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Thanks for posting those bios sketches. What's important, as I go through them, is they evoke a certain world view, or conceptual grasp of what we are living in, our habitat(my word, not Harvey's). Harvey mentioned some of this.
You need an another concept or model for your mental frame. I use habitat. It sounds like a hippy idea, and indeed it started out that way for me. But that isn't it. The key thing, I think, is to study a little descriptive biological ecology. Stephen Gould comes in handy here. It's the basic idea that an organism doesn't exist without its habitat, its medium in the world. A habitat actually forms the totality of an organism's relationships with the world and interconnects the organism with other relationships in the biological and physical world.
This gets a little into Deleuze and the example of the orchid and the wasp. What I studied under my father-in-law, was his work on fruit bats and insects as pollenators. Bees are more familiar. There are two things to see. One is the gross anatomy of the bee's legs, the primary forms that collect and distribute pollen, from the sticky hairs. The other thing to notice are the physical shapes of the flowers and how they conform to the anatomical shapes of their pollenators. These are given in biology as examples of co-evolution. It's much more intimate, since some classes of pollenators have adapted their digestive chemistry to the nectar, and the biochemistry of the nectar has adapted to the nutrition needs of pollenator.
But don't get lost. The point is to illustrate what an organism and its habitat or eco-niche is. It is a set of mutually interdependent relations.
Now switch to a city and its surrounding landscape. The relationship is formed and interdepentent with the processes of the city, as if the city were an organizm and the landscape was its habitat. Harvey used the concept of a factory, the city as a factory. He went into this a little with the questioner about who is the new prolitariat---(the worker bees of the city). The organic model works just as well as the factory or industrial complex. Both are conceptual abstractions that attempt to understand the world we live in.
The nice thing about Berkeley-Oakland's smallness, is it makes it easier to `see' its processes, dependencies and interactions---its organelles.
What's the point? These guys Harvey, Soja, Storper teach and study these subjects-ideas-data. The educational point is to help students form a grasp of their world which is probably not something they've ever heard of before they walk into one of these classes. These subjects give flesh and bone to abstractions like globalization and capitalism.
Wojtek quotes, `I give this book 2 stars for its fair assessment of capitalism & its weaknesses but it fails to provide a solid alternative to capitalism with a proven track record.''
Okay, fair point, since I wanted to hear how to change things and didn't hear any suggestions. However last night Harvey outlined general categories that I listed like technology, ideology, relations to resources, disaffected intelligenstia. social relations, and other things. What he said was that this constellation forms the area of change which is mobilized by capital against the rest of us, in other words the domain of battle.
His time was running out and he still hadn't said anything about geography. He really needed examples but he couldn't give them. We had gone about an hour and fifteen or twenty min.
So I will give an example.
There is a small short section of Adeline south of downtown that is or was a black retail district. It was thriving at one time for the reason that it was a key intersection of the muni-rail line that went through the industrial area of Oakland. This was the north end of black and mixed working class demographic. At some point in the late 70s it was really run down and most of the business were failing. Shops closed, while a couple bars stayed. It became a locus for crime, etc. At this point the city was working a gentrification--redevelopment plan in the mid-80s. But the black business and community groups got together and petitioned the city to make this area an historical strip, called the Historic Lorin District to stop the plan. (There was quiet laughter comming the white planners that this area had any redeeming features.) The community eventually won. Very little was torn down. It was remodelled and upgraded nearby infrastructure. It was saved. But its underlying socio-cultural life was lost.
Okay you got that picture. Now consider what should have been done. First the whole of Oakland's former industrial zone is linked up with the port and the main rail hub, along with several military bases that were fed by this area corridor and its former rail line. The physical infrastructure of the city is laid out in its street maps, provided you know how to look at them. This Adeline corridor is like a backbone or armature. This corridor and several others were populated by various heavy industries from WWII like steel, ship building, and these corridors connected the working class with their jobs and social life.
This forms a city system that had been killed over decades. How to revive it? Bring in newer and a few older industeries, built on something resembling more eco-friendly complexes. Rehab the housing, markets, and local retail trades. Do not displace the population, because they also could use some reviving, which is done with the socio-economic safety net and most important their means of reproduction, which are social life, education, etc. You also need an education plan that ties this community to the rest of the city system to creat all those jobs in the city and region. It also includes re-unionization and a bunch of history study of labor movements, looking for models, etc.
Who is supposed to think all this up and plan out ways to do it? The working class intellectuals from the existing communities. How to embody them? Remember all those black, latino, asian and white radicals from yore? Most of them got together at Laney college, some later went to Cal or SF State. So then the ones who survived, had kids. At a guess a lot of those kids went to college and took these classes and started to figured it out.
If I was commissar of planning, I would go find them, recruit them, and others like them: kids who grew up in depressed and oppressed communities, went to college, took some planning and or social science, law, econ, education, geography and always wanted to give back and could never find a way how.
What I sketched out above is probably not Harvey or Soja. It comes from being in contact with urban planning and trying to think through how to radicalize it into concepts of what should be. Near the close of his talk, Harvey wrote out these interlocking areas that needed to be addressed all together to effect change. The above is a loose interpretation applied to an local area I know about.
CG