GEOG 2P03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Surplus Labour, Urban Density, Bourgeoisie
15 Nov 2016
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Document Summary
Argument: if the modern city is a space of capital, capitalists and their chief boosters, the bourgeoisie (or middle-class), tend to fear urban modernity because it is so dif cult to control. More than anything else capital needs certainty, order, and risk-lessness (geographic, social, and economic) to guarantee the surplus value (or pro ts) that drive the system. Sprawling suburbs replaced the congestion of inner cities, etc: modernity, the chaotic plane upon which modernization confronts the natural and social world in urban environments; the condition of the con ict, the re ection of the irony. Dostoevsky"s time to our own, it has been impossible to grasp and embrace the modern world"s potentialities without loathing and ghting against some of its most palpable realities. No wonder then that, as the great modernist and anti-modernist. Kierkegaard said, the deepest modern seriousness must express itself through irony .
