New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question

by Neil Brenner

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.

Genres: Urban Studies, Academic, Urban

320 pages, ebook

Published June 21, 2019

Reviews

[TNVR · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read New Urban Spaces—or really its introductory and concluding chapters—instrumentally and at a fast pace, hoping to broadly familiarize myself with Brenner’s project and work being done in contemporary urban studies. I may return to it more in depth at a later point and can’t give a very thorough review here.

Brenner’s main intervention—one he emphasizes a little too often—is against what he calls “methodological cityism.” This framework, which he claims to be quite prominent in contemporary urban theory, takes “the city” as the object of urban studies, defining it as a spatially-coherent and bounded entity defined in contrast to other regions (namely the suburban and the rural) (13). Against this, Brenner follows Henri Lefebvre in distinguishing the city from ‘the urban’ (or ‘the urban fabric’). It’s not entirely clear to me, on my too-quick read, how ‘the urban’ is defined (except as a “problematic”), but the key point for Brenner is the need to investigate “the constitutive essences—the core processes through which urban(izing) geographies are produced, tendentially stabilized, and recurrently transformed” (349) rather than taken-for-granted units like ‘the city.’ This is necessary at this particular juncture because of ongoing spatial tendencies of capitalist development that problematize equations of urbanization with the growth of cities. These include: the creation of urban megaregions, the reterritorialization of various functions that used to be centered in cities in the suburbs and alongside transportation corridors, the industrialization of the hinterland (i.e., its enclosure, ‘infrastructuralization,’ and ‘operationalization’ in large-scale infrastructure projects and the creation of nodes for global supply chains), and “the disintegration of the wilderness” (305-307).

Brenner formulates his relational-processual conception of “planetary urbanization” by identifying what he calls “the dialectics of concentrated and extended urbanization” (or, after Lefebvre, implosion and explosion). Concentrated urbanization refers to socio-spatial agglomeration—essentially the creation of cities—the dynamics of which are historically variable (356). His intervention is to dialectically relate concentrated urbanization to processes of extended urbanization, the intertwining of agglomeration with “wide-ranging sociospatial, infrastructural, and ecological transformations beyond metropolitan centers and their immediately contiguous regions” (358)—i.e. the industrialization of the hinterland and the logistical-spatial tightening (in a “progressively thickening mesh”) of moments of extraction, production, circulation, and consumption

“The process of extended urbanization is dialectically intertwined with that of concentrated urbanization, and ever more so as the creatively destructive forward motion of capitalist industrialization intensifies, leading to the consolidation of more tightly-integrated, if chronically volatile, unevenly articulated, and deeply stratified, planetary-scale production networks” (361).

“This results in the mutation of those spaces—or specific infrastructural assemblages within them—into what may be termed ‘operational landscapes’: zones whose sociospatial and ecological relations are rationalized, infrastructuralized, and recurrently reorganized to support the metabolism of capitalist industrialization in more or less direct relation to the shifting dynamics of concentrated urbanization” (363)

Another illuminating section for me was his discussion of the present “global land rush”/”infrastructural scramble” being undertaken by many governments—especially of the BRICS. This was a clarifying, synthetic account of the role of the state in creating the emerging economic geography of our century.

[Nash Δ. · Rating 3 out of 5]

"New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question" by Neil Brenner is a seminal work in urban theory that examines the relationship between urbanization and scale. Brenner argues that traditional approaches to urban theory often overlook the role of scale in shaping urban spaces and processes.

One of the key concepts in the book is the idea of "scalar restructuring," which refers to the ways in which different scales of urbanization – from the local to the global – interact and influence each other. Brenner argues that understanding these scalar dynamics is crucial for understanding contemporary urbanization processes.

Through a combination of theoretical analysis and case studies, Brenner explores how changes in global capitalism, governance structures, and technological advances have transformed urban spaces at various scales. He also examines the implications of these transformations for urban theory and practice.

Overall, "New Urban Spaces" is a complex but insightful book that challenges readers to rethink their understanding of urbanization and scale. Brenner's analysis is both rigorous and thought-provoking, making this book essential reading for anyone interested in urban studies or geography.