New Urban Spaces by Neil Brenner

In many ways, the book is an extended critique of what I've called city-centric approaches to the urban question and to urban theory. And what I mean by that is the assumption that urbanization is defined entirely as the growth of cities. The issue here is not that cities are not part of urbanization, but rather that we cannot understand the full complexity of urbanization just by looking at cities as bounded spaces or agglomerations. We need a much broader political economic and spatial perspective to understand the growth of cities in relation to a variety of other institutional, economic, and ecological dynamics that support and result from the growth of cities. I'm Neil Brenner. I'm a critical urban theorist and I'm the author of the book New Urban Spaces, Urban Theory and the Scale Question. The question around which the book is framed is simple to summarize. Is the urban question a scale question? What I mean by that is what would happen to our understanding of the urban? If we think of the urban, not as it were on a horizontal axis, in contrast to other settlement types, the suburb, the town, the countryside, or the rural, but rather on a vertical axis, the urban has defined as a scale embedded within a broader hierarchy of interconnected and constantly changing scales. The urban, the regional, the national, the super national, and the global. Capital accumulation is an example of that. The dynamics of capital accumulation are global. They're organized within super national systems like the European Union or Latin America or NAFTA. They're also obviously organized within national territories as national economies, regional or metropolitan economies, and then localities. We always need to embed cities within and agglomerations, within larger interscaler configurations whose dynamics and morphologies continually changed. The main substantive chapters of the book, which are mostly focused on urban restructuring in North America and Western Europe from the 1960s up through the present, elaborate some of the implications of a scalar approach to urban restructuring in a context in which the urban as a scale has been completely transformed in relation to broader geoeconomic and geopolitical configurations. Prior to the 1970s, cities were tightly embedded within broader national, political, and economic systems. The urban development was understood to be one element within the development of national economies. That proposition applies whether we're talking about Western Europe, a so-called first world, North America, or whether we're talking about the developing world in terms of cities being viewed as a word of spearheads for national industrialization processes. And national states were very interested in managing that particular process. During the 1970s and 1980s, significant geoeconomic restructuring crises unfolded, and what we've seen is the increasing hegemony of neoliberal free market ideologies, which have not at all entailed a retreat of states from the production of urban space and from the organization of economic life, but a recalibration of state power to promote particular strategies of economic development that are much more polarizing and much more speculative than the ones that we saw previously. So it's a complete inversion in what we might think of as the politics of uneven spatial development. Instead of national states trying to alleviate spatial inequality across the entire national territory, effectively state policies in different ways in different contexts since the 1980s have been intensifying social and spatial inequality, and that in turn has entailed a radical remaking of the urban. The latter third of the book starts to explore what I think of as some of the limits to a purely scalar lens into the urban question. The urban is also a place, it's a locality, it's a site of meaning, it's a site of social embeddedness, it's also a territory. The urban is also part of a network. Cities are tightly interconnected with one another and with other entities in the world. Corporations, for example. So the book starts to open up a more polymorphic conceptualization of urban space in the context of an inquiry into what I and some of my collaborators, Christian Schmidt and others have described as planetary urbanization. What is the narrative thinking of urbanization only in terms of the moment of concentration or agglomeration? We're interested in the ways in which the growth of cities also entails the radical transformation of non-city landscapes to support city growth, the remaking of land use systems, infrastructural configurations, labor relations and ecological dynamics. The concept of extended urbanization is a basis for analyzing the connections between city building processes and a variety of industrial transformations that are occurring in other kinds of spaces around the world whose populations may be declining or may be relatively low, but which become incredibly significant operationally and ecologically for supporting urban life on planet earth. Industrial infrastructures related to extraction, related to agriculture, related to logistics have in many ways enclosed historical countryside and contributed to a process of deep hasentization and dispossession of populations that have long sustained themselves in rural environments and in the countryside and which continue to struggle over land and livelihood outside of major metropolitan regions. The field of urban studies today is extremely exciting. There's a proliferation of new conceptualizations of city building and of the urban. There's a proliferation of critiques of inherited approaches to urban development and there's massive disagreement. I think all of this is productive. I however do have a particular take on how we might think about urbanization, but I certainly don't view it as the solution to these problems and I view it as an offering and as a contribution to collective discourse and collective debate. I don't think there ever could be a singular encompassing meta narrative that could capture all of the complexities of the urban. And even if there were one of the constitutive features of the urban is that it constantly changes. So any attempt to nail down the urban it will inevitably be superseded. Theory is always a couple steps, sometimes many steps behind the forward motion of life and struggle and imagination. Neil Brenner's book New Urban Spaces, Urban Theory and the Scale Question is out now from Oxford University Press. What do you think about that org/interstitial for the reading? Sound up for a newsletter while you're there? New things in 2020. Interstitial is available wherever you list the podcasts. Share the show if you like it, please. Sound design is always by Sam Clap. I'm David Huber, more next week.