital on the one hand, and plays
a central role in the process of socialist and Communist transformation on the other. In
other words, the city—or rather the urbanization process—is both the product of class
relations and the arena through which class struggle operates and manifests itself.
Second, the production and reproduction of capital and its circulation operates in and
through the transformation of the urban process. The political economy of capital and the
production and distribution of (surplus) value in its various interdependent circuits
(commodities, finance, land/non-human nature) is both dependent on and actively
produces actually existing urban life. The Marxist notion of land rent is central for
grappling with the choreographies of urban transformation. Third, this article will explore
how inegalitarian socio-ecological development is also driven by the dynamics of the
capitalist urbanization process and has become central in contemporary class politics.

1. The City as Revolutionary Space

In Marx’s oeuvre, there are only a few scattered comments on the urban condition and its
role under capitalism, but they nonetheless open up, if systematized, a spellbinding set of
insights that reveals a vast and crucial terrain for grappling with the multiple socio-
spatial contradictions that mark urban life under capitalism (see Harvey 1982b;
Katznelson 1993; Lefebvre 2016; Merrifield 2002).

The whirlpool of modernity through which the dialectics of capital unfolds constantly
revolutionizes both the urban experience and urban life. As one of the great Marxist
urban intellectuals, Marshall Berman, exquisitely evokes in Everything That Is Solid Melts
Into Air, the fragmented and kaleidoscopic maelstrom of urban transformation relays
both the perverse inequities and uneven power relations that animate capitalist
dynamics, as well as the multifarious resistances, insurgencies, and counter-punches
through which a post-capitalist urban world will be forged (Berman 1983). A socially and
ecologically sane socialism will have to be urban or will not be at all.

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The Urbanization of Capital and the Production of Capitalist Natures

Indeed, planetary urbanization with its multiple internal inequities and embedding within
the combined and uneven geographical development of world capitalism is not only the
geographical imprint of the deepening and widening of capitalist socio-ecological
relations and accumulation dynamics; it is one of the driving forces through which the
accumulation process proceeds. In other words, urbanization is an “active moment” in the
development of capitalism. At the same time, cities have historically also been both the
theater of class struggle and the terrain that required repossessing from the
dispossessing class dynamics that underpin the accumulation process (Harvey 2012).

Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, Havana, and a wide range of other cities have historically
been associated with radical and emancipatory social and political struggle. Indeed, cities
have always been the hotbed of all manner of conflicts and struggle, from the Athenian
Ochlos (the rabble) demanding the right to be part of the Demos, to suffragettes
demanding gender equality, Parisian communards establishing and governing their own
city, or undocumented immigrants staging their right to equality in the contemporary city.

Of course, the urban process was and is also marked by the making of the capitalist class
and the rise of the bourgeois city. As Marx insisted all along, capitalist class formation is
a bourgeois project and process. The historically torturous process of the making of the
working class constitutes the symptom of the imposition and generalization of the rule of
value and formation of a capitalist elite. The making of both the bourgeoisie and the
working class operated in and through the urban. Consider, for example, how the early
modern mercantile bourgeoisie battled with the guilds and crafts system in cities to lift
the strict rules of market entry, access, organization, and the hiring and firing of a “free”
labor force. The urban transformation through which a mercantile bourgeoisie rose to
power (in cities such as Amsterdam, Bruges, or Venice) was also paralleled by a process
of spatial expansion and the budding formation of global inter-urban trade routes and
links.

The subsequent making of the industrial bourgeoisie, with Manchester of course as the
emblematic example, showed decisively how the urbanization of capital produced both a
capitalist city—chronicled so well by Friedrich Engels—and an urbanized working class,
forging a highly concentrated and volatile ensemble of condensed class relations (Engels
[1845] 1987). The rapid urban proletarianization process produced a mesmerizing
kaleidoscope of heterogeneous social and economic positions that nonetheless shared,
both socially and spatially, a class-based sense of exclusion, exploitation, and domination.
These class relations became etched in the unequal geographies of urban life and
produced perverse forms of market-led urbanization, marked by the co-existence of elite
neighborhoods with areas of utmost deprivation, socio-ecological disintegration, abject
poverty, and permanent housing crisis. Indeed, by the mid-nineteenth century the great
capitalist cities of the Global North had become hellholes for some on the one hand, and
spaces of radiant luxury where the elites reveled in the pleasures of an intensifying
commodity spectacle on the other. In the process, the production of the capitalist city and
the privatization and commodification of (urban) land went hand in hand. The dismal
conditions of urban social reproduction also fermented an incipient urban class-

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The Urbanization of Capital and the Production of Capitalist Natures

consciousness. It does not come as a surprise, therefore, that many of the most
emblematic anti-capitalist conflicts and struggles unfolded as an urban theater, from
Luddite insurrections aimed at destroying labor-replacing machinery in urban
manufacture, to the first proper proletarian organizations, workers associations, and
political movements. The first people’s houses, which would become the privileged sites
for the making of a working-class-for-itself, would also be built in industrial cities, both as
a haven for protection from repression, and as the site for experimenting with new and
proletarian ways of seeing, speaking, hearing, writing, and doing (Rancière 1989).

