NEW URBAN SPACES: URBAN THEORY AND THE SCALE QUESTION BY NEIL BRENNER

Abstract

It can be a common thought, but there´s no doubt that urban spaces and cities are undergoing very significant transformations today. The challenge of urban restructuring today affects practically the entire global space, especially large metropolises, but also cities on an intra-urban scale. It is a process indisputably associated with the capitalist production of space carried out at multiple scales and dimensions. In “New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question”, Brenner (2019) asserts that to comprehend these changes we need a conceptual and methodological renewal that aspires to a total, holistic and integrated understanding of the urban phenomenon, from the socioeconomic fabric of urban space on its micro scale, to the macro scale of the transnational processes that feed the capitalist production of urban space. Neil Brenner presents us with the perspective of critical urban theory on the process of urbanization, which we are witnessing today at a global level, while reviewing the epistemological, theoretical-conceptual and methodological bases of this approach in light of contemporary conditions in the 21st century. The work is structured into ten chapters, each one explaining the best of the state of the art of the thinking of the Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at Harvard, to guide reflection around the issues of capitalist urbanization and critical urban theory and whose brief analysis here we decided to structure it into two fundamental and transversal axes to the author's work: critical urban theory and the rescaling rationale.