Taking Space to Market

Abstract

The replacement of regulated markets by price-fixing or competitive markets set in motion a narrower, more insistent restructuring of space. In being taken to market, space was allocated to those uses or users that yielded the highest rent. In whatever terms we choose to see it — as location, resource, structure or activity — it became capitalised, treated as something that could be taken to market and sold at the highest bid-price, its price being used to balance levels of consumption with levels of supply. In the process, it became predominantly ordinated and configured through economic forces, or as Polanyi might have put it, something embedded in economy. There are, of course, other ways of construing the spatial order that was ushered in by early capitalism. In a recent study, for instance, Harvey was quite specific in his abandonment of price-fixing markets as the central, integrating mechanism of capitalism, a mechanism that permeated his conceptualisation of the capitalist city in an earlier study (Harvey, 1973, pp. 261–74), preferring instead to recouch his analysis as a problem of capital and its spheres of circulation (Harvey, 1982, p. xiii). In a text that tries to tease out and extend the ideas with which Marx dealt in his treatise on capital, he follows the latter in seeing capitalist profit as arising out of the relations between capital and wage labour, more especially the differential between the value of labour power and the value that labour-power produces, and not as something created through market exchange (Harvey, 1973, p. 23).