- CAPITALISM IN PLACE
- GALLERIES
- Imagining Italy
- Revisiting Rome
- Staging Emilia-Romagna
- Consuming Milan
- Unhoused Atlanta
- Globalized Atlanta
- Racialized Atlanta
- Greenwashed Atlanta
- Georgia Timescapes
- Mississippi Timescapes
- New Mexico Timescapes
- Florida Beachscapes
- California Waterscapes
- Yankee Landscapes
- ¿Auténtica Oaxaca?
- Authentique Quebec?
- ¿Auténtica Cuba?
- New York Streetscapes
- Southern Roadscapes
- Branding Jacksonville
- Crafting the Quarter
- CONTACT
ABOUT THIS WEBSITE
Welcome! If this is your first visit to my website, you will have lots of questions. Let me try to answer six of them.
QUESTION 1. What is Capitalism in Place about?
This website is about how capitalism shapes place. So I'll begin by defining my two key terms.
Capitalism encompasses the wide variety of social and institutional arrangements that grow up around capital, the only mode of production in history which seeks limitless growth, not because of favorable external circumstances but owing to its own internal logic. Capital is hardwired to break down every barrier—natural, social, spatial or otherwise—impeding its reproduction on an ever-expanding scale. It is as monomaniacal as a heat-seeking missile locked on its target, though in this case the target is not an enemy installation but the profit which comes from living labor. In pursuit of profit, capital relies on its lightning speed and mobility, deploying communication and transportation technologies that annihilate space with time, to paraphrase Karl Marx. Put simply, capital is a mode of production that must expand across space if it is to grow through time, otherwise it will seize up, sicken and even die.
Place refers to a particular kind of space, not the cold, empty, abstract space of Newton, but the pulsating, meaningful space invoked in great literature, such as Twain's Mississippi River, García Márquez's Macondo or Ferrante's Naples. Place is where social reproduction, everyday life, emotional attachments, cultural representation, tradition, class struggles, blood feuds, tribal identities, love, birth and death intermingle. Unlike high-flying capital, place at every scale keeps its nose on the ground, thriving on permanence and embeddedness in the land. The spatiality and temporality of place are rigid and cumbersome when compared to the malleability of capitalist spacetime. If immobility is a death sentence for capital, it is the lifeblood of place. To move place is to cut off its flow of oxygen, to kill it, as any number of ghost towns, rust belts and ruins bleaching in the sun bear witness.
I will ask you to keep a close eye on this tension between the fluidity of capital and fixity of place as you scroll through the photo galleries, essays and personal reflections assembled here. These materials explore the physical and cultural dynamics of place formation in relation to the process of capital accumulation. I am especially interested in the built environment of cities, for this is where we can see most clearly the enormous power that capitalism exerts over the spatial form and cultural representation of place. In analyzing capitalist place formation, I will rely heavily on the theory of capital formulated by Marx and more recently applied to questions of space by geographer David Harvey.
QUESTION 2. Why do I call myself a Marxist Tourist?
My answer has three parts:
First, I call myself a Marxist because I believe that the arguments set out by Marx in Capital remain the indispensable starting point for any critical inquiry into capital as a mode of production and capitalism as a social formation.
Second, I call myself a tourist because I rely on the mass tourism industry to travel, as when I book my flights through Travelocity, my lodging through Airbnb and my tourist "experiences" through interlocking global and local service networks.
Third, I call myself a Marxist tourist because the tourism industry allows me to travel to destinations near and far, observing, documenting and analyzing capitalist place formation from Marxist perspective.
QUESTION 3. What do the two photos above have to do with this website?
Milan, Italy (population 1.362 million), and Tupelo, Mississippi (population 37,675), have more in common than you might think.
