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Towards a new epistemology of the urban?

Neil Brenner & Christian Schmid

To cite this article: Neil Brenner & Christian Schmid (2015) Towards a new epistemology of theurban?, City, 19:2-3, 151-182, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2015.1014712

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2015.1014712

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Towards a new epistemology ofthe urban?Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid

New forms of urbanization are unfolding around the world that challenge inheritedconceptions of the urban as a fixed, bounded and universally generalizable settlementtype. Meanwhile, debates on the urban question continue to proliferate and intensifywithin the social sciences, the planning and design disciplines, and in everyday politicalstruggles. Against this background, this paper revisits the question of the epistemology ofthe urban: through what categories, methods and cartographies should urban life beunderstood? After surveying some of the major contemporary mainstream and criticalresponses to this question, we argue for a radical rethinking of inherited epistemologicalassumptions regarding the urban and urbanization. Building upon reflexive approachesto critical social theory and our own ongoing research on planetary urbanization, wepresent a new epistemology of the urban in a series of seven theses. This epistemologicalframework is intended to clarify the intellectual and political stakes of contemporarydebates on the urban question and to offer an analytical basis for deciphering the rapidlychanging geographies of urbanization and urban struggle under early 21st-centurycapitalism. Our arguments are intended to ignite and advance further debate on theepistemological foundations for critical urban theory and practice today.

Key words: urbanization, urban age, postcolonial urbanism, planetary urbanization, extendedurbanization, reflexivity, critical urban theory, rural

Introduction: a crisis of urbanepistemologies

Adramatic wave of urban restructur-ing has been unfolding across theplanet since the long 1980s. Follow-

ing the crisis of national-developmentalistmodels of territorial development, the col-lapse of state socialism and the subsequentintensification of global economic inte-gration, a variety of contradictory urbantransformations has been under way. Thecauses, contours, contexts, interconnec-tions and implications of such transform-ations are widely debated, and remainextremely confusing in the wake of the

global financial and economic crises of thelate 2000s and early 2010s. However, evenas contextually specific patterns of urbaniz-ation endure and proliferate, at least threemacro-trends appear to be consolidating,each of which challenges long-entrenchedassumptions regarding the nature of theurban:

(1) New geographies of uneven spatialdevelopment have been emergingthrough a contradictory interplaybetween rapid, explosive processes ofurbanization and various forms of stag-nation, shrinkage and marginalization,often in close proximity to one another.

# 2015 Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid

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In contrast to the geographies of terri-torial inequality associated with previouscycles of industrialization, this newmosaic of spatial unevenness cannot becaptured adequately through arealmodels, with their typological differen-tiation of space between urban/rural,metropole/colony, First/Second/ThirdWorld, North/South, East/West and soforth (see also Merrifield 2013; Robinson2014). Today, divergent conditions ofwealth and poverty, growth anddecline, inclusion and exclusion, central-ity and marginality, mutually produceone another at all spatial scales, fromthe neighborhood to the planetary.Under these conditions, new approachesto understanding and influencing pro-cesses of uneven spatial developmentunder capitalism are urgently needed(Peck 2015a).

(2) The basic nature of urban realities—long understood under the singular,encompassing rubric of ‘cityness’—hasbecome more differentiated, poly-morphic, variegated and multiscalarthan in previous cycles of capitalisturbanization. Even though thephrase, ‘the city’, persists as an ideo-logical framing in mainstream policydiscourse and everyday life (Wachs-muth 2014), the contemporary urbanphenomenon cannot be understood asa singular condition derived from theserial replication of a specific sociospa-tial condition (e.g. agglomeration) orsettlement type (e.g. places with large,dense and/or heterogeneous popu-lations) across the territory. Indeed,rather than witnessing the worldwideproliferation of a singular urban form,‘the’ city, we are instead confrontedwith new processes of urbanizationthat are bringing forth diverse socio-economic conditions, territorial for-mations and socio-metabolictransformations across the planet.Their morphologies, geographies andinstitutional frames have become so

variegated that the traditional visionof the city as a bounded, universallyreplicable settlement type now appearsas no more than a quaint remnant ofa widely superseded formation of capi-talist spatial development (Brennerand Schmid 2014).

As we have argued elsewhere(Brenner and Schmid 2011), the for-mation of large-scale megacities andpolynucleated metropolitan regions isonly one important expression of thisongoing reconstitution of urbanizinglandscapes (see also Soja and Kanai[2006] 2014). Its other key expressionsinclude, among others: (a) the unprece-dented densification of inter-metropo-litan networks, requiring colossallyscaled infrastructural investments(from highways, canals, railways, con-tainer ports, airports and hydroelectricdams to undersea cables, tunnels, pipe-lines and satellite fleets) stretchingacross territories and continents aswell as oceanic and atmosphericenvironments; (b) the restructuringand repositioning of traditional ‘hin-terlands’ through the installation ofnew export processing zones, globalsweatshop regions, back officelocations, data processing facilities andintermodal logistics terminals; (c) theremaking and spatial extension oflarge-scale land-use systems devotedto resource extraction, the productionand circulation of energy (includingfossil fuels), and water and waste man-agement; (d) the profound social andenvironmental transformation of vast,erstwhile ‘rural’ areas through theexpansion of large-scale industrial agri-culture, the extension of global agro-business networks, and the impositionof associated forms of land grabbingand territorial enclosure; and (e) theoperationalization of erstwhile ‘wilder-ness’ spaces, including the rainforests,deserts, alpine regions, polar zones,the oceans and even the atmosphere

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itself, to serve the relentless growthimperatives of an accelerating, increas-ingly planetary formation of capitalisturbanization.

(3) Closely intertwined with the afore-mentioned trends, the regulatory geo-graphies of capitalist urbanizationhave likewise been undergoing pro-found, rapid mutations. Since the accel-erated expansion of industrialization inthe 19th century, the urban process hasbeen largely subsumed within andregulated through the hierarchicalinstitutional frameworks of consolidat-ing national states and nationally coor-dinated imperial systems. Since thatperiod, including within majorempires and colonial regimes, nationalstates instrumentalized major urbanregions in relation to the broaderproject of establishing territoriallyintegrated markets and creating rela-tively uniform, standardized frame-works of national territorialorganization within which industrialdevelopment could unfold. However,the tumultuous transformations ofrecent decades decisively shattered thisentrenched national-developmentalistmodel of urban and territorial regu-lation, leading to a significant reconsti-tution of inherited geographies ofurban governance (Brenner 2004;Schmid 2003).

Although some of its elements havelonger historical lineages, includingwithin mercantile capitalism and thecolonial empires of high industrialcapitalism, the contemporary periodhas seen the proliferation of new geo-graphies of urban governance that areno longer neatly subsumed within asingular, encompassing territorial fra-mework of state power at any spatialscale, national or otherwise. Instead,an intensely variegated, polarized, mul-tiscalar and relatively uncoordinatedlandscape of territorial and networkedgovernance has emerged through (a)

the consolidation of neoliberalized,market-oriented transnational rule-regimes; (b) the proliferation ofnational state projects of deregulation,liberalization, privatization and auster-ity; (c) the worldwide diffusion of place-marketing campaigns and locationalpolicies intended to attract inwardcapital investment into subnationalzones; (d) the establishment of a ‘newmetropolitan mainstream’ in whichlocal and regional governmentsincreasingly prioritize economicgrowth, property-led investment inflagship mega-projects, urban renewaland gentrification over job creation,social redistribution, equity and par-ticipation (Schmid 2012); (e) the con-struction of new forms of inter-localnetworking and policy transfer to dis-seminate putative ‘best practices’ inresponse to persistent social, economicand environmental crises withinurban regions (Peck and Theodore2015); and (f) the ongoing explosion ofpolitical struggles over access to thebasic resources of social reproductionsuch as housing, water, food, edu-cation, health care and security.Under these conditions, diverse regu-latory agencies, coalitions, movementsand actors struggle not only to influ-ence the production of places, but toreshape the broader institutional andterritorial frameworks through whichurbanization processes are beingmanaged at every spatial scale.

The terrain of the urban has thus been sub-jected to a high-intensity, high-impact earth-quake through the worldwide social,economic, regulatory and environmentaltransformations of the post-1980s period.Not surprisingly, in conjunction withongoing efforts to decipher these wide-ranging transformations, the field of urbanstudies has also been experiencing consider-able turbulence and fragmentation. In anapparent parallel to the field-transforming

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epistemological crises of the late 1960s andearly 1970s, which fundamentally challengedthe entrenched orthodoxies of mainstreamurban sociology, positivist urban policyresearch and quantitative urban geography,the intellectual foundations of urban studiesare today being profoundly destabilized.

Since its origins in the early 20th century,the field of urban studies has been regularlyanimated by foundational debates regardingthe nature of the urban question, often inquite generative ways. The intensification ofsuch debates in recent times could thus beplausibly interpreted as a sign of creativerenaissance rather than of intellectual crisis.Today, however, the intense fragmentation,disorientation and downright confusion thatpermeate the field of urban studies are notmerely the result of methodological disagree-ments (which of course persist) or due to theobsolescence of a particular research para-digm (Marxism, regulation theory, globalcity theory or otherwise). Instead, as thenational-developmentalist configuration ofpostwar world capitalism recedes rapidlyinto historical memory, and as the politico-institutional, spatial and environmentalimpacts of various neoliberalized and author-itarian forms of urban restructuring radiateand ricochet across the planet, a more intel-lectually far-reaching structural crisis ofurban studies appears to be under way.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the epis-temic crises of urban studies involved foun-dational debates regarding the appropriatecategories and methods through which tounderstand a sociospatial terrain whosebasic contours and parameters were a matterof broad consensus. Simply put, that consen-sus involved the equation of the urban with aspecific spatial unit or settlement type—thecity, or an upscaled territorial variantthereof, such as the metropolis, the conurba-tion, the metropolitan region, the megalopo-lis, the megacity, the megacity-region and soforth. Even though radical critics such asManuel Castells fiercely criticized establishedways of understanding this ‘unit’, and offeredan alternative, substantially reinvigorated

interpretive framework through which toinvestigate its production, evolution and con-testation, they persisted in viewing the unit inquestion—the urban region or agglomera-tion—as the basic focal point of debates onthe ‘urban question’ (Castells [1972] 1977;see also Katznelson 1992). Across otherwisedeep methodological and political dividesand successive epistemological realignments,this largely uninterrogated presuppositionhas underpinned the major intellectualtraditions in 20th-century urban studies.Indeed, it has long been considered soself-evident that it did not require acknowl-edgment, much less justification.

