David Harvey on gentrification in Baltimore and Barcelona
Way back in March of 2008, just as we were getting things up and running out here in the land of AK Baltimore, I helped to organize The City from Below Conference, a three-day gathering of activists, academics, artists, and other all-around interesting folks, at the 2640 Space, a radical community center that’s a part of the Red Emma’s proliferation here in town. City from Below was an amazing experience; it was a chance to really see theory and praxis interacting and shaping each other in a multiplicity of ways. The City from Below conference actually makes an appearance in an upcoming AK Press book, Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the U.S., which I have been frantically proofreading for the past week. Reading over the transcript from the “Organizing Models” roundtable that appears in Whirlwinds reminded me that I’ve been sitting on some of the videos from CfB for a while now, meaning to post them up on the AK Blog from time to time, and I’ve decided that today is the day to start that project!
The original AK Baltimore office (we’ve now moved to a larger space, stay tuned for more details on that later this month) was actually right up the street from 2640, and it served as the main organizing headquarters in the lead-up to the City from Below conference … and as a supplementary space for interviews and small working-group meetings during the conference itself.
One of the most interesting videos from that weekend was actually shot in the AK office. It’s urban sociologist and Marxist geographer David Harvey in dialogue with our friend Marina, an activist and documentary videographer from Barcelona. In the video, David talks about the history of urban development and gentrification in Baltimore, and in Barcelona. It’s an interesting conversation, and a useful one, especially for those of us who are thinking hard about the nature of urban development in the United States and how that affects the work we do as activists and organizers. It’s a reminder that we need to look both inside the U.S. and outside of it to really understand how development happens, and to find models for how we can work to shape the social, political, and geographical worlds we live in. Here’s David and Marina chatting, against the backdrop of a wall of AK Press titles:
I think this video is especially relevant right now. It popped into my head when I was thinking about one of our new releases, Chris Ealham’s Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Barcelona, 1898-1937. Of course this video discusses a very different time period in Barcelona’s (and Baltimore’s) history, but in some ways, the struggle for control of the city’s spaces that Ealham discusses in the context of the early industrial period before the Spanish Civil War are still going on today. A friend of mine, one of the most brilliant folks I know, and an urban activist herself, told me recently that she thought that Chris’s book was the best analysis Barcelona she’d read to date, which I take as very, very high praise.
It also points to a deeper relevance of a book like Anarchism and the City than we might realize at first glance. When I talked to Chris about promoting his book, really early on, he talked about it as not just a history, but as a blueprint for contemporary action. He told me a story about a talk he gave in Barcelona, at the end of which an activist working in one of the city’s old industrial neighborhoods came up to him, and told him that their group was using Anarchism and the City as a “manual de lucha,” a fighting manual. How many historians can say that? So watch the video, and then check out Chris’s book for some historical context. (Zach was kind enough to post an excerpt of it up on the blog a couple of weeks ago, if you want a sneak preview!)