Cities in Global Capitalism

Ugo Rossi. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2017. 213 pp., references, index. $64.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-7456-8966-1), $22.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-7456-8967-8); $18.99 electronic (ISBN 978-0-7456-8970-8).

Cities in Global Capitalism begins with a deceptively simple question: “Why have the fates of cities and capitalism become so inextricable in times of globalization” (p. 2). In response to this provocation, the book traces three essential “emergences” that define contemporary urbanization. These interlinked processes—the multiplication and intensification of financial activities; the entrepreneurialization of society and individuals; and the incorporation of information and affects into productive circuits—are not unique to the contemporary era, but come to the fore as hegemonic forces in the twenty-first century. It is from this triangulation that Rossi sets out on the path of “disentangling the city–capitalism nexus in the global age” (p. 2).

As in his previous work, Rossi here theorizes urban economic development in post-Fordist cities and the diverse articulations of late neoliberalism. Crucially, Rossi puts biopolitical production—whereby capitalism does not aim primarily at the creation of commodities, but of subjectivities, knowledges, and social relations—at the center of his inquiry. In so doing, he identifies how capitalism works beyond repression, through the making of populations that are productive in a capacious sense of the term. If ordering capabilities has been a long-standing element of capitalist organization, in the last three decades of prolonged and repeated crisis, and under the dynamics of real subsumption, this feature has become absolutely central. “[F]ollowing the ‘global recession,’” claims Rossi, “capitalism has shifted its focus from the incorporation of society within its value chain to the incorporation of life itself” (p. 11).

What makes this book distinctive, then, is that it details the coevolution of cities and capitalism not only through the abstract logics of wage labor, exchange, and investment, but also through the prosaic practices of habit, custom, and selfhood. Combining “a strategic-relational political economy approach and a materialist ontology” (p. 145), Rossi clarifies that urban capitalism is not reducible to a narrow economistic relationship of surplus value extraction, but is also intrinsically an ideological, political, social, cultural, and ecological system. Notably, what he terms the “life oriented construction of contemporary capitalism” (p. 12) takes place in cities of the Global North and the Global South, albeit in uneven, stratified, and differentiated ways. Engaging a wide range of interlocutors, Rossi provides a complex, cosmopolitan, and conjunctural account of this dynamic.

Cities in Global Capitalism is neither a bleak indictment of our precarious age nor a utopian celebration of an imminent revolution. Indeed, Rossi insists that a deep structural ambivalence characterizes our political horizon. Urban capitalism is, he says, “at one and the same time a force of exploitation and invention” (p. 7). With global markets and geopolitics in upheaval, and with urban dwellers around the world mobilizing for more just life-sustaining environments, attending to the kinds of problems foregrounded by Rossi's book is critically important. This forum—based on a conversation held at the 2017 American Association of Geographers annual meeting—aims to host a dialogue on this generative set of ideas and provocations.

In the introductory pages of Cities in Global Capitalism, Ugo Rossi lays out the core proposition from which this engaging and ambitious book departs: “In the current urban age, cities are no longer viewed merely in relation to but within capitalism, as its constitutive element” (p. 2). This constitutive role of urbanism and urbanization that the book attributes to processes of capitalist accumulation and expansion underpins the central question animating the narrative: “Why have the fates of cities and capitalism become so inextricable in times of globalization?” (p. 2). Rossi's answer to this question, which he lays out in five theoretically rich and intellectually engaged chapters, is that contemporary capitalism has “subsumed” (p. 150) urban life itself. Drawing on the formulations of Hardt and Negri, Rossi argues that contemporary processes of capitalist expansion proceed not through the subsumption (real or otherwise) of labor into the machinations of industrial capitalist production as in the past (or at least as certain theorizations of capitalism–city connections have argued); in the urban present, Rossi instead suggests, “there is no longer a rigid demarcation between the working place and the private sphere, as there was at the time of historical capitalism” (p. 9). In this context, it is argued, capitalist expansion proceeds through the “real subsumption [of] society and life itself” by means of the “capitalist valorization of knowledge, affects and relational abilities” (p. 47).

