Take Over the City

Neil Gray is a proletarian autodidact currently based in Glasgow, Scotland. He is a former editor for Variant magazine and his writing and research have appeared in numerous magazines and academic journals. He is a long-term housing and anti-gentrification activist and is the editor of Rent and its Discontents: A Century of Housing Struggle (2018).

"Take Over the City addresses a gap in the existing scholarship on Italian operaismo by turning attention to the spatial dimensions of a tradition that has been examined primarily through the lens of factory politics and philosophical category-building. Neil Gray offers a productive framework for thinking through the relationship between urban space and political struggle. Methodical and convincing."—Leopoldina Fortunati, author of The Arcana of Reproduction: Housewives, Prostitutes, Workers and Capital"Take Over the City is an extremely original book. Neil’s use of 'spatial composition' is a significant moment in the ongoing rethinking of political theory, one that is informed by an excellent grounding in critical geography."—Steve Wright, author of Storming Heaven“Across a highly readable account of operaismo and autonomist movements from the 1960s to the 1977, Gray elaborates how a politics of space was largely overlooked by operaist analyses of class composition and yet central to the struggles of the new social subjects, women, internal migrants, students, and the youth proletariat.”—Miriam Tola, co-editor of Handbook of Ecomedia Studies

• PrefaceIntroduction: The Spatialities of Italian AutonomyChapter 1: Urbanisation and the Tendency: Italian StyleChapter 2: The Social FactoryChapter 3: Take Over the CityChapter 4: The Material Geographies of Social ReproductionConclusion: A Future at our Backs?