Today, this entrenched set of assump-tions—along with a broad constellation ofclosely associated epistemological frameworksfor confronting and mapping the urban ques-tion—is being severely destabilized in thewake of a new round of worldwide sociospa-tial restructuring. Of course, the ‘power ofagglomeration’ remains as fundamental asever to the dynamics of industrialization; thespatial concentration of the means of pro-duction, population and infrastructure is apotent generative force that continues toignite waves of capital accumulation and toreshape places, territories and landscapes atall spatial scales (Soja 2000; Kratke 2014;Scott and Storper 2014). Despite this,however, the erstwhile boundaries of thecity—along with those of larger, metropolitanunits of agglomeration—are being explodedand reconstituted as new forms of urbaniz-ation reshape inherited patterns of territorialorganization, and increasingly crosscut theurban/non-urban divide itself (Schmid 2006,[2012] 2014; Brenner 2013, 2014a, 2014b;Brenner and Schmid 2014).

The contemporary crisis of urban studies isthus not only an expression of epistemic per-plexity (though the latter is still abundantlyevident). From our point of view, rather, itstems from an increasing awareness of funda-mental uncertainties regarding the very sites,objects and focal points of urban theory andresearch under contemporary capitalism. Ina world of neatly circumscribed, relatively

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bounded cities or urban ‘units’, whose coreproperties were a matter of generalized scho-larly agreement, urban researchers couldburrow into the myriad tasks associatedwith understanding their underlying social,economic and cultural dynamics, historicaltrajectories, inter-contextual variations andthe various forms of regulation, conflict andstruggle that emerged within them (Saunders1986). However, under contemporarycircumstances, these basic conditions ofpossibility for urban research appear to havebeen relativized, if not superseded.

For this reason, we argue, the question ofthe epistemology of the urban—specifically:through what categories, methods and carto-graphies should urban life be understood?—must once again become a central focalpoint for urban theory, research and action.If the urban is no longer coherently containedwithin or anchored to the city—or, for thatmatter, to any other bounded settlementtype—then how can a scholarly fielddevoted to its investigation continue toexist? Or, to pose the same question as a chal-lenge of intellectual reconstruction: is there—could there be—a new epistemology of theurban that might illuminate the emergentconditions, processes and transformationsassociated with a world of generalizedurbanization?

Urban ideologies, old and new

Some four decades ago, Lefebvre ([1970]2003, 191, n. 3) argued not only that a newunderstanding of the urban was required,but that the urban was itself becoming theepisteme of our time, the condition of possi-bility for understanding major aspects ofcontemporary global economic, socialand political life: ‘We can say that the urban[ . . . ] rises above the horizon, slowlyoccupies an epistemological field, andbecomes the episteme of an epoch’ (forfurther discussion, see also Prigge 2008). Inthis sense, Lefebvre suggested, the reconcep-tualization of the urban was becoming an

essential epistemological and political pre-condition for understanding the nature ofsociety itself. This proposition appears moreapt than ever today. Whether in academic dis-course or in the public sphere, the urban hasbecome a privileged lens through which tointerpret, to map and, indeed, to attempt toinfluence contemporary social, economic,political and environmental trends.

Paradoxically, however, rather thandirectly confronting the radically trans-formed conditions for urban theory andresearch, the mainstream of contemporarydiscourses on global urbanism has embraceda strong, even triumphalist, reassertion of atraditional, universal, totalizing and largelyempiricist concept of ‘the city’. Within thismainstream framework, the nature of con-temporary urban restructuring is narratedsimply as an increasing importance of citiesto worldwide social, economic, political andecological processes. The question of what‘cities’ and the ‘urban’ are, and how theirconstitutive properties and geographies maybe changing in qualitative terms, is therebyeffectively ‘black-boxed’.

The most influential contemporary meta-narrative of the global urban condition issurely the notion of an ‘urban age’, whichwas first introduced several decades ago byUnited Nations (UN) demographers, andwhich has more recently been popularizedin public and scholarly discourses on thegrowth of urban settlements and associatedsocial, regulatory and environmentalhazards (Burdett and Sudjic 2006; Davis2006; UN-Habitat 2007). According to thiscity-centric perspective, for the first time inhuman history, more than half the world’spopulation now lives within cities. With theputative crossing of this ‘threshold’ or ‘mile-stone’ in 2007, the city is said to have beengeneralized into the universal form ofhuman settlement; it is now thought to rep-resent the most elemental spatial unit forhumanity’s future. Across otherwise diversediscursive, ideological and institutional con-texts, the urban age thesis has become aform of doxic common sense framing

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contemporary discussions of the global urbancondition. It is repeated incessantly, mantra-like, in scholarly papers, research reportsand grant proposals, as well as in the publicsphere of urban, environmental and architec-tural journalism. In effect, the assertion thatwe have crossed the ‘fifty per cent urbanthreshold’ has become the most quoted, buttherefore also among the most banal, formu-lations in contemporary urban studies (forhistorical contextualization and detailed cri-tique, see Brenner and Schmid 2014).

As has been noted by many researchers, thedemographic data on which the urban agehypothesis hinges are deeply inadequate;they are derived from nationally specificcensus agencies which define the city andthe urban using a myriad of inconsistent,unreliable and incompatible indicators (Sat-terthwaite 2010). Moreover, within themajor strands of urban age discourse, thecity is defined with reference to an arbitrarilyfixed population size, density threshold oradministrative classification, which is in turntaken as the main indicator demarcating thepresumed boundary between urban andnon-urban areas. Even when these indicatorsare further elaborated, for instance, withreference to commuting patterns, catchmentareas and economic activities, the notion ofcityness used within this discourse is still fun-damentally empiricist. It presupposes that thecity can be defined through (some combi-nation of) statistically measurable variablesdescribing conditions (coded as either‘urban’ or ‘non-urban’) within a boundedadministrative zone. With a few exceptions(i.e. Angel 2011), the coherent bounding ofthe zone in question is simply presupposedbased upon extant administrative jurisdic-tions; the diverse economic, political andenvironmental processes that are reworkingthe ‘structured coherence’ (Harvey 1989) ofinherited urban formations are not acknowl-edged or analyzed (Brenner and Katsikis2014). Additionally, through its contentionthat ‘the city’ has become the universallydominant, endlessly replicable form ofglobal human settlement, urban age discourse

drastically homogenizes the variegated pat-terns and pathways of urbanization thathave been emerging in recent decades acrossthe world economy (Schmid [2012] 2014).Just as problematically, by equating theurban exclusively with large and/or densepopulation centers, urban age discourserenders invisible the intimate, wide-rangingand dynamically evolving connectionsbetween contemporary shifts in city-buildingprocesses and the equally far-reaching trans-formations of putatively non-urban land-scapes and spatial divisions of labor alludedto above.

Several parallel or derivative metanarra-tives of the contemporary global urban con-dition have been popularized in closeconnection to the overarching ideology ofthe urban age (for a critical overview, seeGleeson 2014). These variations on urbanage discourse involve a variety of normative,methodological, strategic and substantiveconcerns; they include, among others, the fol-lowing main streams:

. Urban triumphalism. Several recent,popular books have presented cities as theengines of innovation, civilization, prosper-ity and democracy, across historical andregional contexts (see, e.g. Brugmann 2010;Glaeser 2011). According to these triumph-alist perspectives, contemporary citiesrepresent the latest expressions of a time-tested sociospatial formula that has enabledthe progressive historical development ofhuman society, technology and governance.This set of arguments represents an impor-tant extension of urban age discoursebecause it connects the UN’s basic demo-graphic propositions to broader, qualitat-ively elaborated arguments concerning therole of cities in unleashing humanity’s econ-omic, social and cultural potentials.

. Technoscientific urbanism. There has alsorecently been an outpouring of influentialnew approaches that mobilize the tools ofnatural science, mathematics and ‘bigdata’ analysis to analyze, and often topredict, inter- and intra-urban spatial

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arrangements (Bettencourt and West 2010;Batty 2013). Such neo-positivist, neo-nat-uralist approaches represent a revival ofimportant strands of postwar systemsthinking in geography, planning anddesign discourse, which had been closelyaligned with national state projects ofurban social engineering and territorialcontrol. Contemporary discussions of‘smart cities’ represent an important paral-lel strand of technoscientific urbanism, inwhich information technology corpor-ations are aggressively marketing newmodes of spatial monitoring, informationprocessing and data visualization toembattled municipal and metropolitangovernments around the world as a techni-cal ‘fix’ for intractable governance pro-blems (Greenfield 2013; Townsend 2013).In the current context, technoscientificaspirations to reveal law-like regularitieswithin and among the world’s major citiesoften serve to naturalize the forms of socio-spatial disorder, enclosure and displace-ment that have been induced through thelast several decades of neoliberal regulatoryrestructuring and recurrent geoeconomiccrisis (Gleeson 2014). Despite their moreelaborate methodological apparatus andtheir capacity to process huge data assem-blages, these technoscientific urbanismsreplicate, and indeed reinforce, the basicurban age understanding of cities as univer-sally replicable, coherently bounded settle-ment units. The law-bound understandingof urbanization it embraces is used notonly for epistemological purposes, tojustify a universalizing, naturalisticresearch agenda, but as part of a broadertechnoscientific ideology that aims todepoliticize urban life and thus ‘to assistthe cause of sound management’ (Gleeson2014, 348).

. Debates on urban sustainability. Anadditional metanarrative of the contempor-ary global urban condition focuses on thekey role of cities in the deepening planetaryecological crisis. Here, cities are viewed atonce as the ‘front lines’ where

environmental crises are most dramaticallyexperienced, and as techno-social arenas inwhich potential responses are beingpioneered (for critical review, see Sat-terthwaite 2004). Discussions of urban sus-tainability are often linked to the twoaforementioned strands of contemporaryurban discourse insofar as they celebratecities as the most ecologically viablearrangements for human settlement (Girar-det 2004; Meyer 2013) and/or propose newtechnoscientific ‘solutions’ for re-engineer-ing urban metabolic processes, oftenthrough architectural and design interven-tions under the rubric of an ‘ecologicalurbanism’ (Mostafavi and Doherty 2011).In many cases, the proposed visions of afuture urban ecological order entail theconstruction of ‘premium ecologicalenclaves’ (Hodson and Marvin 2010) thatare substantially delinked from extantinfrastructural systems, and thus intensifyinherited patterns of territorial exclusion.Emergent strategies to enhance urban ‘resi-lience’ in the face of climate change andassociated socio-natural disasters containsimilar hazards insofar as they normalizecontemporary forms of market-orientedgovernance and associated processes of ter-ritorial stigmatization (Fainstein 2014;Slater 2014). Research on urban sustain-ability remains heterogeneous in methodo-logical, thematic and political terms, andseveral scholars have recently made impor-tant critical interventions that link this pro-blematique to uneven spatial development,neoliberalization and struggles for environ-mental justice (Rees and Wackernagel1996; Atkinson 2007, 2009; Elmqvist2014). However, the main thrust of recentdebates on urban sustainability has beento promote a vision of cities as bounded,technologically controlled islands of eco-rationality that are largely delinked fromthe broader territorial formations inwhich they are currently embedded. Inthis way, urban age discourse is translatedinto a city-centric techno-environmental-ism that often justifies and even celebrates

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the enclavization of settlement space as theoptimal means to ensure human survivalunder conditions of deepening planetaryecological crisis.

