text: David Harvey Geographer and historian David Harvey in a series of works from the 1970s onwards (Social Justice and the City, 1973; The Limits to Capital, 1982; The Urbanization of Capital, 1985; Spaces of Hope, 2000; Spaces of Capital, 2001; Spaces of Neoliberalization, 2005; The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism, 2010), elaborated Marx's thought on the systemic contradictions of capitalism, particularly in relation to the production of the urban environment (and to the production of space more broadly). He developed the notion that capitalism finds a "spatial fix" for its periodic crises of overaccumulation through investment in fixed assets of infrastructure, buildings, etc.: "The built environment that constitutes a vast field of collective means of production and consumption absorbs huge amounts of capital in both its construction and its maintenance. Urbanization is one way to absorb the capital surplus". While the creation of the built environment can act as a form of crisis displacement, it can also constitute a limit in its own right, as it tends to freeze productive forces into a fixed spatial form. As capital cannot abide a limit to profitability, ever more frantic forms of "time-space compression" (increased speed of turnover, innovation of ever faster transport and communications' infrastructure, "flexible accumulation") ensue, often impelling technological innovation. Such innovation, however, is a double-edged sword:
  Globalization can be viewed as some ultimate form of time-space compression, allowing capital investment to move almost instantaneously from one corner of the globe to another, devaluing fixed assets and laying off labour in one urban conglomeration while opening up new centres of manufacture in more profitable sites for production operations. Hence, in this continual process of creative destruction, capitalism does not resolve its contradictions and crises, but merely "moves them around geographically".
  Marshall Berman
  In his 1987 book All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, particularly in the chapter entitled "Innovative Self-Destruction" (pp. 98–104), Marshall Berman provides a reading of Marxist "creative destruction" to explain key processes at work within modernity. The title of the book is taken from a well-known passage from The Communist Manifesto. Berman elaborates this into something of a Zeitgeist which has profound social and cultural consequences:
  Here Berman emphasizes Marx's perception of the fragility and evanescence of capitalism's immense creative forces, and makes this apparent contradiction into one of the key explanatory figures of modernity.