The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.

What kind of city we wish to build should reflect our personal wishes and needs.

The geographical movement of money and commodities as capital is not the same as the movements of products and of precious metals. Capital is, after all, money used in a certain way, and is by no means identical with all money uses.

Speculation in land may be necessary to capitalism, but speculative orgies periodically become a quagmire of destruction for capital itself.

The common-sense notion that 'there is a time and a place for everything' gets carried into a set of prescriptions which replicate the social order by assigning social meanings to spaces and times.

Capitalists behave like capitalists wherever they are. They pursue the expansion of value through exploitation without regard to the social consequences.

The invocation of social necessity should alert us. It contains the seeds for Marx's critique of political economy as well as for his dissection of capitalism.