The making of the capitalist city was nurtured further by the transformation of the state,
captured by an increasingly confident liberal bourgeoisie. Indeed, occupying state power
was a decisive moment for bourgeois class formation, a process that would take several
hundred years to complete but found its iconic expression in the French Revolution
(really a Parisian revolution) through which the French bourgeoisie finally became a
class-for-itself. In its aftermath, the bourgeoisie shaped the material cultures of urban life
and the urban experience against the vestiges of the old order, defending its “national”
interests against outside forces; in particular, the bourgeoisie mobilized city and state to
deal with the insurgencies and rebellions that would mark the slow process of the making
of a proletarian class-for-itself. Indeed, the bourgeoisie would remodel the city, both
aesthetically and materially, in its own image with its own modern aesthetic registers,
displays of cultural prestige, fast transportation networks, and tightly policed quarters of
potentially insurrectional classes (Harvey 2003). The latter carved out their own urban
landscapes, living environments, and spaces of organization and resistance, turning the
urban landscape into a mesmerizing and feverishly dynamic whirlpool of change.

Consider, for example, how Chicago, Manchester, Lyon, and many other incipient
capitalist cities became the theaters of insurrectional struggles. The 1819 Manchester
Peterloo massacre, the 1886 Chicago Haymarket riot, or the Lyon Canut revolts (which
Engels dubbed as “the first working-class rising” (Engels [1880] 1935) became iconic
events in the turbulent history of urbanized class warfare. The city turned indeed into a
whirlpool of revolutionary fervor and transformation in all manner of ways, from
insurgent rebellions to the aesthetic register and technological or infrastructural change,
from experimenting with new forms of organizing labor to practicing new ways of living
together. The experience of slow time and relatively fixed spaces of pre-capitalist urbanity
was rapidly replaced by the frenzy of commodity production and exchange, the creative
destruction of socio-technical arrangements, and the multiple tensions and conflicts that
animated the tumultuous choreographies of urban life. The barricades and the solemn
declarations of freedom, liberty, and fraternity (and, of course, Bentham) became clarion
calls to be heard in cities as diverse as Athens, Barcelona, Lille, Brussels, Berlin and
Vienna, while in Haiti’s Port-au-Prince and other colonial cities the first anti-colonial slave
rebellions announced the embryonic manifestation of what would later become anti-
colonial and anti-imperial struggles.

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The Urbanization of Capital and the Production of Capitalist Natures

In the maelstrom of urban class conflicts that animated modern urban life, the first
successful labor revolt that resulted in the realization of the early Communist dream
became a reality, an alarming situation for the elites but an ecstatic moment for the
proletariat. Between March and May 1871, the Paris Commune demonstrated the
proletariat’s ability, not only to stage an urban revolution but also to manage and govern
the city in a collective and egalitarian manner. The Paris Commune would indeed for
decades remain the emblematic example of the potential and capacity of the proletariat
and a horrifying specter for the bourgeoisie who now had to face the reality that the
working class is indeed capable of taking power and governing (Lissagaray and Hazan
2012; Ross 2016). Only the concerted mobilization of state power and its military might
deployed in the service of protecting the elite’s interests would defeat the Commune. It
became clear that self-organization of the proletariat is not sufficient in the absence of a
disciplined party and a well-organized military defense structure to keep the enemy at
bay. Communist strategies in the 20th century would indeed increasingly rely on a
militarist and strong party apparatus capable of capturing state power and warding off
class enemies. In addition, the wave of urban revolts and the rising tide of socialism
during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century increasingly relied on Marx’s
analysis both for analytical insight and strategic guidance. And organized labor spurned a
frantic transformation of the city. Class struggle would indeed also be fought increasingly
by means of urban restructuring.

While nineteenth- and early twentieth-century class struggle and socialist politics
revolved in and around the urban (with the storming of Saint Petersburg’s Winter Palace
in 1917 as the emblematic culmination), this shifted decidedly in the later twentieth
century. Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Patrice Lumumba, Che Guevara, and
proliferating post-colonial national liberation movements relied more on peasant rebels
and rural discontent as the social base for organizing political transformation and focused
on capturing the state as the privileged site to conquer. Nonetheless, even the success of
these national peasant uprisings eventually relied on capturing the big cities (Beijing or
Havana) to consolidate their power. The revolutionary success of these peasant
rebellions, combined with a lingering anti-urban romanticism of many left-wing
intellectuals and activists, shifted the attention away from the centrality of the urban in
revolutionary praxis, precisely at the time that actually existing socialism and
Communism began to reconstruct the city in the socialist states of the Global North.

