Critique of Urbanization: Selected Essays (Bauwelt Fundamente) (Bauwelt Fundamente, 156)

“Every building, every infrastructure and every regulatory framework is traversed by power relations, ideological visions and institutionalized exclusions that benefit some populations at the expense of others…”
-From the Preface of Critique of Urbanization

Urbanization is transforming the planet, within and beyond cities, at all spatial scales. In this book, Neil Brenner mobilizes the tools of critical urban theory to deconstruct some of the dominant urban discourses of our time, which naturalize, and thus depoliticize, the enclosures, exclusions, injustices and irrationalities of neoliberal urbanism.

In so doing, Brenner advocates a constant reinvention of the framing categories, methods and assumptions of critical urban theory in relation to the rapidly mutating geographies of capitalist urbanization. Only a theory that is dynamic—which is constantly being transformed in relation to the restlessly evolving social worlds and territorial landscapes it aspires to grasp—can be a genuinely critical theory.