Cities in Global Capitalism suggests that the urban character of this posited shift from industrial to “cognitive” capital relates to (and perhaps stems from) sociospatial dynamics and phenomena that are distinctive to cities. In chapter 1, Rossi lays out three “key forces” by means of which the sociospatiality of cities is enlisted in processes of capitalist expansion: real estate finance (commoditization of urban land through the mortgage sector), “entrepreneurialization” (in forms and technologies of urban governance as well as entrepreneurialization “of the self”), and “knowledge-based capitalism” (i.e., the spread and intensive use of information and communication technologies in everyday urban life). This “technology-based economy,” Rossi sums up one of his book's key claims, “throws light on capitalism's tendency to commodify life as a whole, creating new forms of exploitation and self-exploitation” (p. 9). Neoliberalism, Rossi thus suggests, “has grown into the living tissue of the city” (p. 78).

The ambition and scope of the theoretical explorations that drive Cities in Global Capitalism is impressive and Rossi is an exceptionally able and informed guide. To an ethnographer, Rossi's book provides fuel for the research imagination, posing a number of important questions. First, though, I want to spend a moment thinking through some concerns I have about the book's approach and line of argumentation.

Cities in Global Capitalism's central claim rests on two problematic moves: The first is methodological (having to do with the evidence marshaled in support of the book's propositions and premises) and the second is theoretical (relating to the conclusions and generalizations drawn from this evidence). The first problem is that the proposition that the book sets out to explore—“the role of capitalism as the driving force behind global urbanism” (p. 13)—is asserted as the book's point of analytical departure rather than proposed as a claim to be substantiated. The trouble with beginning with this presumption is twofold: First, there is much scholarly disagreement over what “neoliberal capitalism” is or means, as well as over whether or not “neoliberal capitalism” (however defined) is in fact “the driving force behind global urbanism.” The theoretical disagreements over the meaning of “neoliberalism” have both theoretical and empirical dimensions. Scholars have adopted the term neoliberalism to refer (on the one hand) to the idea that, when left to their own devices, markets are efficient, self-correcting, and fair in the way they allocate resources, as well as (on the other hand) to the multiplicity of policies and programs that evoke the efficient market idea as a legitimating rationale.

Even if we were to bracket these debates over what neoliberal capitalism is, means, or does—even if we were to agree that perhaps, however defined, capitalism (“neoliberal” or otherwise) does indeed appear to loom large in cities these days—then we are still left with the question of where and how this posited relationship between capitalism and cities is borne out empirically. The narrative proceeds not by marshaling evidence in support of the book's central claim, but instead by marshaling more theory—in the three “emergences” outlined earlier. Any countervailing evidence falls by definition outside the ambit of what “counts” as evidence of the story about cities in capitalism that the book wants to tell. This means not only excluding cities that are illegible to these concepts and categories, but also excluding any alternative formulations or theories about the relationship between cities and capitalism that might emerge from consideration of such illegible cities.

An example of this problem can be seen, for instance, in how Cities in Global Capitalism deals with the question of how globally mobile urban policy ideas travel. Cities in Global Capitalism critiques the scholarly literature on “policy mobility,” not on empirical but theoretical grounds: “The process of socialization in the policy-mobility thesis and related strands of research is limited essentially to the elite level, while neoliberalism is viewed as a somewhat external force moving across the globe” (p. 70). The book dismisses these formulations because they disagree with the book's premise that neoliberal capitalism is not an external force but instead is productive in a biopolitical sense—a “constituent element of global capitalism” that has grown into “the living tissue of the global capitalist city” (p. 17).