Indeed, centralized state Communism in the Soviet Union had begun to re-order cities to
provide mass housing and experimented with modernist and constructivist design
principles while planning entirely new industrial-urban conglomerates (Vienna Centre for
Architecture 2013). In the West, Keynesian welfare politics, supported by a confident
social democracy and an elite frightened by the specter of a victorious Communism,
turned its attention to the urban as a key site for the organization and provision of
collective means of consumption such as housing and health and for attenuating class
conflict. “Red” Vienna became a classic example of this urban socialist modernization
project (Gruber 1991). Nonetheless, by the late 1960s, in the wake of processes of
political radicalization, as well as an emerging process of de-territorialization of capital to
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The Urbanization of Capital and the Production of Capitalist Natures

the new states in the Global South in the making of a global spatial division of labor, a
renewed wave of urban revolts choreographed much of the anti-capitalist and New Left
insurgencies. Highly racialized rebellions rolled through US cities, anti-fascist and anti-
capitalist uprisings marked the urban condition in places such as Spain, South Africa, or
Mexico, and radical urban movements fought against imposed urban transformations to
remodel the city according to modernist-Fordist visions in places such as Amsterdam,
Berlin, Brussels, or Paris. These movements were often inspired and supported by a
generation of new Marxist urban scholars for whom the urban condition was indeed the
key battleground for forging new and emancipatory futures (Castells 1977).

If Paris was the iconic capital of the nineteenth century and Los Angeles the metropolis of
the twentieth, Lagos, Beijing, Cairo, Istanbul, Mumbai, or Sao Paulo are the
megalopolises that emblematically shape the planetary urbanization process of twenty-
first-century capital (Rossi 2017). It is in these sprawling urban life worlds that new
forms of resistance and new political subjectivities are formed and where new forms of
social and political organization emerge and are experimented with. It is in the cracks
and interstices of rampant inequalities of global neoliberal “slum city” urbanization that
class struggle, often in intersectional attachment to questions of race, gender, and
sexuality, and re-imagined (eco-)socialist futures are discussed and fought for (Davis
2007). Particularly since 2011, urban revolts against rampant neoliberal market rule and
its deepening inequalities put in place by increasingly autocratic state apparatuses that
have truly become the executive managers of the capitalist elite have been dotting the
global urban landscape in cities as diverse as Cairo, Istanbul, Santiago, or Hong Kong,
and tentatively point to the possibilities for a different, more socially equal,
democratically governed, and ecologically sensible urbanity (Wilson and Swyngedouw
2014). Yet again, these movements testify to the pivotal role of the urban as the
privileged site to express discontent and to stage revolt.

2. “The Shitty Rent Business”: The Political

Economy of Urbanization
While the urbanization of capital produces the mesmerizing and conflicting kaleidoscope
of the urban experience, capitalists mobilize and shape the urban in decisive and
strategic manners in their relentless and frantic search for creating or maintaining the
conditions for the production and appropriation of surplus value (Harvey 1982b). The
urban is where the circulation of capital as it flows through forms of labor power, means
and conditions of production, financial (fictitious) capital, and land in all its forms comes
together to produce a socio-spatial landscape amenable for supporting and facilitating
the accumulation of capital. In this sense, the urban expresses the multiple contradictions
through which capitalism unfolds. It is simultaneously a site and location for production
while functioning as the anchoring node for the global circulation of capital. The tension
between the need to fix some capital in place in order for the circulation of other forms of

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The Urbanization of Capital and the Production of Capitalist Natures

capital to accelerate choreographs much of urban restructuring and produces a highly

contested and restless urban landscape.

The accumulation of capital and its geographical concentration as manifested in the

process of urbanization are paralleled by an intensification and spatial expansion of
capital circulation and an acceleration of the turnover of capital, resulting in what David
Harvey dubs as “time-space compression” (Harvey 1982b). All physical and social
infrastructures have to be fixed in space in order to make capital flow. Think of, for
example, offices, stock exchanges, Information Technology networks, transport
infrastructures of all kind, among others. As Marx put it in Grundrisse:

The more production comes to rest on exchange value, hence on exchange, the
more important do the physical conditions of exchange—the means of
communication and transport—become for the costs of circulation. Capital by its
nature drives beyond every spatial barrier. Thus the creation of the physical
conditions of exchange—of the means of communication and transport—the
annihilation of space by time—becomes an extraordinary necessity for it.

