It seems to be almost ingrained in our minds that cities are the land of opportunity and that moving to them will almost overnight transform a hard working person into someone of stature and wealth. This false promise is what has and continues to bring immigrants to the United States. Taking a step back and forgetting the United States as a whole, let us focus on the city itself as a generator of “fake” opportunity.

In The Right to the City , David Harvey states countless times that cities are the device of “geographical and social concentrations of a surplus product.” What exactly does this sentiment mean? “Capitalists have to produce a surplus product in order to produce surplus value; this in turn must be reinvested in order to generate more surplus value.”(The Right to the City) Basically in order for me as a capitalist to make money, I cannot simply break even on my investment, if I want to invest again to make more money. As stated before cities allow this to happen. This leads to the obvious link between capitalism and urbanization.

Throughout time cities have been transformed due to capitalism and the sparkling, pristine mega city, the “generic city” as Koolhaas calls it, becomes a playground for the rich and hell for the poor. Cities, though they provide opportunity, provide it only to certain classes, thus producing a social ladder which is not climbable. It is heartbreaking to know this when thousands of people have come from all over the world to climb the not climbable. This has proved to be true time and time again.

The first example of capitalist city morphing due to surplus is that if Paris in the mid 1800s. At this time Paris was in a state of unemployment and poverty, Napoleon then took power and promised prosperity. To deal with this he set out building up infrastructural and other grand works around the world such as the Suez Canal, in France, other infrastructural entities such as improved railway network, harbors, and water control, allowed people to get back to work. Back in Paris Napoleon hired Haussmann to revitalize the city’s public works. During this revitalization process, Haussmann demolished anything that stood in his way of transforming Paris into the Utopian paradise he imagined in his head. Many neighborhoods were destroyed, in those neighborhoods were the poor and unemployed which the revitalization projects were originally meant to “help”. In essence the poor and destitute were thrown under the bus in order to make happy the capitalist monster.

This series of destroying impoverished in order to boost the capitalist villain does not stop in Paris, in fact it has happened many times since and continues to happen. In New York City,  Robert Moses attempted to re-engineer the city, again by building up the infrastructure for the extremely wealthy. Again many neighborhoods containing the poor or working class suffered the wrath of Moses. Jane Jacobs, a writer and activist, sought to derail his plans and eventually, Moses’s ideals were no longer favored.

It is apparent that this “infrastructure building” always stands in opposition to the poor, those who can do very little to stop the destruction and bullying. To reflect back on the past readings of this class,  the slums of Mumbai have been marked for the same destructive fate as the previous examples, again, to boost consumerism and capitalism.

There has to be a way to allow both the necessary capitalist agendas while aiding the destitute. Perhaps though, in the current state of things, these two notions are like oil and water. Let us hope for our future that the needs of the people are taken into account during the development of cites rather than turning them into monotonous land unfit for living.