Implosions /Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization

A rethinking of the Henri Lefebvre's hypothesis that society has been completely urbanised. "I'll begin with the following hypothesis: society has been completely urbanized." - Henri Lefebvre, La révolution urbaine (1970) In 1970, Henri Lefebvre put forward the radical hypothesis of the complete urbanisation of society, a circumstance that in his view required a radical shift from the analysis of urban form to the investigation of the urbanisation processes. Drawing together classic and contemporary texts on the 'urbanisation question', this book explores various theoretical, epistemological, methodological and political implications of Lefebvre's hypothesis. It assembles a series of analytical and cartographic interventions that supersede inherited spatial ontologies (urban/rural, town/country, city/non-city, society/nature) in order to investigate the uneven implosions and explosions of capitalist urbanisation across places, regions, territories, continents and oceans up to the planetary scale. Neil Brenner is Professor of Urban Theory at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). His writing and teaching focus on the theoretical, conceptual, methodological and cartographic dimensions of urban questions. His work builds upon, and seeks to extend, the fields of critical urban and regional studies, comparative geopolitical economy and radical sociospatial theory. Major research foci include processes of urban and regional restructuring and uneven spatial development; the generalisation of capitalist urbanisation; the problem of spatial visualisation in urban studies; and processes of state spatial restructuring, with particular reference to the remaking of urban governance configurations under neoliberalising capitalism. In 2014, Brenner was selected as a Thompson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher (www.highlycited.com). Based on Web of Science data, his publications were ranked among the top 1% most cited globally in the general social sciences between 2002 and 2012. http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/person/neil-brenner/