Page "Creative destruction" Paragraph 36

Geographer and historian David Harvey in a series of works from the 1970s onwards ( Social Justice and the City, 1973 ; The Limits to Capital, 1982 ; The Urbanization of Capital, 1985 ; Spaces of Hope, 2000 ; Spaces of Capital, 2001 ; Spaces of Neoliberalization, 2005 ; The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism, 2010 ), elaborated Marx's thought on the systemic contradictions of capitalism, particularly in relation to the production of the urban environment ( and to the production of space more broadly ).

He developed the notion that capitalism finds a " spatial fix " for its periodic crises of overaccumulation through investment in fixed assets of infrastructure, buildings, etc.

: " The built environment that constitutes a vast field of collective means of production and consumption absorbs huge amounts of capital in both its construction and its maintenance.

Urbanisation is one way to absorb the capital surplus ".

While the creation of the built environment can act as a form of crisis displacement, it can also constitute a limit in its own right, as it tends to freeze productive forces into a fixed spatial form.

As capital cannot abide a limit to profitability, ever more frantic forms of " time-space compression " ( increased speed of turnover, innovation of ever faster transport and communications ' infrastructure, " flexible accumulation ") ensue, often impelling technological innovation.

Such innovation, however, is a double-edged sword: