IMPLOSIONS / EXPLOSIONS

NEIL BRENNER

ILL BEGIN WITH THE FOLLOWING HYPOTHESIS:

SOCIETY HAS BEEN COMPLETELY URBANIZED.

IMPLOSIONS / EXPLOSIONS

NEIL BRENNER IS PROFESSOR OF URBAN THEORY AND DIRECTOR OF THE URBAN

THEORY LAB AT THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF DESIGN ( GSD ) HARVARD UNIVERSITY.

EDITED BY NEIL BRENNER

HENRI LEFEBVRE, LA RVOLUTION URBAINE ( 1970 )

TOWARDS A STUDY OF PLANETARY URBANIZATION

CONTENTS

1Introduction:
Urban Theory Without an Outside
Neil Brenner

TWO
COMPLETE URBANIZATION
EXPERIENCE, SITE, PROCESS

THREE
PLANETARY URBANIZATION
OPENINGS

FOUR
HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHIES OF
URBANIZATION

5 Where Does the City End?

10 The Urbanization of the World

16 Urbs in Rure: Historical Enclosure and the

Matthew Gandy

Edward W. Soja and J. Miguel Kanai

Extended Urbanization of the Countryside

86

142

lvaro Sevilla-Buitrago

14

ONE
FOUNDATIONS
THE URBANIZATION QUESTION

236
6 Travelling Warrior and

11 Planetary Urbanization

2 From the City to Urban Society

Complete Urbanization in Switzerland

Henri Lefebvre

Christian Schmid

36

90

Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid

17 What is the Urban

160

in the Contemporary World?

Roberto Lus Monte-Mr

12 The Urban Question Under Planetary

Urbanization

260

3 Cities or Urbanization?

7 Is the Matterhorn City?

David Harvey

Marcel Meili

Andy Merrifield

18 The Urbanization of Switzerland

52

103

164

Christian Schmid

268
4 Networks, Borders, Differences:

8 Extended Urbanization and Settlement Patterns:

13 Theses on urbanization

Towards a Theory of the Urban

an Environmental Approach

Neil Brenner

19 Regional Urbanization

Christian Schmid

Roberto Lus Monte-Mr

181

and the End of the Metropolis Era

67

Edward W. Soja

109
14 Patterns and Pathways of Global Urbanization:

276

9 The Emergence of Desakota Regions in Asia:

Towards Comparative Analysis

Expanding a Hypothesis

Christian Schmid

20 The Fractures of Worldwide Urbanization:

Terry G. McGee

203

Insights From the Literary World

Stefan Kipfer

121
15 The Country and The City
in the Urban Revolution
Kanishka Goonewardena
218

288

FIVE
URBAN STUDIES
AND URBAN IDEOLOGIES

SIX
VISUALIZATIONS
IDEOLOGIES AND EXPERIMENTS

SEVEN
POLITICAL STRATEGIES,
STRUGGLES AND HORIZONS

CODA

21 The Urban Age in Question

26 A Typology of Urban Switzerland

29 Two Approaches to World Management:

34 Dissolving City, Planetary Metamorphosis

Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid

Christian Schmid

R. B. Fuller and C. A. Doxiadis

Henri Lefebvre

310

398

Nikos Katsikis

566

480
22 What Role For Social Science

27 Is the Mediterranean Urban?

in the Urban Age?

Neil Brenner and Nikos Katsikis

30 City Becoming World: Nancy, Lefebvre

428

and the Global-Urban Imagination

Brendan Gleeson
338

28 Envisioning an Urbanized Planet

23 City as Ideology

Materials

Contributors

572

David J. Madden

Sources

505

575

David Wachsmuth

Urban Theory Lab-GSD

31 The Right to the City and Beyond:

353

460

Notes on a Lefebvrian Reconceptualization

Andy Merrifield

24 Urbanizing Urban Political Ecology:

A Critique of Methodological Cityism

523

Hillary Angelo and David Wachsmuth

32 The Hypertrophic City Versus

372

the Planet of Fields

Max Ajl
25 Whither Urban Studies?

533

Andy Merrifield
386

33 Becoming Urban: on Whose Terms?

John Friedmann
551

1
INTRODUCTION:
URBAN THEORY
WITHOUT AN OUTSIDE
Neil Brenner

The urban question has long been a flashpoint for intense debate among researchers
concerned with the nature of cities and urbanization processes.1 Despite profound
differences of methodology, analytical focus and political orientation, the major twentieth
century approaches to this question have taken an entity commonly labeled as the city (or
some lexical variation thereof) as their primary unit of analysis and site of investigation.
This foundational epistemological focus was canonized in the 1925 mission-statement
of urban sociology by Chicago School founders Ernest Burgess and Robert Park,
laconically but confidently titled The City.2 It subsequently evolved into a basically selfevident presuppositionso obvious that it did not require explanation or justification
across diverse traditions and terrains of urban research. Indeed, despite their significant
epistemological, methodological and political differences from Chicago School urban
sociology, the major strands of mid- to late twentieth century urban studies have likewise
focused their analytical gaze primarily, if not exclusively, on city-like (nodal, relatively
large, densely populated and self-enclosed) sociospatial units. This generalization applies
to mainstream quantitative research on city-size distributions, central place systems and
urban hierarchies; to the periodizations of capitalist urban development by radical political
economists in the 1970s and 1980s; to the influential analyses of postfordist cities, global
city formation and megacity expansion in the 1990s; and to more recent research forays
on neoliberal cities, ordinary cities and postcolonial cities in the late 1990s and into the

