Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization, Paperback/Neil Brenner

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.