(Marx [1857–1858] 1973:539–540)

The continuous class struggle over both the conditions of production and the provisions
of means of reproduction conflicts with the permanent socio-spatial restructuring
required to sustain the conditions for successful accumulation. The latter produces not
only forms of organizational centralization and geographical concentration of capital but
also distinct forms and processes of decentralization. Urban geographical differentiation
in labor conditions, socio-environmental regulations, physical endowments, and spatially
differentiated productive powers produce a variegated landscape that different fractions
of capital mobilize in strategic manners; this results in a detailed spatial division of labor,
functions, and accumulation sites and ultimately produces an interlinked but deeply
uneven global urban network (Storper and Walker 1991). Forms of relative geographical
coherence become constituted and produce a more or less precarious balance but one
that is continuously perturbed by the continuing dynamics of social, technical,
organizational, and political change. All this results in an urban landscape prone to
continuous upheaval, latent and occasionally acute crisis, and transformation
(Swyngedouw 1997). The city becomes both the central node in the spidery web through
which global capital circulates, as well as the site where subaltern groups concentrate to
provide the range of services and commodities on which the reproduction of urban social
life depends crucially.

Access to urban locations as well as the ability to cash in on locational advantages is

structured largely by rent, the process through which the specific quality of use values
embodied in land and location are transformed into the homogeneous abstraction of
exchange values and appropriated by a variety of social classes. Rent is the crucial
variable through which socioeconomic differentiation in the city is triaged. Marx
appropriately called it “the shitty rent business” (Ward and Aalbers 2016). The production
of rent and its appropriation by landowners (and increasingly by financial capital) has
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The Urbanization of Capital and the Production of Capitalist Natures

become one of the driving forces that animate contemporary urban restructuring as well
as urban conflict. The spectacular neoliberalizing urban transformations of the late
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, which have attempted to re-order the urban
landscape within the new co-ordinates of a financialized capitalist urbanity, centers on
the production, appropriation, and financialization of urban land rent. And this is what we
shall focus on next.

The Marxist analysis of land rent is one of the most tantalizing, contested, and debated
themes in both the history of Marxist intellectual thought and urban political strategies,
not least because Marx never completed a full analysis of rent and concentrated mainly of
agricultural land. With the accelerating urbanization of capital, urban land rent became
more central to the reproduction of capital. And the urban rent question is now pivotal for
grasping contemporary capitalist dynamics. The urbanization of capital operates through
and actively produces a complex rent-map that directs the distribution of functions and
activities, is mobilized through processes of land financialization, and articulates with
dynamics of both state policies and urban social struggles. The contours of the rent
problematic are easily drawn. As Anna Haila put it, the main theoretical questions related
to the vexing problem of rent are: How does (the substance of) rent emerge? (i.e., why
does land have a price, expressed in the form of rent? Why and how does land rent vary
over space and in time?). Who or what are its agents? What are their behavioral patterns
and mutual social relations? What is the political-economic role of rent in the process of
capital accumulation and coordination? (Haila 1990)

The theoretical difficulty resides in explaining why land/location (and its appurtenances)
possesses exchange value and use value (and, therefore, functions as a commodity) but
apparently no value defined as socially necessary labor time; there is also the question of
accounting for its apparent anomalous character in the process of capital accumulation.
While land rent constitutes a potentially major source of income for landowners and can
be turned into fictitious financialized capital circulation (as in the mortgage market), the
private and exclusive ownership of (and therefore monopoly over) land also obstructs the
accumulation of capital. Indeed, land ownership is a significant barrier to access a vital
means of production, while the payment of land rent constitutes a major drain on profits
(as both capitalists and workers need access to land/location for production and
reproduction). Nonetheless, competition over and the mobilization of land of different
absolute, relative, or relational qualities plays a pivotal role both in allocating capital
flows as well as in generating extraordinary profits (as, for example, the real estate
bubble during the 2000–2007 period testifies). Combined land rents in the urban
environment act as a gigantic and expanding reservoir for storing surplus value, as well
as an asset that permits expanding fictitious capital formation (Ward and Swyngedouw
2018).

The starting point for Marx is that land—like interest on capital for the owner of money-
capital—is an entitlement to the landowner in return for surrendering the use of that land
to someone else. The fundamental relationship through which rents arises is a social one
(i.e., between landowners, on the one hand, and those who wish to make use of the land,

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The Urbanization of Capital and the Production of Capitalist Natures

on the other) (Ball 1977; 1985). As Marx put it: “Landed property is based on the
monopoly by certain persons over definite portions of the globe, as exclusive spheres of
their private will to the exclusion of all others” (Marx [1894] 1959:461). The owner of the
land will not surrender ownership without proper recompense. However, this
understanding of the foundation of rent does not reveal anything about the magnitude of
land rent, the origin of landed property, or the role of rent in capital accumulation and
coordination, and consequently in producing concrete urban constellations. Obviously,
different pieces of land with different locational characteristics have different and often
competing uses, different prices and play—and depending on the social relations and
struggles that unfold around them, different roles in different places and at different
times.

