From Social Justice and the City (1973) onward, the geographer David Harvey applied Marxist political economy to the analysis of urbanisation. He argued that cities are shaped by the circulation of capital, with surplus repeatedly absorbed through investment in the built environment in a recurring cycle of boom and crisis. His later works traced how capital switches into real estate and infrastructure, and how urban development both expresses and displaces capitalism's contradictions. He combined close reading of Marx with concrete studies of Baltimore, Paris and global finance.
It established the dominant framework for understanding cities as products of capital accumulation, influential across geography, planning and urban studies. Harvey's analysis of the urban built environment as an outlet for surplus capital reshaped critical thinking on property booms and crises.
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