Spaces of Hope (California Studies in Critical Human Geography) [Paperback]

David Harvey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 29, 2000 | Series: California Studies in Critical Human Geography (Book 7)

As the twentieth century drew to a close, the rich were getting richer; power was concentrating within huge corporations; vast tracts of the earth were being laid waste; three quarters of the earth's population had no control over its destiny and no claim to basic rights. There was nothing new in this. What was new was the virtual absence of any political will to do anything about it. Spaces of Hope takes issue with this.
David Harvey brings an exciting perspective to two of the principal themes of contemporary social discourse: globalization and the body. Exploring the uneven geographical development of late-twentieth-century capitalism, and placing the working body in relation to this new geography, he finds in Marx's writings a wealth of relevant analysis and theoretical insight. In order to make much-needed changes, Harvey maintains, we need to become the architects of a different living and working environment and to learn to bridge the micro-scale of the body and the personal and the macro-scale of global political economy.
Utopian movements have for centuries tried to construct a just society. Harvey looks at their history to ask why they failed and what the ideas behind them might still have to offer. His devastating description of the existing urban environment (Baltimore is his case study) fuels his argument that we can and must use the force of utopian imagining against all who say "there is no alternative." He outlines a new kind of utopian thought, which he calls dialectical utopianism, and refocuses our attention on possible designs for a more equitable world of work and living with nature. If any political ideology or plan is to work, he argues, it must take account of our human qualities. Finally, Harvey dares to sketch a very personal utopian vision in an appendix, one that leaves no doubt about his own geography of hope.

Editorial Reviews

Review

An inspiring, well written and beautifully illustrated book, and one that I hope will help to change the trajectory of social existence as well as academic inquiry. -- Diane Perrons It is refreshing to read a book that not only represents a major scholarly achievement, but that also breathes enthusiasm, commitment, displays a clearly situated positionality, and is energised by the belief that a better world is there to be fought for and made. Students of the urban condition should be grateful to David Harvey for his rigorous and challenging scholarship and for the creativity of his imaginative vision. There is much to praise. One thing I love is the way it is written. Harvey's prose is so clear and precise ... I was reminded of how consistently Harvey has insisted on the centrality of the geographical to both the critique of this world and the possibility of the next. We could not wish for a more compelling ambassador. This is a very intriguing book. It bristles with ideas and the scope of Harvey's interests seem to be ever growing ! his analyses are rich with insight. An inspiring, well written and beautifully illustrated book, and one that I hope will help to change the trajectory of social existence as well as academic inquiry. It is refreshing to read a book that not only represents a major scholarly achievement, but that also breathes enthusiasm, commitment, displays a clearly situated positionality, and is energised by the belief that a better world is there to be fought for and made. Students of the urban condition should be grateful to David Harvey for his rigorous and challenging scholarship and for the creativity of his imaginative vision. There is much to praise. One thing I love is the way it is written. Harvey's prose is so clear and precise ... I was reminded of how consistently Harvey has insisted on the centrality of the geographical to both the critique of this world and the possibility of the next. We could not wish for a more compelling ambassador. This is a very intriguing book. It bristles with ideas and the scope of Harvey's interests seem to be ever growing ! his analyses are rich with insight. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Inside Flap

"There is no question that David Harvey's work has been one of the most important, influential, and imaginative contributions to the development of human geography since the Second World War. . . . His readings of Marx are arresting and original--a remarkably fresh return to the foundational texts of historical materialism."--Derek Gregory, author of Geographical Imaginations

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Product Details

• Paperback: 303 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (March 29, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520225783
• ISBN-13: 978-0520225787
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #251,318 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

David Harvey teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and is the author of many books including Social Justice and the City, The Condition of Postmodernity, The Limits to Capital, A Brief History of Neoliberalism and Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Time and Space and Karl Marx, September 10, 2001

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Panopticonman "panopticonman" (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Spaces of Hope (California Studies in Critical Human Geography) (Paperback)

