Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Jiang Xu, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

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Description:

Professor Neil Brenner (Urban Theory Lab, University of Chicago) will deliver a lecture entitled "Extended urbanization—a concept in search of a theory?":

Originally developed by Brazilian planning scholar Roberto-Luís Monte-Mór in the 1980s, the concept of extended urbanization has been deployed widely to analyze emergent worldwide patterns and pathways of capitalist urban transformation. While the concept is rooted in a neo-Lefebvrian agenda—in particular, the concern to supersede the limits of city-centric epistemologies of urban theory—it has, in practice, been tethered to rather diverse, and sometimes divergent, theoretical explanations of how and why non-city spaces are co-constitutive of the process of (capitalist) urbanization. This contribution differentiates two major streams of work on extended urbanization—city-extensionist approaches; and metabolic approaches. While appreciating the contributions of the former, I argue for a metabolic conceptualization of extended urbanization as one moment within a sociospatial dialectic that includes concentrated and differential urbanization as equally co-constitutive moments (see also Brenner and Schmid 2015). Building upon collaborative research in the Urban Theory Lab (Abouelhossein, Brenner, Conroy and Ghosh 2021), I articulate this conceptualization of extended urbanization to eco-feminist and eco-materialist approaches to social reproduction theory which emphasize the variegated “hidden abodes” of expropriation that support the wage nexus under capitalism (Moore 2015; Fraser 2020). From this point of view, the central problematique for a theory of extended urbanization is to illuminate the hidden abodes of the city—specifically, the non-city sociospatial and environmental transformations that support and result from city-building processes under capitalism. This line of theorization thus opens up a horizon for a reproduction-theoretical approach to the combined and uneven political ecologies of planetary urbanization (Brenner and Ghosh 2021).

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda