The Capitalist Spatial Matrix: A Political Theory of the Built Environment

Abstract

This dissertation develops a theory of the built environment and its role in the reproduction and stabilization of capitalist society. It begins by demonstrating that despite consistent engagement with that problematic, the past fifty years of critical socio-spatial scholarship has yet to produce an adequate account of that relationship. To develop one, the dissertation then proceeds in two parts. The first part of the dissertation is pitched at a high level of conceptual abstraction and considers the place of the built environment in capitalist society across three conceptual axes: crisis, articulation, and interpellation. Through dialogues with key figures in the history of political and social thought—ranging from Johann Heinrich von Thünen and G.F.W. Hegel to David Harvey and Stuart Hall—it demonstrates that the built environment should be understood as central to (1) the production and resolution of crises that arise across capitalism’s normatively differentiated abodes of social and ecological work; (2) the articulation of capitalist society’s necessary and contingent parts, especially the articulation of racialized and gendered forms of ascriptive hierarchization in capitalist contexts; and (3) the interpellation of differentiated capitalist subjectivities. Part II of the dissertation concretizes the theoretical agenda developed in Part I, turning to a close reading of two episodes in the history of American heterodox political economic thought to do so. First, it engages the “black belt debate” of the 1930s, which sought to make sense of the survivals of slavery after Reconstruction and the potentiality of black self-determination in the US south. In so doing, it attends specifically to the spatial presuppositions and implications of that debate, and to what it reveals regarding the role of the built environment in mediating capitalist crises. Second, it engages the US iteration of the “domestic labor debate” of the 1970s and 1980s. The dissertation argues that several participants within that debate relied heavily on spatial concepts and categories, and that their interventions help to demonstrate the role of the built environment in the articulation of race, gender, and capitalism’s constitutive dynamics, as well as the built environment’s role in the interpellation of differentiated capitalist subjectivities. The dissertation then concludes with a brief discussion of the normative implications of this account of the role of the built environment in the reproduction of capitalist society.