. Debates on megacities. One additional sub-stream of urban age discourse has involveddiscussions of megacities, generally under-stood as a specific settlement type that hasbeen consolidated across the ‘Third World’or the ‘global South’ under conditions ofrapid urbanization, hypercongestion andresource scarcity (UN-Habitat 2007). Themegacities discussion partially tempersthe universalizing thrust of urban age dis-course by emphasizing the specificity ofurban settlements in poorer countries,whether due to colonial legacies, earlierstrategies of import-substitution industri-alization, the impacts of contemporaryforms of structural adjustment policy or,most prominently, the proliferation of‘informal’ settlement patterns withindense city cores and around metropolitanfringes. However, in many ways, urbanage approaches articulate directly to, andreinforce, discussions of mega-cities: thelatter, with their pervasive crises ofemployment, housing, public health andenvironment, are commonly representedas the unplanned, and possibly unplan-nable, spatial units in which the contem-porary ‘urban transition’ is unfolding;they are thus the most elementary units ofthe contemporary ‘planet of slums’ (Davis2006; for a strong counterpoint, see Roy2005). Therefore, even if discussions ofmegacities emphasize the distinctivenessof such spaces relative to Euro-American or Northern urbanisms and theworldwide system of global cities, theypreserve the basic emphasis on the city asa bounded settlement type that underpinseach of the major strands of urban agediscourse.

These various versions of urban age discoursemust be understood as a powerful seriesof ideological interventions into rapidlychurning, fragmenting fields of urban

restructuring. Precisely under conditionsin which the very foundations of urbanlife are being radically reconstituted, suchmainstream discourses on global urbanismstrongly reassert a universalizing, totalizingand often naturalistic epistemologicaloutlook that subsumes all dimensions of theurban process under the encompassing lensof cityness, understood as a transcendentalsettlement form that has now been general-ized worldwide. Across the diverse politico-institutional and geographical contexts inwhich these discourses are mobilized, their‘common wrapping is a bright universalism’(Gleeson 2014, 351) that masks the proliferat-ing crisis-tendencies and contradictions ofcontemporary capitalism.

In a striking parallel to the long-discreditedmodernization theories of the postwarperiod, the various strands of this metanarra-tive are now being used as discursive framesto legitimate a wide range of neoliberalizingproposals to transform inherited urban builtenvironments. The simple message that thecity has assumed unprecedented planetaryimportance has thus come to serve as an all-purpose, largely depoliticized ideologicalrubric around which, in diverse contexts,aggressively market-oriented and/or authori-tarian contemporary projects and prescrip-tions of urban transformation are beingnarrated, justified and naturalized. At oncein the public sphere, in planning and designdiscourse, and in scholarly arenas, such uni-versalizing, totalizing and city-centric ideol-ogies serve to reassert the viability of all-too-familiar urban epistemologies even astheir historical and sociospatial conditionsof possibility are being superseded in practice(for further reflection on this apparentparadox, see Wachsmuth 2014).

Reflexive epistemological openings

In contrast to the unapologetically self-assured universalism of urban age ideologies,the core agendas of critical urban socialscience have become rather disjointed in

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recent years. Writing at the turn of the mil-lennium, Soja (2000, xii) observed:

‘[T]he field of urban studies has never been sorobust, so expansive in the number of subjectareas and scholarly disciplines involved withthe study of cities, so permeated by new ideasand approaches, so attuned to the majorpolitical and economic events of our times,and so theoretically and methodologicallyunsettled. It may be the best of times and theworst of times to be studying cities, for whilethere is so much that is new and challenging torespond to, there is much less agreement thanever before as to how best to make sense,practically and theoretically, of the new urbanworlds being created.’

Nearly 15 years later, this statement remainsan apt characterization of the intellectuallandscape of critical urban studies: it is stillfilled with creative, energetic and eclecticresponses to dynamically changing con-ditions, but it is also still quite fragmentedamong diverse epistemological frameworksand a wide range of ontological assumptions.

Although this situation of intellectual frag-mentation results from some productiveforms of epistemological, conceptual andmethodological experimentation, it is alsoproblematic insofar as it limits the field’s col-lective capacity to offer convincing, accessi-ble alternatives to the dominant urbanideologies of our time. Particularly in lightof the broad appeal of simplistic urban agereasoning to scholars, designers and policy-makers, and its continued instrumentaliza-tion in the service of neoliberalizing and/orauthoritarian forms of urban governanceand environmental engineering, the develop-ment of such critical counterpositions is amatter of increasing urgency for all thosecommitted to developing more adequateways of interpreting—and, ultimately, ofinfluencing—the patterns and pathways ofcontemporary urbanization.

One of the hallmarks of any form of criticalsocial theory, including critical urban theory,is epistemological reflexivity (Horkheimer[1968] 1972; Bourdieu 1990; Postone 1993;

see also Brenner 2009). This entails an insis-tence on the situatedness of all forms ofknowledge, and a relentless drive to reinventkey categories of analysis in relation toongoing processes of historical change.Rather than presupposing a rigid separationbetween subject (knower) and object (thesite or context under investigation), reflexiveapproaches emphasize their mutual consti-tution and ongoing transformation throughsocial practices and political struggles,including in the realm of interpretation andideology. In Archer’s (2007, 72) moregeneral formulation, a reflexive approach tosocial theory involves ‘a subject consideringan object in relation to itself, bending thatobject back upon itself in a process whichincludes the self being able to consider itselfas its own object’.

In the context of critical urban studies, thisphilosophical requirement involves not onlythe constant interrogation of changingurban realities, but the equally vigilant analy-sis and revision of the very conceptual andmethodological frameworks being used toinvestigate the urban process. For any reflex-ive approach to urban theory, therefore, thecategories and methods of urban analysisare important focal points of inquiry: under-standing their conditions of emergence andintelligibility, as well as the possibility oftheir destabilization or obsolescence, rep-resent essential, ongoing and potentiallytransformative research tasks. Simply put,reflexive approaches to urban theory mustconstantly subject their own categories andmethods to critical interrogation, even asthe latter are being mobilized in ongoingresearch endeavors.

During the last decade, amidst the deepen-ing intellectual fragmentation of urbanstudies outlined above, a notably reflexivestrand of critical urban scholarship has beenconsolidated under the rubric of postcolonialurban studies. In a wide-ranging series ofinterventions, the main protagonists of thistradition of urban research have revealed theways in which inherited urban epistem-ologies have been implicitly derived from

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the Euro-American experience of capitalisturbanization. This, they argue, has beenused unreflexively as a normalizing templatefor (mis)interpreting processes of urbandevelopment across the ‘global South’. Thevery recognition of such normalizing Euro-American or ‘metrocentric’ assumptionsrequires their ‘provincialization’ (Bunnelland Maringanti 2010; Parnell and Robinson2012; Sheppard, Leitner, and Maringanti2013) and underscores the urgency of elabor-ating alternative categories for understandingthe contextually specific patterns and path-ways of urbanization that have emerged, forexample, in East and Southeast Asia, LatinAmerica, Africa or the Middle East.

In general, postcolonial urban theoristspresent their work as a critique of the natur-alized Euro-American epistemologies associ-ated with the major traditions of academicurban social science extending from theearly 20th-century Chicago School of urbansociology to the Los Angeles School ofurban geography and the global city theoriesof the late 20th century. However, insofar asthey call into question any model of urbantheory that claims universal validity, thereconceptualizations proposed in this tra-dition also offer a theoretically reflexivecounterpoint to the ideological totalizationsof urban age discourse. Rather than adoptinga singular ontological position regarding theunderlying essence of cityness or the urban,postcolonial urbanisms have embraced abroadly nominalist approach to producing‘new geographies of theorizing’ (Roy 2009;Robinson 2014) under early 21st-centuryconditions. Its main orientations and com-mitments include: (a) skepticism regardingauthoritative, universalizing knowledgeclaims about any aspect of the urban experi-ence; (b) attention to contextual particulari-ties and local experiences within places;(c) an analysis of the inter-place relations or‘worlding’ processes that constitute sociospa-tial configurations, whether within cities orat larger spatial scales; and (d) an explorationof the diverse lines of influence throughwhich local, apparently parochial urbanisms

(whether relating to spatial organization,design, planning or policy) circulate beyondtheir contexts of emergence and are therebytransformed into ‘prototypes’ that are atonce implemented and reconstituted else-where (see, e.g. Robinson 2006; Roy 2009;Parnell and Robinson 2012; Roy and Ong2012; Mabin 2014; Parnell and Oldfield2014).

Since the publication of Jennifer Robin-son’s (2006) forceful intervention in hernow-classic book Ordinary Cities, the coreintellectual frameworks of postcolonialurbanism have been undergoing a period ofmaturation and consolidation. It wouldprobably be premature, however, to suggestthat this approach has now established afully fledged urban epistemology or a newresearch paradigm because, as with mostother emergent frameworks within criticalurban studies, it contains many distinctstrands of theory-building, methodologicalexperimentation and substantive research,as well as several competing epistemologicalorientations (see, e.g. Simone 2009; Kipferand Goonewardena 2013). Nonetheless,especially in light of the pervasively frag-mented character of contemporary criticalurban theory, the time is ripe for the theor-etically reflexive interventions and theory-driven research forays that have recentlybeen elaborated by postcolonial urbanists.Particularly in the last few years, in a seriesof provocative manifestos and agenda-setting theoretical articles, several postcolo-nial urban thinkers have pursued the goalof systematically reinventing the epistemo-logical basis for grappling with urban ques-tions (see, especially, Roy 2011, 2014;Robinson 2011, 2014; Sheppard, Leitner,and Maringanti 2013). In this way, theyrespond directly to the question posedabove: under contemporary conditions, canthere be a new epistemology of the urban?

Our own developing investigations of pla-netary urbanization partially overlap with thesubstantive research foci of postcolonialurbanism. Our work is likewise animatedby an overarching concern to develop new

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ways of understanding emergent urban con-ditions and ongoing urban transformations.Similarly, and in stark contrast to some con-temporary approaches that pursue ontologi-cal or quasi-metaphysical speculationsregarding the nature of the urban, weendorse a nominalist approach that permitsan open-ended interplay between critique(of inherited traditions of urban theory andcontemporary urban ideologies), epistemo-logical experimentation (leading to the elab-oration of new concepts and methods) andconcrete research (on specific contexts,struggles and transformations). It is thus ina spirit of comradely dialogue that we offerbelow our own set of critical reflections onthe possible foundations for a new epistem-ology of the urban under 21st-century con-ditions. However, despite our sharedcommitment to epistemological reflexivityand conceptual reinvention, several of thetheses presented here stand in some measureof tension with certain methodological ten-dencies within postcolonial urban studies.

