CityReads│The Urban Question as a Scale Question

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The Urban Question as a Scale Question

A critical urban theorist proposes a scale approach to the urban question.

Neil Brenner, 2019. New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question – Oxford University Press.

The urban condition is today being radically transformed. Urban restructuring is accelerating, new urban spaces are being consolidated, and new forms of urbanization are crystallizing. In New Urban Spaces, a critical urban theorist and professor at Harvard University, Neil Brenner argues that understanding these mutations of urban life requires not only concretere search, but new theories of urbanization. To this end, Brenner proposes an approach that breaks with inherited conceptions of the urban as a bounded settlement unit-the city or the metropolis-and explores the multiscalar constitution and periodic rescaling of the capitalist urban fabric. Drawing on critical geopolitical economy and spatialized approaches to state theory, Brenner offers a paradigmatic accountof how rescaling processes are transforming inherited formations of urban spaceand their variegated consequences for emergent patterns and pathways of urbanization. The book also advances an understanding of critical urban theory as radically revisable: key urban concepts must be continually reinvented in relation to the relentlessly mutating worlds of urbanization they aspire to illuminate

A paradigm shift in the urban question?

For over a century, the urban question has generated intense debate on matters of conceptualization, method, and interpretation. FOR MUCH OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY,  the field of urban studies defined  its research object through a series of explicit or implied geographical contrasts. Even as debates raged regarding how best to define the specificity of urban life, this realm was almost universally demarcated in opposition to two purportedly nonurban zones—the suburban and the rural. In a word, most of twentieth-century urban studies rested upon the underlying assumption that cities represent a particular type of territory that could be defined in opposition to other differently configured territories that lay beyond or outside its boundaries.

During the mid- to late twentieth century, as the field of urban studies matured and evolved, several subterranean theoretical explorations began to unsettle the prevalent metageographical unconscious of urban studies, and thus to suggest the possibility of alternative conceptualizations of the field, its research focus, and its methods. One of the most important strategies to this end, which had been pioneered as early as the 1930s but which was not broadly consolidated until the early 1990s, entailed demarcating the urban not as a territory, but as a scale. In this alternative approach, urban space was delineated not through a horizontal contrast of cities to other (suburban or rural) settlement zones, but instead through a vertical positioning of urban scales within dynamically evolving, multitiered organizational-geographical configurations. In addition to the urban scale, such configurations were generally assumed to include at least three other key scales—the regional, the national, and the worldwide or global. Sometimes other scales were also considered—for instance, the body, the neighborhood, the local, the metropolitan, the supranational, and the continental.

Since the 1990s, in the context of debates on post-Fordism, globalization, and urban restructuring, the urban question has been redefined as a question of scale. Why has this scalar redefinition of the urban occurred, and what does this mean for urban theory and research? What are its analytical possibilities anddangers? In what ways does such an approach reframe the long-standing emphasis on the “city” as the core focal point for urban studies?

The urban question as a scale question

The urban was conceptualized less as a bounded areal unit—the container of the city—than as a sociospatial relation embedded within a broader, dynamically evolving whole.

Scale had, of course, long been a key concept in human geography, but its intellectual foundations were reinvented as of the 1980s in conjunction with emergent concerns with worldwide capitalist restructuring and associated debates on“globalization.”The new lexicon of geographical scale came to offer urbanists a powerful new conceptual tool through which to investigate, in rigorously relational terms, the changing geographies of urbanization, both historically and under contemporary conditions.

To conceptualize the urban as a scale means not as a unit or type of settlement space, but as a vibrant force field of sociospatial practices defined through its relational embeddedness and shifting positionality within a broader, interscalar framework of patterned, regularized sociospatial interdependencies.

Scale was now recognized as a key dimension of urbanization, and meanwhile there wasan impressive outpouring of research on cities as arenas and targets for diverse forms of rescaling. The explosion of interest in the new political economy of scale dovetailed with the development of what is today known asglobal city theory and, more generally, with the elaboration of critical approaches to globalized urbanization

The organization of the book

This book is devoted to a systematic exploration of the broad problematique associated with the reflexive mobilization of scalar narratives, scalar categories, and scale-attuned methods in the field of critical urban studies since the early 1990s. Its guiding questions are the following: In what sense can the urban question be reframed as a scale question? What conceptualizations of scale—and of the urban scale in particular—are most appropriate for such an exploration? What are the theoretical, methodological, and empirical consequences of such a scalar reframing? How does a scalar analytics transform our understanding of the unit, site, and object of urban research? To what degree, and in what ways, can and should “the city” remain a central analytical construct and empirical focal point in a scale-attuned approach to the urban question? What are the implications of scale-attuned approaches to urban theory and research for interpretations of contemporary patterns of urban restructuring? What are the implications of such approaches for the investigation of restructuring processes within specific places, regions, and territories? Finally, what are the appropriate conceptual parameters for scalar approaches to urban questions? In other words, are there limits to scale as an explanatory, interpretive, and descriptive category?

This book charts the contours of a multifaceted, open-ended, and still-ongoing exploration. Its chapters follow a pathway of focused questioning, defined by the scalar problematique outlined previously, and by the concerted search for conceptual tools and methodological strategies adequate to deciphering emergent rescalings of the worldwide urban fabric under late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century capitalism.

