4

Elements for a New

Epistemology of the Urban1
N e i l B re n n e r a n d C h r i s t i a n S c h m i d

A new concept is animating debates on the urban question: planetary urbanization. What
was only a few years ago no more than a preliminary hypothesis, significantly inspired
by Henri Lefebvre’s (2003 [1970]) conception of a worldwide ‘urban revolution,’ has
now become a vibrant theoretical approach that is being applied across divergent terrains
of urban research around the world. It is also provoking some intense, sometimes polemi-
cal debates on the appropriate conceptualization, methodology, site, scale and focal point
for urban research today..
The guiding thread of our own efforts to theorize planetary urbanization is the explo-
ration of an apparently simple but highly consequential question: To what degree do
inherited conceptualizations, epistemologies and cartographies of the urban provide an
adequate basis for grasping emergent patterns and pathways of urbanization? For reasons
we have elaborated in our previous writings, we believe that a significant reframing of the
urban question is today required in order more effectively to decipher, and to influence,
the urban transformations and urbanization processes that are currently reshaping the
planet. Specifically, we have questioned inherited, city-centric approaches, in both their
mainstream and critical/radical variants (a) for reducing the urban to a nodal agglomera-
tion or a territorially bounded settlement type and (b) for contrasting the latter to a puta-
tively non-urban (rural, countryside, wilderness) ‘outside’ (Brenner and Schmid 2015,
2014, 2011). From our point of view, these long-entrenched metageographical assump-
tions regarding the urban are not a productive basis for deciphering the variegated patterns
and pathways of contemporary urbanization, and their massive consequences for plane-
tary-scale socio-spatial relations. Several patterns and pathways of urban restructuring of
the post-1980s period have seriously destabilized such assumptions:

• The creation of new scales of urbanization. Extensively urbanized interdependencies are being
consolidated within extremely large, polynucleated metropolitan regions to create sprawling urban

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 48 The SAGE Handbook of the 21st Century City

galaxies that stretch far beyond any single metropolitan region and often traverse multiple national
boundaries. Such mega-scaled urban constellations have been recognized for over a century within
the field of urban studies. In recent decades, however, such urbanized megaregions have been devel-
oping with unprecedented speed; they are also now more tightly interlinked across territories, scales
and worldwide interspatial networks.
• The blurring and rearticulation of the urban fabric. The fabric of urban space is being at once
expanded and blurred, as urban fragments are distributed extensively, if unevenly, across large-scale
territories. Formerly central city functions, such as shopping facilities, corporate headquarters, multi-
modal logistics hubs, research institutions, cultural venues, as well as spectacular architectural forms,
dense settlement patterns and other major infrastructural arrangements, are now being dispersed
outward from historic central city cores, into erstwhile suburbanized spaces and hinterlands, among
expansive catchments of small- and medium-sized towns and along major transportation corridors
such as superhighways and rail lines.
• The reterritorialization of the hinterland. The long entrenched image of an urban region surrounded
by a territorially contiguous hinterland serving the city core with food, water, energy and materials,
and processing its waste, has today become obsolete. The erstwhile hinterlands of major metropoli-
tan regions and national territories are increasingly being operationalized to serve specific functions
within worldwide spatial divisions of labor – whether as back office and warehousing locations,
global sweatshops, agro-industrial land-use systems, data storage facilities, energy generation grids,
resource extraction zones, fuel depots, waste disposal areas, recreational areas or corridors of con-
nectivity. Meanwhile, the metabolic supply and processing zones of the global urban system are
becoming more industrialized, infrastructuralized and spatially distanciated from the metropolitan
areas they support. In effect, the planet’s most industrially specialized hinterlands are no longer stag-
ing grounds for specific urban regions or even national urban hierarchies, but have come to serve as
metabolic supports for the global metropolitan network as a whole.
• New corridors of urbanization. Accelerated by the unprecedented densification of inter-metropolitan
networks, new logistical geographies are being established across major global regions, especially in
East and Southeast Asia and Latin America, as well as in strategic corridors of Central Asia, Central
America and Sub-Saharan Africa. These extended zones of logistical infrastructure require colossally
scaled investments, including highways, canals, railways, waterways and pipelines, as well as nodal
points such as seaports, airports, rail stations and intermodal logistics hubs, which are in turn coor-
dinated via the undersea cables and satellite fleets of the Internet age. Here too, transport-based
urban development patterns have long been recognized by urban theorists, but their planetary-scale
consolidation, thickening and impact in the current period are historically unprecedented, as is their
role in generating new infrastructural geographies of urban life.
• The end of the wilderness. Erstwhile ‘wilderness’ spaces are being transformed and often degraded
through the cumulative socio-ecological consequences of unfettered worldwide urbanization or are
otherwise being converted into bio-enclaves offering ‘ecosystem services’ to offset destructive envi-
ronmental impacts generated elsewhere. In this way, the world’s oceans, alpine regions, the equato-
rial rainforests, major deserts, the arctic and polar zones, and even the earth’s atmosphere itself, are
being more tightly intermeshed with the rhythms of planetary urbanization at every geographical
scale.

The aforementioned trends and transformations obviously overlap and reinforce one
another, albeit in place-, territory- and scale-specific ways. They are also, of course,
always mediated through contextually specific regulatory–institutional arrangements,
state and corporate strategies and everyday socio-political struggles. But their cumulative
result has been to generate radically transformed planetary geographies of urbanization
and urban restructuring that can only be bluntly deciphered on the basis of the traditional,
singular vision of ‘the’ city as a nodal, bounded, singular and thus universally replicable

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 Elements for a New Epistemology of the Urban 49