First, because of its concern to ‘provincia-lize’ the universalizing, (over)generalizingthrust of ‘northern’ theory, much of postco-lonial urban studies has emphasized thespecificity, distinctiveness or even uniquenessof cities beyond the West. Although severalscholars (e.g. Roy 2009, 2014; Robinson2011, 2014) have recently introduced produc-tively relational concepts designed to illumi-nate inter-place transformations, the tropeof contextual specificity pervades much ofcontemporary postcolonial urban research,in part due to the influence of parallel argu-ments in the fields of subaltern historicalstudies and postcolonial cultural theory(Chibber 2013). The appropriately decon-structive concern to ‘speak back against,thereby contesting, mainstream global urban-ism’ (Sheppard, Leitner, and Maringanti2013, 896) thus often translates into a meth-odological injunction to reveal the distinc-tiveness of particular places within the‘global South’, often in rhetorical contrast toa putatively overgeneralized ‘northern’model, such as that of the global or neoliberal

city (see, e.g. Seekings 2013; for critical dis-cussion, see Peck 2015b). Many of thoseaccounts present thick descriptions—forinstance, of everyday life and subalternstruggle—as theoretically self-evident coun-terpoints to the apparent totalizations ofEuro-American frameworks (for a criticaldiscussion, see Mabin 2014; see alsoBrenner, Madden, and Wachsmuth 2011).

Clearly, such ‘strategic essentialisms’ (Roy2009) have been generative in both methodo-logical and empirical terms, especially as areflexive counterpoint to mainstream globalurban ideologies. However, they also containcertain intellectual hazards, not the least ofwhich is the risk of prematurely retreatingfrom essential conceptual tools, such as thoseof geopolitical economy, state theory andregulation theory, as outdated vestiges of‘northern’ epistemologies (see also Mabin2014). The idea of specificity is logically intel-ligible only in relation to an encompassingnotion of generality against which it isdefined; it is thus best understood as a rela-tional, dialectical concept, one that presup-poses a broader totality, rather than as ademarcation of ontological singularity(Schmid 2015a). In a capitalist world systemthat continues to be shaped profoundly bythe drive towards endless capital accumu-lation, by neoliberalizing and/or authoritarianforms of global and national regulatoryrestructuring, by neo-imperial military strat-egies, and by various interconnected forms ofexploitation, dispossession and socio-environ-mental destruction, contextual specificity isenmeshed within, and mediated through,broader configurations of capitalist unevenspatial development and geopolitical power.This ‘context of context’ (Brenner, Peck, andTheodore 2010; Peck 2015b) is not merely abackground condition for urban development,but represents a constitutive formation—aself-forming, internally contradictory andconstantly evolving whole—in and throughwhich the ‘geo-positionality’ of local placesis inscribed and mediated (Sheppard 2009).Theorizing the production of such multi-layered spatial configurations—not only

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contexts, but the context(s) of those con-texts—in processual, multiscalar terms thusremains an urgent task for contemporary criti-cal urban theorists.

For these reasons, rather than equating theproject of postcolonial urbanism simply witha commitment to concrete, regionally situ-ated or place-based studies derived from a‘southern’ positionality, it may be most pro-ductive, as Robinson (2014, 61) has recentlyproposed, to understand such methodologi-cal positions as ‘interim moves’ anticipating‘more sustained formulations for buildingglobal urban analyses’ (see also Roy 2014).The theses presented below are intended tocontribute to that collective project, whichwould connect the deconstructive epistemo-logical critiques and conceptual innovationsof postcolonial urban theory to the equallyurgent task of deciphering the evolving, andincreasingly planetary, ‘context of context’in which contemporary forms of neoliberalcapitalist urbanization are unfolding acrossthe North/South divide.

This point connects to a second methodo-logical tendency in postcolonial urbantheory from which our own epistemologicalorientations significantly diverge—namely,its tendency to treat ‘the city’ as the privi-leged terrain for urban research. To be sure,in contrast to the totalizing, empiricist settle-ment fetishism of urban age ideology andother mainstream discourses of global urban-ism, postcolonial urban studies embraces areflexively relational approach to the con-struction of cityness. Rather than reifyingthe city as a generic, universal settlementtype, this approach is productively attunedto the multiple sociospatial configurationsin which agglomerations are crystallizingunder contemporary capitalism, as well asto the transnational, inter-scalar and oftenextra-territorial webs through which theirdevelopmental pathways are mediated or‘worlded’ (see, e.g. Roy 2009, 2014). Andyet, despite its sophisticated methodologicalfoundations, the bulk of postcolonial urbanresearch and theory-building has, in practice,focused on cities, tout court.

In effect, even though a ‘southern’ lens isbeing mobilized within this literature toreconceptualize the geographies of theurban, its concrete sites of investigationhave remained relatively familiar local ormetropolitan units—the great populationcenters of Latin America, sub-SaharanAfrica, South and Southeast Asia, East Asiaand the Middle East. In a form of stubbornlypersistent ‘methodological cityism’ (Angeloand Wachsmuth 2014), major strands of post-colonial urban studies still demarcate theirresearch terrain with the same conditions—large, dense and heterogeneous settle-ments—upon which the inherited field ofEuro-American urban studies has longfocused its analytical gaze. The broader land-scapes of urbanization, which extend farbeyond the megacities, metropolitan regionsand peri-urban zones of the postcolonialworld, are not completely ignored withinthis literature (as illustrated, for example, inits concern with the geographies ofmigration). But nor, however, are theybrought into explicit or reflexive focuswhen postcolonial urbanists frame theirresearch agendas and conceptual cartogra-phies (for further elaborations, see Robinson2014). We argue below that such landscapesof ‘extended urbanization’—understood asfundamental conditions of possibility forthe production of historically and geographi-cally specific forms of ‘cityness’—must beanalyzed and theorized centrally within anyupdated epistemology of the urban for the21st century. Today, such zones can nolonger be understood as elements of a ‘rural’outside that impacts the city and is in turneffected by it; rather, they are now increas-ingly internalized within world-encompass-ing, if deeply variegated, processes ofplanetary urbanization.

The epistemological orientations presentedbelow are intended to contribute to the col-lective project of illuminating the greatvariety of urbanization processes that are pre-sently reshaping the planet. These theses areclosely connected to our developing theori-zation of planetary urbanization, but they

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are not intended to elaborate that analysis inany detail. Instead, our proposals are meantto demarcate some relatively broad epistemo-logical parameters within which a multi-plicity of reflexive approaches to criticalurban theory might be pursued. We aim notto advance a specific, substantive theory ofthe urban, but to present a general epistemo-logical framework through which thiselusive, yet seemingly omnipresent conditionof the contemporary world might be analyti-cally deciphered, even as it continues toevolve and mutate before our eyes, therebychanging yet again the epistemic foundationsfor its future interpretation. This discussion isthus intended as a meta-theoretical exercise:instead of attempting to nail down a fixeddefinition of the essential properties of theurban phenomenon ‘once and for all’, itinvolves developing a reflexive epistemologi-cal framework that may help bring intofocus and render intelligible the ongoingreconstitution of that phenomenon inrelation to the simultaneous evolution of thevery concepts and methods being used tostudy it. Any rigorously reflexive account ofthe urban requires this meta-theoreticalmoment.

Thesis 1: the urban and urbanization aretheoretical categories, not empirical objects

In most mainstream traditions, the urban istreated as an empirically self-evident, univer-sal category corresponding to a particulartype of bounded settlement space, the ‘city’.While such empiricist, universalistic under-standings continue to underpin importantstrands of urban research and policy, includ-ing contemporary mainstream discourses onglobal urbanism, we argue that the urban,and the closely associated concept of urbaniz-ation, must be understood as theoreticalabstractions; they can only be definedthrough the labor of conceptualization. Theurban is thus a theoretical category, not anempirical object: its demarcation as a zoneof thought, representation, imagination or

action can only occur through a process oftheoretical abstraction.

Even the most descriptively nuanced,quantitatively sophisticated or geospatiallyenhanced strands of urban research necess-arily presuppose any number of pre-empiri-cal assumptions regarding the nature of theputatively ‘urban’ condition, zone or trans-formation that is under analysis (Brennerand Katsikis 2014). Such assumptions arenot mere background conditions or inciden-tal framing devices, but constitute the veryinterpretive lens through which urbanresearch becomes intelligible as such. Forthis reason, the ‘urban question’ famouslyposed by Castells ([1972] 1977) cannot beunderstood as a theoretical detour, or as amere intellectual diversion for those inter-ested in concept formation or in the field’shistorical evolution. Rather, engagementwith the urban question is a constitutivemoment of theoretical abstraction within allapproaches to urban research and practice,whether or not they reflexively conceptualizeit as such.

Since the early 20th century, the evolutionof urban studies as a research field has beenanimated by intense debates regarding theappropriate conceptualization of theurban—its geographical parameters, its his-torical pathways and its key social, economic,cultural or institutional dimensions (Saunders1986; Hartmann et al. 1986; Katznelson1992). These debates have underpinned andanimated the succession of research para-digms on urban questions across the socialand historical sciences, and they have alsobeen closely articulated to broader develop-ments, controversies and paradigm shiftswithin the major traditions of social theory,planning and design. In each framing,depending on the underlying epistemologicalperspective, conceptual grammar, carto-graphic apparatus and normative-politicalorientation, the urban has been equatedwith quite divergent properties, practices,conditions, experiences, institutions and geo-graphies, which have in turn defined the basichorizons for research, representation and

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practice. Such demarcations have entailed notonly diverse, often incompatible, ways ofunderstanding cities and agglomeration, butalso a range of interpretive methods, analyti-cal strategies and cartographic techniquesthrough which those conditions are distin-guished from a ‘non-urban’ outside—thesuburban, the rural, the natural or otherwise.In this sense, rather than developing througha simple accretion of concrete investigationson a pre-given social condition or spatialarrangement, the field of urban studies hasevolved through ongoing theoretical debatesregarding the appropriate demarcation,interpretation and mapping of the urbanitself.

The urban is, then, an essentially contestedconcept and has been subject to frequent rein-vention in relation to the challenges engen-dered by research, practice and struggle.While some approaches to the urban haveasserted, or aspired to, universal validity, andthus claimed context-independent applica-bility, every attempt to frame the urban inanalytical, geographical and normative-politi-cal terms has in fact been strongly mediatedthrough the specific historical-geographicalformation(s) in which it emerged—forexample, Manchester, Paris and classicallyindustrial models of urbanization in the mid-19th century; Chicago, Berlin, London andrapidly metropolitanizing landscapes ofimperial–capitalist urbanization in the early20th century; and Los Angeles, Shanghai,Dubai, Singapore and neoliberalizing modelsof globally networked urbanization in thelast three decades. As Gieryn (2006, 6)explains, the city is both ‘the subject and thevenue of study—scholars in urban studies con-stitute the city both as the empirical referent ofanalysis and the physical site where investi-gation takes place’.

