Implosions /Explosions : Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization

Drawing together classic and contemporary texts on the 'urbanisation question', this book explores various theoretical, epistemological, methodological and political implications of Lefebvre's hypothesis.

“I’ll begin with the following hypothesis: society has been completely urbanized.” –Henri Lefebvre, La révolution urbaine (1970) In 1970, Henri Lefebvre put forward the radical hypothesis of the complete urbanization of society, a circumstance that in his view required a radical shift from the analysis of urban form to the investigation of urbanization processes. Drawing together classic and contemporary texts on the “urbanization question”, this book explores various theoretical, epistemological, methodological and political implications of Lefebvre’s hypothesis. It assembles a series of analytical and cartographic interventions that supersede inherited spatial ontologies (urban/rural, town/country, city/non-city, society/nature) in order to investigate the uneven implosions and explosions of capitalist urbanization across places, regions, territories, continents and oceans up to the planetary scale.