15

early 2000s. Whatever their specific methodological orientations, explananda and politicotheoretical agendas, each of these influential approaches to the urban question has either (a)
documented the replication of city-like settlement types across larger territories; or (b) used
a modifying termmercantile, industrial, Fordist-Keynesian, post-Keynesian, postfordist,
global, mega, neoliberal, ordinary, postcolonial and so forthto demarcate its research
terrain as a subset of a putatively more general sociospatial form, the city.3
Of course, there have been many terms on offer for labeling the city-like unit in question
metropolis, conurbation, city-region, metropolitan area, megalopolis, megapolitan zone,
and so forthand these appropriately reflect the changing boundaries, morphologies
and scales of human settlement patterns.4 Concomitantly, across and within each of the
aforementioned research traditions, intense debates have long raged regarding the origins,
internal dynamics and consequences of city-building, and more generally, regarding the
functions of cities in relation to broader political-economic, sociocultural and demographic
transformations.5 But underneath the tumult of disagreement and the relentless series of
paradigm shifts that have animated urban theory and research during the last century, a
basic consensus has persisted: the urban problematique is thought to be embodied, at core,
in citiesconceived as settlement types characterized by certain indicative features (such
as largeness, density and social diversity) that make them qualitatively distinct from a noncity social world (suburban, rural and/or natural) located beyond or outside them.6
In effect, as Hillary Angelo and David Wachsmuth explain in their contribution to this
volume, the epistemology of urban studies has been characterized by a deeply entrenched
methodological cityism which entails an analytical privileging, isolation and [] naturalization
of the city in studies of urban processes where the non-city may also be significant.7
This book assembles a series of contributions to the urban question that push strongly
against the grain of that epistemology. Through diverse modes of engagement (conceptual,
methodological, historical, political-economic, representational) and analytical windows
(social scientific, cartographic, literary and cinematic), its chapters articulate the elements
of a radically different way of understanding the problematique of urban theory and research,
and more generally, of conceptualizing the imprint and operationality of urban processes
on the planetary landscape. In so doing, we aim to advance a hitherto largely subterranean
stream of urban research that has, since the mid-twentieth century, cast doubt upon
established understandings of the urban as a bounded, nodal and relatively self-enclosed
sociospatial condition in favor of more territorially differentiated, morphologically variable,
multiscalar and processual conceptualizations.8 Building upon various concepts, methods
and mappings derived from that work, especially Henri Lefebvres approach, this book
aspires to supersede the urban/non-urban divide that has long anchored the epistemology
of urban research, and on this basis, to develop a new vision of urban theory without an
outside.

In so doing, the books contributors preserve the analytical centrality of agglomeration to

the problematique of urban theory, but interpret it as only one dimension and morphological
expression of the capitalist form of urbanization. In this understanding, the development,
intensification and worldwide expansion of capitalism produces a vast, variegated terrain
of urban(ized) conditions that include yet progressively extend beyond the zones of
agglomeration that have long monopolized the attention of urban researchers. As this
erstwhile non-urban realm is increasingly subsumed within and operationalized by a worldencompassingand, indeed, world-makingprocess of capitalist urbanization, the meaning
of the urban must itself be fundamentally re-imagined both in theory and in practice.9

Why should the urban/non-urban distinction be transcended, and why now? Clearly,
settlement space has long been differentiated by place names, and it seems intuitive to
demarcate the terrain of the urban, both historically and today, with reference to the names
of the worlds great citiesLondon, New York, Shenzhen, Mumbai, Lagos and so forth.
Even amidst the intense volatility associated with accelerated geoeconomic restructuring,
such places clearly do still exist, and in fact, their size and strategic economic importance
appear to be growing, not diminishing. But what, exactly, are these places, aside from names
on a map that have been institutionalized by governments and branded as investment
locations by growth coalitions? What distinguishes them qualitatively from other places
within and beyond, say, the South East of England and Western Europe; the US Northeast
and North America; the Pearl River Delta and East Asia; Maharashtra and South Asia;
or southern Nigeria and West Africa? Do they contain some special quality that makes
them uniquetheir size, perhaps, or their population density? Their infrastructural outlays?
Their strategic centrality in global flows of capital and labor? Or, on the other hand, have
the sociospatial relations of urbanism that were once apparently contained within these
units now exploded haphazardly beyond them, via the ever thickening commodity chains,
infrastructural circuits, migration streams and circulatory-logistical networks that today
crisscross the planet? But, if this is the case, can any erstwhile city, whatever its size, still be
said to have coherent boundaries? Have the everyday social relations, inter-firm networks,
labor markets, built environments, infrastructural corridors and socio-environmental
footprints associated with such densified clusters now been extended, thickened,
superimposed and interwoven to forge what Jean Gottmann once vividly described as an
irregularly colloidal mixture of rural and suburban landscapes on national, international,
continental and even global scales?10 And, to the degree that all this is indeed occurring,
in a world in which the city is everywhere and in everything, shouldnt the inherited
understanding of the urban as a distinctive settlement type be abandoned, or at least be
radically reconceptualized?11
This was, of course, precisely the position advanced by Lefebvre over four decades ago,
when he opened La rvolution urbaine with the provocative hypothesis that society has been

17

completely urbanized.12 Although he viewed complete urbanization as a virtual objectan

emergent condition rather than an actualized realityLefebvre suggested that the broad
outlines of a complete formation of urbanization were already coming into relief during
the 1960s in Western Europe. They were evidenced, he argued, in the fragmentation and
destruction of traditional European cities; in the formation of a large-scale territorial
megalopolis stretching from England, Paris and the Ruhr region to Scandinavia; in the
extension of logistical, commercial and tourist infrastructures deep into previously remote
areas; in the construction of major industrial estates and large-scale housing ensembles
in formerly peripheral locations in France, Spain and Italy; in the destruction of quasiautonomous agrarian communities in formerly rural zones; and in wide-ranging processes
of environmental degradation across the continent.13 When actualized on a planetary scale,
Lefebvre suggested, such tendencies would entail a relentless, if fragmentary, interweaving
of an urban fabrica net of uneven meshacross the entire world, including terrestrial
surfaces, the oceans, the atmosphere and the subterranean, all of which would be ever more
directly instrumentalized and operationalized to serve the voracious pursuit of capitalist
industrial growth.14
In several striking formulations, Lefebvre characterizes the generalization of capitalist
urbanization as a process of implosion-explosion, a phrase he introduced to illuminate
the mutually recursive links between capitalist forms of agglomeration and broader
transformations of territory, landscape and environment. In some of his initial formulations,
Lefebvre uses the metaphor of implosion-explosion in an almost Mumfordesque manner, to
characterize the destruction of European mercantile cities (the moment of implosion) and
the subsequent growth of megalopolitan territorial formations to support industrialization
(the moment of explosion).15 But Lefebvre subsequently expands his use of the implosionexplosion metaphor to describe some of the wide-ranging territorial transformations that
have ensued at various spatial scales during the longue dure history of capitalist urbanization.
As cities are extended outwards into their surrounding territories and are woven together
via thickening long-distance logistics networks, these erstwhile non-city zones are more
tightly integrated into large-scale spatial divisions of labor. With the intensification,
acceleration and territorial expansion of capitalist forms of growth, precapitalist and
mercantile cities and towns are either peripheralized or remade into strategic locations
within heavily industrialized landscapes. Subsequently, a further round of sociospatial
explosion occurs as urban practices, institutions, infrastructures and built environments
are projected aggressively into and across the erstwhile non-urban realm, annihilating any
transparent differentiation between city and countryside, and linking local and regional
economies more directly to transnational flows of raw material, commodities, labor and
capital. In this way, processes of concentration and dispersion, as well as new patterns of
core-periphery polarization, are superimposed upon one another across places, territories
and scales, creating an almost kaleidoscopic churning of sociospatial arrangements during
successive cycles of capitalist development. The notion of implosion-explosion thus comes
to describe the production and continual transformation of an industrialized urban fabric

