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.

About the Author
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.

Reviews
Brenner's work will undoubtedly inspire future theorists of alter-urbanizations... * Julian B. Hartman, School of Geography, Development, and Environment, University of Arizona, The AAG Review of Books (Routledge Taylor & Francis Group) *
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 * Jean-Paul D. Addie, Georgia State University, Regional Studies *
Brenner's new book New Urban Spaces - Urban Theory and the Scale Question reads as a poignant and well-articulated (self-)critique of what the author sees as a dominant tendency in urban theory to envisage the urban and the rural in opposition to each other... [New Urban Spaces] offers a skillfully-wrought exploration by a leading scholar of urban theory into the multi-scalar realm of urbanity and its highly complex interpenetrations with state power... * David Leupold, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, Eurasian Geography and Economics *



Book Information
ISBN 9780190627195
Author Neil Brenner
Format Paperback
Page Count 464
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 678g
Dimensions(mm) 236mm * 157mm * 28mm