settlement type (Brenner and Schmid 2014). Paradoxically, much contemporary debate
on our putative ‘urban age’ continues to embrace such city-centric metageographical
framings, even as they are being superseded in practice through the forward motion of
socio-spatial and socio-ecological creative destruction that animates the contemporary
formation of capitalist urbanization. It is for this reason that we have devoted extensive
attention, in our previous writings, to the critique of contemporary urban ideologies,
which at once express and obscure some of the key urban transformations of our time
(Brenner 2016, 2014a, 2014b; Brenner and Schmid 2014; Schmid 2015, 2012). Unless
we are able to acquire some critical distance from such omnipresent city-centric, and
often city-triumphalist, urban ideologies, our collective capacities to decipher, and thus
to influence, emergent urbanization patterns will be seriously compromised.
Our argument is not that cities, or metropolitan agglomerations, no longer exist, or
are no longer central sites and expressions of urbanization processes – of course they do;
and of course they are. Our proposal, rather, is that approaches to urban theory that focus
exclusively on agglomeration processes and/or intercity relations cannot adequately grasp
their connections to a wide range of non-city conditions, processes and transformations
that are increasingly essential to the spatiotemporal dynamics and metabolic circuitry of
capitalist urbanization on a planetary scale. From our point of view, contemporary urban
transformations encompass a much broader, if massively uneven, terrain of sites, territories
and landscapes, including many that may contain relatively small or minimal populations,
but where colossal infrastructural and socio-environmental metamorphoses are underway
precisely in support of the everyday socio-economic activities, metabolic operations and
growth imperatives of often-distant agglomerations. Such developments, we argue, require
a much broader conceptualization of the urban that includes not only dense agglomerations,
their jagged, dispersed perimeters, their proximate hinterlands and their long-distance net-
works of connectivity, but also the vast, increasingly planetary operational landscapes of
energy, labor, food, water, infrastructure and waste – in short, of worldwide socio-meta-
bolic transformation – that support what Chicago School urban sociologist Ernest Burgess
(1967 [1925]) once laconically described as ‘the growth of the city.’
It is against this background, then, that we frame our core question in this chapter: If
the urban is no longer coherently contained within or anchored to ‘the’ city – or, for that
matter, to any other bounded settlement type – then how can a scholarly field devoted to
its investigation continue to exist? Or, to pose the same question as a challenge of intel-
lectual reconstruction: Is there – could there be – a new epistemology of the urban that
might illuminate the emergent conditions, processes and transformations associated with
a world of generalized urbanization?
To confront this problematique, this chapter presents a series of seven epistemologi-
cal theses, which are intended to offer a conceptual basis for deciphering emergent urban
transformations. These theses are closely connected to our earlier critique of contempo-
rary urban ideologies and to our developing theorization of planetary urbanization, but
they are not intended to elaborate those analyses in any detail. Instead, our proposals are
meant to demarcate some relatively broad epistemological parameters within which a
multiplicity of reflexive approaches to critical urban theory might be pursued. We aim
here, then, not to advance a specific, substantive theory of the urban, but to present a gen-
eral epistemological framework through which this elusive, yet seemingly omnipresent
condition of the contemporary world might be analytically deciphered, even as it contin-
ues to evolve and mutate before our eyes.

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 50 The SAGE Handbook of the 21st Century City

This chapter is thus intended as a meta-theoretical exercise. Rather than attempting

to ‘nail down’ a fixed definition of the essential properties of the urban phenomenon, it
involves developing a reflexive epistemological framework that may help bring into focus
and render intelligible the ongoing reconstitution of that phenomenon in relation to the
simultaneous evolution of the very concepts and methods being used to study it.

Thesis 1: The urban and urbanization are theoretical

categories, not empirical objects

In most mainstream traditions, the urban is treated as an empirically self-evident, univer-

sal category corresponding to a particular type of bounded settlement space, the ‘city.’
While such empiricist, universalistic understandings continue to underpin important
strands of urban research and policy, including contemporary mainstream discourses on
global urbanism, we argue that the urban, and the closely associated concept of urbaniza-
tion, must be understood as theoretical abstractions; they can only be defined through the
labor of conceptualization. The urban is thus a theoretical category, not an empirical
object: its demarcation as a zone of thought, representation, imagination or action can
only occur through a process of theoretical abstraction.
Even the most descriptively nuanced, quantitatively sophisticated or geospatially
enhanced strands of urban research necessarily presuppose any number of pre-empirical
assumptions regarding the nature of the putatively ‘urban’ condition, zone or transfor-
mation that is under analysis (Brenner and Katsikis 2014). Such assumptions are not
mere background conditions or incidental framing devices, but constitute the very inter-
pretive lens through which urban research becomes intelligible as such. For this reason,
the ‘urban question’ famously posed by Manuel Castells (1977 [1972]) cannot be under-
stood as a theoretical detour, or as a mere intellectual diversion for those interested in
concept formation, or in the field’s historical evolution. Rather, engagement with the
urban question is a constitutive moment of theoretical abstraction within all approaches
to urban research and practice, whether or not they reflexively conceptualize it as such
(Brenner 2013).
Since the early twentieth century, the evolution of urban studies as a research field
has been animated by intense debates regarding the appropriate conceptualization of the
urban – its geographical parameters, its historical pathways and its key social, economic,
cultural or institutional dimensions (Saunders 1986; Hartmann, Hitz, Schmid and Wolff
1986). In each framing, the urban has been equated with divergent properties, prac-
tices, conditions, experiences, institutions and geographies, which have in turn defined
the basic horizons for research, representation and practice. Such demarcations have
entailed not only diverse, often incompatible, ways of understanding cities and agglom-
eration, but also a range of interpretive methods, analytical strategies and cartographic
techniques through which those conditions are distinguished from a putatively ‘non-
urban’ outside – the suburban, the rural, the natural or otherwise. In this sense, rather
than developing through a simple accretion of concrete investigations on a pre-given
social condition or spatial arrangement, the field of urban studies has evolved through
ongoing theoretical debates regarding the appropriate demarcation, interpretation and
mapping of the urban itself.

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 Elements for a New Epistemology of the Urban 51

The urban is, then, an essentially contested concept and has been subject to frequent
reinvention in relation to the challenges engendered by research, practice and struggle.
While some approaches to the urban have asserted, or aspired to, universal validity, and
thus claimed context-independent applicability, every attempt to frame the urban in
analytical, geographical and normative–political terms has in fact been strongly medi-
ated through the specific historical–geographical formation(s) in which it emerged – for
example, Manchester, Paris and classically industrial models of urbanization in the mid-
nineteenth century; Chicago, Berlin, London and rapidly metropolitanizing landscapes
of imperial–capitalist urbanization in the early twentieth century; and Los Angeles,
Shanghai, Dubai, Singapore and neoliberalizing models of globally networked urbaniza-
tion in the last three decades. More recently, following some major postcolonial interven-
tions (Robinson 2006; Roy 2009; Sheppard, Leitner and Maringanti 2013), many more
urban territories have become starting points for urban concepts and theory building.
This circumstance means that all engagements with urban theory, whether Euro-
American, postcolonial or otherwise, are in some sense ‘provincial,’ or context-
dependent, because they are mediated through concrete experiences of time and space
within particular places. Just as crucially, though, conditions within local and regional
contexts under modern capitalism have long been tightly interdependent with one another,
and have been profoundly shaped by broader patterns of capitalist industrialization, regu-
lation and uneven socio-spatial development. The recognition of context-dependency –
the need to ‘provincialize’ urban theory – thus stands in tension with an equally persistent
need to understand the historically evolving totality of inter-contextual patterns, devel-
opmental pathways and systemic transformations in which such contexts are embedded,
whether at national, supranational or worldwide scales.
In all cases, therefore, theoretical definitions of the urban and the historical–
geographical contexts of their emergence are tightly intertwined. This proposition applies
whether the urban is delineated as a local formation or as a global condition; the contexts
of theory production must likewise be understood in both situated and inter-contextual
terms. Any reflexive approach to the urban question must make explicit the venue of its own
research practice (be it a specific place, an urbanizing territory or a broader socio-economic
network) and consider the implications of the latter for its own epistemological and
representational framework.
Such definitional debates and theoretical controversies are not only derived from
specific contexts of urbanization; they also powerfully impact those contexts insofar
as they help clarify, construct, legitimate, disseminate and naturalize particular visions
of socio-spatial organization that privilege certain elements of the urban process while
neglecting or excluding others. These often-contradictory framing visions, interpreta-
tions and cartographies of the urban (as site, territory, ecology and experience) mediate
urban design, planning, policy and practice, with powerful consequences for ongoing
strategies and struggles, in and outside of major institutions, to shape and reshape urban-
ized landscapes. It is essential, therefore, to connect debates on the urban question to
assessments of their practical and political implications, institutional expressions and
everyday consequences in specific contexts of urban restructuring. Such a task may only
be accomplished, however, if the underlying assumptions associated with framing con-
ceptualizations of the urban are made explicit, subjected to critical scrutiny and revised
continually in relation to evolving research questions, normative–political orientations
and practical concerns.

