Capitalist development and urbanization have always gone together — “the antagonism between town and country” — as Marx and Engels once put it. But this relationship has always been laden with contradictions and dilemmas. The intensification of production that is characteristic of capitalist growth processes pushes the rural population into the cities. In the cities, the huge stock of fixed capital, of modern factories and supporting urban infrastructure, of transportation, power, communications, housing takes on ever greater complexity. The concentrated populations and sprawling built environments of today’s capitalist cities seem almost unfathomable.
