ARCH020/URPL626

Global Urban History: The Interwar Period

Instructor: Ümit Fırat Açıkgöz (ua00@aub.edu.lb)
Tuesdays, 3:30-6:30 ArD324

Response Paper-Tuesday March 19, 2024

Yamen Al Mohtar
AUB School of Design

The basis of societies’ economies and their social structures are inextricably linked as they define
one another. Capitalism and colonial capitalism have sustained their markets through labor
exploitation and resource accumulation. As a big portion of capital remained within a handful of
individuals, analogues are drawn with settler colonialism. This structure of society seems to be
constant despite different economic systems and within different regions across time. As the
value of labor contests that of resources and land, dynamics change between the different ends of
society.
Before the economy was as major in defining societies and as effective a tool of control, military
oppression was more common even when used to drive markets. Colonialism affected most of
the world, each part in different measure.
Jurisdictional and occupational control meant that China was not independent, yet the debate
over whether China was a colony or semi-colony should be concluded in its economic
controllers. The number of colonizers did not matter. Maybe the existence of capital in the hands
of the Chinese investors gave it an extra mile of freedom, or at the very least an easier path to
independence, already possessing the needed post-independence capital. From here Lenin sees
the economy as a driving factor that could save places like China from being labelled
“colonies”.1

Colonial Capitalism meant that China’s resources were not exclusive only to the country.
China’s economy rests on capital from the people, and control from the government. Were it
regulations or tax laws, a market without state intervention has not been -and could not be.
Calcutta and New York’s housing crises were bent on the idea that housing could take its place
in the market like any other commodity, which was the result of any capitalist economy left
without account.2

The wealth of China could not show better than in the waterfront of Shanghai, and the impact of
Victor Sassoon on it. Yet this was undermining China’s own wealth: exterior investors were
driving the economy in China’s newest thoroughfare. Building built in the Bund reflected their
owners’ ambitions before a country’s political status, but with the influence these people would
have on China’s later history, we could at least analyze China’s architectural scene based on the
Shanghai Strip:
1
Elizabeth LaCouture, Dwelling in the World
2
Bhattacharyya, Debjani. 2016
A style, or type, was seen around the world as the fruits of the industrial revolution started to
show in different places. American building styles started to get exported outside and buildings
that look straight out of Chicago or New York could be seen in cities like Shanghai: the most
notable Sassoon House being an example where the glamour and the economy of America was
imported into China. Independence would be military and jurisdictional, but economic, cultural,
and technological Chinese independence would be unobtainable, or delayed at best. By rejecting
British neoclassical style in favor of Art Deco, China replaced British control with American
influence -bordering on dependency.3

Vis a vis its property, a big part of Shanghai was controlled by a handful of people -Sasson alone
owned 1800 properties. It was not like Suburbs, and surely nothing like Settler Colonialism. But
the hegemonic and exclusionary practices combined with a need for the other is not unseen in all
three conditions. It’s all a natural tendency towards societal structure, it all follows the laws of
progress. “Settler Colonialism destroys to replace” is vastly dissimilar, yet eerily resembling of
development projects once they start to take the city from certain people and give it to others;
and progressively influence, appropriate, alienate, and gentrify this city.

A notable difference is one challenge -or exception- to Marx theories, where the value is situated
in the land rather than labor. Land, i.e. resources, become more valuable as labor is already
present in the Colonizing society, and indigenous populations are seen as a resource, that usually
needs to be separated from the land and that in terms of labor is less competent and useful than
the already existing national labor force.4

As economies are built on labor, the most successful and financially stable economies are ones
that use the cheapest labor: free labor. As slavery had carried American -and several other
empires’ economies- for a long time, its rejection in more developed societies meant the creation
of similar conditions to counterbalance the lost labor, and rejection of the once slaves, now
citizens with rights who pose a threat to the economy. Florida’s Black belts is one example of the
American response to this issue, an example of how a certain portion’s poverty and segregation
is the thriving of other people. Black rental housing made profit through segregation, and profit
strategies were disguised as -or put before- reforms. This is not neo-slavery: that would be 21st
century strategies of overworking, and the exploitation present in many parts of the world.
Rather, the New Deal presented a continued societal process of oppression towards certain
groups, maintaining their role as a support for a corrupt economy.5
This labor resource could create the drive for society, being the main and true object of trade. If
commodities could not create a value separated from the labor value of their creators, land did
not have that issue. Just like Chinese land, land in Rio realized its value as a market based on
coffee was being built. Labor became a necessary commodity that is as valuable as the size of the
land, and needed in limited quantity, enough to maintain the land resource.

3
Chung, Stephanie Po-yin. 2019
4
Blatman-Thomas, N. and Porter, L.
5
Conolly, N.D.B.
This is interesting in that it begs a question over where exactly labor is the main treasure of the
economy. Theories mainly originate in cities by city dwellers and cannot be exhaustive to
country sides or -in the case of Brazil- fazendas that were a means of investment. This shift from
the labor value increased the prices of land compared to work wages, which synthesizes
opposition in the form of protests to these conditions. 6
Power manifests itself in constantly changing ways. It becomes progressively more complex as it
evolves from its purest form of violence -or military presence, and morphs to the point where it
disconnects from its initial state. But as the economy and the rules imposed on society become
stricter and harder to bare, balance is brought back through different means of protests,
regulations, or ultimately through revolution, power’s inevitable synthesis.

6
Ribeiro, L. C. de Q. (1989)