Those who call the shots at Milan Malpensa Airport and in downtown Tupelo have decided that branding their hometowns with murals of their respective Kings is good for business. Place branding of this sort has become universal nowadays as the logic of capital subsumes the cultural representation of place. In the juxtaposed photos above, we see how place branding appropriates and commodifies cultural products like Leonardo's Last Supper and DARCY's Elvis Presley. These cultural products are used to advertise the supposedly unique qualities or cultural terroir of a given place so that tourists and investors will spend their money there rather than someplace else, thereby boosting local property values and catalyzing local economic growth. In the present moment of fierce interurban competition, this highly regressive growth strategy has congealed into what Raoul Bianchi, a Marxist political economist, calls "the tourism-real estate regime of accumulation."
Branding has important implications for place as a site of capital accumulation and cultural representation. If place is defined as meaningful space, and if the representation of meaning lies at the heart of culture, what we are now witnessing as a result of the intensification of interplace competition is the commodification of culture on an unprecedented scale. To put it differently, the places where we make our lives, and the meanings we attach to these places, are being rapidly reconfigured around the representational needs of capital not people.
QUESTION 4. Who do I think might be interested in this website?
If you recognize yourself anywhere in the bullet points below, the chances are good that you'll feel right at home in Capitalism in Place. If you don't, give the website a try anyway. You never know what may catch your eye or awaken some slumbering interest.
- Geographers, historians, anthropologists, sociologists.
- Urbanists in general, urban planners in particular.
- Those interested in the "spatial turn" in contemporary thinking.
- MBA students looking for fresh ideas they won't find on their syllabus.
- Readers of critical theory, especially Marxist theory.
- Documentary, street and travel photographers.
- Visual story tellers from comic book writers to street artists.
- Place-based activists fighting for social justice.
- Anti-capitalist activists on both sides of the socialist/anarchist divide.
QUESTION 5. What's the best way to navigate through this website?
You have three options:
First, start with the two essays filed under the "Place" and "Capitalism" tabs. They provide a Marxist theoretical framework for understanding the deeper processes at work in the locations I have visited, photographed and written about. Next, dive into the galleries. Each photo has a caption indicating where it was taken and how it illuminates this or that aspect of the process of capitalist place formation. Finish up with the reflections. This is where I step out from behind the curtain of the camera and the theories in order to reflect on certain personal experiences that have left their mark on the work I am doing here.
Second, start with the galleries. If you like the photos and want to know more about the story they tell and why I took them, proceed to the essays and reflections.
Third, start and end wherever you please. Perhaps you prefer an unstructured, smorgasbord approach—a gallery here, an essay there, a reflection or two if you have the appetite for it. Or you might choose to scroll through the photos and leave the essays and reflections for some other time. It's up to you. Capitalism in Place is not a fixed menu. Think of it as your friendly neighborhood tapas bar.
QUESTION 6: Is this website all wrapped up and ready to go?
Not by a long shot! I will be adding new photos, deleting old ones and reworking the essays and reflections as I continue to travel and think about the process of capitalist place formation. So, stay tuned for updates.
This website is a work in progress. How could it be otherwise given the unsettled state of world today? The troubled marriage between capitalism and place was sealed during the industrial revolution of the 19th century. Whether it can endure in the face of the multiplying crises we now confront is an open question. Since every dimension of this polycrisis—economic, environmental, social and political—is place-based and grounded in the dynamics of capital accumulation, it behooves us to ask:
- What happens when the growth imperative of capitalism threatens to cannibalize the enabling conditions and reproduction requirements of place?
- Are we approaching the point beyond which living under capitalism is no longer compatible with living in place?
- If so, how do we go about creating safe places for human and planetary life which operate outside capitalism and its laws of motion?
Capitalism in Place offers no easy answers. Its goal is to convince you with pictures and words that such questions are worth asking.
Leonardo da Vinci, "Last Supper," Milan Malpensa Airport; Ryan "ARCY" Christenson, Elvis Mural, Tupelo, Mississippi. (Many thanks to my good friend and fellow photographer, Craig Deman, for merging these two photos.)