This week’s readings continue to provide insight into the core tensions of an urban studies discipline. I’ve come to think of these tensions, or really transition/transformation of the field, as asking not the “what” of urbanity, but the “how.” There appears to be some amount of consensus that looking at a “city” as a unit of study ultimately misses, or even obscures, the true nature (global, uneven, capitalist, etc.) of urbanization. Instead of delineating space as urban, if looking at a given space – any space – we can ask how it has been touched by urbanization. Ultimately, it seems that particularly Brenner’s concern, similar to Zukin’s (both articles having started with Castells will now marry them in my brain), is what is taken for granted when even a process (as opposed to a place) is labeled as urban. The uneven global nature of a process of urbanization, which he defines as “the creative destruction of political-economic space under capitalism,” naturally creates concentrated agglomerations for study, but opens the questions up to what Jacobs might think of as the relational nature of urban development.
Lefebvre’s writing was striking in how it approaches the tension of studying the global, and conceptualizing space beyond its current state of both means of production and product itself. He takes the contradictions of capitalist space and literally (literarily?) blows them up, as the social sphere clashes with the ultimately restrictive effects of the uneven development described by Brenner. Sandoval-Strausz’s use of the framework of transnationalism to understand the urban process, focusing on a particular case that describes a broad network of relationships, appears to be an incisive way to cut through the conceptual limits of previous place-based study; it reflects the explosion described by Lefebvre. Considering the explosion of digital space since Lefebvre wrote, creating an entirely new and dominant realm of production and a new plane of space, in a sense, I wonder how he’d incorporate it…
Toby Irving
