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Question Four

In this section, I will define and critically analyze the commodification of urban space.

Parker (104) defines commodification of urban space as when the owners of a given "territory or

terrain” can “sell, rent, or derive” other advantages regarding their ownership title. As the author

notes, even though it might be argued that encountering “commodified public space is leisure,"

this encounter is applied in a regulated and profit-manner. Commodities, according to Parker,

should not be concrete, moveable goods which might be stored in a warehouse because, in the

Marxian logic, a commodity entails “anything that the labor value has converted into a

redeemable good, property, or service” (Parker 104).

Additionally, as the author argues, the city is never completely the commodified space

product; public roads, marketplaces, and squares occur “alongside modest townhouses, or grand

palaces and yet even ‘public space’ might be acquired, sold or hired and as such is valued as a

state asset in state accounts." For that reason, the urban scheme is essentially founded on

production relationships, which blend labor in the form of inhabitant and traveling wage-

workforces together with capital used to generate factory-made goods as well as services for a

moneymaking trade-off. As Parker (104) argues, the capitalist city comprises the conversion of

the space’s use-value into the land’s exchange value whereas offering the ways to generate and

trade-off the rest of commodities’ types. Besides, all elements – “labour, land or space, along

with immovable as well as liquid capital” – occur in their temporal field. Therefore, the office
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commuters’ working days which have to be taken as mealtimes and journey times, are a portion

of a varying sequence to that of the structures; they work that might be designed for a 20 or 30

tenancy period prior to their refurbishing or demolishing for different reasons.

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Work Cited

Parker, Simon. Urban theory and the urban experience: Encountering the city. Routledge, 2003.