THE HIDDEN ABODES OF CAPITALIST SPACE : Rethinking Crisis and the Built Environment

Abstract

This article develops a new theory of the relationship between the built environment and the reproduction of capitalism. To do so, it pursues a critical engagement with David Harvey's landmark texts on that theme, which provide a comprehensive account of that relationship and which continue to hold considerable sway within urban studies. It begins by situating Harvey in a long history of efforts to spatialize crisis theory. Tracing his relation to G.F.W. Hegel, Johann Heinrich von Thünen, Rosa Luxemburg and V.I. Lenin, it underscores the genuine theoretical revolution that Harvey inaugurated with his crisis‐centric account of the role of the built environment in the reproduction of capital. Then, it teases out the occluded relations in Harvey's theory. Building on the work of critical theorist Nancy Fraser, among others, the article demonstrates that the recurrent and endemic remaking of the built environment is consistently (if not exclusively) propelled by capital's tendency to undermine its own unwaged and/or undercapitalized hidden abodes behind the abode of production. It demonstrates that the built environment is central not only to the resolution of crises that emerge in the ‘formal’ economy but to the reproduction of capitalism as an ‘institutionalized social order’.