Skip to content
Future of City Search
ES EN
Neil Brenner
Thinkers

Neil Brenner

1969

American sociologist who argues there is no longer an outside to the urban: urbanisation also organises the countryside, the mine and the ocean.

Brenner disputes the very idea of the «city» as a bounded object. His thesis of planetary urbanisation holds that the urban is not a place but a process: a soy plantation, a logistics hub or an undersea cable are as urbanised as a historic centre, because they exist to sustain it.

One practical consequence follows: if a city's sustainability is measured only within its municipal boundary, the territory that feeds it, supplies its energy and absorbs its waste is ignored. Honest accounting includes what happens far away.

An American sociologist and urban theorist, Brenner taught at New York University and at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he founded the Urban Theory Lab, and since 2020 he is a professor at the University of Chicago. New State Spaces (2004) showed how European states reorganised their territory from the 1970s, shifting from equalising regions to promoting competitive cities, and with Nik Theodore and Jamie Peck he formulated the idea of actually existing neoliberalism, which is not a state but a process of destruction and creation different in each city.

His most debated thesis is planetary urbanization, developed with Christian Schmid from Lefebvre and gathered in Implosions/Explosions (2014) and New Urban Spaces (2019): urbanisation is no longer limited to cities but reorganises mines, oceans, fields and forests, and the age of cities is a misleading statistic. He co-edited Cities for People, Not for Profit (2012) and in 2011 criticised assemblage urbanism for flattening power. Feminist and postcolonial scholars reproach him for an overly abstract theory; his influence on critical urban theory is hard to overstate.

Videos on Neil Brenner (3)

Where Neil Brenner is cited (12)

Watch the channel