in which centers of agglomeration and their operational landscapes are woven together in
mutually transformative ways while being co-articulated into a worldwide capitalist system.16
In a provocative, widely discussed diagram presented in the opening chapter of La
rvolution urbaine, Lefebvre uses the notion of implosion-explosion to describe the broad
constellation of historical-geographical transformations that would, he believed, herald
the onset of complete urbanization on a world scalespecifically, urban concentration,
rural exodus, extension of the urban fabric, complete subordination of the agrarian to
the urban (see page 43). When this critical point is reached, Lefebvre suggests, the
condition of complete urbanization will no longer be hypotheticala mere virtual
object whose tendencies are selectively manifested in particular territories, whether in
Europe or elsewhere.17 It will, rather, have become a basic parameter for planetary social
and environmental relations, imposing new constraints upon the use and transformation of
the worldwide built environment, unleashing potentially catastrophic inequalities, conflicts
and dangers, but also harboring new opportunities for the democratic appropriation and
self-management of space at all scales. In the late 1980s, in one of his final texts, Lefebvre
suggested that the critical point of complete urbanization had actually been crossed, and
thus that a planetarization of the urban was now being realized in practice.18
The contributions to this book build upon and extend Lefebvres hypothesis and
subsequent analysis. They suggest various ways in which Lefebvres virtual object of
complete urbanization is today being actualized, albeit unevenly, on a worldwide scale,
as well as in specific territories, regions and places; and they explore some of the wideranging intellectual, social, political and environmental implications of this state of affairs.
As many chapters included here suggest, this newly consolidated, planetary formation
of urbanization has blurred, even exploded, long-entrenched sociospatial bordersnot
only between city and countryside, urban and rural, core and periphery, metropole and
colony, society and nature, but also between the urban, regional, national and global scales
themselvesthereby creating new formations of a thickly urbanized landscape whose
contours are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to theorize, much less to map, on
the basis of inherited approaches to urban studies. The present volume assembles some
conceptual, methodological, analytical and cartographic tools through which that challenge
might be productively confronted. The notion of implosion-explosion is useful in this
endeavor not because it offers a finished theory or a fully differentiated cartography of
our emergent global-urban moment, but simply because it begins to demarcate the vast,
unwieldy problematique that opens before us as the legacies of methodological cityism are
questioned and tendentially superseded.

In exploring this emergent agenda, our claim in this book is decidedly not, as some urbanists
have occasionally proposed, that cities (or, more precisely, zones of agglomeration) are

19

dissolving into a placeless society of global flows, borderless connectivity or haphazard

spatial dispersal.19 Nor do we suggest that population density, inter-firm clustering,
agglomeration effects or infrastructural concentrationto name just a few of the
conditions that are commonly associated with the phenomenon of cityness under modern
capitalismare no longer operationally significant features in contemporary economy and
society. On the contrary, the contributors to this volume remain fundamentally concerned
with agglomeration processes, their changing role in regimes of capital accumulation, and
their variegated expressions in diverse morphological forms and spatial configurations
from large-scale urban regions, polycentric metropolitan territories and linear urban
corridors to inter-urban networks and worldwide urban hierarchies. They simply insist, as
Matthew Gandy succinctly proposes, that cities are just a form of urbanization, and thus
that they must be understood as dynamically evolving sites, arenas and outcomes of broader
processes of sociospatial and socio-ecological transformation.20 David Harvey offers an
equally concise formulation of this proposition with his suggestion that the thing we call
a city is the outcome of a process that we call urbanization.21
But how, precisely, to theorize this process of urbanization and its variegated geographies?
In fact, this task poses considerable challenges because, even though the concept of
urbanization may initially appear to connote the dynamic, processual qualities emphasized
by Gandy and Harvey, it has actually long been thoroughly mired in the epistemological
assumptions of methodological cityism. Along with other meta-concepts such as
industrialization, modernization, democratization and rationalization, the concept of
urbanization has a long history in the modern social and historical sciences, and has
generally been used to invoke one of the putatively all-pervasive large processes of
modern capitalist social formations.22 Yet, in most accounts, whether within urban studies,
social theory or historical sociology, urbanization refers, tout court, to the process of city
growth: it is circumscribed, by definition, to refer only to the growth of large, and perhaps
dense or diverse, settlements, generally in conjunction with some of the other macro-trends
of capitalist modernity.
Although its origins may be traced to various strands of nineteenth and early twentieth
century social theory, such a conceptualization was paradigmatically embodied in American
sociologist Kingsley Davis classic, mid-twentieth century definition of urbanization as the
expansion of the city-based population relative to the total national population. Rather than
defining cities in social, morphological or functional terms, Davis famously used numerical
population thresholdsgenerally 20,000 or 100,000to demarcate their specificity as
settlement types.23 Davis concisely summarized this strictly empirical understanding in the
formula: U = Pc / Pt (U = urbanization; Pc = population of cities; and Pt = total national
population); and he subsequently devoted several decades of careful empirical research to
its international application, eventually producing the first comprehensive worldwide survey
of national urbanization levels.24

