In this article----The Right to the City David Harvey argues that the whole neoliberal project over the last thirty years has been oriented towards the privatization of control over the surplus. Urbanization we may conclude has played a crucial role in the absorption of capital surpluses and has done so at every increasing geographical scales but at the price of burgeoning processes of creative destruction that entail the dispossession of the urban masses of any right to the city whatsoever. He says:

the question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from the question of what kind of people we want to be, what kinds of social relations we seek, what relations to nature we cherish, what style of daily life we desire, what kinds of technologies we deem appropriate, what aesthetic values we hold. The right to the city is, therefore, far more than a right of individual access to the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city more after our heart’s desire. It is, moreover, a collective rather than an individual right since changing the city inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power over the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake ourselves and our cities is..... one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.

1950s suburbia is one example of the way that the city has been remade. Today the city has become a commodity in an urban world where consumerism, tourism, cultural and knowledge-based industries have become major aspects of urban political economy. The postmodernist penchant for encouraging the formation of market niches, both in urban lifestyle choices and in consumer habits, and cultural forms, surrounds the contemporary urban experience with an aura of freedom of choice in the market, provided you have the money. Shopping malls, multiplexes and box stores proliferate ...as do fast food and artisanal market places, boutique cultures etc.