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 52 The SAGE Handbook of the 21st Century City

Thesis 2: The urban is a process, not a universal form,

settlement type or bounded unit

Across significant strands of the social sciences and the design disciplines, the urban has
been treated as a fixed, unchanging entity – the city, or an upscaled territorial variant
thereof, such as the city-region or the metropolitan region. However, even though the
phrase ‘the city’ persists as an ideological framing in mainstream policy discourse and
everyday life (Wachsmuth 2014), it is no longer possible to understand the urban phe-
nomenon as a singular condition derived from the serial replication of a specific socio-
spatial condition (for instance, agglomeration) or settlement type (for instance, places
with large, dense and/or heterogeneous populations) across the territory. By contrast,
following Lefebvre’s (2003 [1970]) methodological injunction, we interpret the urban as
a multiscalar process of socio-spatial transformation. The study of specific urban forms,
types or units must thus be superseded by investigations of the relentless ‘churning’ or
creative destruction of urban configurations at all spatial scales. This apparently simple
proposal entails a series of far-reaching consequences for many of the core epistemologi-
cal operations of urban theory and research.
First, the urban can no longer be understood as a fixed, universal form. Apparently
stabilized urban sites are merely temporary materializations of ongoing socio-spatial
transformations. Such transformative processes do not simply unfold within fixed or
stable urban ‘containers,’ but actively produce, unsettle and rework them, and thus con-
stantly engender new urban configurations. As such, the urban is dynamic, historically
evolving and variegated. It is materialized within built environments and socio-spatial
arrangements at all scales; and yet it also continually transforms the latter to produce new
patterns of socio-spatial organization (Harvey 1985). There is thus no singular morphol-
ogy of the urban; there are, rather, many processes of urban transformation that crystallize
across the world at various spatial scales, with wide-ranging, often unpredictable conse-
quences for inherited socio-spatial arrangements.
Second, the urban can no longer be understood as a specific settlement type. The field
of urban studies has long been preoccupied with the task of classifying particular socio-
spatial conditions within putatively distinct types of settlement space (city, town, suburb,
metropolis and various sub-classifications thereof). Today, however, such typologies of
urban settlement have outlived their usefulness; processes of socio-spatial transformation,
which crisscross and constantly rework diverse places, territories and scales, must instead
be moved to the foreground of our epistemological framework. In such a conceptual-
ization, urban configurations must be conceived not as discrete settlement types, but as
dynamic, relationally evolving force fields of socio-spatial restructuring (Massey 2005;
Allen, Massey and Cochrane 1998). As such, urban configurations represent, simultane-
ously, the territorial inheritance of earlier rounds of restructuring and the socio-spatial
frameworks in and through which future urban pathways and potentials are produced.
The typological classification of static urban units is thus considerably less productive,
in both analytical and political terms, than explorations of the various processes of socio-
spatial creative destruction through which urban configurations are produced, contested
and transformed.
Third, the urban can no longer be understood as a bounded spatial unit. Since the
origins of modern approaches to urban theory in the late nineteenth century, the urban
has been conceptualized with reference to the growth of cities, conceived as relatively

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 Elements for a New Epistemology of the Urban 53

circumscribed, if constantly expanding, socio-spatial units. Such assumptions have long

pervaded mainstream urban research, and they are today powerfully embodied in the
discourses on global urbanism promoted by the United Nations, the World Bank and
other major international organizations. In light of the above considerations, however,
our analyses of urban configurations must be systematically disentangled from inherited
understandings of cityness, which obfuscate the processes of ‘implosion–explosion’ that
underpin the production and continual restructuring of socio-spatial organization under
modern capitalism. It is misleading to equate the urban with any singular, bounded spatial
unit (city, agglomeration, metropolitan region, or otherwise); nor can its territorial con-
tours be coherently delineated relative to some postulated non-urban ‘outside’ (suburban,
rural, natural, wilderness, or otherwise). Conceptualizations of the urban as a bounded
spatial unit must thus be superseded by approaches that investigate how urban configu-
rations are churned and remade across the uneven landscapes of worldwide capitalist
development.
In sum, the process-based approach to the urban proposed here requires a fundamental
reorientation of urban research. No longer conceived as a form, type or bounded unit, the
urban must now be re-theorized as a process that, even while continually reinscribing
patterns of agglomeration across the earth’s terrestrial landscape, simultaneously trans-
gresses, explodes and reworks inherited geographies (of social interaction, settlement,
land use, circulation and socio-metabolic organization), both within and beyond large-
scale metropolitan centers.

