Conferencia Neil Brenner

The Explosion of the Urban
Neil Brenner

In what sense is the contemporary world "urban"? In this lecture, Neil Brenner critiques contemporary ideologies of the "urban age," which confront this question with reference to the purported fact that more than 50 percent of the world's population resides within cities. Against such city-centric understandings, which relegate most of the world to a non-urban "exterior," Brenner excavates Henri Lefebvre’s notion of generalised urbanisation for insights into the emergent planetary urban condition. He argues that the geographies of urbanization can no longer be conceptualized only with reference to cities, megacities or metropolitan regions, but today encompass diverse patterns and pathways of land-use intensification and infrastructural development across the planetary landscape, from Manhattan to the Matterhorn, from the Pearl River Delta to Mount Everest, from the Nile River valley to the Pacific Ocean. This variegated urban fabric must become a central focal point for new approaches to urban theory, strategies of collective intervention and design imaginaries.

Neil Brenner is Professor of Urban Theory at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he teaches classes on critical urban theory, urbanization, urban/territorial governance and sociospatial theory. Brenner’s most recent book is Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization (Jovis, 2013); he is also the author of New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood (Oxford University Press, 2004). Forthcoming books include New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question (Oxford University Press, 2016); Critique of Urbanization (Bauwelt Fundamente Series / Birkhäuser Verlag, 2016); and Is the World Urban? Towards a Critique of Geospatial Ideology (with Nikos Katsikis; Actar, 2016). In 2014, Brenner was selected as a Thompson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher (www.highlycited.com). Based on Web of Science data, his publications were ranked among the top 1% most cited globally in the general social sciences between 2002 and 2012. Brenner directs the Urban Theory Lab at the Harvard GSD, a research team that uses the tools of critical urban theory, historical geopolitical economy and radical cartography to decipher emergent patterns of urbanization under twenty-first century capitalism.

Invitan_
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
Escuela de Arquitectura UC
Instituto de Estudios Urbanos y Territoriales UC
Instituto de Geografía UC