What do you think?
Rate this book
Abstract from the Concrete
Marxist geographer David Harvey opened his lecture with a fact: between 2011 and 2013 China consumed 50 percent more cement than the United States had in the entire twentieth century. In Abstract from the Concrete, he asks why. Spiraling outward--geographically and materially--Harvey travels from the building industry in China to the foreclosed housing market in the United States to the automobile industry in São Paolo and back again. The why emerges as a direct result of "anti-value," of capital in crisis--intrinsic, he contends, to capital and capital cities today.
The Incidents is a series of publications based on events that occured at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design between 1936 and tomorrow.
Edited by Jennifer Sigler and Leah Whitman-Salkin
Copublished with the Harvard University Graduate School of Design
The Incidents is a series of publications based on events that occured at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design between 1936 and tomorrow.
Edited by Jennifer Sigler and Leah Whitman-Salkin
Copublished with the Harvard University Graduate School of Design
- GenresPhilosophy
174 pages, Paperback
Published March 13, 2017
69 people want to read
About the author
David Harvey
189 books1,629 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
David Harvey (born 1935) is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). A leading social theorist of international standing, he graduated from University of Cambridge with a PhD in Geography in 1961.
He is the world's most cited academic geographer (according to Andrew Bodman, see Transactions of the IBG, 1991,1992), and the author of many books and essays that have been prominent in the development of modern geography as a discipline.
His work has contributed greatly to broad social and political debate, most recently he has been credited with helping to bring back social class and Marxist methods as serious methodological tools in the critique of global capitalism, particularly in its neoliberal form.
David Harvey (born 1935) is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). A leading social theorist of international standing, he graduated from University of Cambridge with a PhD in Geography in 1961.
He is the world's most cited academic geographer (according to Andrew Bodman, see Transactions of the IBG, 1991,1992), and the author of many books and essays that have been prominent in the development of modern geography as a discipline.
His work has contributed greatly to broad social and political debate, most recently he has been credited with helping to bring back social class and Marxist methods as serious methodological tools in the critique of global capitalism, particularly in its neoliberal form.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 20, 2025
Yes, this is supposed to look like a bad photocopy that was printed, sewn and bound.
(You can make whooshing noises and pretend to be a scanner whenever you see green on the page.)
Yes, the screenshot formatting is intentional.
No, you did not get a misprint.
This is a weird book to hold,
but artfully/artistically justified.
_____
Remarkably dense for its brevity and readability. (Page count is deceptive here: every second page is on average empty, and the margins on every page that isn't are generous.)
David Harvey offers an analysis of how capitalism perpetuates itself, of the vital concrete (heh.) impact of living spaces and their construction.
It's an althogether elegant analysis that firmly grounded in a material, political, economical accounting of the ways states act to assure stability: in a sort of ping-pong game of deferring crisis. How? Why? And what does accumulation demand? Spiralling out - exponential growth, an untenable position, that must be worked around, side-stepped.
Crucial to Harvey is not only productive value, which Marxist discourse and politics traditionally foregrounds, but realized value, which is where most of wealth is extracted, a lot "in the course of daily life on the streets of the city", through debt and rent and speculation and private capture.
The appended interview, The Insurgent Architect (also published by urbanNext), Harvey also discusses the role of the architect, of the designer and urban planner, and how they can make politically meaningful choices whilst tarrying with the adaptative, assimilating character of capital.
_____
notes on the book as a physical commodity: (for other people the right side of the Atlantic mildly befuddled about procuring this) Abstract from the Concrete is shipped out from the Netherlands by UK-based publisher Sternberg Press.
(You can make whooshing noises and pretend to be a scanner whenever you see green on the page.)
Yes, the screenshot formatting is intentional.
No, you did not get a misprint.
This is a weird book to hold,
but artfully/artistically justified.
_____
The future is already foretold and foreclosed (ask any student who has $100,000 in student loans to pay). Debt imprisons us within certain structures of future value production. [...] [D]ebt-encumbered homeowners don't go on strike, it was said. So after World War II, the strategy was to debt encumber as many homeowners as possible. Then they would have to support the capitalist system in order to pay off their debts. [...] Suburbanization contributed enormously to social stability and fostered certain mental conceptions of the world and political subjectivities to support rather than challenge the status quo of a rampant capitalism.