This problematic use of theory—that is, of basing an argument about the empirical validity of a theory by using more theory—has a second, related dimension: A theory about how neoliberal capitalism and market mechanisms work is not the same thing as the concrete policies that cite these ideas as their justification and motivation. The necessary divide between efficient market ideas, and the policies and practices animated by these ideas means as well that there is no necessary correspondence between the two as far as ends and goals are concerned. Indeed, ethnographers thus have shown how efficient market logics have been put to work in trying to address all manner of social and political problems, from environmental pollution to political deadlock. The question of how policy ideas travel, in other words, is not necessarily one of how globally hegemonic ideas and forces are imposed, translated, mediated, or resisted at the local level, but rather of how bits and fragments of often contradictory ideas are put to work by various urban actors having often widely divergent goals and with sometimes unanticipated effects.

My own work in Mumbai, for instance, reveals how the “efficient market” idea found a receptive audience among an odd-bedfellows coalition of city development planners, international experts, populist politicians, slum activists, land owners, and developers who saw in the idea of “the market” mechanism a seemingly magical solution to a long-standing and intractable urban problem: of how to reconcile sky-high urban land values with the need to acquire land for social purposes like infrastructure, public amenities, or social housing. Ethnographic evidence thus reveals the spuriousness of any “outside–inside” distinction when it comes to how and where neoliberalism works, and calls our attention instead to the contingent and creative ways that market ideas and ideologies are put to work by heterogeneous urban actors to diverse ends (Björkman 2015).

The importance of attending to historical difference as “constituent of global urbanization” is a point that has been strongly asserted by postcolonial urban theorists. Taking postcolonial critiques seriously means moving away—in Roy's (2016) words—from “a universal grammar of cityness, modified by (exotic) empirical variation” (200), and instead building on insights from the specificities of any particular city (any city, that is—not necessarily one with a colonial past or one located in the geographical South) to formulate new concepts and ideas about the urban dimensions of global-level processes. Decolonializing urban studies thus means probing and unsettling (in Gregory's evocative words, which Roy cites) “the stories the West most often tells itself about itself” (Roy 2016, 202). Although Cities in Global Capitalism is well aware of the postcolonial critique—asserting in its opening chapter that “the book largely accepts postcolonial criticism”—in practice the book forecloses multiple understandings of political economy and reasserts a “universal grammar of cityness.”

A second area where the universalizing ambitions of Cities in Global Capitalism runs aground on difference is in its discussion of how urban agglomeration relates to what Rossi, drawing on Hardt and Negri (2001), calls “knowledge-intensive capitalism.” In locating capitalism in urban processes themselves (rather than in some external force acting on cities), Cities in Global Capitalism weighs in on scholarly debates over what we mean when we talk about “the city” in the first place. Cities in Global Capitalism embraces a conception of the urban that takes agglomeration as the defining characteristic of the urban. In Rossi's formulation, knowledge-empowered urban elites are described to capture surplus values accruing from the positive “externalities” of spatial concentration (e.g., increased real estate values in centrally located, aesthetically pleasing, socially valued locations); by means of technologically enabled communications tools, the affective energies of the urban “common wealth” are thereby appropriated as capitalist surpluses. Chapter 5 looks at how in the context of “austerity and growth-driven politics” (p. 164), cities have become “engines of capitalism,” because urban areas play host to high-tech startups and to the technology-based “sharing economy.” The postindustrial city of Turin is given as an example of the former, where “university led processes of business incubation, politico-economic elites emphasize the need to modernize technologically oriented sectors and to open the doors to a new generation of [flexible and globally-oriented] high-tech firms” (p. 166). Brooklyn and London are given as examples of the latter, where “the idea of communal life” has inspired setting up of tech-enabled “co-living spaces” in sought-after neighborhoods. Meanwhile, as informationally empowered actors extract profit from the commonwealth, urban “undesirables” find themselves subject to a parallel “logic of expulsion” (p. 47) from those very same places.

These observations from particular cities are richly suggestive and point to a compelling comparative urban research agenda. Indeed, as an ethnographer, I found Cities in Global Capitalism's discussion of agglomeration extremely interesting for the questions it raises: What does spatial concentration do? What does the materiality and sensory experience of the urban fabric afford—when, how, for whom, and to what end? Yet instead of outlining what such a research agenda might look like, Cities in Global Capitalism moves directly to a generalizing formulation, asserting that “knowledge-intensive urbanism” is comprised of “hegemonic projects mobilized by politico-economic elites who are appropriating the socio-affective externalities of urban environments” (p. 74).