Thesis 3: Urbanization involves three mutually constitutive

moments – concentrated urbanization, extended urbanization
and differential urbanization

Inherited understandings of urbanization are seriously limited by their pervasive focus on

the classic of ‘the growth of the city’ (Burgess 1967 [1925]). This is not merely a matter
of empirical emphasis, but flows from a fundamental epistemological commitment –
namely, the conceptualization of urbanization with exclusive reference to the condition
of agglomeration, the spatial concentration of population, means of production, infra-
structure and investment within a more or less clearly delineated spatial zone.
Without denying the essential importance of such spatial clusters to urbanization
processes, we argue that a more multifaceted conceptualization is today required which
illuminates the interplay between three mutually constitutive moments: (i) concentrated
urbanization, (ii) extended urbanization and (iii) differential urbanization (Figure 4.1).
These three moments are dialectically interconnected and mutually constitutive; they are
analytically distinguished here simply to offer an epistemological basis for a reinvented
conceptualization that transcends the limitations and blind spots of mainstream models.
Since Friedrich Engels famously analyzed the explosive growth of industrial
Manchester in the mid-nineteenth century, the power of agglomeration has been a key
focal point for urban research. Although its appropriate interpretation remains a topic of
intense debate, the moment of concentrated urbanization is thus quite familiar from inher-
ited approaches to urban economic geography, which aim to illuminate the agglomeration
processes through which firms, peopleand infrastructure cluster together in space during

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 54 The SAGE Handbook of the 21st Century City

Concentrated urbanization Extended urbanization

Spatial clustering of population, Activation and transformation
means of production, of places, territories and
infrastructure and investment landscapes in relation to
agglomeration processes;
subsequent uneven thickening
and stretching of an
‘urban fabric’ across the planet

Differential urbanization

Relentless creative destruction or ‘implosion–explosion’

of socio-spatial organization; production of new urban
‘potentials’ for the appropriation of extant urban
configurations and for the production of radically new
forms of urban space

Figure 4.1  The three ‘moments’ of urbanization

successive cycles of capitalist industrial development (Scott 1988; Veltz 1996; Storper
1996; Krätke 2014). Obviously, large agglomerations remain central arenas and engines
of massive urban transformations, and thus clearly merit sustained investigation, not least
under early twenty-first-century capitalism. However, we reject the widespread assump-
tion within both mainstream and critical traditions of urban studies that agglomerations
represent the privileged or even exclusive terrain of urban development. In contrast, we
propose that the historical and contemporary geographies of urban transformation encom-
pass much broader, if massively uneven, territories and landscapes, including many that
may contain relatively small, dispersed or minimal populations, but where major socio-
economic, infrastructural and socio-metabolic metamorphoses have occurred precisely
in support of, or as a consequence of, the everyday operations and growth imperatives of
often-distant agglomerations. For this reason, the moment of concentrated urbanization is
inextricably connected to that of extended urbanization.
Extended urbanization involves, first, the operationalization of places, territories and
landscapes, often located far beyond the dense population centers, to support the every-
day activities and socio-economic dynamics of urban life. The production of such opera-
tional landscapes results from the most basic socio-metabolic imperatives associated with
urban growth: the procurement and circulation of food, water, energy and construction
materials; the processing and management of waste and pollution; and the mobilization
of labor power in support of these various processes of extraction, production, circula-
tion and management. Second, the process of extended urbanization entails the ongoing
construction and reorganization of relatively fixed and immobile infrastructures (in par-
ticular, for transportation and communication) in support of these operations, and conse-
quently the uneven thickening and stretching of an ‘urban fabric’ (Lefebvre 2003 [1970])
across progressively larger zones, and ultimately, around much of the entire planet (see
Thesis 5 below). Third, the process of extended urbanization frequently involves the enclo-
sure of land from established social uses in favor of privatized, exclusionary and profit-
oriented modes of appropriation, whether for resource extraction, agro-business, logistics
functions or otherwise. In this sense, extended urbanization is intimately intertwined with

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 Elements for a New Epistemology of the Urban 55

the violence of accumulation by dispossession (often animated and enforced by state insti-
tutions) through which non-commodified modes of social life are destabilized and articu-
lated to global spatial divisions of labor and systems of exchange (Sevilla-Buitrago 2014).
The moment of extended urbanization has been partially illuminated in classic accounts
of city–hinterland relations, which have explored not only the making of operational land-
scapes to support population centers, but the ways in which the very process of metropoli-
tan development has hinged upon massive, highly regularized inputs (of labor, materials,
food, water, energy, commodities, information and so forth) procured from agglomera-
tions as well as various types of non-city spaces, both proximate and remote (Harris
and Ullman 1945; Jacobs 1970; Cronon 1991; for discussion see Katsikis 2015). More
recently, accounts of extended urbanization have emphasized the progressive enclosure,
operationalization and industrialization of such landscapes around the world – including
rainforests, tundra, alpine zones, oceans, deserts and even the atmosphere itself – to fuel
the rapid intensification of metropolitan growth in recent decades (Monte-Mór 2014a,
2014b; Schmid 2006; Brenner 2014a, 2014b; Soja and Kanai 2014 [2006]).
Throughout the longue durée history of capitalist industrialization, the geographies
of extended urbanization have been essential to the consolidation, growth and restructur-
ing of urban centers. Rather than being relegated to a non-urban ‘outside,’ therefore, the
moment of extended urbanization must be viewed as an integral terrain of the urbaniza-
tion process as a whole. Thus, without abandoning the long-standing concern of urbanists
to understand agglomeration processes, we propose to connect that familiar problema-
tique to a wide-ranging set of socio-spatial transformations that have not typically been
viewed as being connected to urbanization.
Concentrated and extended urbanization are inextricably intertwined with the process
of differential urbanization, in which inherited socio-spatial configurations are recur-
rently creatively destroyed in relation to the broader developmental dynamics and crisis
tendencies of modern capitalism. Lefebvre (2003 [1970]) captured this distinctive ten-
dency within capitalist forms of urbanization through the vivid metaphor of ‘implosion–
explosion,’ a formulation that has been appropriated in diverse ways in recent years by
critical urban thinkers (Brenner 2014a, 2014b; Schmid, Stanek and Moravánszky 2014).
For our purposes here, rather than equate ‘implosion’ exclusively with concentrated urban-
ization and ‘explosion’ with extended urbanization, the metaphor offers a useful basis for
demarcating a third, differential moment of urbanization based upon the perpetual drive
to restructure socio-spatial organization under modern capitalism, not only within metro-
politan agglomerations but across broader landscapes of extended urbanization.
Consistent with the process-based conceptualization of the urban presented in
Thesis 2, the differential moment of urbanization puts into relief the intense, perpetual
dynamism of capitalist forms of urbanization, in which socio-spatial configurations are
tendentially established, only to be rendered obsolete and eventually superseded through
the relentless forward motion of the accumulation process and industrial development
(Harvey 1985). Just as crucially, differential urbanization is also the result of various
forms of urban struggle and expresses the powerful potentials for radical social and politi-
cal transformation that are unleashed, but often suppressed, through capitalist industrial
development. In this sense, the term differential urbanization underscores the double-
edged character of urban transformation: it radically and often violently transforms
existing socio-spatial configurations, but it meanwhile may open up new options for the
creation of differences, and thus for the further creative transformation of socio-spatial