This circumstance means that all engage-ments with urban theory, whether Euro-American, postcolonial or otherwise, are insome sense ‘provincial’, or context-depen-dent, because they are mediated through con-crete experiences of time and space withinparticular places. Just as crucially, though,

conditions within local and regional contextsunder modern capitalism have long beentightly interdependent with one another,and have been profoundly shaped bybroader patterns of capitalist industrializ-ation, regulation and uneven sociospatialdevelopment. The recognition of contextdependency—the need to ‘provincialize’urban theory—thus stands in tension withan equally persistent need to understand thehistorically evolving totality of inter-contex-tual patterns, developmental pathways andsystemic transformations in which such con-texts are embedded, whether at national,supranational or worldwide scales.

In all cases, therefore, theoretical defi-nitions of the urban and the historical-geographical contexts of their emergenceare tightly intertwined. This propositionapplies whether the urban is delineated asa local formation or as a global condition;the contexts of theory production mustlikewise be understood in both situatedand inter-contextual terms. Any reflexiveapproach to the urban question must makeexplicit the venue of its own research prac-tice (be it a specific place, an urbanizing ter-ritory or a broader socioeconomic network)and consider the implications of the latterfor its own epistemological and represen-tational framework.

Such definitional debates and theoreticalcontroversies are not only derived fromspecific contexts of urbanization; they alsopowerfully impact those contexts insofar asthey help clarify, construct, legitimate, disse-minate and naturalize particular visions ofsociospatial organization that privilegecertain elements of the urban process whileneglecting or excluding others. These often-contradictory framing visions, interpret-ations and cartographies of the urban (assite, territory, ecology and experience)mediate urban design, planning, policy andpractice, with powerful consequences forongoing strategies and struggles, in andoutside of major institutions, to shape andreshape urbanized landscapes. It is essential,therefore, to connect debates on the urban

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question to assessments of their practical andpolitical implications, institutionalexpressions and everyday consequences inspecific contexts of urban restructuring.Such a task may only be accomplished,however, if the underlying assumptionsassociated with framing conceptualizationsof the urban are made explicit, subjected tocritical scrutiny and revised continually inrelation to evolving research questions, nor-mative-political orientations and practicalconcerns.

Thesis 2: the urban is a process, not auniversal form, settlement type or boundedunit

Across significant strands of the socialsciences and the design disciplines, theurban is treated as a fixed, unchangingentity–as a universal form, settlement typeor bounded spatial unit (‘the’ city) that isbeing replicated across the globe. By contrast,following Lefebvre’s ([1970] 2003) methodo-logical injunction, we interpret the urban as amultiscalar process of sociospatial transform-ation. The study of specific urban forms,types or units must thus be superseded byinvestigations of the relentless ‘churning’ ofurban configurations at all spatial scales.This apparently simple proposal entails aseries of far-reaching consequences formany of the core epistemological operationsof urban theory and research.

First, the urban can no longer be under-stood as a universal form. Apparently stabil-ized urban sites are in fact merelytemporary materializations of ongoing socio-spatial transformations. Such processes ofcreative destruction (see Thesis 3 below) donot simply unfold within fixed or stableurban ‘containers’, but actively produce,unsettle and rework them, and thus con-stantly engender new urban configurations.Simply put, the urban is not a (fixed) formbut a process; as such, it is dynamic, histori-cally evolving and variegated. It is materia-lized within built environments and

sociospatial arrangements at all scales; andyet it also continually creatively destroysthe latter to produce new patterns of socio-spatial organization (Harvey 1985). There isthus no singular morphology of the urban;there are, rather, many processes of urbantransformation that crystallize across theworld at various spatial scales, with wide-ranging, often unpredictable consequencesfor inherited sociospatial arrangements.

Second, the urban can no longer be under-stood as a settlement type. The field of urbanstudies has long been preoccupied with thetask of classifying particular sociospatial con-ditions within putatively distinct types ofsettlement space (city, town, suburb, metro-polis and various sub-classificationsthereof). Today, however, such typologiesof urban settlement have outlived their use-fulness; processes of sociospatial transform-ation, which crisscross and constantlyrework diverse places, territories and scales,must instead be moved to the foreground ofour epistemological framework. In such aconceptualization, urban configurationsmust be conceived not as discrete settlementtypes, but as dynamic, relationally evolvingforce fields of sociospatial restructuring(Allen, Cochrane, and Massey 1998; Massey2005). As such, urban configurations rep-resent, simultaneously, the territorial inheri-tance of earlier rounds of restructuring andthe sociospatial frameworks in and throughwhich future urban pathways and potentialsare produced. The typological classificationof static urban units is thus considerablyless productive, in both analytical and politi-cal terms, than explorations of the variousprocesses through which urban configur-ations are produced, contested andtransformed.

Third, the urban can no longer be under-stood as a bounded spatial unit. Since theorigins of modern approaches to urbantheory in the late 19th century, the urbanhas been conceptualized with reference tothe growth of cities, conceived as relativelycircumscribed, if constantly expanding,sociospatial units. Such assumptions have

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long pervaded mainstream urban research,and they are today powerfully embodied inthe discourses on global urbanism promotedby the UN, the World Bank and othermajor international organizations. In lightof the above considerations, however, ouranalyses of urban configurations must be sys-tematically disentangled from inheritedunderstandings of cityness, which obfuscatethe processes of ‘implosion-explosion’ thatunderpin the production and continualrestructuring of sociospatial organizationunder modern capitalism. It is misleading toequate the urban with any singular,bounded spatial unit (city, agglomeration,metropolitan region or otherwise); nor canits territorial contours be coherently deli-neated relative to some postulated non-urban ‘outside’ (suburban, rural, natural,wilderness or otherwise). Conceptualizationsof the urban as a bounded spatial unit mustthus be superseded by approaches that inves-tigate how urban configurations are churnedand remade across the uneven landscapes ofworldwide capitalist development.

In sum, the process-based approach to theurban proposed here requires a fundamentalreorientation of urban research. No longerconceived as a form, type or bounded unit,the urban must now be retheorized as aprocess that, even while continually rein-scribing patterns of agglomeration acrossthe earth’s terrestrial landscape, simul-taneously transgresses, explodes andreworks inherited geographies (of socialinteraction, settlement, land use, circulationand socio-metabolic organization), bothwithin and beyond large-scale metropolitancenters.

Thesis 3: urbanization involves threemutually constitutive moments—concentrated urbanization, extendedurbanization and differential urbanization

If the urban is no longer to be conceived as auniversal form, as a specific settlement typeor as a bounded unit, inherited understandings

of urbanization must likewise be completelyreinvented, for they are largely derived fromor intertwined with precisely this triad ofnaturalized epistemological assumptions. Thenotion of urbanization may initially appearto resonate productively with the processualepistemological orientation emphasized inThesis 2. In practice, however, all majortheories of urbanization are seriously limitedby their exclusive focus on what Burgess([1925] 1967) classically described as ‘thegrowth of the city’. This is not merely amatter of empirical emphasis, but flowsfrom a fundamental epistemological commit-ment—namely, the conceptualization ofurbanization with exclusive reference to thecondition of agglomeration, the spatialconcentration of population, means ofproduction, infrastructure and investmentwithin a more or less clearly delineatedspatial zone.

Without denying the importance of spatialclusters to urbanization processes, we arguethat a more multifaceted conceptualizationis today required which illuminates the inter-play between three mutually constitutivemoments—(i) concentrated urbanization, (ii)extended urbanization and (iii) differentialurbanization. These three moments are dia-lectically interconnected and mutually con-stitutive; they are analytically distinguishedhere simply to offer an epistemological basisfor a reinvented conceptualization that trans-cends the limitations and blind spots of main-stream models.

Since Friedrich Engels famously analyzedthe explosive growth of industrial Manche-ster in the mid-19th century, the power ofagglomeration has been a key focal point forurban research. Although its appropriateinterpretation remains a topic of intensedebate, the moment of concentrated urbaniz-ation is thus quite familiar from inheritedapproaches to urban economic geography,which aim to illuminate the agglomerationprocesses through which firms, workers andinfrastructure cluster together in spaceduring successive cycles of capitalist indus-trial development (Veltz 1996; Storper 1996;

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Scott 1988; Kratke 2014). Obviously, largeagglomerations remain central arenas andengines of massive urban transformations,and thus clearly merit sustained investigation,not least under early 21st-century capitalism.However, we reject the widespread assump-tion within both mainstream and critical tra-ditions of urban studies that agglomerationsrepresent the privileged or even exclusiveterrain of urban development (Scott andStorper 2014). In contrast, we propose thatthe historical and contemporary geographiesof urban transformation encompass muchbroader, if massively uneven, territories andlandscapes, including many that maycontain relatively small, dispersed orminimal populations, but where major socio-economic, infrastructural and socio-meta-bolic metamorphoses have occurredprecisely in support of, or as a consequenceof, the everyday operations and growthimperatives of often-distant agglomerations.For this reason, the moment of concentratedurbanization is inextricably connected tothat of extended urbanization.

Extended urbanization involves, first, theoperationalization of places, territories andlandscapes, often located far beyond thedense population centers, to support theeveryday activities and socioeconomicdynamics of urban life. The production ofsuch operational landscapes results from themost basic socio-metabolic imperativesassociated with urban growth—the procure-ment and circulation of food, water,energy and construction materials; the pro-cessing and management of waste and pol-lution; and the mobilization of labor-powerin support of these various processes ofextraction, production, circulation and man-agement. Second, the process of extendedurbanization entails the ongoing constructionand reorganization of relatively fixed andimmobile infrastructures (in particular, fortransportation and communication) insupport of these operations, and conse-quently, the uneven thickening and stretchingof an ‘urban fabric’ (Lefebvre [1970] 2003)across progressively larger zones, and

ultimately, around much of the entire planet(see Thesis 5 below). Third, the process ofextended urbanization frequently involvesthe enclosure of land from established socialuses in favor of privatized, exclusionary andprofit-oriented modes of appropriation,whether for resource extraction, agro-business, logistics functions or otherwise. Inthis sense, extended urbanization is inti-mately intertwined with the violence ofaccumulation by dispossession (often ani-mated and enforced by state institutions)through which non-commodified modes ofsocial life are destabilized and articulated toglobal spatial divisions of labor and systemsof exchange (Ajl 2014; Sevilla-Buitrago 2014).

The moment of extended urbanization hasbeen partially illuminated in classic accountsof city-hinterland relations, which haveexplored not only the making of operationallandscapes to support population centers,but the ways in which the very process ofmetropolitan development has hinged uponmassive, highly regularized inputs (of labor,materials, food, water, energy, commodities,information and so forth) procured fromagglomerations as well as various types of‘non-city’ spaces, both proximate andremote (Harris and Ullman 1945; Jacobs1970; Cronon 1991; for discussion, see Katsi-kis 2015). More recently, accounts ofextended urbanization have emphasized theprogressive enclosure, operationalizationand industrialization of such landscapesaround the world—including rainforests,tundra, alpine zones, oceans, deserts andeven the atmosphere itself—to fuel the rapidintensification of metropolitan growth inrecent decades (Schmid 2006; Brenner2014a, 2014b; Soja and Kanai [2006] 2014;Monte-Mor 2014a, 2014b).