As Christian Schmid and I argue in Ch. 21 below, Davis mid-century definition is today
firmly institutionalized in the data collection systems that are still used by the United
Nations (UN) and other global organizations, and it is also still rigidly entrenched within
major strands of contemporary social science, urban planning, social policy and public
health.25 Indeed, it is precisely this empiricist, city-centric conceptualization of urbanization
that underpins the influential contemporary assertion that an urban age has recently
dawned due to the putative shift of the majority of the worlds population from the
countryside to the city. Aside from its empirical blind-spots, which are considerable
given the non-standardized definitions of settlement types that are intermixed within the
UNs data tables, such a proposition is a deeply misleading basis for understanding the
contemporary global urban condition. It presupposes a narrow, ahistorical and populationcentric concept of the city that does not adequately grasp the extraordinary scale and
diversity of agglomeration processes that are associated with contemporary forms of
urban development around the world. Just as importantly, the urban age concept fails to
illuminate the wide-ranging operations and impacts of urbanization processes beyond the
large centers of agglomeration, including in zones of resource extraction, agro-industrial
enclosure, logistics and communications infrastructure, tourism and waste disposal, which
often traverse peripheral, remote and apparently rural or natural locations.26
While such operational landscapes may not contain the population densities, settlement
properties, social fabric and infrastructural equipment that are commonly associated
with cities, they have long played strategically essential roles in supporting the latter,
whether by supplying raw materials, energy, water, food or labor, or through logistics,
communications or waste processing functions. More generally, as Marx recognized in
his classic analysis of original accumulation (ursprngliche Akkumulation) in volume 1 of
Capital, the enclosure, commodification and ongoing reorganization of such landscapes has
figured crucially throughout the history of capitalism in the dispossession, displacement
and proletarianization of the very populations that so often cluster within large urban
centers.27 The capitalist form of agglomeration thus presupposes the enclosure and
operationalization of large-scale territories located well beyond the city to support its
most basic socioeconomic activities, metabolic cycles and growth imperatives.28 Today, such
landscapes are being comprehensively produced, engineered or redesigned through a surge
of infrastructural investments, enclosures and large-scale territorial planning strategies
intended to support the accelerated growth and expansion of agglomerations around the
world. Their developmental rhythms are thus being linked ever more directly to those
of the major urban centers via worldwide spatial divisions of labor; and their continuing
commodification, enclosure and socio-ecological degradation is contributing to the forms
of mass dispossession and displacement that are uncritically catalogued or even celebrated
in contemporary urban age discourse under the rubric of rural-to-urban demographic
change.29 Consequently, if a global urban age is indeed currently dawning, this circumstance
cannot be understood adequately with reference to the formation of global cities or largescale mega-city regions, but requires systematic consideration of the tendential, if uneven,

21

operationalization of the entire planetincluding terrestrial, subterranean, oceanic and

atmospheric spaceto serve an accelerating, intensifying process of urban industrial
development.30 Insofar as the dominant model of capitalist urbanization continues to be
based upon the generalized extraction, production and consumption of fossil fuels, it is
directly implicated in a form of global ecological plunder that has permanently altered
the earths climate while infiltrating the earths soils, oceans, rivers and atmosphere with
unprecedented levels of toxic waste.31
From this point of view, then, morphological or population-centric approaches are
extremely misleading lenses into the emergent dynamics of global urbanization. This
process cannot be understood adequately either with reference to intensified population
growth within the worlds largest cities, or simply as a replication of city-like settlement
types across the earths surface. Nor, on the other hand, can traditional notions of the
hinterland or the rural adequately capture the processes of extended urbanization through
which formerly marginalized or remote spaces are being enclosed, operationalized, designed
and planned to support the continued agglomeration of capital, labor and infrastructure
within the worlds large cities and mega-city regions. Instead, a new understanding of
urbanization is needed that explicitly theorizes the evolving, mutually recursive relations
between agglomeration processes and their operational landscapes, including the forms
of land-use intensification, logistical coordination, core-periphery polarization and
sociopolitical struggle that accompany the latter at all spatial scales.
Through a variety of methodological strategies and substantive interventions, the
contributions to this book offer useful intellectual tools for such an analysis. They replace
city- and settlement-centric, population-based models of urbanization with an exploration
of the dynamics of implosion-explosion under capitalism, as outlined in general terms above
with reference to Lefebvres provocative metaphor. In such a conceptualization, implosion
and explosion are not separate temporal sequences or distinct morphological crystallizations,
but represent moments in the dialectical sense of the termmutually interdependent
yet intensely conflictual dimensions of an historically constituted, discontinuously evolving
totality. As such, processes of implosion-explosion also necessarily involve what Lefebvre
aptly termed the politics of spacecontestation over the political-economic hierarchies
and power relations that are inscribed in, and in turn transform, sociospatial arrangements.32
The key elements of this theorization are summarized schematically in Figure 1.1 (see next
page); they are elaborated at length, via diverse avenues of conceptualization, analysis,
representation, speculation and critique, in the chapters that follow.

This book does not provide a definitive statement of the agendas outlined above, but is
intended to assemble intellectual resources for elaborating them. The first word of its
subtitle, towards a study of planetary urbanization, is meant literally; such a study has

23
Methodological cityism

Urban theory without an outside

Open, variegated, multiscalar:

the urban as an unevenly developed yet worldwide
condition and process of sociospatial transformation

Unit of
analysis

Bounded:
the city as a settlement type that is contrasted to
other settlement types, usually within a national
territory

Model of
territorial
organization

Typological, binary:
territory is differentiated among distinct settlement
types, with cities contrasted to specific non-city
zonessuburbs, towns, villages, rural areas, the
countryside and natural areas

Processual, dialectical:
agglomerations (cities) relate dialectically to their
(non-city) operational landscapes, which are in turn
continually transformed through their roles in supporting
agglomerations

Understanding
of territorial
development

Population-centric:
growth of city populations relative to total
(national) population size

Mediated through capitalism, state strategies and

sociopolitical struggle:
worldwide implosion/explosion of capitalist sociospatial
organization, encompassing the evolving relations
between agglomerations and their operational
landscapes within a crisis-prone capitalist world economy

Model of
longue dure
historicalgeographical
change

Linear, universal:
specific cities may grow or decline, but the
phenomenon of cityness is increasingly
universalized as a settlement type around the
world

Discontinuous, uneven:
sociospatial configurations (including both
agglomerations and their operational landscapes)
are creatively destroyed through the crisis-tendencies
of capital (mediated through state institutions and
sociopolitical struggles), contributing to successive rounds
of territorial differentiation and redifferentiation at various
spatial scales

Classic and
background
texts
(1970 to 2007)

Lefebvre, Ch. 2 (1970)

Harvey, Ch. 3 (1996)
Schmid, Ch. 4 (2006)
Meili, Ch. 7 (2006)
Monte-Mr, Ch. 8 (1994)
McGee, Ch. 9 (1991)
Soja and Kanai, Ch. 10 (2007)
Monte- Mr, Ch. 17 (2005)
Schmid, Ch. 18 (2006)
Schmid, Ch. 26 (2006)
Lefebvre, Ch. 34 (1989)

Recent texts
(2011-2013)

Gandy, Ch. 5 (2012)

Schmid, Ch. 6 (2012)
Brenner and Schmid, Ch. 11 (2011)
Merrifield, Ch. 12 (2013)
Brenner, Ch. 13 (2012)
Schmid, Ch. 14 (2012)
Soja, Ch. 19 (2011)
Brenner and Schmid, Ch. 21 (2013)
Gleeson, Ch. 22 (2013)
Wachsmuth, Ch. 23 (2013)
Angelo and Wachsmuth, Ch. 24 (2013)
Brenner and Katsikis, Ch. 27 (2013)
Madden, Ch. 30 (2012)
Merrifield, Ch. 31 (2011)