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 56 The SAGE Handbook of the 21st Century City

relations (Lefebvre 1991 [1974] 2003 [1970]). These urban potentials are usually seen
as being produced and contained within large, globally networked metropolitan centers.
However, with the intensification of extended urbanization, as defined above, this poten-
tial is now also being distributed to other places and territories, often in unpredictable,
unexpected ways that are also radically reworking the politics of space that underpin and
animate the planetary urban fabric (see Thesis 7 below).
We reiterate that these three moments of urbanization under capitalism refer not to
distinct morphological conditions, geographical sites or temporal stages, but to mutu-
ally constitutive, dialectically intertwined elements of an historically specific process of
socio-spatial transformation. Just as distant flows of material, energy and labor under-
pin the everyday dynamics of large metropolitan agglomerations, so too do the growth
imperatives and consumption demands of the latter directly mediate the construction of
large-scale infrastructural projects, land-use reorganization and socio-cultural transfor-
mations in apparently ‘remote’ operational landscapes. As the urban fabric is progres-
sively, if unevenly, stretched, thickened, rewoven and creatively destroyed, new centers
of agglomeration (from mining and farming towns and tourist enclaves to logistics hubs
and growth poles) may emerge within zones that previously served mainly as operational
hinterlands (Arboleda 2015). The urban fabric of modern capitalism is thus best con-
ceived as a dynamically evolving force field in which the three moments of urbanization
continually interact to produce historically specific forms of socio-spatial organization
and uneven development. A framework that reflexively connects the three moments of
urbanization demarcated here may thus offer productive new interpretive perspectives not
only on the historical and contemporary geographies of capitalist industrial development,
but also on some of the socio-ecological conditions that are today commonly thought to
be associated with the age of the ‘anthropocene’ (Crutzen 2002; for a critical discussion
see Chakrabarty 2008; Malm and Hornborg 2014).

Thesis 4: The fabric of urbanization is multi-dimensional

The epistemology of urbanization proposed above explodes inherited assumptions

regarding the geographies of this process: they are no longer expressed simply through
the city, the metropolitan region or interurban networks, and nor are they bounded neatly
and distinguished from a putatively non-urban ‘outside.’ But this systematic analytical
delinking of urbanization from trends related exclusively to city growth entails a further
epistemological consequence – the abandonment of several major sociological, demo-
graphic, economic or cultural definitions of urbanization that are directly derived from
that assumption. Thus, with the deconstruction of mono-dimensional, city-centric episte-
mologies, urbanization can no longer be considered synonymous with such commonly
invoked developments as: rural-to-urban migration; expanding population levels in big
cities; the concentration of investments and economic capacities within dense population
centers; the diffusion of urbanism as a socio-cultural form into small- and medium-sized
towns and villages; or the spreading of similar, ‘city-like’ services, amenities, technolo-
gies, infrastructures or built environments across the territory. Any among the latter
trends may, under specific conditions, be connected to distinctive patterns and pathways
of urbanization. However, in the epistemological framework proposed here, their

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 Elements for a New Epistemology of the Urban 57

analytical demarcation as such no longer hinges upon the definitionally fixed assumption
either (a) that they necessarily originate within specific settlement units (generally, big
cities), or (b) that they necessarily result from the replication of formally identical urban
settlement types, infrastructural arrangements or cultural forms across the entire
territory.
What is required, instead, is a multi-dimensional understanding of urbanization that
can illuminate the historically specific patterns and pathways through which the varie-
gated, uneven geographies of this process, in each of its three constitutive moments, are
articulated during successive cycles of worldwide capitalist development. To facilitate
such an analysis, building upon Lefebvre’s three-dimensional conceptualization of the
production of space (Lefebvre 1991 [1974]; Schmid 2005, 2008, 2014a), we distinguish
three further dimensions of urbanization: spatial practices, territorial regulation and every-
day life (Figure 4.2). These dimensions of urbanization co-constitute the three moments
of urbanization demarcated in Thesis 3, and together produce the unevenly woven, rest-
lessly mutating urban fabric of the contemporary world.
First, urbanization involves distinctive spatial practices through which land use is
intensified, connectivity infrastructures are thickened and socio-metabolic transforma-
tions are accelerated to facilitate processes of industrialization. Such spatial practices
underpin the production of built environments within major cities as well as a wide range
of socio-spatial transformations in near and distant zones in relation to the latter.
Second, urbanization is always mediated through specific forms of territorial regula-
tion that (a) impose collectively binding rules regarding the appropriation of labor, land,
food, water, energy and material resources; (b) mobilize formal and informal planning
procedures to govern investment patterns into the built environment; and (c) manage pat-
terns of territorial development with regard to processes of production and social repro-
duction, major aspects of logistics infrastructure and commodity circulation, as well as
emergent crisis tendencies embedded within inherited spatial arrangements (Brenner
2004; Schmid 2003).
Finally, urbanization is always deeply embedded in everyday life. Whether within
dense population centers or in more remote locations embedded within the broader urban
fabric, urban space is defined by the people who use, appropriate and transform it through
their daily routines and practices, which frequently involve struggles regarding the very
form and content of the urban itself, at once as a site and stake of social experience. In this
context, questions of social reproduction, ways of life and livelihoods also play crucial
roles in the production of urban space. The qualities of urban space, across diverse loca-
tions, are thus mediated and reproduced through lived experiences, which in turn crystal-
lize longer-term processes of socialization that are materialized within built environments
and territorial arrangements.
Clearly, this is a broad conceptualization of urbanization: it involves a wide-ranging,
contradictory constellation of material, social, institutional, environmental and everyday
transformations associated with capitalist industrialization, the circulation of capital and
the management of territorial development at various spatial scales. We would insist,
however, on distinguishing urbanization from the more general processes of capitalist
industrialization and world market expansion that have been investigated by economic
historians and historical sociologists of capitalist development (see, for instance, Arrighi
1994). As understood here, urbanization is indeed linked to these processes, but its speci-
ficity lies precisely in materializing the latter within places, territories and landscapes, and

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BK-SAGE-HALL_BURDETT-170083.indb 58
D I M E N S I O N S
SPATIAL PRACTICES TERRITORIAL REGULATION EVERYDAYLIFE
CONCENTRATED The production of built environments and Rule regimes and planning systems The production of social routines,
URBANIZATION socio-spatial configurations to harness governing socio-economic and everyday practices and forms of
the power of agglomeration environmental conditions associated with life associated with the power of
the power of agglomeration agglomeration

S
EXTENDED The activation of places, territories and Governance systems oriented towards The social routines, everyday practices
URBANIZATION landscapes in relation to agglomerations; the socio-metabolic and socio-economic and forms of life that emerge (a) as
the subsequent creation, thickening and processes that support major urban diverse places, territories and landscapes