Throughout the longue duree history ofcapitalist industrialization, the geographiesof extended urbanization have been essentialto the consolidation, growth and restructur-ing of urban centers. Rather than being rele-gated to a non-urban ‘outside’, therefore,the moment of extended urbanization mustbe viewed as an integral terrain of the

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urbanization process as a whole. Thus,without abandoning the long-standingconcern of urbanists to understand agglom-eration processes, we propose to connectthat familiar problematique to a wide-ranging set of sociospatial transformationsthat have not typically been viewed as beingconnected to urbanization.

Concentrated and extended urbanizationare inextricably intertwined with theprocess of differential urbanization, inwhich inherited sociospatial configurationsare continually creatively destroyed inrelation to the broader developmentaldynamics and crisis-tendencies of moderncapitalism. Lefebvre ([1970] 2003) capturedthis distinctive tendency within capitalistforms of urbanization through the vividmetaphor of ‘implosion-explosion’, a formu-lation that has been appropriated in diverseways in recent years by critical urban thin-kers (Brenner 2014a, 2014b; Schmid, Stanek,and Moravanszky 2015). For our purposeshere, rather than equate ‘implosion’ exclu-sively with concentrated urbanization and‘explosion’ with extended urbanization, themetaphor offers a useful basis for demarcat-ing a third, differential moment of urbaniz-ation based upon the perpetual drive torestructure sociospatial organization undermodern capitalism, not only within metropo-litan agglomerations but across broader land-scapes of extended urbanization.

Consistent with the process-based concep-tualization of the urban presented in Thesis 2,the differential moment of urbanization putsinto relief the intense, perpetual dynamismof capitalist forms of urbanization, in whichsociospatial configurations are tendentiallyestablished, only to be rendered obsoleteand eventually superseded through therelentless forward motion of the accumu-lation process and industrial development(Harvey 1985; Storper and Walker 1989).Just as crucially, as we suggest below(Thesis 7), differential urbanization is alsothe result of various forms of urban struggleand expresses the powerful potentials forradical social and political transformation

that are unleashed, but often suppressed,through capitalist industrial development(see Lefebvre [1974] 1991 on differentialspace; and Lefebvre 2009 on the ‘politics ofspace’).

The creative destruction of sociospatialarrangements within large urban centers haslong been recognized in radical approachesto the periodization of urban development(Gordon 1978; Harvey 1989). In suchapproaches, successive configurations of theurban built environment are thought tempor-arily to internalize the underlying contradic-tions of capitalism associated, for instance,with class struggle, property relations, over-accumulation and the political control ofsurplus value. To the degree that inheritedbuilt environments can no longer effectivelymanage the struggles and conflicts engen-dered through such contradictions, it isargued, they are radically remade, or crea-tively destroyed, until a new formation ofthe urban is produced. In this sense, despitemajor disagreements regarding the under-lying causes of crisis-induced urban restruc-turing, radical theories of the capitalist cityhave already developed a relatively elaborateaccount of the interplay between concen-trated and differential urbanization sincearound 1850 (Soja 2000).

By contrast, we currently have only alimited grasp of how—via what mechanisms,struggles, patterns and pathways—the land-scapes of extended urbanization have beencreatively destroyed during the history ofcapitalist development, whether in relationto waves of concentrated urbanization or,more generally, in relation to broaderregimes of capital accumulation and modesof territorial regulation. The cycles of urbandevelopment explored by radical scholarsunder the rubric, for instance, of the mercan-tile, industrial, Fordist-Keynesian and neo-liberal city (Harvey 1989) have only rarelybeen connected, either empirically or analyti-cally, to the sociospatial dynamics and crisis-tendencies within the broader landscapes ofextended urbanization (for some suggestiveopenings, however, see Jones 1997; Bayat

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and Denis 2000; Thompson, Bunnell, andParthasarathy 2013; McGee [1991] 2014).However, it can be argued that the geogra-phies of extended urbanization have likewisebeen undergoing intensive processes of crea-tive destruction throughout the history ofcapitalist industrial development, generallyin relation to major waves of crisis-inducedrestructuring and political struggle withinurban centers and the broader territorialeconomies in which the latter are embedded(Moore 2008, 2011). Such transformationshave been intensifying, deepening and broad-ening around the world since the long 1980s,with far-reaching social, environmental andpolitical consequences for the future of capit-alism, and indeed, humanity as a whole (Luke2003).

Figure 1 offers a stylized summary of thethree core moments of urbanization undercapitalism. We reiterate that these‘moments’ refer not to distinct morphologi-cal conditions, geographical sites or temporalstages, but to mutually constitutive, dialecti-cally intertwined elements of a historicallyspecific process of sociospatial transform-ation. Just as distant flows of material,energy and labor underpin the everydaydynamics of large metropolitan agglomera-tions, so too do the growth imperatives andconsumption demands of the latter directlymediate the construction of large-scale infra-structural projects, land-use reorganizationand sociocultural transformations in appar-ently ‘remote’ operational landscapes. Asthe fabric of urbanization is progressively, ifunevenly, stretched, thickened, rewoven andcreatively destroyed, new centers of agglom-eration (from mining and farming towns andtourist enclaves to logistics hubs and growthpoles) may emerge within zones that pre-viously served mainly as operational hinter-lands (Storper and Walker 1989). The urbanfabric of modern capitalism is thus best con-ceived as a dynamically evolving force fieldin which the three moments of urbanizationcontinually interact to produce historicallyspecific forms of sociospatial organizationand uneven development. A framework that

reflexively connects the three moments ofurbanization demarcated here may thusoffer some productive new interpretive per-spectives not only on the historical and con-temporary geographies of capitalistindustrial development, but also on some ofthe socio-ecological conditions that aretoday commonly thought to be associatedwith the age of the ‘anthropocene’ (Crutzen2002; for a critical discussion, see Chakra-barty 2009; Malm and Hornborg 2014).

Thesis 4: the fabric of urbanization ismultidimensional

The epistemology of urbanization proposedabove explodes inherited assumptionsregarding the geographies of this process:they are no longer expressed simply throughthe city, the metropolitan region or inter-urban networks, and nor are they boundedneatly and distinguished from a putativelynon-urban ‘outside’. But this systematicanalytical delinking of urbanization fromtrends related exclusively to city growthentails a further epistemological conse-quence—the abandonment of several majorsociological, demographic, economic or cul-tural definitions of urbanization that aredirectly derived from that assumption.Thus, with the deconstruction of monodi-mensional, city-centric epistemologies,urbanization can no longer be consideredsynonymous with such commonly invokeddevelopments as: rural-to-urban migration;expanding population levels in big cities; theconcentration of investments and economiccapacities within dense population centers;the diffusion of urbanism as a socioculturalform into small- and medium-sized townsand villages; or the spreading of similar,‘city-like’ services, amenities, technologies,infrastructures or built environments acrossthe territory. Any among the latter trendsmay, under specific conditions, be connectedto distinctive patterns and pathways ofurbanization. However, in the epistemologi-cal framework proposed here, their analytical

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demarcation as such no longer hinges uponthe definitionally fixed assumption either (a)that they necessarily originate within specificsettlement units (generally, big cities) or (b)that they necessarily result from the replica-tion of formally identical urban settlementtypes, infrastructural arrangements or cul-tural forms across the entire territory.

What is required, instead, is a multidimen-sional understanding of urbanization that canilluminate the historically specific patternsand pathways through which the variegated,uneven geographies of this process, in eachof its three constitutive moments, are articu-lated during successive cycles of worldwidecapitalist development. To facilitate such ananalysis, building upon Lefebvre’s three-dimensional conceptualization of space(Lefebvre [1974] 1991; Schmid 2005, 2008,2015b), we distinguish three further dimen-sions of urbanization—spatial practices, terri-torial regulation and everyday life. Thesedimensions of urbanization co-constitutethe three moments demarcated in the pre-vious thesis, and together produce theunevenly woven, restlessly mutating urbanfabric of the contemporary world (Figure 2).

First, urbanization involves distinctivespatial practices through which land use isintensified, connectivity infrastructures arethickened and socio-metabolic transform-ations are accelerated to facilitate processesof capitalist industrialization. Such spatialpractices underpin the production of builtenvironments within major cities as well asa wide range of sociospatial transformationsin near and distant zones in relation to thelatter.

Second, urbanization is always mediatedthrough specific forms of territorial regu-lation that (a) impose collectively bindingrules regarding the appropriation of labor,land, food, water, energy and materialresources within and among places and terri-tories; (b) mobilize formal and informal plan-ning procedures to govern investmentpatterns and financial flows into the builtenvironment and infrastructural networks atvarious spatial scales; and (c) manage patternsof territorial development with regard to pro-cesses of production and social reproduction,major aspects of logistics infrastructure andcommodity circulation, as well as emergentcrisis-tendencies embedded within inherited

Figure 1 The three ‘moments’ of urbanization.

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spatial arrangements (Brenner 2004; Schmid2003).

Finally, urbanization mediates and trans-forms everyday life. Whether within densepopulation centers or in more dispersedlocations embedded within the broaderurban fabric, urban space is defined by thepeople who use, appropriate and transform

it through their daily routines and practices,which frequently involve struggles regardingthe very form and content of the urbanitself, at once as a site and stake of socialexperience. The qualities of urban space,across diverse locations, are thus alsoembedded within and reproduced througheveryday experiences, which in turn

Figure 2 Moments and dimensions of urbanization

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crystallize longer term processes of socializa-tion that are materialized within builtenvironments and territorial arrangements.

Clearly, this is a broad conceptualizationof urbanization: it involves a wide-rangingconstellation of material, social, institutional,environmental and everyday transformationsassociated with capitalist industrialization,the circulation of capital and the managementof territorial development at various spatialscales. We would insist, however, on dis-tinguishing urbanization from the moregeneral processes of capitalist industrializ-ation and world market expansion that havebeen investigated by economic historiansand historical sociologists of capitalist devel-opment (e.g. Wallerstein 1974; Braudel 1984;Arrighi 1994). As understood here, urbaniz-ation is indeed linked to these processes, butits specificity lies precisely in materializingthe latter within places, territories and land-scapes, and in embedding them within con-crete, temporarily stabilized configurationsof socioeconomic life, socio-environmentalorganization and regulatory management.Capitalist industrial development does notengender urban growth and restructuring onan untouched terrestrial surface; rather, itconstantly collides with, and reorganizes,inherited sociospatial configurations, includ-ing those produced directly through thesocial relations and political forms of capital-ism. Urbanization is precisely the mediumand expression of this collision/transform-ation, and every configuration of urban lifeis powerfully shaped by the diverse social,political and institutional forces thatmediate it.

