Description
Book SynopsisThe 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.
Trade ReviewBrenner's work will undoubtedly inspire future theorists of alter-urbanizations... * Julian B. Hartman, School of Geography, Development, and Environment, University of Arizona, The AAG Review of Books (Routledge Taylor & Francis Group) *
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 *
Table of Contents1 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