Newly
commissioned
texts

Goonewardena, Ch. 15
Sevilla-Buitrago, Ch. 16
Kipfer, Ch. 20
Merrifield, Ch. 25
UTL-GSD, Ch. 28
Katsikis, Ch. 29
Ajl, Ch. 32
Friedmann, Ch. 33

1.1 Rethinking the urbanization question

1.2 Overview of chaptersperiod of publication

yet to be conducted, but it may be productively informed through some of the concepts,
methods, cartographies and political orientations assembled in this book. As Figure 1.2
indicates, the chapters included here fall into three broad categories.

urbanization by Brazilian planner Roberto Luis Monte-Mr with specific reference to

the Amazon (1994) and spatial development in Brazil more generally (2005); a concise,
forceful defense of a process-based theorization of urbanization by David Harvey (1996);
several excerpts from the pathbreaking, multi-volume study of complete urbanization in
Switzerland by two members of Studio Basels research team, Marcel Meili and Christian
Schmid (2006); and Ed Soja and J. Miguel Kanais preliminary yet precise demarcation of
the emergent worldwide urban fabric (2006). While these texts were produced prior to the
consolidation of the research agenda sketched above, they offer some essential concepts
and perspectives that may inform such an investigation.

Classic and background texts. This book is not intended to offer a survey either of work on
urbanization in general or on the contemporary formation of this process. However, a
number of key texts from earlier periods of research on these topics acquire renewed
contemporary significance in the context of the wide-ranging intellectual agenda proposed
here. Accordingly, several earlier texts have been included that introduce essential analytical
tools for our work. The earliest among these is an excerpt from Henri Lefebvres La
rvolution urbaine (1970), but others range in publication date from the late 1980s to the
mid-2000s. They include one of Lefebvres last publicationsa short, rather gloomy essay
for Le Monde (1989); as well as Terry McGees pioneering explosion of the urban-rural
divide in relation to the desakota regions of Asia (1991); an early theorization of extended

Recent texts. The bulk of the book is composed of articles and essays on various aspects
of planetary urbanization that have been produced during the last several years, mainly by
members of my own research group, the Urban Theory Lab (which relocated from New
York City to the Harvard GSD during this time), and through an ongoing collaboration

with Christian Schmid of the ETH-Zurich. Although not immediately connected either to
the Urban Theory Lab or to Christian Schmids research teams in Zurich and Singapore, our
friends and colleagues Matthew Gandy, Brendan Gleeson and Andy Merrifield produced
closely aligned interventions during this same period. Their chapters resonate powerfully
with the work of our Lab and research network, while extending it in important, original
directions. To date, Merrifields The Politics of the Encounter is the only book-length study
of planetary urbanization, but the proliferation of articles and essays on this topic during
the last two or three years does suggest that a new problematiquea set of interconnected
explorations and inquiries around a common set of questionsis emerging and gaining
some intellectual traction and momentum.33
Newly commissioned texts. A final cluster of texts was commissioned specifically for this
book, either through projects emerging directly from within the Urban Theory Lab or
through dialogues and exchanges with colleagues based elsewhere. These texts broach
essential topics that have only partially been addressed in our work to dateincluding,
among others, the historical geographies of enclosure and urbanization (Sevilla-Buitrago,
Goonewardena); urbanization, colonization and everyday life (Kipfer, Goonewardena);
urbanization and the agrarian question (Sevilla-Buitrago, Ajl); the critique of technoscientific
approaches to world management (Katsikis); and the politics of spatial organization,
urban and otherwise (Kipfer, Goonewardena, Friedmann). Other newly commissioned
texts complement themes covered in several sections of the bookthese include a chapter
by Andy Merrifield on the future of urban studies; and an overview of the problem of
visualizing worldwide urbanization by Urban Theory Lab researchers. Taken together, these
newly produced chapters reinforce the agendas that have been developed through the Urban
Theory Labs work since 2011, while opening up a range of questionsmethodological,
historical, contextual, representational and (geo)politicalthat urgently require sustained
attention and elaboration in future work on this problematique.
Following this introductory chapter, the book is divided into seven sections followed
by a brief Coda. Figure 1.3 surveys the intellectual terrain of the book as a whole by
summarizing the key questions around which each of the seven sections, and the Coda,
are focused.
Some readers may wish to navigate the book sequentially. Such an approach should prove
highly productive insofar as it will offer multiple perspectives on the issues explored within
each section, while permitting readers to gain familiarity with the key concepts, methods
and arguments upon which successive sections of the book are grounded. However, other
approaches to appropriating the books arguments are also certainly viable, and may open
up some illuminating perspectives on the issues at stake. For example, several major threads
of argumentation crosscut multiple sections of the bookfor instance, on the need to
develop new concepts and representations of urbanization processes; on the investigation
of the historical geographies of urbanization; on the critique of urban knowledges and

25
One
Foundations
the urbanization
question

What is urbanization? How are urbanization processes inscribed in built

Two
Complete
urbanization
Experience, site,
process

Can the spatial boundaries of cities be coherently delineatedwhether in

Three
Planetary
urbanization
openings

Is a planetary formation of complete urbanization being consolidated in the early

Four
Historical
geographies
of urbanization

If urbanization includes yet transcends the process of city building, how can the

Five
Urban studies
and urban
ideologies

What are the limitations and blind-spots of inherited and contemporary approaches

Six
Visualizations
Ideologies and
experiments

How to develop appropriately differentiated spatial representations of historical and

Seven
Political
strategies,
struggles and
horizons

How are worldwide urbanization processes, past and present, mediated through

Coda

If the traditional city is dissolving, and urbanization is being generalized across

environments, landscapes and territories, beyond the boundaries of cities? What

would a complete or generalized formation of urbanization entail, in experiential,
social, spatial and environmental terms?

theory, analysis or experience? Is a new formation of complete urbanization

being consolidated in specific regions and territories? If so, what are its major
manifestationswhether in built environments, spatial configurations or infrastructural
arrangements, in political discourses, or in everyday life?

twenty-first century? If so, what are its major experiential, social, spatial and
environmental expressions, and what are its sociopolitical implications? What
categories of analysis and methods of representation are needed to decipher such
trends and transformations?

historical geographies of these intertwined processes be conceptualized in relation

to ongoing transformations of place, landscape, territory and environment at various
spatial scales?

to the urban question in relation to emergent worldwide urbanization patterns?