Thesis 5: urbanization has becomeplanetary

Since the first wave of capitalist industrializ-ation in the 19th century, the functionalborders, catchment areas and immediate hin-terlands of urban regions have been extendedoutwards to create ever larger regional units.Just as importantly, however, this dramatic

process of metropolitan expansion has longbeen premised upon the intensive activationand transformation of progressively broaderlandscapes of extended urbanization whichsupply agglomerations with their most basicsocioeconomic and socio-metabolic require-ments. The patterns and pathways of socio-spatial restructuring that crystallized aroundthe world during the long, violent and inten-sely contested transition from industrial andmetropolitan to territorial formations ofurbanization, roughly from the 1830s to the1970s, require further investigation andinterpretation. In contrast to inherited peri-odizations, which focus almost exclusivelyon cities and urban form, the framework pro-posed here would permit the dynamics of citygrowth during each period to be analyzed indirect relation to the production and recon-stitution of historically and geographicallyspecific operational landscapes (mediatedthrough Empire, colonialism, neo-colonial-ism and various forms of enclosure andaccumulation by dispossession) that sup-ported the latter.

For present purposes, we focus on the con-temporary formation of urbanization. In ourview, a genuinely planetary formation ofurbanization began to emerge following thelong 1980s, the transitional period of crisis-induced global restructuring that began withthe deconstruction of Fordist-Keynesianand national-developmentalist regimes ofaccumulation in the early 1970s and contin-ued until the withering away of state social-ism and the collapse of the Soviet Union inthe late 1980s and early 1990s. These develop-ments established some of the basic con-ditions for the subsequent planetaryextension of the urban fabric during the lasttwo decades—the deregulation of the globalfinancial system and of various national regu-latory systems; the neoliberalization ofglobal, national and local economic govern-ance; the worldwide digital revolution; theflexibilization of production processes andthe generalization of global production net-works; and the creation of new forms ofmarket-oriented territorial regulation at

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supranational, national and subnationalscales. These realignments have created anew regulatory framework encouragingspeculative urban investment, not onlywithin the property markets and builtenvironments of the world’s major cities,but also through the construction of vastlyexpanded urban networks and infrastructuresof resource extraction, agro-industrial culti-vation and logistical circulation, all of whichhave massively contributed to the acceleratedenclosure of landscapes around the world topermit intensified, accelerated capital circula-tion (Harvey 2010; Merrifield 2014).

In the early 1970s, Lefebvre ([1970] 2003)anticipated this situation, advancing theradical hypothesis of the complete urbaniz-ation of society. For Lefebvre, this was anemergent tendency that might be realized inthe future, but he did not speculate as towhen or how it might actually occur, andwith what consequences. Today, it is increas-ingly evident that the urban has indeedbecome a worldwide condition in which allaspects of social, economic, political andenvironmental relations are enmeshed,across places, territories and scales, crosscut-ting any number of long-entrenched geo-graphical divisions (urban/rural, city/countryside, society/nature, North/South,East/West). The dawn of planetary urbaniz-ation is being expressed through severalintertwined tendencies that have only justbegun to come into analytical focus duringthe early 21st century, but whichurgently require the scrutiny of criticalurban thinkers.

Perhaps most prominent among these isthe remarkable territorial expansion ofurban agglomerations, vividly capturedthrough Sudjic’s (1993) notion of ‘100-milecities’, which has blurred and even begun todissolve the boundaries between manymajor cities and their surrounding territoriesor erstwhile ‘hinterlands’ (Soja and Kanai[2006] 2014). Today, urban agglomerationscan no longer be understood simply asnodal concentrations organized around andoriented towards a single urban core.

Instead, they must be reconceptualized asdense force fields of nearly continuous inter-action among the various processes associatedwith concentrated, extended and differentialurbanization (Topalovic, Knusel, and Jaggi2013).

Equally important, in this context, areseveral additional waves of socioeconomicand socio-metabolic transformation of thepost-1980s period that have significantlyrewoven the inherited fabric of urbanizationwhile extending it into new realms thatwere previously relatively insulated from itswide-ranging imprints. These include (a) amajor expansion in agro-industrial exportzones, with associated large-scale infrastruc-tural investments and land-use transform-ations to produce and circulate food andbiofuels for world markets (McMichael2013); (b) a massive expansion in investmentsrelated to mineral and oil extraction, in largepart due to the post-2003 commodity boommanifested in dramatic increases in globalprices for raw materials, especially metalsand fuels (Arboleda 2015); and (c) the acceler-ated consolidation and extension of long-distance transportation and communicationsinfrastructures (including networks such asroads, canals, railways, waterways andpipelines; and nodal points such as seaports,airports and intermodal logistics hubs)designed to reduce the transaction costsassociated with the production and circula-tion of capital (Notteboom and Rodrigue2005; Hein 2011; Hesse 2013). Under theseconditions, erstwhile ‘rural’ zones aroundthe world are being profoundly transformed:various forms of agro-industrial consolida-tion and land enclosure are underminingsmall- and medium-sized forms of food pro-duction; new forms of export-oriented indus-trial extraction are destabilizing establishedmodels of land-use and social reproduction,as well as environmental security; andnewly consolidated inter-regional migrationnetworks and communications infrastruc-tures are dramatically rearticulating the inter-dependencies between villages, small townsand larger, often-distant urban centers,

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contributing in turn to the production of newforms of everyday experience that transcendthe confines of specific places.

Amidst these far-reaching sociospatialtransformations, the fabric of extendedurbanization is meanwhile also being wovenever more densely, if still quite unevenly,across many relatively depopulated and erst-while ‘wilderness’ landscapes, from theArctic, the European Alps and the Amazonto Patagonia, the Himalayas, the Sahara,Siberia and the Gobi desert, as well asthrough major zones of the world’s seas andoceans (Diener et al. 2006; Gugger, Couling,and Blanchard 2012; Urban Theory Lab2015). While the ecology and topography ofthese landscapes may still appear relativelypristine or untouched by the ‘footprint’ ofindustrial capitalism, such impressions aredeeply misleading. In fact, for severaldecades now, strategic places, grids, corridorsand concession zones within such territorieshave been aggressively enclosed and opera-tionalized, usually by transnational corpor-ations under the legal protection ofneoliberal and/or authoritarian nationalstates and various kinds of intergovernmentalorganizations, to facilitate new forms ofresource extraction, energy and agro-indus-trial production, an unprecedented expansionof logistics infrastructures, as well as variousadditional forms of land-use intensificationand environmental plunder intended tosupport the relentless growth and consump-tion imperatives of the world’s major cities.

Under contemporary conditions, then, tra-ditional models of metropolis and hinterland,center and periphery, city and countryside,have been exploded. The urban/rural opposi-tion, which has long served as an epistemo-logical anchor for the most basic researchoperations of urban studies, has todaybecome an increasingly obfuscatory basisfor deciphering emergent patterns and path-ways of sociospatial restructuring aroundthe world. On the one hand, the geographiesof uneven spatial development are todaybeing articulated as an interweaving of newdevelopmental patterns and potentials

within a thickening, if deeply polarized,fabric of worldwide urbanization. Theurban is thus no longer defined in oppositionto an ontological Other located beyond or‘outside’ it, but has instead become the verytissue of human life itself, at once the frame-work and the basis for the many forms ofsociospatial differentiation that continue toproliferate under contemporary capitalistconditions. Nor can the rural be understoodany longer as a perpetually present ‘else-where’ or ‘constitutive outside’ that permitsthe urban to be demarcated as a stable, coher-ent and discrete terrain. Instead, this suppo-sedly non-urban realm has now beenthoroughly engulfed within the variegatedpatterns and pathways of a planetary for-mation of urbanization. In effect, it has beeninternalized into the very core of the urbaniz-ation process.

This proposition may prove controversial,especially if it is misunderstood as a totalizinggeneralization that ignores the continueddifferences, whether in social, institutional,infrastructural or environmental terms,between large metropolitan centers andzones characterized, for instance, by low ordispersed population, minimal or degradedbuilt environments and/or relatively poorcommunications and transportation connec-tivity (for discussion and debate of thisissue, see Catterall 2014; Catterall andWilson 2014; Scott and Storper 2014). Ourclaim here, however, is not that ‘rural’ ornon-urban zones have totally disappeared;on the contrary, such spaces still exist andmay even play decisive roles in the social, pol-itical and economic life of certain regions, forinstance, in parts of Africa, Southeast Asia orLatin America (see, e.g. Scott 2009).However, the conditions within so-called‘rural’ zones should not be taken forgranted; they require careful, contextuallyspecific and theoretically reflexive investi-gations that may be seriously impededthrough the unreflexive use of generic labelsthat predetermine their patterns and path-ways of development and their form anddegree of connection to other places,

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regions and territories. Indeed, much con-temporary research on putatively ruralregions has shown that many such areas arebeing transformed through and embeddedwithin urbanization processes, preciselythrough the kinds of accumulation strategies,infrastructural projects and socio-metaboliclinkages we propose to theorize under therubric of extended urbanization (see, e.g.Cloke 2006; Diener et al. 2006; Woods2009; Alton 2014; Wilson 2014; Monte-Mor2014a, 2014b). Such studies strongly reinforceour contention that the inherited urban/ruraldistinction has come to obscure much morethan it reveals regarding the entities, pro-cesses and transformations being classifiedon either side of the divide it aspires todemarcate.

Precisely against this background, theconcept of planetary urbanization mayoffer a useful epistemological reorientation.Obviously, it cannot substitute for concreteresearch on specific zones of sociospatialtransformation anywhere in the world. Butit does open up an epistemological paththrough which the latter may be pursuedin relation to broader questions regardingthe increasingly worldwide, if deeplypolarized and uneven, geographies inwhich even the most apparently ‘remote’places, regions and territories are now inex-tricably interwoven.

Thesis 6: urbanization unfolds throughvariegated patterns and pathways ofuneven spatial development

The emergence of a planetary formation ofurbanization does not entail a homogeniz-ation of sociospatial landscapes; it is notexpressed through the ‘globalization’ of auniform condition of cityness (or urban‘sprawl’) across the entire planet; and it doesnot involve the transformation of the earthas a whole into a single world-city, akin tothe Death Star in George Lucas’ Star Warsfilms or the planet Trantor in IsaacAsimov’s science fiction series, Foundation.

On the contrary, as conceived here, urbaniz-ation under capitalism is always a historicallyand geographically variegated process: it ismediated through historically and geographi-cally specific institutions, representations,strategies and struggles that are, in turn, con-flictually articulated to the cyclical rhythmsof worldwide capital accumulation and theirassociated social, political and environmentalcontradictions. Rather than being analyzedthrough monodimensional or formalisticinterpretive frames, capitalist urbanizationmust be understood as a polymorphic, multi-scalar and emergent dynamic of sociospatialtransformation: it hinges upon and continu-ously produces differentiated, unevenlydeveloped sociospatial configurations at allscales. The task for any contemporary urbanepistemology is therefore to develop ananalytical and cartographic orientationthrough which to decipher its uneven, rest-lessly mutating crystallizations.

