Building a better theory of the urban: A response to ‘Towards a new epistemology of the urban?’

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Notes

1 For a more extensive discussion of 'the new urban age' literature, see Brenner and Schmid 2014.

2 As Neil Brenner has reiterated in a separate communication, February 19, 2015.

3 I cannot disagree with Brenner and Schmid when they say that, ‘[T]he conditions within so-called “rural” zones should not be taken for granted; they require careful, contextually specific and theoretically reflexive investigations that may be seriously impeded through the unreflexive use of generic labels that predetermine their patterns and pathways of development and their form and degree of connection to other places, regions and territories.’ But this seems to me a first principle of all investigation and sets up rural studies as an unreflective straw man.

4 And what to make of the strange claim that there was a ‘long, violent and intensely contested transition from industrial and metropolitan to territorial formations of urbanization, roughly from the 1830s to the 1970s' – I can't make any sense of it.

Additional information

Richard Walker is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Geography, University of California, Berkeley.