New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question

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. Dedication Table of Contents List of Figures List of Abbreviations 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 Acknowledgments Bibliography Index