Again, though, ethnographic evidence demurs. To take another example from my own work in Mumbai, although it is quite true that urban knowledge is a crucial component of the sociomaterial infrastructure facilitating access to valorized urban resources (land, water, markets, surpluses of various sorts), determinants of access to the “information technologies” by means of which this knowledge is produced, circulated, and deployed do not map neatly (or at all) onto received sociological categories—things like class or caste. I conclude with an example: In February 2007, voters in a low-income, so-called slum neighborhood of Mumbai that I call Nehru Nagar, elected a man named Sable, their local water department valve operator, to represent them in the Municipal Corporation. In doing so, area voters threw out the incumbent elected city councilor who had been in the seat for twenty-two years, a wealthy and high-caste man who was an established leader of a major political party.

Sable—a formally uneducated, working-class, Dalit (formerly known as “untouchable” caste) municipal laborer—swept the election with a comfortable margin, campaigning on a promise to bring public resources to bear on the neighborhood's deeply deficient infrastructures. The valve operator's authority stemmed from his command of invaluable urban knowledge—both material knowledge about the locations and workings of below-ground networks of pipes and valves and sociopolitical knowledge about how the lower level bureaucracy functions. This knowledge was not borne of class position or access to newfangled technologies, but rather stemmed from the intimate, embodied expertise acquired over many years of work with and on the city's pipes and municipal offices. Over the following five years, the valve operator's tenure as an elected city councilor would witness dramatic changes in Nehru Nagar: the inauguration of a new health dispensary (which was part of an effort to turn the tide on the neighborhood's long-standing battle with tuberculosis), the dredging of the neighborhood's gutters, the laying of a new below-ground water pipe, and the approval of a slew of new metered water connections. That is to say, the material, legal, financial, and infrastructural futures toward which valorized urban knowledge is directed can diverge drastically from elite-driven, world-class urban fantasies. Sable's neighborhood, for instance, is not being brought under a builder-driven slum redevelopment scheme that would stack residents in crumbling tenement buildings while earning the developer lucrative development rights; rather, the neighborhood has seen the revitalization of its infrastructures and public life.

All of which is to say that Cities in Global Capitalism calls attention to how the sociomaterial processes through which actually existing cities are being reconfigured both enlist and empower new sorts of configurations and scales of practical efficacy and expertise. In this context, the empirical question is this: For whom is this knowledge power?

Cities in Global Capitalism sets out to disentangle the mutually reinforcing nexus of cities and the contemporary globalized, neoliberalized capitalism, in its postcrisis, knowledge-intensive form. Theorizing the dynamic constitution of this nexus and bringing together the broad church of theorists that the book does—Harvey, Hardt and Negri, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Agamben, the new institutionalists and postcolonialists—is no mean feat. It requires a wide canvas, big ideas, and broad sweeps. Cities in Global Capitalism brings us all of these.

The book's analysis of the kaleidoscopic imbrication of globalized capitalism and urbanization is structured around a triad of “emergences” that, Rossi argues, characterize the current nexus:

1.	Financialization, particularly of real estate and housing.
2.	The entrepreneurialization not just of urban governance, but of urban society, the self, and, ultimately, life itself.
3.	The valorization of urban-based intellectual skills, affect, and relational abilities as they are incorporated into capitalist circuits of production. Crucially, Rossi suggests, this extends beyond the firm now to embrace “potentially all urban dwellers and their everyday lives” (p. 49) as the urban social fabric and human life are harnessed to capitalist ends.