What is the role of ideological (mis)representations of the city and the urban in
historical and contemporary strategies to shape sociospatial and environmental
transformations?

contemporary urbanization processes? What taxonomies are most effective for

mapping a world of generalized urbanization, massive uneven spatial development
and continued territorial differentiation? What are the limits and possibilities of
inherited mapping strategies and new geospatial data sources for developing a
critical cartography of planetary urbanization?

political and institutional strategies? What are their operational elements and
targets? What are their implications for spatial organization, resource distribution,
power relations and political life? What, if any, alternatives to contemporary
urbanization patterns have been envisioned, and/or pursued by theorists,
designers, policy makers, citizens, inhabitants and activists?

the planet, can new forms of citizenship be constructed that empower people
collectively to appropriate, transform and reshape the common space of the world?

1.3 Key questions explored in each section of the book

ideologies; on the role of state strategies in mediating urbanization processes at various

spatial scales; on the deployment of spatial representations to serve specific strategies of
urbanization; and on the question of alternatives to contemporary urbanization patterns.
These, and no doubt others, may be accessed quite productively as readers construct their
own pathways through the many layers of analysis, experimentation, speculation and
debate that are intermeshed across chapters and sections in this volume. A sequential
approach to the books contents may thus be productively complemented through more
topical reading strategies that reflect specific research interests, concerns and agendas. The
books organizational structure is intended less to enclose the material within pregiven
analytical boxes, than simply as a pragmatic framing device to enhance the accessibility
of an otherwise complex, multifaceted and at times quite challenging intellectual terrain.

The images used on the books cover and in the section introductions were produced by
Garth Lenz, whose photojournalistic work has dramatically documented some of the most
horrific industrial scars on the earths landscape, especially in the Tar Sands of northern
Alberta, Canada as well as in other zones of intensive resource extraction, that have been
induced through our fossil fuel-based formation of worldwide urbanization.34 In recent
years, photographic work on colossal landscapes of industrialized resource extraction and
environmental destructionparticularly in connection to the large-scale infrastructures
required for the production of petrochemicalshas generated considerable attention both
in the public sphere and among environmentalists, conservationists, landscape architects
and geographers. In many of the most widely circulated images of such landscapes, the
spectre of worldwide ecological destruction is depicted with such richly aestheticized
abstraction that some commentators have described this genre using phrases such as the
toxic sublime or the apocalyptic sublime.35 Lenzs interventions are clearly connected
to that genrethere is a surreal, if deeply unsettling, beauty in many of his images of the
shockingly degraded landscapes of the Tar Sands. However, his work is quite explicitly
linked to a political concern to use his powerful photographic vocabulary to communicate
a cautionary message regarding the true cost of oil to the public both in Canada
and beyond.36 Lenzs images thus offer a fitting, if extremely grim, provocation for the
arguments and perspectives being forged in the present volume: they illustrate one way of
visualizing the socially and ecologically disastrous operational landscapes of urbanization
Lefebvre might have described them as a form of terricidethat are being forged at a
truly colossal scale to support and reproduce urban life under early twenty-first century
capitalism.37
While it was, of course, Henri Lefebvre who forecast the situation of complete urbanization
that is today apparently being actualized on a planetary scale, the iconography used in the
cover design of his classic text, The Urban Revolutionboth in its original 1970 version and
in its 2003 English translationis strikingly conventional (Figure1.4).

27

In the French version, a classic image of urban density is adopteda collage of large,
iconic buildings pierced by an elevated subway train. In the more recent English translation,
a similar, if more readily recognizable, iconography is chosen: one of Haussmanns great
Parisian boulevards, forming a knife-like cut through the fabric of a dense urban landscape
that stretches endlessly into the horizon. In stark contrast, Lenzs aerial photograph of the
Tar Sands on this books cover takes us far away from the large, dense, vertical landscapes
of cityness, into a zone in which the earths surface has been layered with a viscous sludge,
traversed by muddy roads twisting around ponds filled with huge accumulations of toxic
waste. As Andy Merrifield proposes in several of his contributions to this book, the
Haussmannization of the past, which evicted city dwellers from the center to create a built
environment for urbanizing capital, has now been ratcheted-up into a worldwide form
of neo-Haussmannization. Perhaps Lenzs image of the Tar Sands provides as fitting an
iconography for this emergent planetary condition as the image of Haussmanns geometrical
boulevard did for an earlier, city-centric formation of urban expansion. The evictions,
enclosures and dispossessions continue, but now on the scale of the entire planet, well
beyond the inherited built environments of earlier civilizations, leading to unprecedented
social devastation and environmental destruction:
Baron Haussmann tore into central Paris, into its old neighborhoods and poor
populations, dispatching the latter to the periphery while speculating on the

1.4 Iconography of the urban revolution?

center; the built urban form became simultaneously a property machine and a
means to divide and rule; today, neo-Haussmannization, in a similar process that
integrates financial, corporate and state interests, tears into the globe, sequesters
land through forcible slum clearance and eminent domain, valorizing it while
banishing former residents to the global hinterlands of post-industrial malaise.38

29
8

It seems as urgent as ever, under these conditions, to develop theories, analyses and
cartographies that situate such operational landscapestheir land-use systems; their labor
regimes and property relations; their forms of governance; their ecological impacts; and
their rapidly changing social fabricsquite centrally within our understanding of the
contemporary urban condition. This volume is intended to advance that project in the
hope that a new understanding of urbanization may prove useful to ongoing struggles
against neo-Haussmannization, planetary enclosure, market fundamentalism and global
ecological plunder; and for a new model of urbanization oriented towards the collective
reappropriation and democratic self-management of planetary space as the work of the
human species.39

Notes
1

For exemplary overviews of the main lines of debate in twentieth

century urban theory, see Peter Saunders, Social Theory and the Urban
Question. Second Edition (London: Routledge, 1986); and Mark
Gottdiener, The Social Production of Urban Space (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1985).
Robert Park and Ernest Burgess eds., The City (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1967 [1925]). See also Neil Brenner and Nikos
Katsikis, Is the Mediterranean urban?, this book, Ch. 27, Figure
27.1, page 429.
Building heavily upon Walter Christallers central place theory, the
quantitative approaches to urban systems of the mid-twentieth
century assembled and analyzed diverse indicators on a large
number of cities. However, despite its use of large-N research
designs, this work was still premised upon the same overarching
concern with cities as (qualitatively specific, yet increasingly
generalized) settlement types that had characterized the earlier
work of Burgess, Park and their Chicago School colleagues. For a
detailed overview of such quantitative approaches, see Brian J. L.
Berry and Frank Horton eds., Geographic Perspectives on Urban Systems
(Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1970). Although periodizations
of capitalist urban development within the tradition of radical
urban studies productively emphasized the specifically capitalist
form of urbanization and the larger spatial divisions of labor
in which capitalist cities are embedded, they were still generally
grounded upon a generic model of a single city whose morphology
was considered to be paradigmatic for the phase of urbanization
under investigation. See, for example, the classic distinctions
between city-types (mercantile, industrial, Fordist-Keynesian
/ corporate-monopoly, post-Keynesian) that were developed
by David Gordon, Capitalist Development and the History of
American Cities, Marxism and the Metropolis, eds. William Tabb
and Larry Sawyers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) 2563; and David Harvey, The Urbanization of Capital, The Urban
Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) 17-58.
A similar analytical emphasis on particular types of cityglobal,
mega, postfordist, neoliberal, ordinary, postcolonial and so forth
underpins most major strands of contemporary critical urban
studies. For overviews of the latter approaches and associated

