Neil Brenner – författare

The worldwide financial crisis has sent shock-waves of accelerated economic restructuring, regulatory reorganization and sociopolitical conflict through cities around the world. It has also given new impetus to the struggles of urban social movements emphasizing the injustice, destructiveness and unsustainability of capitalist forms of urbanization. This book contributes analyses intended to be useful for efforts to roll back contemporary profit-based forms of urbanization, and to promote alternative, radically democratic and sustainable forms of urbanism.

The contributors provide cutting-edge analyses of contemporary urban restructuring, including the issues of neoliberalization, gentrification, colonization, "creative" cities, architecture and political power, sub-prime mortgage foreclosures and the ongoing struggles of "right to the city" movements. At the same time, the book explores the diverse interpretive frameworks – critical and otherwise – that are currently being used in academic discourse, in political struggles, and in everyday life to decipher contemporary urban transformations and contestations. The slogan, "cities for people, not for profit," sets into stark relief what the contributors view as a central political question involved in efforts, at once theoretical and practical, to address the global urban crises of our time.

Drawing upon European and North American scholarship in sociology, politics, geography, urban planning and urban design, the book provides useful insights and perspectives for citizens, activists and intellectuals interested in exploring alternatives to contemporary forms of capitalist urbanization.

The worldwide financial crisis has sent shock-waves of accelerated economic restructuring, regulatory reorganization and sociopolitical conflict through cities around the world. It has also given new impetus to the struggles of urban social movements emphasizing the injustice, destructiveness and unsustainability of capitalist forms of urbanization. This book contributes analyses intended to be useful for efforts to roll back contemporary profit-based forms of urbanization, and to promote alternative, radically democratic and sustainable forms of urbanism.

The contributors provide cutting-edge analyses of contemporary urban restructuring, including the issues of neoliberalization, gentrification, colonization, "creative" cities, architecture and political power, sub-prime mortgage foreclosures and the ongoing struggles of "right to the city" movements. At the same time, the book explores the diverse interpretive frameworks – critical and otherwise – that are currently being used in academic discourse, in political struggles, and in everyday life to decipher contemporary urban transformations and contestations. The slogan, "cities for people, not for profit," sets into stark relief what the contributors view as a central political question involved in efforts, at once theoretical and practical, to address the global urban crises of our time.

Drawing upon European and North American scholarship in sociology, politics, geography, urban planning and urban design, the book provides useful insights and perspectives for citizens, activists and intellectuals interested in exploring alternatives to contemporary forms of capitalist urbanization.

Urbanization is transforming the planet, within and beyond cities, at all spatial scales. In this book, Neil Brenner mobilizes the tools of critical urban theory to deconstruct some of the dominant urban discourses of our time, which naturalize, and thus depoliticize, the enclosures, exclusions, injustices and irrationalities of neoliberal urbanism. In so doing, Brenner advocates a constant reinvention of the framing categories, methods and assumptions of critical urban theory in relation to the rapidly mutating geographies of capitalist urbanization. Only a theory that is dynamic—which is constantly being transformed in relation to the restlessly evolving social worlds and territorial landscapes it aspires to grasp—can be a genuinely critical theory.

1970 formulierte Henri Lefebvre seine radikale These der vollkommenen Urbanisierung der Gesellschaft, eine Entwicklung, die seiner Meinung nach den radikalen Umschwung von einer Analyse der Stadtformen zur Untersuchung von Urbanisierungsprozessen erforderte.Indem es klassische und zeitgenössische Texte zur “Urbanisierungsfrage” zusammenführt, untersucht dieses Buch verschiedene theoretische, erkenntnistheoretische, methodologische und politische Schlussfolgerungen aus Lefebvres These. Es versammelt eine Reihe von analytischen und kartografischen Interventionen, die traditionelle Raumontologien ablösen (städtisch/ländlich, Stadt/Land, Stadt/Nicht-Stadt, Gesellschaft/Natur), um die heterogenen Implosionen und Explosionen der vom Kapitalismus bestimmten Urbanisierung über Orte, Regionen, Territorien, Kontinente und Ozeane hinweg bis in planetare Größenordnungen hinein zu untersuchen.

How can we map the urbanization of the planet in an era of climate breakdown? The Urban Theory Lab’s Data-Spheres of Planetary Urbanization confronts this question by assembling a series of experimental visualizations of the worldwide urban fabric. This book reverses the mainstream, city-centric perspective on urbanization, showing, instead, that the world of contemporary urbanization encompasses much of the planet, including apparently remote areas, wildlands, and oceans. Cities are not only producers of value, but entropic black holes that consume surpluses produced elsewhere and project waste back into the planetary biosphere. Non-city spaces are, correspondingly, the metabolic bases of planetary urbanization.

With a foreword by Jason W. Moore, an afterword by Alexander Arroyo, and contributions by Martín Arboleda, Danika Cooper, Kian Goh, Julie Michelle Klinger, Roi Salgueiro Barrio, and Hashim Sarkis