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Against the backdrop of contemporary debates on the transcendence of city-centric epistemologies in urban theory, this article proposes a theoretical framework for exploring the connections between processes of planetary urbanization and the political ecologies of emergent infectious disease. Following a brief overview of research on cities and the coronavirus pandemic, we elaborate a critical interrogation and heterodox synthesis of two distinct lines of investigation—(1) research by Roger Keil and his collaborators on the embeddedness of emergent infectious diseases within processes of extended urbanization and (2) work by radical epidemiologist Rob Wallace and his colleagues, which productively situates emergent infectious diseases in relation to the geographies and political ecologies of agribusiness under neoliberalizing capitalism. We direct attention to the ways in which processes of planetary urbanization are remaking the human and nonhuman geographies of non-city spaces, causing infectious pathogens to be unmoored from previously localized ecosystems and catapulted into broader territories of circulation. This line of analysis requires rigorous application of dialectical methods that can illuminate the internal relations through which cities dynamically co-evolve and co-transform with the non-city spaces, more-than-human territories, and multispecies political ecologies that support their metabolic operations, including at the microbiological scale of novel pathogens. The elaboration of such an approach yields an interpretation of the urbanization/emergent infectious disease nexus as a medium and expression of the agro-ecological crisis tendencies of neoliberal capitalism. A concluding section outlines three emergent arenas of agro-industrial transformation in which processes of extended urbanization have created new spatial configurations and infrastructural pathways for the production and proliferation of emergent infectious diseases.

AbstractForeboding declarations about contemporary urban trends pervade early twenty‐first century academic, political and journalistic discourse. Among the most widely recited is the claim that we now live in an 'urban age' because, for the first time in human history, more than half the world's population today purportedly lives within cities. Across otherwise diverse discursive, ideological and locational contexts, the urban age thesis has become a form of doxic common sense around which questions regarding the contemporary global urban condition are framed. This article argues that, despite its long history and its increasingly widespread influence, the urban age thesis is a flawed basis on which to conceptualize world urbanization patterns: it is empirically untenable (a statistical artifact) and theoretically incoherent (a chaotic conception). This critique is framed against the background of postwar attempts to measure the world's urban population, the main methodological and theoretical conundrums of which remain fundamentally unresolved in early twenty‐first century urban age discourse. The article concludes by outlining a series of methodological perspectives for an alternative understanding of the contemporary global urban condition.

The worldwide financial crisis has sent shock-waves of accelerated economic restructuring, regulatory reorganization and sociopolitical conflict through cities around the world. It has also given new impetus to the struggles of urban social movements emphasizing the injustice, destructiveness and unsustainability of capitalist forms of urbanization. This book contributes analyses intended to be useful for efforts to roll back contemporary profit-based forms of urbanization, and to promote alternative, radically democratic and sustainable forms of urbanism. The contributors provide cutting-edge analyses of contemporary urban restructuring, including the issues of neoliberalization, gentrification, colonization, "creative" cities, architecture and political power, sub-prime mortgage foreclosures and the ongoing struggles of "right to the city" movements. At the same time, the book explores the diverse interpretive frameworks - critical and otherwise - that are currently being used in academic discourse, in political struggles, and in everyday life to decipher contemporary urban transformations and contestations. The slogan, "cities for people, not for profit," sets into stark relief what the contributors view as a central political question involved in efforts, at once theoretical and practical, to address the global urban crises of our time. Drawing upon European and North American scholarship in sociology, politics, geography, urban planning and urban design, the book provides useful insights and perspectives for citizens, activists and intellectuals interested in exploring alternatives to contemporary forms of capitalist urbanization.

Making the political aspect of Lefebvre's work available in English for the first time, this book contains essays on philosophy, political theory, state formation, spatial planning, and globalization, as well as provocative reflections on the possibilities and limits of grassroots democracy under advanced capitalism

AbstractNeoliberalization processes have been reshaping the landscapes of urban development for more than three decades, but their forms and consequences continue to evolve through an eclectic blend of failure and crisis, regulatory experimentation, and policy transfer across places, territories and scales. The proliferation of familiar neoliberal discourses and policy formulations in the aftermath of the 2007‐09 world financial crisis masks evidence of more deeply rooted transformations of policies, institutions and spaces that continue to combatively remake terrains of urban development. Accordingly, the critical intellectual project of deciphering the problematic of neoliberal urbanism must continue to evolve. This essay outlines some of the methodological and political challenges associated with (re)constructing a ′moving map′ of post‐crisis neoliberalization processes. We affirm a form of critical urban theory that adopts a restlessly antagonistic stance towards orthodox urban formations and their dominant ideologies, institutional arrangements and societal effects, tracking their endemic policy failures and crisis tendencies while at the same time demarcating potential terrains for heterodox, radical and/or insurgent theories and practices of emancipatory social change.

O início da crise financeira global em 2008 foi interpretado como um desafio fundamental à governança neoliberal. O artigo explora algumas das consequências de curto e longo prazo da crise econômica em relação aos processos da neoliberalização e propõe referências teóricas para uma compreensão adequada da natureza desse modelo político e socioeconômico e de suas manifestações e desenvolvimentos socioespaciais.