Determining the magnitude of rent, however, remains theoretically complex and

empirically intractable. Marx basically distinguishes between four forms of rent:
monopoly, absolute, differential rent I (DRI), and differential rent II (DRII) (Harvey 1991).
These different but interrelated forms of rent, taken together, determine the magnitude of
land rent. However, each form plays a different role and has a different origin, although
the landowner appropriates all. Monopoly rent, as the word suggests, relates to the
specific and unique characteristics of a particular piece of land. Consider, for example,
how the ownership of a plot of land in a central Manhattan location, or an ice-cream stall
near a summer tourist attraction, generate surplus profit for the owner by virtue of the
unique character of the land or location. Absolute rent, in contrast, derives from the
imperfect mobility of capital as a result of fragmented and dispersed landownership. The
latter leads to a situation—in contrast to an otherwise unobstructed equalization of rates
of profit across sectors—whereby a lower value composition implies that products tend to
trade above their price of production and, therefore, yield absolute rent (Fine 1979). This
explains, for example, why archaic activities and functions or the provision of high-price
low-quality commodities can still continue to exist in some high- value urban
environments.

Until the 1960s, and under the influence of the political importance of the peasant or
agricultural question under capitalism in postcolonial states, Marxist thought on rent
focused on these two forms. The political implications of this were significant. Most
Marxists at the time as well as Ricardo considered landownership as a historically archaic
feudal remnant that, although transformed by and incorporated into capitalism,
constituted a drain on and barrier to capital accumulation. It also pitted landowners
against both industrial capitalists and tenant farmers. Landowners were considered to be
both parasitic on capital accumulation elsewhere and a formidable barrier to the proper
functioning of the law of value.

The rent debate has changed considerably since the late 1970s, when greater attention
began to be paid to the other two forms of rent that Marx had identified, forms that
fundamentally choreographed much of the struggles over urban space. Indeed, the levels
of DRI and DRII derive from an entirely different process. These forms of rent refer to the
way in which the mobilization of a particular piece of land affects the value of the

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The Urbanization of Capital and the Production of Capitalist Natures

commodities produced on or through it. In other words, DRI and DRII are strictly parallel
to the role of technological and organizational change in determining value as socially
necessary labor time (and play similarly important roles in inter-capitalist competition).
DRI is related to the absolute, relative, or relational qualities of land as a means of
production: it refers to the different qualities of land with equal amounts of capital
invested in it. These differing qualities are the result of given, but usually historically
produced, socio-spatial differences between different plots of land with respect to their
ability to sustain the production of value when mobilized in a specific capital circulation
process. Indeed, urban land of different qualities and locational attributes requires
different mobilizations of living labor to produce a given commodity with a given
magnitude of capital investment. DRI, therefore, refers to the position of a particular plot
of land in relation to all other possible positions and/or to its position within a larger
geographical configuration (Swyngedouw 1992). Consider, for example, the premium on
urban land with better infrastructural amenities, or connectivity. What is intriguing here
is that “superior location” does not derive from “naturally” given characteristics but
entirely from historically and socio-spatially produced conditions. The historically-
geographically produced configurations place a specific location in a distinctive
(advantageous or disadvantageous) position vis-à-vis other places. Consider, for example,
the difference in rent (or land price) between a Silicon Valley location, on the one hand,
and a rival location on the outskirts of, say, Cairo, on the other. In sum, urban DRI derives
from the accrued advantages that have been produced over time as the collective
outcome of many successive rounds of capital investments in space and its associated
uneven development. These collectively or socially produced “locational” effects have a
great (and, over time, increasing) effect on land rents, something that can be cashed in
“freely” by the landowner, irrespective of his or her own capital investment in the land. It
follows that all manner of individual investments, collective interventions or state policies
directly affect the magnitude of DRI. In addition, this opens up a vast terrain of possible
trade-offs or choices for capitalists. For example, they can decide either to invest in
superior technologies or to relocate to cheaper locations (or do both simultaneously).
Much of the changing geographies of capital accumulation and its associated dynamic
mosaic of uneven geographical development derive exactly from the space/technology
trade-offs that capitalists make on a daily basis.

DRII also derives from different qualities of land, but is generated by differential capital
investments in pieces of land of equal quality. In other words, the qualities of urban land
can be enhanced (and over time greatly so) by capital investment (engineering,
infrastructural improvements, new or upgraded buildings, new investments for new
functions in the built environment, etc.). This form of investment is strictly speaking
comparable to capital investment in technological or organizational improvements in the
production process. To the extent that capital investment in the labor process reduces the
socially necessary labor time, extra surplus value is generated. Marx defines this surplus,
made possible by the sinking of capital into land, as DRII. In sum, while rent accrues to
the landowner by virtue of the monopoly ownership of land, the magnitude of land rent

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The Urbanization of Capital and the Production of Capitalist Natures

(and hence the price of land) is composed of four distinct components: monopoly and
absolute rent, and DRI and DRII.