N T
stretching of an ‘urban fabric’ connecting centers and facilitate the thickening are operationalized in relation to

E
agglomerations to the diverse sites of and stretching of an urban fabric across agglomerations, and (b) as a broader
socio-metabolic and socio-economic territories urban fabric is thickened and stretched

M
transformation upon which they depend across territories and scales

O
DIFFERENTIAL Recurrent pressures to creatively destroy Mobilization of state institutions and The reorganization of social routines,
inherited geographies of agglomeration other regulatory instruments to promote, everyday practices and forms of life in

M
URBANIZATION
and associated operational landscapes manage, accelerate or otherwise conjunction with the creative destruction
influence the ongoing reorganization of of built environments and the urban
urban agglomerations and the broader fabric at any spatial scale
fabric of extended urbanization

Figure 4.2  Moments and dimensions of urbanization

21/09/17 8:01 AM
 Elements for a New Epistemology of the Urban 59

in embedding them within concrete, temporarily stabilized configurations of everyday

life, socio-economic organization and modes of territorial regulation. Capitalist industrial
development does not engender urban growth and restructuring on an untouched terres-
trial surface; rather, it constantly collides with, and reorganizes, inherited socio-spatial
configurations. Urbanization is precisely the medium and expression of this collision, and
every configuration of urban life is powerfully shaped by the diverse social, political and
institutional forces that mediate it.

Thesis 5: Urbanization has become planetary

Since the first wave of large-scale capitalist industrialization in the nineteenth century,
the functional borders, catchment areas and immediate hinterlands of urban regions have
been extended outward to create ever-larger regional units. Just as importantly, however,
this dramatic process of metropolitan expansion has long been premised upon the inten-
sive activation and transformation of progressively broader landscapes of extended
urbanization that supply agglomerations with their most basic socio-economic and socio-
metabolic requirements. In contrast to inherited periodizations, which focus almost
exclusively on cities and urban form, the framework proposed here would permit the
dynamics of city growth during each period to be analyzed in direct relation to the pro-
duction and reconstitution of historically and geographically specific operational land-
scapes (mediated through empire, colonialism, neocolonialism and various forms of
enclosure and accumulation by dispossession) that supported the latter.
For present purposes, we focus on the contemporary formation of urbanization. In our
view, a genuinely planetary formation of capitalist urbanization began to emerge follow-
ing the long 1980s, the transitional period of crisis-induced global economic restructuring
that began with the deconstruction of Fordist–Keynesian and national–developmentalist
regimes of accumulation in the early 1970s and continued until the withering away of
state socialism and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
These developments established some of the basic preconditions for the subsequent plan-
etary extension of the urban fabric during the last two decades: the deregulation of the
global financial system and of various national regulatory systems; the neoliberalization
of global, national and local economic governance; the worldwide digital revolution; the
flexibilization of production processes and the generalization of global production net-
works; and the creation of new forms of market-oriented territorial regulation at suprana-
tional, national and subnational scales. These realignments have created a new regulatory
framework encouraging speculative urban investment, not only within the property
markets and built environments of the world’s major cities, but also through the construc-
tion of vastly expanded urban networks and infrastructures of resource extraction, agro-
industrial cultivation and logistical circulation, all of which have massively contributed to
the accelerated enclosure of landscapes around the world to permit intensified, acceler-
ated capital circulation (Harvey 2010).
Aside from the reconstitution and thickening of networked connectivities among the
world’s major metropolitan regions, which have received extensive attention within the
global urban studies literature (Taylor 2004), several additional waves of socio-economic
and socio-metabolic transformation of the post-1980s period have significantly rewoven

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 60 The SAGE Handbook of the 21st Century City

the inherited fabric of urbanization, while also extending it into new realms that were
previously relatively insulated from its wide-ranging imprints. These include: (a) a major
expansion in agro-industrial export zones, with associated large-scale infrastructural
investments and land-use transformations to produce and circulate food and biofuels
for world markets (McMichael 2013); (b) a massive expansion in investments related
to mineral and oil extraction, in large part due to the post-2003 commodity boom mani-
fested in dramatic increases in global prices for raw materials, especially metals and fuels
(Arboleda 2015); and (c) the accelerated consolidation and extension of long-distance
transportation and communications infrastructures designed to reduce the transaction
costs associated with the production and circulation of capital (Hesse 2013). Under these
conditions, erstwhile ‘rural’ zones around the world are being profoundly transformed:
various forms of agro-industrial consolidation and land enclosure are undermining small-
and medium-sized forms of food production; new forms of export-oriented industrial
extraction are destabilizing established models of land-use and social reproduction, as
well as environmental security; and newly consolidated inter-regional migration networks
and communications infrastructures are dramatically rearticulating the interdependencies
between villages, small towns and larger, often-distant urban centers, contributing in turn
to the production of new forms of everyday experience that transcend the confines of
specific places.
Amid these far-reaching socio-spatial transformations, the fabric of extended urban-
ization is meanwhile also being woven ever more densely, if still quite unevenly, across
many relatively depopulated and erstwhile ‘wilderness’ landscapes, from the Arctic,
the European Alps and the Amazon to Patagonia, the Himalayas, the Sahara, Siberia
and the Gobi Desert, as well as through major zones of the world’s seas and oceans
(Diener, Herzog, Meili, de Meuron and Schmid 2006; Gugger, Couling and Blanchard
2012; Urban Theory Lab 2015). While the ecology and topography of these landscapes
may still appear relatively pristine or untouched by the footprint of industrial capitalism,
such impressions are misleading. In fact, for several decades now, strategic places, grids,
corridors and concession zones within such territories have been aggressively enclosed
and operationalized, usually by transnational corporations under the legal protection of
neoliberal and/or authoritarian national states and various kinds of intergovernmental
organizations, to facilitate new forms of resource extraction, energy and agro-industrial
production, an unprecedented expansion of logistics infrastructures, as well as vari-
ous additional forms of land-use intensification and environmental plunder intended to
support the relentless growth and consumption imperatives of the world’s major cities.
Under contemporary conditions, then, traditional models of metropolis and hinterland,
center and periphery, city and countryside, have been exploded. The urban/rural opposi-
tion, which has long served as an epistemological anchor for the most basic research
operations of urban studies, has today become an increasingly obfuscatory basis for
deciphering emergent patterns and pathways of socio-spatial restructuring around the
world. The geographies of uneven spatial development are today being articulated as an
interweaving of new developmental patterns and potentials within a thickening, if deeply
polarized, fabric of planetary urbanization. The urban is thus no longer defined in oppo-
sition to an ontological Other located beyond or ‘outside’ it, but has instead become
the very tissue of human life itself, at once the framework and the basis for the many
forms of socio-spatial differentiation that continue to proliferate under contemporary
capitalist conditions. Nor can the rural be understood any longer as a perpetually present

