Marxist geographer David Harvey opened his lecture with a fact: between 2011 and 2013 China consumed 50 percent more cement than the United States had in the entire twentieth century. In Abstract from the Concrete , he asks why. Spiraling outward--geographically and materially--Harvey travels from the building industry in China to the foreclosed housing market in the United States to the automobile industry in S o Paolo and back again. The why emerges as a direct result of "anti-value," of capital in crisis--intrinsic, he contends, to capital and capital cities today. The Incidents is a series of publications based on events that occured at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design between 1936 and tomorrow.Edited by Jennifer Sigler and Leah Whitman-Salkin Copublished with the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.