The structures of desire and dispossession: Class-nature of neo-urban structuralism in post war Sri Lanka (A revisit to David Harvey’s conceptualization on capitalist city)

Abstract

Introduction

Human-cities are not simply a set of material constructions, a set of buildings, transportation networks and mode of transportation, and identities of metropolitans. Historically, cities have been signified the highest achievement of conquering political economic ideology, or the justified framework of capital accumulation and transformation, contemporarily the ideology of capitalism realism. They appear, at a specific geography and in a certain epoch of a society, with a set of ideological positions and with a set of propositions of logics of surplus generation and capital accumulation. As a result of that very ideological positioning and the logics of surplus generation and capital accumulation, a city of capitalism is the ideal site to be seen the glorified-desire and muted-dispossession of capitalism itself. At a wider sense of this argument it is more than that. David Harvey elaborates the broader picture of capitalists’ city and its camouflaged-true-nature of contradictions in production, reproduction, surplus generation and class-nature of urbanization comprehensively (see Harvey 1985, 2001, 2010).

This study fundamentally depends on the theoretical foundation which David Harvey unearthed and developed regarding urban structuralism in capitalist development and the class-nature of urbanization. The study can be called as a theoretical revisit of Harvey’s key arguments,on the city, urbanization and class-nature of neo-urbanization in the post-war Sri Lankan context and a revisit to the grounded dynamics of neo-urbanization which take place in the same context.