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

Brenner, Neil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 3035610118 ISBN 13: 9783035610116

Publisher: Birkhäuser, 2016

Synopsis

“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.

About this title

From the Back Cover

'Critique' is not simply an oppositional orientation towards extant spaces, institutions and ideologies; it requires a continual interrogation of the changing historical conditions of possibility for such an orientation.  Through its irreducible abstraction, critique is an essential moment within the ongoing struggle to imagine and to pursue alternative pathways for the production of space.  

From the Inside Flap

Neil Brenner is Professor of Urban Theory, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University.

Edition details

• Publisher: Birkhäuser
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 3035610118
• ISBN 13: 9783035610116
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 296