Capitalist urbanization might best be con-ceived as a process of constant, if contested,innovation in the production of sociospatialarrangements—albeit one that always simul-taneously collides with, and thereby trans-forms, inherited formations of spatialpractice, regulatory coordination and every-day life (Schmid 2013). Under capitalism,urbanization is always articulated in contex-tually embedded sociospatial formations,since it is precisely in relation to, andthrough collisions with, inherited structuresof uneven spatial development that itsspecific patterns and pathways are forgedand fought out. In this way, the abstract, uni-versalizing processes of capitalist industrial-ization are materialized in historically andgeographically specific urban configurations,which are in turn relentlessly transformedthrough the interplay of accumulation strat-egies, regulatory projects and sociopoliticalstruggles at various spatial scales.

The consolidation of a planetary configur-ation of urban development since the 1980s isthus only the most recent expression of thisintense variegation, differentiation and con-tinual reorganization of landscapes. On the

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one hand, planetary urbanization is thecumulative product of the earlier longueduree cycles of urbanization that haveforged, differentiated and continuallyreshaped the worldwide geographies of capit-alism since the mid-19th century. At the sametime, this latest formation of urbanization hasemerged in the wake of the post-1980s waveof global neoliberalization, financial specu-lation and accumulation by dispossessionthat has at once accelerated and intensifiedthe process of commodification and, by con-sequence, the uneven extension of industrialinfrastructures around much of the planet(Thesis 5). However, despite abundant evi-dence of accelerating urbanization andunprecedented worldwide interconnectivity,the production of planetary urban landscapesduring the last three decades has not entaileda simple homogenization of sociospatial con-ditions. Rather, the dawn of planetary urban-ization appears to have markedly accentuatedand rewoven the differentiations and polariz-ations that have long been both preconditionand product of the urbanization processunder capitalism, albeit in qualitatively newconfigurations whose contours remain extre-mely difficult to decipher.

In an attempt to analyze these develop-ments, contemporary urban thinkers haveintroduced dozens of new concepts intendedto designate various putatively ‘new’ urbanphenomena (Taylor and Lang 2004;Wolfrum, Nerdinger, and Schaubeck 2008).While these endeavors productively under-score the changing geographies of the urbanin contemporary global society, most havebeen focused too rigidly upon emergenturban forms that appear to have rupturedinherited sociospatial arrangements. Theseinclude, for instance, purportedly new kindsof cities (global cities, megacities, edgecities, in-between cities, airport cities, infor-mal cities and the like), regions (global city-regions, megacity-regions, polycentricmetropolitan regions and so forth) as well asinter-urban networks, corridors and thelike. However, within the epistemologicalframework proposed here, the constant

search for such ‘new’ urban forms is an intel-lectual trap: it yields only relatively super-ficial insights into the modalities andconsequences of the wide-ranging transform-ations that are unleashed through the urban-ization process. Creative destruction is themodus operandi of capitalist forms of urbandevelopment; new urban geographies arethus constantly being produced through thedynamics of differential urbanization,whether within large urban centers or acrossextended operational landscapes. The essen-tial task, therefore, is less to distinguish‘new’ urban forms that are putatively super-seding earlier spatial morphologies, than toinvestigate the historically and geographicallyspecific dynamics of creative destruction thatunderpin the patterns and pathways ofurbanization, both historically and in thecontemporary epoch.

Much work remains to be done to con-front this challenge. A new vocabulary ofurbanization is urgently required thatwould help us, both analytically and carto-graphically, to decipher the differentiatedand rapidly mutating landscapes of urbaniz-ation that are today being produced acrossthe planet. While the shifting geographies ofagglomeration must obviously remain aprimary focus in such an endeavor, patternsof extended urbanization must now likewisebe positioned centrally in any sustainedeffort to elaborate new concepts andmethods for deciphering this emergent, vola-tile and still largely unfamiliar worldwideurban fabric.

Thesis 7: the urban is a collective project inwhich the potentials generated throughurbanization are appropriated andcontested

The preceding theses have attempted toclarify in analytical terms some of the foun-dations for a new epistemology of the urbanthat could more productively illuminateboth historical and contemporary geogra-phies of capitalist urbanization than inherited

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frameworks. We conclude with a final thesisthat underscores the essentially political char-acter of such epistemological considerations.Here we build upon our previous discussionof differential urbanization (Thesis 3),which emphasized the relentless drivetowards creative destruction under capitalismand the powerful potentials for radical socio-spatial transformation associated with it.Such potentials are, we argue, an essentialproduct and stake of urbanization: they aregenerated through the ‘productive force’ ofagglomeration and associated operationallandscapes; they are often instrumentalizedthrough capital and state institutions to facili-tate historically specific forms of industrializ-ation and political regulation; but they arealso reappropriated, redistributed and conti-nually remade through the everyday use andcontestation of urban space.

The urban can be productively understoodas a transformative potential that is con-stantly generated through processes of urban-ization. As both Georg Simmel and HenriLefebvre paradigmatically recognized indifferent moments of 20th-century capitalistdevelopment, this transformative potentialinheres in the social, economic and culturaldifferentiations that are produced throughurbanization, which connect diverse popu-lations, institutions, activities, interactionsand experiments in specific sociospatial con-figurations (Schmid 2015a). The harnessingof such potentials is of central importance inthe process of capital accumulation and intechnologies of political regulation. At thesame time, social movements struggle toappropriate such potentials for everydayuses, social reproduction and cultural exper-imentation. In precisely this sense, theurban cannot be completely subsumedunder the abstract logics of capitalist industri-alization or state domination: it is always co-produced and transformed through its users,who may strive to appropriate its actualizedor unrealized potentials towards collectivesocial uses, to create new forms of experience,connection and experimentation—in short, toproduce a different form of life (Lefebvre

[1974] 1991, [1970] 2003). The definition ofthe urban is thus not an exclusively theoreti-cal question; it is ultimately a practical one: itis necessarily articulated through debates,controversies, struggles, uprisings andrevolts, and it is ultimately realized in thepleasures, routines and dramas of everydaylife.

In recent years, many radical urban theor-ists have wrestled with this constellation ofissues through explorations of Lefebvre’s([1968] 1996) classic concept of the ‘right tothe city’ (Marcuse 2012). Originally elabo-rated in the context of the political uprisingsof the late 1960s in Paris, this slogan sub-sequently became an important rallying cryfor political mobilizations, which havesought to connect diverse struggles thatwere related in some way to the urban ques-tion (i.e. regarding rights to housing, trans-portation, education, public health,recreational infrastructures or environmentalsafety). Since the long 1980s, the demand forthe right to the city has become even morewidespread around the world, and its politi-cal content has meanwhile been differentiatedto encompass a variety of normative andideological positions, policy proposals,movement demands and popular constituen-cies in diverse local and national contextsacross the world (Mayer 2012; Schmid 2012).

Given our arguments and proposals above,however, struggles over the right to the citymust be fundamentally reframed—for, asHarvey (2012, xv) notes, ‘to claim the rightto the city is, in effect, to claim a right tosomething that no longer exists’ (for an ana-logous discussion, see Merrifield 2013).Clearly, struggles over access to urbanresources in large cities—and over the collec-tive power to produce and transform them—remain as fundamental as ever, and will con-tinue to shape ongoing processes of urbaniz-ation around the world. However, undercontemporary conditions of planetary urban-ization, the classical city (and its metropolitanand regional variants) can no longer serve asthe primary reference point for urbanstruggles or for visions of ‘possible urban

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worlds’ (Harvey 1996). Instead, a wide rangeof new urban practices and discourses arebeing produced in diverse places, territoriesand landscapes, often in zones that are geo-graphically removed from large cities, butwhere new forms of collective insurgencyare emerging in response to the patterns ofindustrial restructuring, territorial enclosureand landscape reorganization sketchedabove. From Nigeria, South Africa, Indiaand China to Brazil, Mexico and northernCanada, new political strategies are beingconstructed by peasants, workers, indigenouspeoples and other displaced populations tooppose the infrastructuralization and enclo-sure of their everyday social spaces and thedestruction of their established forms of live-lihood (see, e.g. Alton 2014; Wilson 2014;Arboleda 2015; and the documentary film,Millions Can Walk, Schaub and Musale2014). The politics of anti-gentrificationmovements and resistance to corporatemega-projects in dense city cores canthereby be connected, both analytically andpolitically, to mobilizations against landenclosure, large-scale infrastructures (dams,highways, pipelines, industrial corridors,mines) and displacement in seemingly‘remote’ regions (on which, see Merrifield’s[2014] analysis of ‘neo-Haussmannization’). Rather than rejectingurban life, such mobilizations are oftendemanding a more socially equitable, demo-cratically managed and environmentallysane form of urbanization than thatbeing imposed by the forces of neoliberalcapitalism.

The concept of planetary urbanization pro-posed here offers no more than an epistemo-logical orientation through which to begin todecipher such struggles, their interconnec-tions across places, territories and landscapes,and the urban potentials they are claiming,articulating and constantly transforming.Such an investigation remains to be under-taken, but the epistemological perspectiveproposed here requires that it be framed ina manner that attempts to overcome the com-partmentalization and fragmentation not

only of urban spaces, but of urban strugglesthemselves, no matter where they are situ-ated. Just as crucially, rather than beingbased upon inherited concepts and represen-tations of the urban, such an inquiry wouldneed to illuminate the manifold ways inwhich the users of urbanizing spacesproduce and transform their own urbanworlds through everyday practices, dis-courses and struggles, leading to the for-mation not only of new urban spatialconfigurations, but of new visions of thepotentials being produced and claimedthrough their activities (INURA 1998).

The urban is a collective project—it is pro-duced through collective action, negotiation,imagination, experimentation and struggle.The urban society is thus never an achievedcondition, but offers an open horizon inrelation to which concrete struggles over theurban are waged. It is through such struggles,ultimately, that any viable new urban epis-temology will be forged.

Acknowledgements

This paper has benefited substantially fromthe generosity of several friends and col-leagues, who offered us exhaustive, provoca-tive and challenging comments on a draft.Particular thanks are due to Hillary Angelo,Bob Catterall, Ozan Karaman, Nikos Katsi-kis, David Madden, Margit Mayer, JamiePeck, Jennifer Robinson, Monika Streule,Nik Theodore and David Wachsmuth. Wehave done our best to address their wide-ranging concerns, objections and counterar-guments, but many issues raised in thispaper necessarily require further clarificationand elaboration elsewhere. We assume fullresponsibility for the arguments presentedhere.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the

authors.

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