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 Elements for a New Epistemology of the Urban 61

‘elsewhere,’ ghost acreage or ‘constitutive outside’ that permits the urban to be demar-
cated as a stable, coherent and discrete terrain. Instead, this supposedly non-urban realm
has now been thoroughly engulfed within the variegated patterns and pathways of a plan-
etary formation of urbanization. In effect, it has been internalized into the very core of the
urbanization process.
This proposition may prove controversial, especially if it is misunderstood as a gener-
alization that ignores the continued differences, whether in social, institutional, infrastruc-
tural or environmental terms, between large metropolitan centers and zones characterized,
for instance, by low or dispersed population, minimal or degraded built environments
and/or relatively poor communications and transportation connectivity. Our claim here,
however, is not that ‘rural’ zones and ways of life have disappeared; on the contrary, such
spaces still exist and may even play decisive roles in the social, political and economic
life of many regions.. However, conditions within so-called ‘rural’ zones should not be
taken for granted; they require careful, contextually specific and theoretically reflexive
investigations that may be seriously impeded through the unreflexive use of generic spa-
tial taxonomies that predetermine their patterns and pathways of development and their
form and degree of connection to other places, regions and territories. Indeed, contem-
porary research on putatively rural regions has shown that many such areas are being
transformed through and embedded within urbanization processes, precisely through the
kinds of accumulation strategies, infrastructural projects and socio-metabolic linkages
we theorize under the rubric of extended urbanization (see, for example, Diener et  al.
2006; Monte-Mór 2014a, 2014b; Woods 2009; Cloke 2006; Wilson 2014). Such studies
strongly reinforce our contention that the inherited urban/rural distinction has come to
obscure much more than it reveals regarding the entities, processes and transformations
being classified on either side of the divide it purports to demarcate.
Precisely against this background, the concept of planetary urbanization may offer a
useful epistemological reorientation. Obviously, it cannot substitute for concrete research
on specific zones of socio-spatial transformation. But it does open up an epistemological
pathway through which the latter may be pursued in relation to broader questions regard-
ing the increasingly worldwide, if deeply polarized and uneven, geographies in which
even the most apparently ‘remote’ places, regions and territories are now inextricably
interwoven.

Thesis 6: Urbanization unfolds through variegated patterns

and pathways of uneven spatial development

The emergence of a planetary formation of urbanization does not entail a homogenization

of socio-spatial landscapes; it is not expressed through the ‘globalization’ of a uniform
condition of cityness (or urban ‘sprawl’) across the entire planet; and it does not involve
the transformation of the earth as a whole into a single world-city, akin to the Death Star
in George Lucas’s Star Wars films or the planet Trantor in Isaac Asimov’s science fiction
series, Foundation. On the contrary, as conceived here, urbanization under capitalism is
always an historically and geographically variegated process: it is mediated through his-
torically and geographically specific institutions, representations, strategies and struggles
that are, in turn, conflictually articulated to the cyclical rhythms of worldwide capital

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 62 The SAGE Handbook of the 21st Century City

accumulation and their associated social, political and environmental contradictions.

Rather than being analyzed through mono-dimensional or formalistic interpretive frames,
capitalist urbanization must be understood as a polymorphic, multiscalar and emergent
dynamic of socio-spatial transformation: it hinges upon and continuously produces
differentiated, unevenly developed socio-spatial configurations at all scales. The task for
any contemporary urban epistemology is therefore to develop an analytical and carto-
graphic orientation through which to decipher its uneven, restlessly mutating
crystallizations.
Capitalist urbanization might best be conceived as a process of constant, if contested,
innovation in the production of socio-spatial arrangements – albeit one that always simul-
taneously collides with, and thereby transforms, inherited formations of spatial practice,
regulatory coordination and everyday life (Schmid 2013). Under capitalism, urbaniza-
tion is always articulated in contextually embedded socio-spatial formations, since it is
precisely in relation to, and through collisions with, inherited structures of uneven spatial
development that its specific patterns and pathways are forged and fought out. In this
way, the abstract, universalizing processes of capitalist industrialization are materialized
in historically and geographically specific urban configurations, which are in turn relent-
lessly transformed through the interplay of accumulation strategies, regulatory projects
and socio-political struggles at various spatial scales.
The consolidation of a planetary configuration of urban development since the 1980s
is thus only the most recent expression of this intense variegation, differentiation and
continual reorganization of landscapes. On the one hand, planetary urbanization is the
cumulative product of the earlier longue durée cycles of urbanization that have forged,
differentiated and continually reshaped the worldwide geographies of capitalism since
the mid-nineteenth century. At the same time, this latest formation of urbanization has
emerged in the wake of the post-1980s wave of global neoliberalization, financial specu-
lation and accumulation by dispossession that has at once accelerated and intensified
the process of commodification and, by consequence, the uneven extension of industrial
infrastructures around much of the planet (Thesis 5). But, despite abundant evidence of
accelerating urbanization and unprecedented worldwide interconnectivity, the produc-
tion of planetary urban landscapes during the last three decades has not entailed a simple
homogenization of socio-spatial conditions. Rather, the dawn of planetary urbanization
appears to have markedly accentuated and rewoven the differentiations and polarizations
that have long been both precondition and product of the urbanization process under
capitalism, albeit in qualitatively new configurations whose contours remain extremely
difficult to decipher.
In an attempt to analyze these developments, contemporary urban thinkers have intro-
duced dozens of new concepts intended to designate various putatively ‘new’ urban
phenomena (Taylor and Lang 2004). While these endeavors productively underscore
the changing geographies of the urban in contemporary global society, most have been
focused too rigidly upon emergent urban forms that appear to have ruptured inherited
socio-spatial arrangements. These include, for instance, purportedly new kinds of cit-
ies (global cities, megacities, edge cities, in-between cities, airport cities, informal cities
and the like), regions (global city regions, megacity regions, polycentric metropolitan
regions and so forth) as well as interurban networks, corridors and the like. However,
within the epistemological framework proposed here, the constant search for such ‘new’
urban forms is an intellectual trap: it yields only relatively superficial insights into the

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 Elements for a New Epistemology of the Urban 63

modalities and consequences of the wide-ranging transformations that are unleashed

through the urbanization process. Creative destruction is the modus operandi of capitalist
forms of urban development; new urban geographies are thus constantly being produced
through the dynamics of differential urbanization, whether within large urban centers or
across extended operational landscapes. The essential task, therefore, is less to distin-
guish new urban forms that are putatively superseding earlier spatial morphologies than
to investigate the historically and geographically specific dynamics of creative destruc-
tion that underpin the patterns and pathways of urbanization, both historically and in the
contemporary epoch.
Much work remains to be done to confront this challenge. A new vocabulary of urban-
ization is urgently required that would help us, both analytically and cartographically, to
decipher the differentiated and rapidly mutating landscapes of urbanization that are today
being produced across the planet (Schmid 2014 [2012]). While the shifting geographies
of agglomeration must obviously remain a primary focus in such an endeavor, patterns of
extended urbanization must now likewise be positioned centrally in any sustained effort
to elaborate new concepts and methods for deciphering this emergent, volatile and still
largely unfamiliar worldwide urban fabric.

