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In 'New Urban Spaces', Neil Brenner proposes a radical reconceptualization of inherited approaches to urbanization. Rather than focusing on cities as bounded units, urbanization is conceived here as multiscalar. Drawing on the methods of critical geopolitical economy, especially the writings of Henri Lefebvre, Brenner systematically elaborates this multiscalar conceptualization of the capitalist urban fabric in order to investigate emergent patterns and pathways of urban restructuring.

'Critique' is not simply an oppositional orientation towards extant spaces, institutions and ideologies; it requires a continual interrogation of the changing historical conditions of possibility for such an orientation. Through its irreducible abstraction, critique is an essential moment within the ongoing struggle to imagine and to pursue alternative pathways for the production of space

Urbanization is transforming the planet, within and beyond cities, at all spatial scales. In this book, Neil Brenner mobilizes the tools of critical urban theory to deconstruct some of the dominant urban discourses of our time, which naturalize, and thus depoliticize, the enclosures, exclusions, injustices and irrationalities of neoliberal urbanism. In so doing, Brenner advocates a constant reinvention of the framing categories, methods and assumptions of critical urban theory in relation to the rapidly mutating geographies of capitalist urbanization. Only a theory that is dynamic—which is constantly being transformed in relation to the restlessly evolving social worlds and territorial landscapes it aspires to grasp—can be a genuinely critical theory.

In 1970, the influential French Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre published a book titled The Urban Revolution, in which he advanced the hypothesis that "society has been completely urbanized." By this, Lefebvre meant that the process of urbanization creates the conditions for capitalism--rather than urbanization being an outcome of the circulation of capital--and that the consequences of this process therefore extended far beyond actual cities. Compiling both classic and contemporary essays on the "urbanization question," this book explores the various theoretical, epistemological and political implications of Lefebvre's claim, with a series of analytical and cartographic interventions that reach beyond the conventional binaries of the topic (urban/rural, city/non-city, society/nature) in order to investigate the uneven implosions and explosions of capitalist urbanization across the globe--and what Lefebvre famously termed (in his book of the same name) "the production of space."