Urban Revolutions: Notes Towards a Systematic Investigation (Historical Materialism)

What do struggles over pipelines in Canada, housing estates in France, and shantytowns in Martinique have in common? In Urban Revolutions, Stefan Kipfer shows how these struggles force us to understand the (neo-)colonial aspects of capitalist urbanization in a comparatively and historically nuanced fashion. In so doing, he demonstrates that urban research can offer a rich, if uneven, terrain upon which to develop the relationship between Marxist and anti-colonial intellectual traditions. After a detailed dialogue between Henri Lefebvre and Frantz Fanon, Kipfer engages creole literature in the French Antilles, Indigenous radicalism in North America and political anti-racism in mainland France.

Stefan Kipfer teaches in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University, Toronto. He has published widely on space, social theory and urban politics, including the co-edited Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre and Gramsci Space Nature Politics.