The premise is apparently simple. “We would all like to live a decent life in a decent place.” This is how David Harvey, one of the great urban planning theorists of our time, summarises the hypothesis that should underpin any reflection on housing policy. But if the starting point is simple, its articulation is not so simple. Because the way in which a space is inhabited depends on economic models, general living conditions, work and consumption, thought and, ultimately, an ideological position. Professor of Geography and Anthropology at New York University (CUNY), Harvey has been dissecting the derivatives of urban development for decades and his vision has not changed: to try to understand it – and even change it – it must be analysed in its entirety, as a complex philosophical body.
The ideas that are being explored this Thursday at the forum Fair housing and shared prosperity, mThe event, chaired by journalists from EL PAÍS and organized by the Cultural Space of the Institute of the National Housing Fund for Workers (Infonavit) and the global consulting firm Urban Front, has one goal as its backdrop: to win the right to the city. To pursue it, however, one must first study the general map of that aspiration. Harvey has dedicated himself to this since the seventies and today, at 88 years of age, he continues to speak passionately about the housing emergency, productive systems and Karl Marx, his main theoretical reference.
In the conference that opened the forum, held at the Los Pinos Cultural Complex, and in the subsequent discussion with Jan Martínez Ahrens, director of EL PAÍS América, the professor reviewed the evolution of the housing crisis, a problem of global scope that shows no signs of abating. “In 1970 it was already clear to me that housing provision could not occur in a free market system. For example, in New York there is a large boom housing and yet there are 60,000 homeless people. That makes no sense. The boom It is so that the richest people in the world can have a penthouse “in Manhattan,” he lamented. However, “no way has been found to consolidate a supply outside the market” and this is related to the development of the capitalist system and its turbulences, such as the bursting of the real estate bubble and the collapse of mortgages in 2007.
Like a doctor looking for a diagnosis, Harvey believes that one should not limit oneself to the analysis of a single organ. That is, “one has to look at everything together.” For example, he recalled that the International Monetary Fund published a study on global debt in 2023 and the amount per capita amounted to 86,000 dollars: “In 1980, that debt was 20 dollars. What happened? A lot of that debt had to do with housing.” “When Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced the mortgage, the idea was to stabilize the economy, but there was a more important long-term sub-argument: those who contract a debt do not go on strike, so to speak. It was social control,” he continued.
In this scheme, the worker acquires the identity of a buyer. And even when governments increase minimum wages or implement measures such as the universal minimum income, Harvey complains, “real estate agents say ‘we can now raise the rent’.” These factors also have a broader function in the machinery of politics, the ebbs and flows that open and close cycles. Now, both in America and in Europe, the extreme right threatens some basic consensus of the social and legal State that was consolidated after the Second World War. But the arrival to power of ultra-populist leaders such as Javier Milei in Argentina has, according to his analysis, specific causes. For example, economic recipes. “I think that this movement towards the extreme right is a response to austerity policies,” he pointed out. Basically, because austerity confronts those who suffer its consequences with the State. This is the climate in which figures such as Donald Trump also prosper, who in his opinion can win the November elections in the United States.
Harvey was born in the United Kingdom and studied at Cambridge, but discovered Marx relatively late, at the age of 35. And it happened in the United States, in the wake of the student protests against the Vietnam War. Since then, he has applied the German philosopher’s thinking to his work, very subtle in the diagnosis of political dysfunctions. Critical of the dominant power and neoliberal models, the professor applauded the struggles of Morena in Mexico and in the capital. When asked what his advice would be to the president-elect, Claudia Sheinbaum, he moved away from his subject of study and went to the essence of public management. “Stay close to the people, because you know what they need or want. I think that politicians do not have to impose, they must propose.” A message as broad as his recommendation to a young geographer, words that go beyond geography and urbanism and have more to do with an ontological position: “Have one foot outside and one foot inside. Most of my ideas, my good ideas, have come from outside.”
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