Now that we have summarized Marx’s theory of the origins and magnitude of land rent
and some of its applications, we are in a position to explore the vital but highly
contradictory roles that (urban) land rent plays in the capital accumulation process. Rent
constitutes a drain on capital accumulation in the sense that, while value is generated
through the labor process, rent is appropriated by the landowner purely by virtue of
ownership of the land. From this vantage point, landownership is fundamentally parasitic.
Moreover, it pits landed capital against productive capital, often resulting in frenzied
inter-capitalist struggles between landowners and other capitalists. However, this
parasitic function is complemented by a series of vitally important functions of
landownership.

First, the historical process of enclosing and privatizing agricultural land was one of the
central processes through which a “free” and landless labor reserve army was produced
as the separation of workers from their means of subsistence underpinned the process of
proletarianization and the making of a “free” working class that had no other choice than
to sell their own bodily labor force as a commodity on the labor market. This form of
accumulation by dispossession is a still ongoing process that in part accounts for the
accelerating migration of landless workers to the megacities of the Global South and
North. Second, land rent also plays powerful economic and regulatory roles in capital
accumulation. The rent relation orders the uses of land and organizes the spatial division
of labor through its influence in allocating different moments, activities, and socio-
technical forms of production to different places and, as such, land rent organizes and
regulates the landscapes of production and consumption. Thirdly, through this allocation
mechanism, land rent helps coordinate capital investment by assigning different forms of
capital to distinct locations and activities, producing an unequal and uneven spatial
division of labor. Fourthly, rent mediates and helps to regulate the distribution of
investment across interest-bearing, productive, and landed capital. Finally, urban
landownership serves also a decidedly ideological function, as it helps to legitimize the
commodification and private ownership of everything as the basis of and for social
organization. Although landownership constitutes a barrier for capital accumulation
(productive capital would be more profitable and the cost of reproduction of the labor
force would be lower if part of the profits and wages did not have to be surrendered to
landowners), ownership of land is one of the pillars of a system of generalized
commodification and private ownership of means of production and reproduction.

All this turns land rent into one of the most powerful and contradictory aspects of the
urban political economy of capitalism. Not only does it pit landed capital against
productive and interest-bearing capital (with the associated intra-class conflicts), but it
also shapes the conflicts between land for reproductive use (in housing, for example),
land for resource exploitation (or ecological reserve or park), land as a form of capital
investment (for landowners), land as a productive asset (comparable to other means of

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The Urbanization of Capital and the Production of Capitalist Natures

production), and land as form of fictitious capital that circulates as a purely financial
asset (for financial capital).

This complex set of contradictions points to the need for the state (or another extra-
economic configuration) to regulate and coordinate the uses of urban land. Indeed, of all
the diverse means of production and reproduction, urban land is among the most tightly
regulated and intensely contested. Not only is landownership (i.e., what one can do with
one’s land) often strictly regulated by the state through zoning, building codes, planning
(among others) but is itself an active agent in land markets (particularly through zoning,
infrastructure planning and construction, public investment in urban development,
eminent domain laws, and the like). Needless to say, an intense (inter)class struggle
unfolds over land use, land rights, and access to land. Small changes in the rules
governing land can have an extraordinary impact on the level of rent and, consequently,
on profits generated through landownership. Consider, for example, how the state’s
mobilization of “eminent domain” has been systematically used to dispossess some
landowners and transfer the dispossessed lands to fractions of capital guaranteeing a
higher rent and return (e.g., in the construction of railroads, airports, seaports, large
industrial estates, and the like).

In recent years, attention has moved to the increasing role of land rent as claims on
future value and the role of urban land as a financialized asset. As David Harvey argues,
titles to land are functioning and circulating increasingly as forms of fictitious capital,
comparable (albeit not identical) to other financial assets (such as shares or bonds). Rent
has become one of the possible forms of generating future claims on value, and land titles
have become integral parts of financial capital investment portfolios (Harvey 1974;
Harvey 1982a). Land markets increasingly function as markets in (paper) titles to future
returns and they have become an integral part of, often speculative, fictitious capital
circulation and accumulation (Andreucci et al. 2017). Arguably, this is the fully developed
capitalist form of the mobilization of urban land. While ultimately still grounded in the
formation of absolute, monopoly, DRI, and DRII forms of rent, there is a complex and
dynamic relation at work under capitalism that combines the continuous production and
transformation of locational rents (e.g., through speculative real estate urban
redevelopment), the production of temporary monopoly rents (cashing in on design,
climate, amenities, “cultural capital,” and the like) (see Harvey 2009), the involvement of
the state in producing geographical configurations that enhance DRI for specific
locations, and so on. The 2007–2008 financial crisis undoubtedly arose out of the
extraordinary speculative carousel of increasing rents while turning these promises into
fictitious capital assets circulating through complex derivative financial instruments. As
with all forms of fictitious capital formation, these speculative carousels are sustained as
long as the promises for securing future value entitlements are maintained but eventually
build up to an inevitable crash. The recent history of global capitalism conclusively shows
how urban land and land rent play a pivotal role in capital accumulation while
intensifying the very contradictions that are the signature hallmark of mature capitalism.
It is not a surprise, therefore, that urban class and other social struggles unfold precisely

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The Urbanization of Capital and the Production of Capitalist Natures

around the dynamics and processes through which the rent map is reorganized and the
modalities through which rent articulates with other forms of capital circulation.

