Reframing the Urban: Cities and their global impact
Neil Brenner, Professor of Urban Theory and Director of Urban Theory Lab (UTL) at Harvard Graduate School of Design, talks with Peter Mares, University of Melbourne, about the phenomenon of ”urbanization”. The talk is available as a podcast on urbantheorylab.net.
As more and more people move into cities, we live in an urban age—this is a common assumption. Brenner opposes this definition of the “urban age”, which is based on a binary opposition between city and countryside. He argues instead that it is necessary to look beyond this notion of the rural/urban divide, since it cannot encompass the differences in processes of urbanization. He proposes a redefinition of the concept of “urbanization”, which acknowledges that rural territories—the so-called hinterland—play a fundamental part in supplying cities with resources and are thus essential to the process. Urbanization has already reached the whole planet, not only so-called “urban” regions: ”I do believe that we live in an urban world and in an urbanised planet, but in order to understand the way in which that's the case we oftentimes have to look far beyond the city limits in order to see the ways in which landscapes, environments, territories are being transformed to support the current form of urbanisation.“—Read more at: upclose.unimelb.edu.au
The book Implosions / Explosions, edited by Neil Brenner, looks at processes of urbanization across places, regions, territories, continents, and oceans up to the planetary scale.
Neil Brenner, Professor of Urban Theory and Director of Urban Theory Lab (UTL) at Harvard Graduate School of Design, talks with Peter Mares, University of Melbourne, about the phenomenon of ”urbanization”. The talk is available as a podcast on urbantheorylab.net.
As more and more people move into cities, we live in an urban age—this is a common assumption. Brenner opposes this definition of the “urban age”, which is based on a binary opposition between city and countryside. He argues instead that it is necessary to look beyond this notion of the rural/urban divide, since it cannot encompass the differences in processes of urbanization. He proposes a redefinition of the concept of “urbanization”, which acknowledges that rural territories—the so-called hinterland—play a fundamental part in supplying cities with resources and are thus essential to the process. Urbanization has already reached the whole planet, not only so-called “urban” regions: ”I do believe that we live in an urban world and in an urbanised planet, but in order to understand the way in which that's the case we oftentimes have to look far beyond the city limits in order to see the ways in which landscapes, environments, territories are being transformed to support the current form of urbanisation.“—Read more at: upclose.unimelb.edu.au
The book Implosions / Explosions, edited by Neil Brenner, looks at processes of urbanization across places, regions, territories, continents, and oceans up to the planetary scale.