Session 6: From Capital to Reform

This seminar aims at building a genealogy of capitalism through the spaces it has produced. In a way, this is an attempt to revisit Leonardo Benevolo’s The Origin of Town Planning, a seminal study in which the Italian historian charted the evolution of Western urbanism in light of capitalistic development. While Benevolo located the beginnings of urbanism in the 19^th century reformist tradition, we argue that the very ground zero of both urbanism and planning had to be situated in the English ‘Agricultural Revolution’ of the 18^th century and in the concomitant colonial appropriation of North America. Within these two events, not only large masses of people were dispossessed of their means of livelihood, but the entire urban territory was re-configured in order to facilitate capitalism’s primary goal: the extraction of surplus value from the entire spectrum of social relationships. The seminar will reread all the most important stages that followed this seminal event: the building of large infrastructural systems such as canals and railways, the commodification of domestic space, the rise of the factory and the technical construction of the labor force, the birth of the welfare state and the development of reformist policies that attempted to soften or counter the consequences of capitalist development. We will maintain that the rise of urbanism and planning were parallel to both the increasing commodification of land use and the working class’ resistance to their subaltern position to capital. During the seminar we will discuss subjects, politics, policies, and projects that are central to the formation of the contemporary hegemony of capitalistic social relationships and we will look at how the engineering and building of urban space became a crucial step in ensuring the reproduction of capitalist relationships.

Image: John Constable, "The Hay Wain", 1821.