New Urban Spaces

Urban Theory and the Scale Question

Neil Brenner

Critiques and reformulates inherited approaches to urbanization
Synthesizes and extends the author's previous work on the rescaling of urbanization
Builds upon the influential perspective of French Marxist theorist Henri Lefebvre
Outlines a vision of urban theory that diverges sharply from mainstream approaches to urban science as well as influential strands of poststructuralist urban research

New Urban Spaces

Urban Theory and the Scale Question

Neil Brenner

Description

The urban condition is today being radically transformed. Urban restructuring is accelerating, new urban spaces are being consolidated, and new forms of urbanization are crystallizing. In New Urban Spaces, Neil Brenner argues that understanding these mutations of urban life requires not only concrete research, but new theories of urbanization. To this end, Brenner proposes an approach that breaks with inherited conceptions of the urban as a bounded settlement unit-the city or the metropolis-and explores the multiscalar constitution and periodic rescaling of the capitalist urban fabric. Drawing on critical geopolitical economy and spatialized approaches to state theory, Brenner offers a paradigmatic account of how rescaling processes are transforming inherited formations of urban space and their variegated consequences for emergent patterns and pathways of urbanization. The book also advances an understanding of critical urban theory as radically revisable: key urban concepts must be continually reinvented in relation to the relentlessly mutating worlds of urbanization they aspire to illuminate.

New Urban Spaces

Urban Theory and the Scale Question

Neil Brenner

1 Openings: The Urban Question as a Scale Question?
2 Between Fixity and Motion: Scaling the Urban Fabric
3 Restructuring, Rescaling and the Urban Question
4 Global city formation and the rescaling of urbanization
5 Cities and the Political Geographies of the 'New' Economy
6 Competitive City-Regionalism and the Politics of Scale
7 Urban Growth Machines-But at What Scale?
8 A Thousand Layers: Geographies of Uneven Development
9 Planetary Urbanization: Mutations of the Urban Question
10 Afterword: New Spaces of Urbanization
Bibliography
Acknowledgements and sources
Index

New Urban Spaces

Urban Theory and the Scale Question

Neil Brenner

Author Information

Neil Brenner, Professor, Harvard Graduate School of Design

Neil Brenner is Professor of Urban Theory at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. Brenner is among the most widely cited contemporary urban theorists. Previous books include New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood; Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization (editor); and _{Critique of Urbanization}. Brenner has made influential contributions to scholarly debates on critical urban theory, the critique of capitalist urbanization, urban restructuring, state space, the political economy of rescaling, variegated neoliberalization and planetary urbanization.

New Urban Spaces

Urban Theory and the Scale Question

Neil Brenner

Reviews and Awards

"New Urban Spaces is a landmark contribution to urban and regional studies. Through a rich, dense and provocative argument, Neil Brenner synthesizes over a decade-and-a-half's work on state rescaling, globalization and urban governance into a comprehensive and radical retheorization of urbanization" - Jean-Paul D. Addie, Georgia State University, Regional Studies

"Brenner's new book New Urban Spaces - Urban Theory and the Scale Question reads as a poignant and well-articulated (self-)critique of what the author sees as a dominant tendency in urban theory to envisage the urban and the rural in opposition to each other... [New Urban Spaces] offers a skillfully-wrought exploration by a leading scholar of urban theory into the multi-scalar realm of urbanity and its highly complex interpenetrations with state power..." - David Leupold, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, Eurasian Geography and Economics