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Theses on Urbanization
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In the early 1970s, a young Marxist sociologist named Manuel Castells, then living in exile in Paris, began his soontobe-classic intervention, The Urban Question, by declaring his “astonishment” that debates on “urban problems” were becoming an essential element in the policies of governments, in the concerns of the mass media and in the everyday life of a large section of the population as mentioned in this paper.Abstract:
In the early 1970s, a young Marxist sociologist named Manuel Castells, then living in exile in Paris, began his soontobe-classic intervention, The Urban Question, by declaring his “astonishment” that debates on “urban problems” were becoming “an essential element in the policies of governments, in the concerns of the mass media and, consequently, in the everyday life of a large section of the population” (1977 [1972]: 1). For Castells, this astonishment was born of his orthodox Marxist assumption that the concern with urban questions was ideological. The real motor of social change, he believed, lay elsewhere, in workingclass action and antiimperialist mobilization. On this basis, Castells proceeded to deconstruct what he viewed as the prevalent “urban ideology” under postwar managerial capitalism: his theory took seriously the social construction of the urban phenomenon in academic and political discourse, but ultimately derived such representations from purportedly more foundational processes associated with capitalism and the state’s role in the reproduction of labor power. Four decades after Castells’s classic intervention, it is easy to confront early twentyfirstcentury discourse on urban questions with a similar sense of astonishment — not because it masks the operations of capitalism but because it has become one of the dominant metanarratives through which our current planetary situation is interpreted, both in academic circles and in the public sphere. Today advanced interdisciplinary education in urban social science, planning, and designread more
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Journal ArticleDOI
Towards a new epistemology of the urban
Neil Brenner,Christian Schmid +1 more
TL;DR: New forms of urbanization are unfolding around the world that challenge inherited conceptions of the urban as a fixed, bounded and universally generalizable settlement type as mentioned in this paper, and debates on t...
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The ‘Urban Age’ in Question
Neil Brenner,Christian Schmid +1 more
TL;DR: The authors argues that the urban age thesis is empirically untenable (a statistical artifact) and theoretically incoherent (a chaotic conception) to conceptualize world urbanization patterns and proposes a series of methodological perspectives for an alternative understanding of the contemporary global urban condition.
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The Nature of Cities: The Scope and Limits of Urban Theory
Allen J. Scott,Michael Storper +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors identify the common dimensions of all cities without, on the one hand, exaggerating the scope of urban theory, or on the other hand, asserting that every individual city is an irreducible special case.
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Urbanizing Urban Political Ecology: A Critique of Methodological Cityism
Hillary Angelo,David Wachsmuth +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors trace UPE's history to show how it arrived at its present predicament, and offer some thoughts on a research agenda for a political ecology not of the city but of urbanization.
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Urban Pulse-provincializing Global Urbanism: A Manifesto
TL;DR: The authors argue that provincializing global urbanism creates space from which to challenge urban theories that treat “northern” urbanization as the norm, to incorporate the expertise and perspectives of urban majorities, and to imagine and enact alternative urban futures.
References
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Book
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
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The Limits to Capital
TL;DR: The Limits to Capital as mentioned in this paper is a theory of capital that links a general Marxian theory of financial and geographical crises with the incredible turmoil now being experienced in world markets, and provides one of the best theoretical guides to the contradictory forms found in the historical and geographical dynamics of capitalist development.
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Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
TL;DR: An American frontier study focusing on the fastest growing city of 19th-century America -Chicago as mentioned in this paper, shows the land as it was when inhabited by Indians and a few white settlers, and the frenzy of development of the meatpacking industry, the grain emporiums and the lumber markets which followed.