David Harvey's Geography (RLE Social Cultural Geography) by John L. Paterson

Author:John L. Paterson [Paterson, John L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Human Geography, Science, Earth Sciences, Geography
ISBN: 9781317906520
Google: haysAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-01-23T05:55:51+00:00

Class-monopoly rents arise because there exists a class of owners of “resource units” – the land and the relatively permanent improvements incorporated in it – who are willing to release the units under their command only if they receive a positive return above some arbitrary level (Marx, 1967, Chapter 45). As a class these owners have the power always to achieve some minimum rate of return (Harvey, 1974b, p. 241).

Harvey suggested that a power struggle would ensue between low-income tenants and their landlords. Whereas the landlords would be seeking maximum rents, the tenants would attempt to use their political power to impose minimum housing standards or rent controls. The landlords might then attempt to block these moves in order to maintain their income. The rate of return set through the working out of this conflict was best interpreted as a class-monopoly rent (Harvey, 1974b, p. 242). Elsewhere in the housing market, suburban middle-income and upper-income groups were confronted by a class of speculator-developers who might attempt to manipulate zoning decisions to gain greater returns.

If the speculator-developer can persuade upper-income groups of the virtues of a certain kind of housing in a particular neighbourhood, gain complete control over the political process, and so on, then the advantage lies with the speculator-developer. If consumers are unimpressed … and have firm control over the political mechanisms for land-use regulation, … then the class-monopoly power of the speculator-developers will be contained (Harvey, 1974b, p. 243).

Harvey asserted that class-monopoly rent appeared inevitable in capitalist housing markets where a hierarchical structure existed, rent being passed from a low-income tenant to a landlord to a speculator-developer to a financial institution at the top (Harvey, 1974b, p. 243). This structure was necessary in order that the government could coordinate the housing market through financial institutions to avoid economic crises (Harvey, 1974b, p. 244). Harvey then repeated in more detail the analysis in Harvey and Chatterjee (1974, pp. 24-30) of the structure of the Baltimore housing submarkets with respect to the type of institutional involvement (Harvey, 1974b, pp. 245-9).

Harvey characterised the city as consisting of man-made islands of absolute space on which class-monopolies produced absolute scarcities (Figure 4.2). These absolute spaces were constructed primarily by the activity of financial institutions in the housing market (Harvey, 1974b, p. 249). Residential differentiation was thus not the result of social ecological processes, consumer preferences, utility-maximising behaviour and so on, although such features helped to maintain the island-like structure. There is a deeper process at work’, asserted Harvey. ‘Financial institutions and government manage the urbanization process to achieve economic growth, economic stability and to defuse social discontent’ (Harvey, 1974b, p. 250). Harvey believed that the processes he had isolated could be generalised to all advanced capitalist nations although the particular manifestations of these processes could not (Harvey, 1974b, p. 250).

Turning his attention to the role of ‘class interest’ in the realisation of class-monopoly rent, Harvey distinguished between subjective classes, which described the consciousness which groups had of their position within a social structure,

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