(p. 61, emphasis mine)
Remarkably dense for its brevity and readability. (Page count is deceptive here: every second page is on average empty, and the margins on every page that isn't are generous.)
David Harvey offers an analysis of how capitalism perpetuates itself, of the vital concrete (heh.) impact of living spaces and their construction.
It's an althogether elegant analysis that firmly grounded in a material, political, economical accounting of the ways states act to assure stability: in a sort of ping-pong game of deferring crisis. How? Why? And what does accumulation demand? Spiralling out - exponential growth, an untenable position, that must be worked around, side-stepped.
Crucial to Harvey is not only productive value, which Marxist discourse and politics traditionally foregrounds, but realized value, which is where most of wealth is extracted, a lot "in the course of daily life on the streets of the city", through debt and rent and speculation and private capture.
The appended interview, The Insurgent Architect (also published by urbanNext), Harvey also discusses the role of the architect, of the designer and urban planner, and how they can make politically meaningful choices whilst tarrying with the adaptative, assimilating character of capital.
_____
notes on the book as a physical commodity: (for other people the right side of the Atlantic mildly befuddled about procuring this) Abstract from the Concrete is shipped out from the Netherlands by UK-based publisher Sternberg Press.
April 1, 2021
I'm biased because Harvey is my favourite geographer, but he speaks on issues centring urbanism, geography and capitalism like no other. The book is a lecture he delivered at Harvard and hence reads very fluently and does not fall into the category of academic jargon. Whilst the book anticapitalist and critical I appreciate his focused-on-solutions approach. He avoids speaking with either the tone of a utopian future at which we will never arrive, nor a dystopic hell which we will never escape- which both seem increasingly common in academic texts. A very interesting read on expanding urban empires, linking urbanisation to Capital's insatiable need for growth. Relevant for all and also accessible to all.
August 17, 2025
This is a brilliant little book that demonstrates the validity of Marxist theory to contemporary problems. As the title suggests, Harvey literally starts with a discussion on China's insane concrete consumption (6500 million tonnes between 2011 and 2013) and concludes with shockingly accurate predictions on China's expansion in the global south, utilising his (I think Harvey developed this) concept of the 'spatial fix' as a necessary solution to China's overaccumulation problem (a problem that only exists because of the global financial crisis).
The power of Harvey's analysis (and of similar materialist analysis more generally) lies in the way events are connected by what they necessitate within their connection in global capitalism. Necessity here is not equivalent with fate; capital is not predetermined by some transcendent capitalist, but the material conditions within capitalism produce and necessitate certain relations and people, allowing us to trace a path of development to reveal the 'why' behind the seemingly sudden change (so often attributed to the "personality of the great man", as if this could escape the social production of individuals). Harvey does this often (such as in smaller essays like 'The Right to the City,' which is free to read on his website) and it's what makes his argument so compelling. He doesn't begin with "As a Marxist, my core beliefs are..." because this opens him to the obvious objection of, "Well, why should I take these core Marxist beliefs?" -- he begins with concrete facts to slowly develop his way to his metatheoretical position, using key Marxist concepts so that they are analytically useful to the object of study. You could say he arrives at the 'Abstract from the Concrete.'
To conclude, I've linked a YouTube video that details Harvey's method more thoroughly and correctly than I have done (and even applies this mode of analysis to other contemporary events, like the Ukraine War).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYIJj...
The power of Harvey's analysis (and of similar materialist analysis more generally) lies in the way events are connected by what they necessitate within their connection in global capitalism. Necessity here is not equivalent with fate; capital is not predetermined by some transcendent capitalist, but the material conditions within capitalism produce and necessitate certain relations and people, allowing us to trace a path of development to reveal the 'why' behind the seemingly sudden change (so often attributed to the "personality of the great man", as if this could escape the social production of individuals). Harvey does this often (such as in smaller essays like 'The Right to the City,' which is free to read on his website) and it's what makes his argument so compelling. He doesn't begin with "As a Marxist, my core beliefs are..." because this opens him to the obvious objection of, "Well, why should I take these core Marxist beliefs?" -- he begins with concrete facts to slowly develop his way to his metatheoretical position, using key Marxist concepts so that they are analytically useful to the object of study. You could say he arrives at the 'Abstract from the Concrete.'
To conclude, I've linked a YouTube video that details Harvey's method more thoroughly and correctly than I have done (and even applies this mode of analysis to other contemporary events, like the Ukraine War).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYIJj...
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews