Harvey’s work of political theory delves into how cities are used as battle grounds by capital – but his reading offers hope, drawing on historical examples of urban rebellion from the Paris Commune, Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War, the 1968 uprisings, Occupy Wall Street to the Brixton riots. He elucidates how it is possible to rebel against the constrictive structure of neoliberal capitalism through a series of historical essays couched in Marxist theory. He responds to Lefebvre with his own definition: “The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.” Even in compact, historical cities such as Venice which are not being rebuilt in the sense of significant urban demolition and redevelopment, they are still being altered in a painstakingly gradual and insidious way.

Harvey says that citizens should have a “radical” power to shape “the ways our cities are made and remade” and they must claim that power through anti-capitalist struggle. Later on in the book, he presents the idea of the “urban commons” and how urban commonalities are being threatened by cultural commodification by property developers, the tourist trade and politicians themselves in their quest for city branding. Urbanism is political and cannot be detached from class struggle. Building a truly socialist city, in which every citizen has an equal right to the city, must happen through the overthrow of extractive capitalism – “That is the city air that can make people truly free.”

Catherine Bennett