Friedrich Engels: unraveling the capitalist city

Abstract

Friedrich Engels' individual work is the first sociological approach to urban development since he analyses it both as an expression of the capitalist mode of production and as a catalyst for it and its contradictions. In his The Housing Question, Engels analyses the causes of such a problem to contradict the proposals for its resolution within the framework of capitalism. In the process, Engels describes dynamics that a century later urban sociology will call gentrification. This article highlights the way in which Engels, within the framework of his broad reflection on housing and capitalism, makes an early detection of the central elements of gentrification and places them in relation to other questions that have been central objects of classic and contemporary urban sociology: hygienism, the city as a space for collective consumption, the extension of homeownership, the financialization of housing and the right to the city.