Harveyan Utopian Thought and Social Justice: Approaching Public Space

Abstract

This essay explores the idea of public space by reviewing David Harvey’s utopian thought about social justice and the future of cities. It analyses several of his writings as well as conceptual constructs, including those of ‘dialectical utopianism’ and ‘territorial distributive justice’, the modified versions of Henri Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’ and of Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ ‘subaltern [insurgent] cosmopolitanism’. Having produced, during the last four decades, a consistent and profound critique (and corresponding theorization) of contemporary capitalist society and its urban development, Harvey finds it critical that, at some point in the future, all institutional and physical infrastructure set up by bourgeois society during the last five centuries or so be replaced by another that gives rise to an alternative, relational space and place which are born out of ‘philosophical reflection’, an ‘assessment of practical requirements and basic human needs’ and the ‘ferment of social movements’.