5
6

debates see, among other works, Edward Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical

Studies of Cities and Regions (Cambridge: Blackwell, 2000); Neil
Brenner and Roger Keil, eds., The Global Cities Reader (New York:
Routledge, 2006); and Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, eds., The
New Blackwell Companion to the City (Cambridge: Blackwell, 2011).
For a useful overview of this terminological proliferation in recent
years, see Peter J. Taylor and Robert E. Lang, The Shock of the
New: 100 Concepts Describing Recent Urban Change, Environment
and Planning A 36 (2004) 95158.
See Saunders, Social Theory and the Urban Question; and Gottdiener,
Social Production of Urban Space.
The triad of size, density and heterogeneity was, of course,
essential to the classic definition of urbanism proposed by Chicago
School sociologist Louis Wirth in 1937. See Wirth, Urbanism as
a Way of Life, Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities, ed. Richard
Sennett (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1969 [1937]) 143-164.
Importantly, however, Wirths famous triad was not intended to
delineate the specificity of cities as settlement types. His goal,
rather, was to explain the occurrence of urbanism, an ensemble
of social behaviors, interactions and routines that, he predicted,
would tend to arise within places containing large, densely settled
and socially diverse populations. In fact, from the essays opening
paragraph forwards, Wirth expressed considerable skepticism
regarding attempts to define the city based on purely empirical
criteria (see Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, The Urban Age
in Question, this book, Ch. 21). It is ironic, therefore, that Wirths
theory is today so frequently invoked to exemplify precisely the type
of empiricist definition of the city that he had so forcefully rejected.
Although Wirths arguments on urbanism have been largely
assimilated into the generic, typological understanding of cityness
that prevails across the field of urban studies, they actually contain
fruitful insights for the development of a more spatially variegated
approach. For further discussion, see Neil Brenner, Louis Wirths
Radiant Urbanism: a Contribution to the Investigation of World
Urbanization, Working Paper (Urban Theory Lab, Graduate
School of Design, Harvard University, 2013).
Hillary Angelo and David Wachsmuth, Urbanizing Urban Political
Ecology: a Critique of Methodological Cityism, this book, Ch.

10
11
12
13

14
15
16

24, page 377.

For a critical evaluation of several such approaches, see Nikos
Katsikis, From Hinterland to Hinterworld: Territorial Organization Beyond
Agglomeration (Doctoral Dissertation, Doctor in Design Studies
Program (DDesS), Graduate School of Design, Harvard University)
in progress. Although such approaches have been elaborated in
relation to an extremely broad range of substantive themes and
concerns, they have been advanced with particular force by, among
other authors, Jean Gottmann and Constantinos Doxiadis in the
1960s, Henri Lefebvre in the 1970s, John Friedmann in the 1970s
and subsequently, Terry McGee in the 1980s and subsequently,
William Cronon in the 1990s, and Matthew Gandy, Maria Kaika and
Erik Swyngedouw in the 2000s. See, for example, Jean Gottmann,
Megalopolis: the Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1961); Constantinos Doxiadis, Ekistics:
An Introduction to the Science of Human Settlements (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1968); Henri Lefebvre, The Right to the City,
Writings on Cities, Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas eds. and
trans. (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996 [1968]) 63-181; Henri Lefebvre,
The Urban Revolution, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003 [1970]); John Friedmann and
Clyde Weaver, Territory and Function (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1979); Terry G. McGee, The
Emergence of Desakota Regions in Asia: Expanding a Hypothesis,
this book, Ch. 9 (originally published in 1991); William Cronon,
Natures Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton,
1991); Matthew Gandy, Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New
York City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005). Maria Kaika, City of Flows
(New York: Routledge, 2005); and Erik Swyngedouw, Metabolic
Urbanization: the Making of Cyborg Cities, In the Nature of
Cities, eds. Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw
(New York: Routledge, 2006) 21-40. There are, obviously, major
methodological, conceptual and substantive differences among
these worksbut they share a systematic concern to supersede
city-centric understandings of the urban in favor of territorially
variegated and/or metabolic visions of the urban condition. While
the influence of Lefebvres work is omnipresent in the present
volume, several chapters critically interrogate the work of other
authors who have made major contributions to the development
of a territorially variegated or metabolic approach to urban theory.
On the work of Kaika, Gandy and Swyngedouw. see Angelo and
Wachsmuth, Urbanizing Urban Political Ecology: a Critique of
Methodological Cityism, Ch. 24. On Doxiadis, see Nikos Katsikis,
Two Approaches to World Management: Doxiadis and Fuller,
this book, Ch. 29.
On urbanization as a world-making process, see David J. Madden,
City Becoming World: Nancy, Lefebvre, and the Global-urban
Imagination, this book, Ch. 30.
Gottmann, Megalopolis, 5.
Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban (London:
Polity, 2002) 1.
Henri Lefebvre, From the City to Urban Society, this book, Ch.
2, page 36.
See Henri Lefebvre, The Right to the City, 69-72; Lefebvre,
From the City to Urban Society, this book, Ch. 2, page 37-38;
and Henri Lefebvre, Reflections on the Politics of Space and
The Worldwide Experience, State, Space, World: Selected Essays, eds.
Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden, trans. Gerald Moore, Neil Brenner
and Stuart Elden (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2009)
190, 278.
Henri Lefebvre, The Right to the City, 71; Lefebvre, From the
City to Urban Society, this book, Ch. 2, page 37-38.
See Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace
and World, 1961).
On this reading, Lefebvres notion of implosion-explosion
contains important parallels with David Harveys account of
the contradiction between fixity and motion in the circulation

