New Urban Spaces : Urban Theory and the Scale Question Urban Theory and the Scale Question

Abstract

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. How can these transformations be deciphered? In this book, critical urban theorist Neil Brenner argues that confronting this challenge requires not only intensive research on urban restructuring 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, political mediation, and ongoing rescaling of the capitalist urban fabric, from the local and the regional to the national and the planetary. New Urban Spaces offers a paradigmatic account of how rescaling processes are transforming inherited formations of urban life, the role of multiscalar state spatial strategies in animating them, 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, methods, and cartographies must be continually reinvented in relation to the relentlessly mutating worlds of urbanization they aspire to illuminate.