Should the urban poor be asked to pay their way out of poverty? Should transnational corporations be invited to profit from the plight of the urban poor? I fear that, if we use privatization to solve urban poverty, then we are answering ‘yes’ to these questions. In his impassioned and challenging contribution to this collection, World Bank President James Wolfensohn describes the World Bank’s Cities Without Slums action plan. This plan is in the process of upgrading infrastructures and services in urban slums globally. However, this plan and others like it seek in part to solve urban poverty by using the specific privatization technique of the public– private partnership. By harnessing the power of transnational corporations to solve urban poverty, such partnerships demand that the poor pay private companies for what should be their birthright: a basic social and economic infrastructure. In this response, I’d like to highlight three pieces for special attention: the lectures by Stuart Hall, David Harvey, and James Wolfensohn. Hall and Harvey’s account of the relationship between globalization, privatization, and urban poverty is very different from that offered by Wolfensohn. For Hall and Harvey, globalization impoverishes, while for Wolfensohn it is the key to solving the problem of urban poverty. With minor qualifications I will side with Hall and Harvey and argue that, while Wolfensohn’s position has important merits, it should be modified in significant ways. It seems to me that many of the problems of urban poverty are caused by globalization. The bill for eradicating urban poverty should be handed to the beneficiaries of globalization, not to its victims. I’ll start by fleshing out a recurring theme in all three chapters, the privatization of our cities, before giving some sense of how the privatization of urban infrastructure has come about over the last twenty-five or so years. Then I’ll turn to the lectures by Hall, Harvey, and Wolfensohn. The privatization of urban infrastructures started in the late 1970s in the United Kingdom. It was part of what Stuart Hall in his contribution refers to as ‘the privatization of public goods’.
