Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization

In 1970, the influential French Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre published a book titled The Urban Revolution, in which he advanced the hypothesis that "society has been completely urbanized." By this, Lefebvre meant that the process of urbanization creates the conditions for capitalism—rather than urbanization being an outcome of the circulation of capital—and that the consequences of this process therefore extended far beyond actual cities. Compiling both classic and contemporary essays on the "urbanization question," this book explores the various theoretical, epistemological and political implications of Lefebvre’s claim, with a series of analytical and cartographic interventions that reach beyond the conventional binaries of the topic (urban/rural, city/non-city, society/nature) in order to investigate the uneven implosions and explosions of capitalist urbanization across the globe—and what Lefebvre famously termed (in his book of the same name) "the production of space."