3. UrbanNatural: Capitalist Urbanization of

Nature
While rent expresses, among other things, how privately owned concrete use values
vested in different types of land become transfigured in the abstract universality of
exchange values, this process becomes even more clearly discernable in the way in which
all manner of non-human stuff becomes metabolized and urbanized as “resources.”
Indeed, over the past two decades or so, Marxist thought has engaged much more
directly with the urban environmental question as one that articulates the dynamics of
capitalism with the process of urbanizing nature. “There is nothing unnatural about New
York City,” David Harvey famously wrote in 1996 (Harvey 1996).

Under capitalism, all manner of non-human matter becomes increasingly enrolled in the
circuits of capital accumulation through which they are both transformed and de-/re-
territorialized as commodified “resources.” As Guy Debord insisted, “Urbanism is the
mode of appropriation of the natural and human environment by capitalism” (Debord
1994:121). This enrolling unfolds through a process of enclosing, privatizing, and socio-
ecologically transforming and metabolizing “physical matter such as water or cows into
useable, ownable, and tradable commodities” (Coe, Kelly, and Yeung 2007:161) with all
sorts of social conflict and ecological problems as a consequence. An extraordinary socio-
metabolic rift shifts all manner of natures—uranium, oil, food, copper, sand, for example—
into the urbanization process through combined labor and technological and physical
metabolic processes.

The importance of the social and material production of urban nature has recently
emerged as an area of importance within historical-geographical materialist thought
(Castree 2002; Foster 2000; O’Connor 1998; Smith 1984; Heynen, Kaika, and
Swyngedouw 2006). The interrelated web of socio-ecological relations that brings about
highly uneven urban environments, as well as shaping processes of uneven geographical
development at other geographical scales, have become pivotal terrains around which
political action crystallizes and socio-ecological mobilizations take place (Arboleda 2015).
As Jason Moore demonstrated, the history of both accumulation and urbanization is
produced by the socio-physical appropriation and metabolism of both human labor and
non-human matter (Moore 2015).

From this perspective, Marxist political ecologists are not primarily concerned with the
city as a dense and heterogeneous assemblage of accumulated socio-natural things and
gathered bodies in a concentrated space but rather with the particular forms of capitalist
urbanization as a socio-ecological process whose functioning is predicated upon ever
longer, often globally structured, socio-ecological metabolic flows (Swyngedouw 2006).
Using Marx’s concepts of metabolism and circulation, these flows not only meld things

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The Urbanization of Capital and the Production of Capitalist Natures

together—natures and social classes, for example—but do so in socially, ecologically, and

geographically articulated (but uneven) ways that produce socio-ecological class conflict,
disastrous environmental conditions, and forms of combined and uneven socio-ecological
collapse. The key question for Marxist urban political ecology is, therefore, not about
what kinds of natures are present in the city, but rather about the capitalist form of
urbanization of natures: the process through which all manner of non-human “stuff’ is
socially mobilized, discursively scripted, imagined, economically enrolled (enclosed,
privatized, and commodified), and physically metabolized/transformed to produce socio-
ecological assemblages that support the urbanization process (Heynen, Kaika, and
Swyngedouw 2005). Consider, for example, how dependent the purportedly de-
materialized affective economies that animate much of contemporary urban social and
cultural life (IT networks, social media, smart networks, eco-architecture, informatics,
and the like) are upon the following: mobilizing a range of minerals (e.g., Coltan
[columbite-tantalite]), feverish resource grabbing (often through tactics of dispossession)
in socio-ecologically vulnerable places; production chains that are shaped by deeply
uneven and often dehumanizing socio-ecological metabolisms (material and immaterial
production processes) to render these non-human natures useful in ITC hardware; and a
“re-cycling” process that returns much of the e-waste to the socio-ecologically dystopian
geographies of, for example, Mumbai’s or Dhaka’s suburban informal wastelands. Indeed,
the excesses of urbanization—from waste to CO2—are customarily decanted onto the
socio-ecological dumping grounds on the periphery of cities.

The capitalist form of planetary urbanization and the socio-ecological and political-
economic processes that animate its combined and uneven socio-ecological development
on a world scale are now generally recognized as key drivers of anthropogenic climate
change and other socio-environmental transformations: for example, biodiversity loss, soil
erosion, large eco-infrastructures such as dams, deforestation, resource extraction and
deep-geological mining, pollution, and the galloping commodification of all manner of
natures (Swyngedouw 2018). Capitalist urbanization is the key driver of the
Anthropocene (or rather Capitalocene) (Moore 2015).

