''As Lipietz (1986:19) argues, a “regime of accumulation” materializes in “the form of norms, habits, laws, regulating networks, and so on that ensure the unity of the process, i.e. the appropriate consistency of individual behaviours with the schema of reproduction;”
and as Harvey (1989:122) further comments, such talk of regulation “focuses
our attention on the complex interrelations, habits, political practices, and cultural forms that allow a highly dynamic, and consequently unstable, capitalist system to acquire a sufficient semblance of order to function coherently at least for a certainperiod of time.”
Hence cities are grappling with two, perhaps contradictory, processes.
On the one hand they must seek to attract capital seemingly unfettered by the sorts of locational determinants important during the era when fordism was under construction. That is, they must make themselves attractive to capital – large and small – that can often choose to locate there or not.'"
If a built environment possesses use value to homeless people (for sleeping, for bathing, for panhandling), but that use threatens what exchange value may still exist, or may be created, then these use values must be shed..... '
That is, through these laws and other means, cities seek to use a seemingly stable, ordered urban landscape as a positive inducement to continued investment and to maintain the viability of current investment in core areas (by showing merchants, for example, that they are doing something to keep shoppers coming downtown)...
interesting to think of destabilising activities... things that are feared to bring the exchange value down... or unpredictable ones like creative acts that come to be lauded (e.g. in the case of graffiti becoming art, such as Banksy, nb previous dissertation).... other destabilising activity - occupy amsterdam... how is this managed?
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