Overview

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.

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9780190627201

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"""Brenner's most recent monograph is a challenging, dense and surprising read that will likely reshape our understanding of the long-established scholarship of one of the world's finest contemporary urban theorists ... [The book offers] a fundamental contribution, both to recent and current debates focusing on the nature of urban theory per se, and more generally to a broader conceptualization of our role as urban scholars. It raises key questions around the changing positionality of urban scholars, and about whether we should lay our previous work to rest within its historical framing or instead constantly revisit it whilst we grapple with the changing (and unequal) realities around us."" Michele Acuto, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR) ""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... Brenner has provided a vital...statement on, and an incisive analytical instrument to cut through, the unfolding problematics of our planetary urban condition."" -Jean-Paul D. Addie, Regional Studies"

Brenner's most recent monograph is a challenging, dense and surprising read that will likely reshape our understanding of the long-established scholarship of one of the world's finest contemporary urban theorists ... [The book offers] a fundamental contribution, both to recent and current debates focusing on the nature of urban theory per se, and more generally to a broader conceptualization of our role as urban scholars. It raises key questions around the changing positionality of urban scholars, and about whether we should lay our previous work to rest within its historical framing or instead constantly revisit it whilst we grapple with the changing (and unequal) realities around us. Michele Acuto, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR) 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... Brenner has provided a vital...statement on, and an incisive analytical instrument to cut through, the unfolding problematics of our planetary urban condition. -Jean-Paul D. Addie, Regional Studies

Author Information

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.

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