Before the reader is one of the classic works of D. Harvey, the most authoritative Anglo-American geographer, one of the founders of "radical geography," winner of the Vautrin Lude Prize (1995), which is considered the Nobel Prize in Geography. The book is a rare example of not just an economic, but a political economic study of the foundations and features of urban development. And although the author relies on an analysis of the processes that took place in the USA and Western Europe in the 1960-1970s of the XX century, his observations half a century ago are more than relevant to the situation in today's Russia. Harvey's works, closely related to the ideas of left-wing intellectuals (primarily French) of the mid-1960s, strongly influenced the Anglo-Saxon tradition of exploring the city in the 20th century.