Sean Tarjoto
Intro to
Urban Political Economy
Oct 1, 2001
Reaction: David Harvey, “Money, time, space and the city” The Urban Experience
If one can afford to waste time and throw money, and own acres of land across and around the globe, then all their uses of power can demand only so much.
The equilibirilating instinct of survival is the first force to assimilates social constructions. It is possible to conceive of money as the foundation and time as a pillar, the final triplet of space already deep within the image. But past the historical relevance, and into the industrial mentality of advanced capitalism, these constructions have become symbiotically intertwined to support each others’ value in a globalized economic machine. In the pre-occupational world of the urban scholar, both forces appropriate space as a commodity whose use value is “worth less” than its exchange value. To those who cannot secure spaces of privilege, scarce amounts of collateral must meet with regimented amounts of “free” time to be invested in locating spaces whose commute will not act as too great a separator between work and life.
The notion of “creative destruction” has an orgasmic quality. Unable to invest more capital and time to accelerate turnover rates, debts can only be solved through improvising projects to usurp more space to collect more money and allow more time for later opportunities, and options, to pulverize, appropriate, or creatively destroy, more of the once virgin urban landscape.
(
geocities.com/tarjoto)