Urbanization and accumulation by dispossession in works of David Harvey. A frame work for urban analysis

Seeing cities in a theoretical frame has been one of the main concerns of many scholars in the course of history. Like any other phenomenon, in order to study and analyze cities, we need to first develop a solid framework to study and define it, and identify some tools that help us to disseminate this complex phenomenon and profound our knowledge through its components. Today in urban studies, there is a major new paradigm of scholars such as David Harvey that emphasizes on the importance of analyzing capitalism, class conflict, and unequal distribution of resources in assessing urban life, space structure, and change. The origin of this paradigm according to Harvey is the Marxian theory. He finds this theory, the most powerful of all the explanatory schemas available in which we can study the city (Harvey, 1985). He explicitly indicates that this theory has the potentiality to get at matters as diverse as built environment formation and architectural designs, street culture and micro politics, urban economics and politics as well as the role of urbanization in the rich and complex historical geography of capitalism. This research is broadly based on Harvey`s literature. Therefor the relevant methodology would be carried out through reading, his books and articles, as well as interviews and lectures given by him on different occasions. The first chapter is an introduction which familiarizes the reader with this scholar and his works, and provides a brief explanation on his importance and relevance to the field of planning, followed by a glimpse of his thoughts and some brief criticism. The second chapter of the research is more of a descriptive approach. I try to reconstruct the city in Harvey`s literature, and draw a picture based on how he describes urbanism and its eternal embodiment, the city. Third chapter will be an evaluative approach, focusing on analyzing urbanism and city according to their definition in the precedent chapter. Here I try to understand whether David Harvey`s concept of city and urbanism, first, is applicable to today’s world realities, second, whether, the mentioned concepts are working in relation to his ideology and ethics. Here, I used the concept of “accumulation by dispossession” as a proxy to examine the problem of segregation and emergence of racialized societies in urbanized contexts driven by the trends mentioned in previous chapters. The fourth chapter is a brief conclusion that helps, first to summarize the ideology and positions of David Harvey regarding urbanism; in this part I outlined, first; the recurrent idea of spatial inequality, its generators and implications in his works. And second; a study on how market led development in current trends of urbanism is shaping the social space.