Marxist urban scholars and activists began to dissect the urbanization of nature as a
process of continuous de- and re-territorialization of socio-ecological metabolic
circulatory flows, organized through predominantly capitalist social relations sustained
by privately or publicly managed socio-physical conduits and networks and nurtured by
particular imaginaries of what nature is or should be. Such produced urban socio-physical
environments embody and reflect the unequal power and associated asymmetrical socio-
ecological living conditions inscribed in socio-ecological metabolisms. “Scarcity” or
“socio-ecological disintegration” resides, therefore, not in nature but in the socially
constructed and utterly contingent modalities of its spatially and socio-ecologically
variegated enrolling within urbanizing circuits of capital circulation and accumulation.

The production of urban environments, and the “metabolic vehicles” (such as

infrastructures of all kinds, the technical conditions that permit the flow and
metabolization of energy, food, information, bodies, and things) that secure its

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The Urbanization of Capital and the Production of Capitalist Natures

functioning are of course mediated by institutional arrangements that are often nominally
democratic but are nonetheless necessarily deeply committed to assuring the
uninterrupted expansion of the capital circulation process (Virilio 1986). “Metabolic
vehicles” are the hard and soft infrastructures through which non-human matter becomes
transformed and express in their techno-political functioning multiple relations of power
in which social actors strive to create and defend socio-physical environments that serve
their interests and satisfy their desires. It is precisely this articulation between state,
class, and environmental translation that renders urban socio-ecological processes,
including the question of “sustainability,” highly conflictive and subject to intense political
and social struggle. Consider, for example, how the urban rebellion that engulfed Turkey
with rarely seen intensity in the summer of 2013 emblematically sparked off with a
conflict over a park and a few trees on Istanbul’s Taksim Square. Also consider how
climate summits meet with increasingly intense street protests (Swyngedouw 2015).

Therefore, Marxist urban political ecology is concerned with the democratic and
emancipatory political process through which such politically embedded ecological
transformation takes place. Rather than invoking a normative notion of environmental
justice or of an idealized (balanced) nature, UPE insists on focusing on the realities of the
presumed democratic political equality in the decision-making processes that organize
socio-ecological transformation and choreograph the management of the commons. In
doing so, the attention shifts from a techno-managerial or ethical perspective to a
resolutely political vantage point—articulated around the notion of equality—that
considers the ecological conundrum to be inexorably associated with democratic political
acting, and focuses on the fundamentally politicized conditions through which natures
become produced (Swyngedouw 2014).

Ultimately, the intellectual challenge posed by the socio-environmental conditions shaped

by planetary urbanization must be to extend the intellectual imaginary and the powers of
thought and practice to overcome the contemporary cultural impasse identified by
Jameson that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than changes in the
[eco-]capitalist order and its inequities” (Jameson 2003:73). This is the courage of the
intellect that is now required more than ever: a courage that takes us beyond the
impotent confines of a sustainability discourse and leaves the existing combined and
uneven, but decidedly urbanized, socio-ecological dynamics fundamentally intact.

4. Conclusion
Capitalism has always been and will continue to be a profoundly geographical project
intent on incorporating places, peoples, and environments within its circuits while
producing new geographies. As Henry Lefebvre insisted, “Capitalism has found itself able
to attenuate (if not resolve) its internal contradictions for a century, and consequently, in
the hundred years since the writing of Capital, it has succeeded in achieving ‘growth.’ We
cannot calculate at what price, but we do know the means: by occupying space, by
producing a space” (Lefebvre 1976:21). Capitalist urbanization expresses (and is an

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The Urbanization of Capital and the Production of Capitalist Natures

active “moment” in) the expanded reproduction of capital and the social relations upon
which capital accumulation is predicated. As such, urbanity embodies the multiple
tensions and contradictions that animate the circulation of capital. It is simultaneously a
site of production and a space for reproduction. It offers all manner of possibilities to
appropriate value as well as sinking value into place. Urbanization is a formidable force
of production and a contested space for organizing the reproduction of both labor and
capital. It is the process that exemplifies par excellence the de- and re-territorializing
dynamics of both human labor and non-human natures through which the circulation of
capital is organized.

Not surprisingly, therefore, the capitalist city has been a pivotal arena for class struggle
as well as the terrain over which it was and continues to be fought. Marx and Marxist
urban scholars and activists have indeed demonstrated that the city is both the greatest
oeuvre of capital in all its manifold contradictions and the privileged site through which a
post-capitalist world will have to be wrought. As Henri Lefebvre argued more than forty
years ago, socialist transformation is about the “Right to the City,” understood as the
right to co-organize and co-manage the commons of the city. A Communist society will
have to be an urban one, or it will never come into being at all.

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