Thesis 7: The urban is a collective project in which the potentials

generated through urbanization are appropriated and contested

The preceding theses have attempted to clarify in analytical terms some of the founda-
tions for a new epistemology of the urban that could more productively illuminate both
historical and contemporary geographies of capitalist urbanization than inherited frame-
works. We conclude with a final thesis that underscores the essentially political character
of such epistemological considerations. Here we build upon our previous discussion of
differential urbanization (Thesis 3), which emphasized the relentless drive toward crea-
tive destruction under capitalism and the powerful potentials for radical socio-spatial
transformation associated with it. Such potentials are an essential product and stake of
urbanization: they are generated through the productive force of agglomeration and asso-
ciated operational landscapes; they are often instrumentalized through capital and state
institutions to facilitate historically specific forms of industrialization and political regu-
lation, but they are also reappropriated, redistributed and continually remade through the
everyday use and contestation of urban space.
The urban can be productively understood as a transformative potential that is con-
stantly generated through processes of urbanization. As both Georg Simmel and Henri
Lefebvre paradigmatically recognized in different moments of twentieth-century capital-
ist development, this transformative potential inheres in the social, economic and cultural
differentiations that are produced through urbanization, which connect diverse popula-
tions, institutions, activities, interactions and experiments in specific socio-spatial con-
figurations (Schmid 2015b). The harnessing of such potentials is of central importance
in the process of capital accumulation and in technologies of political regulation. At the
same time, social movements struggle to appropriate such potentials for everyday use,
social reproduction and cultural experimentation. In precisely this sense, the urban can-
not be completely subsumed under the abstract logics of capitalist industrialization or

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 64 The SAGE Handbook of the 21st Century City

state domination: it is always co-produced and transformed through its users, who may
strive to appropriate its actualized or unrealized potentials toward collective social uses,
to create new forms of experience, connection and experimentation – in short, to produce
a different form of life (Lefebvre 1991 [1974], 2003 [1970]). The definition of the urban
is thus not an exclusively theoretical question, it is ultimately a practical one: it is neces-
sarily articulated through debates, controversies, struggles, uprisings and revolts, and it is
ultimately realized in the pleasures, routines and dramas of everyday life.
In recent years, many radical urban theorists have wrestled with this constellation of
issues through explorations of Lefebvre’s (1996 [1968]) classic concept of the ‘right to the
city’ (Marcuse 2012). Originally elaborated in the context of the political uprisings of the
late 1960s in Paris, this slogan subsequently became an important rallying cry for political
mobilizations, which have sought to connect diverse struggles that were related in some way
to the urban question (for instance, regarding rights to housing, transportation, education,
public health, recreational infrastructures or environmental safety). Since the long 1980s,
the demand for the right to the city has become even more widespread around the world, and
its political content has meanwhile been differentiated to encompass a variety of normative
and ideological positions, policy proposals, movement demands and popular constituencies
in diverse local and national contexts across the world (Schmid 2012; Mayer 2012).
Given our arguments and proposals above, however, struggles over the right to the
city must be fundamentally reframed – for, as David Harvey (2012: xv) notes, ‘to claim
the right to the city is, in effect, to claim a right to something that no longer exists’ (for
an analogous discussion, see Merrifield 2013). Clearly, struggles over access to urban
resources in large cities – and over the collective power to produce and transform them –
remain as fundamental as ever, and will continue to shape ongoing processes of urbaniza-
tion around the world. However, under contemporary conditions of planetary urbaniza-
tion, the classical city (and its metropolitan and regional variants) can no longer serve as
the exclusive reference point for urban struggles or for visions of ‘possible urban worlds’
(Harvey 1996). Instead, a wide range of new urban practices and discourses are being pro-
duced in diverse places, territories and landscapes, often in zones that are geographically
removed from large cities, but where new forms of collective insurgency are emerging
in response to the patterns of industrial restructuring, territorial enclosure and landscape
reorganization sketched above. From Nigeria, South Africa, India and China to Brazil and
North America, new political strategies are being constructed by peasants, workers, indig-
enous peoples and other displaced populations to oppose the infrastructuralization and
enclosure of their everyday social spaces and the destruction of their established forms of
livelihood (Wilson 2014; Arboleda 2015).
The politics of anti-gentrification movements and resistance to corporate megaprojects
in dense city cores can thereby be connected, both analytically and politically, to mobi-
lizations against land enclosure, large-scale infrastructures (dams, highways, pipelines,
industrial corridors, mines) and displacement in seemingly ‘remote’ regions (on which,
see Merrifield’s (2014) analysis of ‘neo-Haussmannization’). Rather than rejecting urban
life, such mobilizations are often demanding a more socially equitable, democratically
managed and environmentally sane form of urbanization than that being imposed by the
forces of neoliberal capitalism.
The concept of planetary urbanization proposed here offers no more than an epistemo-
logical orientation through which to begin to decipher such struggles, their interconnec-
tions across places, territories and landscapes, and the urban potentials they are claiming,

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 Elements for a New Epistemology of the Urban 65

articulating and constantly transforming. Such an investigation remains to be undertaken,

but the epistemological perspective proposed here requires that it be framed in a man-
ner that attempts to overcome the compartmentalization and fragmentation not only of
urban spaces, but of urban struggles themselves, no matter where they are situated. Just
as crucially, rather than being based upon inherited concepts and representations of the
urban, such an inquiry would need to illuminate the manifold ways in which the users
of urbanizing spaces produce and transform their own urban worlds through everyday
practices, discourses and struggles, leading to the formation not only of new urban spatial
configurations, but of new visions of the potentials being produced and claimed through
their activities (INURA 1998).
The urban is a collective project – it is produced through collective action, negotiation,
imagination, experimentation and struggle. The urban society is thus never an achieved
condition, but offers an open horizon in relation to which concrete struggles over the
urban are waged. It is through such struggles, ultimately, that any viable new urban epis-
temology will be forged.

Note
 1  This chapter is a substantially shortened and revised version of Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, ‘Towards a new
epistemology of the urban?’, CITY, 19, 2–3 (2015): 151–182. © Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid.

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