In his introduction to "Spaces of Hope," David Harvey relates how much the times have changed since he began teaching Marx's Capital in the early 1970s. Back then, he didn't openly specify the content of the class in the course catalog -- he felt sure the powers that were at Johns Hopkins at the time would shut him down. At that time, he tells us, no one in U.S. academia (except for a few foreign professors) had ever really read Marx. The interest at that time was directly related to the recent "revolutionary" fervor time of the late 60s/early 70s wherein Mao and Che Guevera, the Weather Underground, etc., were countercultural icons and Marx's Captial was seen to be the source of their revolutionary program. When the Berlin wall came down, Marx's reputation as came down with it. Now, thirty years after he started teaching it, Harvey finds he has fewer students than ever, but that the text itself is perhaps even more relevant now than it has ever been. He notes that convincing others of its relevance is a difficlt task these days partly because there is no political apparatus to give weight to Marx's ideas, but also because post-modernism and identity politics have tended to denigrate mass political movements as "master narratives" that cannot be trusted. Harvey thinks it's time to get a new revolution going, and he thinks Marx's observations go a long way toward helping us think clearly about the world in which we live and how we might change it.

After the personal note sounded in the introduction, Harvey then takes up his real program which is a history of the production of space and under capitalism in the service of trying to create his new revolutionary consciousness to ameliorate, sabotage, rewrite, or replace the prevailing capitalist discourse with new ways of seeing our bodies, the spaces we create and live in. He discusses our impact on the earth and other species and explores new forms of consciousness that grow out of that new sensitivity. At the center of the book is an examination of how deindustrialization has gutted his Baltimore over the past 30 years he's lived there, the rise of the racialized service economy, the rise of the real estate speculators in cahoots with city planners giving massive tax abatements in mostly failed attempts to revitalize the city. This is a subject Harvey knows intimately, and in his description of Baltimore's woes he tells the disheartening story of so many mid-sized American cities which have been struggling to stay afloat during the exportation of blue collar jobs starting in the 70s. Harvey's chapters on the body as an accumulation strategy (quoting Donna Haraway) offer a good history and discussion of the post-modern rejection of the Des Cartes body/mind duality. He considers the body in the Foucauldian sense of society and its spaces and regimes enforcing discipline and docility, and also considers how our bodies are shaped by capital -- work hours, repetitive acts, the food we eat, the tobacco we smoke -- but interestingly, also discusses the body in terms of variable capital, Marx's terminology.

Harvey does a credible job of resurrecting a classic for a new generation, showing how it relates to current postmodern themes. One of his best ideas is to see that we have been in the process of creating utopias in two main ways over the past 500 years or so. The grounded utopias of Sir Thomas More and others, who draw maps and imagine the human relations that might occur in the spaces they create, and the "process utopias" like Adam Smith's view of the invisible hand of captilism making us all better, clothing us, feeding us, improving us. Harvey's most powerful explorations have to do with how capital has created the spaces that capital requires, mostly to the detriment of people, but to the benefit of capital.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A bit dry, but brilliant., June 7, 2003

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C. Phillips-Sears "Eredien" (MA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Spaces of Hope (California Studies in Critical Human Geography) (Paperback)

There's a lot of theory here.
Don't let it scare you away.

This book is a brilliant examination of ideas that run modern society in America--and ideas that could have, but didn't. Harvey asks hard, delicate questions that poke at the very framework of modern society and makes you question assumptions about people and cities that you didn't even realize you had. Utopia has never been so interesting.

The appendix, in which Harvey delineates a society wherein he uses the ideas he describes in the book, is extremely interesting and contradictory. Worth the price of the book alone.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Past the 3rd way, September 26, 2000

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D. Check (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Spaces of Hope (California Studies in Critical Human Geography) (Paperback)

In this work, Harvey seems much more explicitly concerned with the political than in his previous works. While his former works provide excellent an analysis of the present situation, it is this book that takes that total (Marxist) critique, and then provides an analytic from which effective political resistance to the third way might emerge. He argues that those in opposition must be, in some ways, Utopian; that a large part of the failure of critiques of the third way have been that they can dangle no carrot that looks any better.

An understanding of Harvey's prior works, especially Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, as well as Limits to Capital would probably be very helpful to a complete understanding of this work.