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Urban theory and the 'hinterland' question: from agglomeration to climate colonialism
Neil Brenner, Professor of Urban Sociology, University of Chicago
Abstract: How are cities and urbanization connected to the crises associated with planetary climate change? How should the field of urban studies grapple with the brutally uneven planetary geographies and impacts of global warming, biodiversity loss, and the proliferation of environmental dangers (from heat waves and extreme weather to emergent infectious disease)? In this report on ongoing work in the Urban Theory Lab, Neil Brenner argues for a new epistemology of the urban to address these and related issues. Urbanization under capitalism, he argues, is not only embodied in the proliferation and growth of cities, but in the extractive, often highly destructive reorganization of non-city territories and environments to support urban life. In this sense, the "hinterland question"--which reveals the constitutive role of agriculture, mining, energy infrastructure, logistics, and waste in the production of urban spaces--must be repositioned at the intellectual and (geo)political core of urban studies. This presentation discusses the genealogies of the hinterland question in twentieth-century urban studies and several key intellectual pathways through which its core elements have been marginalized or rendered invisible in both mainstream and radical streams of urban research. Brenner argues not only for a recentering of the hinterland problematique into critical urban social science, but for its radical reconceptualization in light of several world-historical and world-ecological transformations of the last half-century--the uneven industrialization of primary commodity production across the world economy; the global reterritorialization of city/non-city metabolic relays (associated with food, energy, materials, and waste); and the dramatic intensification of landscape degradation and the proliferation of environmental 'dead zones' across huge swathes of the earth. In exploring such issues through a reflexively urbanization-theoretical lens, this project demarcates the epistemological, conceptual and methodological elements of a resolutely anti-imperialist approach to contemporary urban studies.
Neil Brenner is a critical urban theorist, sociologist and geographer who is interested in all aspects of research on cities and urbanization within the social sciences, the environmental humanities, the design disciplines and environmental studies. His writing and teaching focus on the theoretical, conceptual and methodological dimensions of urban questions, and on the challenges of reinventing our approach to urbanization in relation to the crises, contradictions and struggles of our time. Brenner has made influential contributions to scholarly debates on critical urban theory, the critique of capitalist urbanization, urban restructuring, state space, the political economy of rescaling, variegated neoliberalization and planetary urbanization. His current work is focused on the question of how “hinterlands”—the non-city territories, infrastructures and ecologies that support urban life—are being remade under contemporary supply-chain capitalism. This inquiry aims to connect the study of urbanization more directly to the analysis not only of primary commodity production (the historical geographies of agro-industrial and extractive capitalism) but also to the critical exploration of contemporary environmental crises and emergent struggles for postfossil—and postcapitalist—planetary futures.
Brenner’s most recent books are New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question (Oxford, 2019) and Critique of Urbanization: Selected Essays (Bauwelt Fundamente, 2016), as well as the edited volume Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization (Jovis, 2014). Brenner’s previous books include New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood (Oxford University Press, 2004) and the co-edited volumes Cities for People, not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City (with Peter Marcuse and Margit Mayer; Routledge 2011); and Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in North America and Western Europe (with Nik Theodore; Blackwell, 2003). Brenner’s writings have been widely translated into other languages, including complete books or essay collections published or forthcoming in Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish.
Prior to his return to the University of Chicago in 2020, Brenner served as Professor of Urban Theory at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and as Professor of Sociology and Metropolitan Studies at New York University. Brenner serves or has previously served on the editorial boards of several urban studies and economic geography journals, including International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Urban Studies, Antipode, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society and Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. During the previous two decades, Brenner has supervised or co-supervised Ph.D. research in Sociology, Geography, History, Political Science, American Studies, Law & Society, Urban Planning and Architecture, among other fields.