The book’s main line of argumentation is thus configured as a spiral movement across levels of abstraction and several interconnected terrains of inquiry. It flows from a relatively abstract, reflexively scalar formulation of the urban question under modern capitalism (Chapters 2 and 3) toward a series of critical engagements with several major approaches to contemporary urban studies in conjunction with more concrete-complex pathways of investigation of post-1980s urban transformations in various zones of Euro-America (Chapters 4 to 7). This leads to a series of autocritical maneuvers that produce a relativization and Aufhebung of my initial scalar formulation of the urban question (Chapter 8)and that, finally, facilitate a reformulation of that question around the problematique of planetary urbanization, which  simultaneously builds upon and transfigures the scalar analytics that were forged and deployed in earlier chapters (Chapters 9 and 10). The main elements of this spiral movement are summarized in Figure 1.1.

Figure1.1 Organizational structure and logic of the book. 

Outline of the Argument: Following this introductory overview, the subsequent two chapters assemble the theoretical foundations for an

exploration of the urban question as a scale question.

Chapter2 excavates the distinctive scalar analytics that are embedded within several key ideas of David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre, with particular reference to the fixity/motion contradiction under capitalism, the concept of the urban fabric, the scalar intermeshing of urban space and state space, and the process ofrescaling. This analysis generates a scale- attuned theorization of the capitalist urban fabric, as well as a state-theoretical understanding of the process Lefebvre famously described as the “planetarization of the urban.”

Chapter3 considers the ways in which, especially since the 1990s, the scalar dimensions of global urban restructuring have been reflexively explored within several major streams of critical urban studies. Against the background of earlier rounds of debate on the spatiality of the urban question, I take stock of this apparent scalar turn in urban studies. What, I ask, is the theoretical specificity of a scalar approach to the production of new urban spaces? What are potential contributions and hazards of such an approach? A relatively narrow, but analytically precise, definitional proposal is offered, which destabilizes methodologically localist, city-centric understandings of the urban while also distinguishing processes of scalar structuration from other key dimensions of sociospatial relations related to place-making, territorialization, and networking.

The core scalar explorations of this book are elaborated over the next four chapters, which seek to illuminate the interplay between urban restructuring and rescaling processes, particularly the rescaling of state space, during the post-1980s period (Chapters 4 to 7). These studies build upon the conceptual foundations developed in the opening chapters in order (1) to critically interrogate and, in some cases, to respecify and rework the scalar assumptions articulated within several major fields of contemporary urban theory and research; (2) to develop scale-attuned, state-theoretical analyses of post-1980s patterns and pathways of urban restructuring in the North Atlantic context; and (3) to demarcate some of the specific interpretive consequences that flow from approaches to the urban question that transcend inherited city-centric framings.

Chapter 8 presents a series of metatheoretical reflections on the scalar framework of analysis developed in the preceding chapters while also outlining several major challenges for subsequent rounds of research on the spatialities of urbanization.

Chapters 9 and 10 connect these metatheoretical reflections to a new round of theorizingon the urban question that, much like previous cycles of debate on such issues, has been provoked by the challenge of deciphering emergent patterns and pathways of urban restructuring. It is here that my guiding question regarding the possibility of a scalar reframing of the urban question is transformed into a more explicit, systematic concern with the problematique of planetary urbanization. These chapters propose such a reframing through a  critical  assessment of contemporary “urban age” discourses, which are viewed as narrowly city-centric simplifications of a constitutively  uneven, territorially differentiated, and spatially extended landscape of planetary urbanization.

The conceptual foundations and methodological orientations that have long underpinned the studies of the rescaling of urban space include:

•    It involves the rejection of localist, city-centric approaches to the urban, emphasizing instead the relationally multiscalar, variegated, and uneven geographies of the capitalist urban fabric.

•    It emphasizes the key role of state spatial strategies in constituting, stratifying, and reorganizing the capitalist urban fabric across places, territories, and scales.

•    It is concerned with the contradictory dynamics of sociospatial creative destruction—the production and deconstruction of territorial organization— that animate and mediate the capitalist form of urbanization.

•    It further elaborates upon the planetarization of the urban, a process that is initially explored in Chapter 2 with reference to the state-theoretical and interscalar dimensions of Henri Lefebvre’s influential hypothesis regarding the contemporary urban revolution.

•    It theorizes emergent forms of urban restructuring as a medium and expression of political strategies to construct new, rescaled urban spaces in a geoeconomic context of deepening, if intensely variegated, processes of scale relativization and neoliberalization.

•    It emphasizes thepolymorphic character of urban geographies under capitalism—their differentiation and stratification by scale, but also through processes of place-making, territorialization, and networking.

The major theoretical imperative is to reconceptualize the capitalist urban fabric not simply as a territorially differentiated, multiscalar geography of urban centers and agglomeration processes embedded within broader, dynamically evolving interscalar configurations, but as the medium and outcome of the relentless processes of implosion/explosion that represent the spatiotemporal core of the capitalist form of urbanization.

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