17
18
19

20
21
22

23

24

25
26

27

28

29

of capital. On the latter, see David Harvey, The Geopolitics

of Capitalism, Social Relations and Spatial Structures, eds. Derek
Gregory and John Urry (London: Macmillan, 1985) 128-63.
For further discussion see Neil Brenner, Between Fixity and
Motion: Accumulation, Territorial Organization and the Historical
Geography of Spatial Scales, Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space 16, 5 (1998) 459-81.
Lefebvre, From the City to Urban Society, this book, Ch. 2, pages
36, 43.
Henri Lefebvre, Dissolving city, Planetary Metamorphosis, this
book, Ch. 35, page 569.
The locus classicus of such arguments is Melvin Webber, The Postcity Age, Daedalus 94, 4 (1968) 1091-110. For a critical review
of more recent versions, see Stephen Graham, The end of
Geography or the Explosion of Place: Conceptualizing Space,
Place and Information Technology, Progress in Human Geography
22, 2 (1998) 165-85.
Matthew Gandy, Where Does the City End?, this book, Ch. 5,
page 86.
David Harvey, Cities or Urbanization?, this book, Ch. 3, page 61.
On such big structures and large processes, and the history of
attempts to understand them in the social and historical sciences,
see Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New
York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984).
Kingsley Davis, The Origins and Growth of Urbanization in
the World, American Journal of Sociology 60, 5 (1955) 429-37;
Kingsley Davis and Hilda Hertz Golden, Urbanization and the
Development of Pre-industrial Areas, Economic Development and
Cultural Change 3, 1 (1954) 6-26. For further discussion and critique
of Kingsley Davis approach to urbanization see Brenner and
Schmid, The urban age in question, this book, Ch. 21.
Davis and Hertz Golden, Urbanization and the Development of
Pre-industrial Areas, 7; Kingsley Davis, World Urbanization: 1950
1970, Volume II: Analysis of Trends, Relationships and Development,
Population Series No. 9 (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies,
University of California, 1972); Davis, World Urbanization: 1950
1970, Volume I: Basic Data for Cities, Countries, and Regions, Population
Monograph Series No. 4 (Berkeley: Institute of International
Studies, University of California, 1969). For discussion see also
Brenner and Schmid, The urban age in question, this book,
Ch. 21.
See Brenner and Schmid, The Urban Age in Question, this
book, Ch. 21.
Ibid. The urbanization of the earths most remote places is
currently the focus of a collaborative research project in the Urban
Theory Lab-GSD on Extreme Territories of Urbanization.
Among other issues, our research team is investigating historical
and contemporary patterns of urbanization in the Arctic, the
Amazon, the Gobi steppe, the Himalayas and the Sahara desert, as
well as in the Pacific Ocean and in the earths atmosphere.
See lvaro Sevilla-Buitrago, Urbs in Rure: Historical Enclosure and
the Extended Urbanization of the Countryside, this book, Ch. 16;
and Max Ajl, The Hypertrophic City Versus the Planet of Fields,
this book, Ch. 32.
This line of argumentation is developed in an important strand of
the urban political ecology literature, especially by authors such as
Matthew Gandy, Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw, for whom a
Marxian notion of metabolism serves as a key analytical lens for
investigating the capitalist form of urbanization (see the works
cited in Note 8 above). For critical discussion and evaluation, see
Hillary Angelo and David Wachsmuth, Urbanizing Urban Political
Ecology, this book, Ch. 24.
This latter point is argued forcefully by Ajl, The Hypertrophic
City, this book, Ch. 32. For a parallel account of such operational
landscapes of urbanization, see also Timothy W. Luke, Global
Cities Versus Global Cities: Rethinking Contemporary Urbanism
as Public Ecology, Studies in Political Economy 70 (2003) 11-33.

30 This is one of the core hypotheses currently being explored in

the Urban Theory Lab-GSD in our work on Extreme Territories
of Urbanization, and it also lies at the heart of my ongoing
collaboration with Christian Schmid on the historical and
contemporary geographies of extended urbanization.
31 See Ajl, The Hypertrophic City; as well as Luke, Global Cities
Versus Global Cities.
32 Lefebvre, Reflections on the Politics of Space, cited above.
33 See Andy Merrifield, The Politics of the Encounter: Urban Theory and
Protest under Planetary Urbanization (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 2013). At recent meetings of the Association of American
Geographers (Los Angeles, 2013) and the Research Committee
on Urban and Regional Development (RC21) of the International
Sociological Association (Berlin, 2013), planetary urbanization was
described on several panels as a new paradigm for research in
urban studies. As I hope the above discussion indicates, I think such
labels are extremely premature; we have only just begun to clarify
our core questions and to introduce concepts and methodological
strategies for confronting them. This book is simply an effort to
consolidate and synthesize some of the major intellectual resources
that have been produced thus far in relation to this emergent
problematique.
34 For further examples of Lenzs work, see http://www.garthlenz.
com.
35 For a useful overview of such work, with specific reference to the
photography of Edward Burtynsky, see Merle Patchett and Andriko
Lozowy, Reframing the Canadian Oil Sands, Imaginations: Journal
of Cross-Cultural Image Studies 3, 2 (2012) 140-69. Along with the
work of Burtynsky, another striking example of this genre is David
Maisel, Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime
(Gttingen: Steidl, 2013).
36 Lenz makes this political agenda quite explicit in his TED talk,
The True Cost of Oil: http://www.ted.com/talks/garth_lenz_
images_of_beauty_and_devastation.html.
37 On Lefebvres notion of terricide, see Stuart Elden, Terricide:
Lefebvre, Geopolitics and the Killing of the Earth, Department
of Politics, University of Warwick, unpublished manuscript, 2013.
38 See Andy Merrifield, The Right to the City and Beyond: Notes
Towards a Lefebvrian Reconceptualization, this book, Ch. 31,
page 526.
39 Henri Lefebvre, The Worldwide and The Planetary, in State,
Space, World: Selected Essays. Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden eds.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009) 206.

31

IMPLOSIONS / EXPLOSIONS
NEIL BRENNER

ILL BEGIN WITH THE FOLLOWING HYPOTHESIS:

SOCIETY HAS BEEN COMPLETELY URBANIZED.

IMPLOSIONS / EXPLOSIONS

NEIL BRENNER IS PROFESSOR OF URBAN THEORY AND DIRECTOR OF THE URBAN

THEORY LAB AT THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF DESIGN ( GSD ) HARVARD UNIVERSITY.

EDITED BY NEIL BRENNER

HENRI LEFEBVRE, LA RVOLUTION URBAINE ( 1970 )

TOWARDS A STUDY OF PLANETARY URBANIZATION