Castillo (2003) Neil Smith’s Uneven Development: the Capitalist Production of Space (original) (raw)
Related papers
Introduction: Uneven Development 25 Years On: Space, Nature and the Geographies of Capitalism
New Political Economy, 2011
This article, along with this special symposium, engages with the lasting significance of Neil Smith's Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space 25 years after its publication. Few books have made such productive contributions to expanding the horizons of political economy, particularly the spatiality of political economy, as has Uneven Development. This introductory article explores some of these aspects of the book's significance for the readership of New Political Economy; it remarks on the lasting if not growing significance of Smith's intellectual and political contributions two and a half decades after one of his, and the discipline of geography's, crowning achievements. At the same time it foreshadows ways in which the text can continue to push our understanding of the interconnections among nature, capital and the production of space.
History, space and nature: building theory from the exception.
Uneven Development endeavours to derive a theory of uneven geographical development by putting in motion a ‘historical dialogue’ between Marx's critical theorisation of capitalism and the geograhical reality of capitalism at the close of the twentieth century, and by theorising the relations between material nature and the spatial dynamics of capitalist accumulation. The result, however, is a theory of uneven development predicated on a logical rather than a historical conception of capitalism, which furthermore supersedes the question of the production of nature in conceptualising the spatial dynamics of (contemporary) capitalism. This article argues for a re-theorisation of uneven geographical development that considers the production of nature, namely extractive industry, as a point of departure in theorising the spatial dynamics of contemporary capitalist accumulation, focusing briefly on the concentration and centralisation of capital.
Geography and Capitalism: Rethinking Contradictions
2019
A workshop was held in Rome in May 2015 based on David Harvey's last book Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. Considering different research perspectives on the topic, this essay proposes a change of perspective in the analysis of the capitalist relation moving from the concept of contradiction to the concept of crisis. Embracing this novel perspective will only be possible understanding the process of territorialization in its broad articulation. Above all, this will imply to move beyond constitutive territoriality while bringing other articulations of the territoriality into the foreground, especially configurative and ontological territorialities. This allows reflecting on the globalitarian capitalistic relation in a specifically geographical perspective.
Old and New Contradictions of Capitalism: Geographical Perspectives
2019
The modern capitalistic system coincides – except for some sporadic, few cases – with the World System. As for other main political events, when capitalism triumphs that is the moment of its decline. Reasoning on the contradictions of capitalism, much more can be said from the geographical perspective in addition to what Harvey wrote in his last work. A key role, indeed, can be played by the geographical levels of the capitalistic processes, about the consequences on the new phases of poverty, on the uses of technology in a territorial sense on the use of the environmental heritage. This contribution proposes some reflections on the Harvey's book, focusing the attention on the geographical dimension of the capitalism's processes, on its consequences on territories and on the relations between human beings and the environments.
International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2020
Capital shapes space and space shapes capital. For decades, geographers have stressed that space is not an abstract dimension or some container to be filled. Space is rather formed actively through social relations. Capitalist society is marked by a particular kind of social relation: class conflict. Class conflict forms the basic ingredient in capital accumulation, insofar as the latter relies on the ongoing exploitation of labor. But capital accumulation is riddled with contradiction. Highlighted here is capitalism's moving contradiction: between the need for human labor and the need to reduce the duration of that labor. Geographers have shown how this contradiction is “fixed” in and through space. From the local to the global, the movement of capital relies on patterns of uneven development, which generate violent divisions between regions and between bodies. In this way capital transforms space in its own image: as a terrain of conflict and competition. Radical geographers explore how space is transformed otherwise, in ways that abolish existing social relations. ***uncorrected proof, there are some typos***
Geography, nature, and the question of development
Dialogues in Human Geography
During the last decade, geography has gained new salience as a development factor in the public imagination and policy realms, through the work of scholars located outside the discipline. Jared Diamond and Jeffrey Sachs have popularized the idea that a physical geographic backcloth, first nature, profoundly shapes the conditions of possibility for global economic prosperity or poverty, and sustainability. Geographical economists have built microfoundational accounts of second nature: how uneven geographies emerge on a uniform biophysical backcloth. ‘New’ development economists, now profoundly critical of neoliberal globalization, argue for both Keynesian and Hayekian alternatives. Notwithstanding their differences, these communities of scholarship share a sociospatial ontology that underwrites a stageist, teleological conception of economic development, to be made possible by globalizing capitalism. A geographical, relational/dialectical conception of the relationship between the ec...