An overarching proposition of the book, then, is that these three emergences are distinctively urban vectors that are enabling neoliberal capitalism to subsume life itself, with neoliberalism having “grown in to the living tissue of the capitalist city” (p. 78). Central to this subsumption, Rossi argues, is the ambivalence of capitalism and neoliberalism. He does not deploy ambivalence, as Ferguson (2010) did, to suggest the potential to harness the techniques and practices of neoliberalism to unexpected or alternative ends. Rather he deploys it to highlight their ability to work in both negative or controlling ways and affirmative or productive ways to further incorporate life into capitalist accumulation structures.

The book presents a second triad of overlapping city tropes to explore how these ambivalent capacities play out:

1.	The socialized city where affect and knowledge are valorized such that all workers need to have a capacity to be “loquacious and potentially inventive” (p. 154).
2.	The dispossessed city where austerity and its socially uneven impacts are normalized.
3.	The revenant city where experimental forms—the sharing economy, smart city, and creative city—are used to mobilize and extend societal entrepreneurialization and to produce entrepreneurialized urban subjects, allowing postcrisis capitalism to be reinvented and re-embedded, ever more deeply socialized into the city.

Across the book's triads of emergences and city tropes, Rossi highlights the biopolitical production of compliant entrepreneurial subjectivities for a knowledge-intensive capitalism. Indeed some of the book's most thought-provoking contributions, for me, arise from Rossi's honing in on neoliberalism's moral and biopolitical dimensions as opposed to its analysis as a “political-economic mode of regulation.” He pivots off a critique of the policy mobilities and planetary urbanization literatures for figuring neoliberalism too prominently as a force external to the city, to focus on its biopolitical production from “within”: within the city and within the self. Rossi then uses the book's three emergences as heuristics through which to unpack the ways existing and emergent features of capitalist urbanization—consumption, home ownership, exchange, aspects of the urban commons—are transmuted from within, via neoliberalism, into more entrepreneurial, individualized forms.

In one of the book's most vibrant themes, he explores how other phenomena that were not previously profit-driven are now being absorbed into and valorized by capitalism via the share economy, creative city, and smart city. Indeed, his analysis of these as affirmative biopolitical economies is thoroughly engaging. The book's argument is that neoliberal capitalism works biopolitically through these urban economies to produce new subjectivities and harness aspects of the urban commons to capitalist accumulation through the animating fantasy (J. Dean 2009) of collaboration, community, participation, and empowerment. It is both a provocative and pragmatic critique.

Cities in Global Capitalism therefore offers a sophisticated analysis that presents us a distinctive way of unpacking the interwoven layers that connect contemporary globalization, capitalism, and urbanization, especially as they cohere through neoliberalization. Rossi's treatment of urban neoliberalism's biopolitical operations is illustrative of the kinds of tantalizing ideas and provocative flashes that the book is replete with and that prompt us particularly with new ways to “think” contemporary urban economies and to critique emergent strands of urban resurgent-ism.

There are also some frustrations for me in the book, though, and these reflect my wider frustration with the finesse that neo-Marxian analyses achieve in diagnosing the degenerative condition of neoliberal capitalist urbanism, while struggling at times to articulate a more generative scholarship and urban politics. I should say that this is a frustration that confronts me in my own work; that is, how to connect the work of critical diagnosis—a vital task, to be sure—with generative knowledge production.

Notwithstanding, first, Rossi's insistence that the book's three emergences are never linear but intricate, indeterminate, and situated and, second, his insistence that “one should not think of processes of social and life subsumption … in a mono-directional and totalising way” (pp. 170–71), a totalizing narrative lurks across the book wherein capitalism is—in every instance, place, and time—successfully constituted, as is neoliberalism, aided and abetted consistently and monodirectionally through the agency of the urban.

Certainly capitalism and neoliberal show little weakness in the book. Neoliberalism is figured as an immanence in a city fully suffused by its sociospatial forms, entities, institutions, and subjectivities. Although I acknowledge that, as Rossi puts it, “neoliberalism has firmly retained its power as today's hegemonic governmental rationality” (p. 80), I am less comfortable with asserting its complete colonization of the urban and its living tissue. To cede this seems to risk leading us to a political dead end: acutely aware of how we got there, but insufficiently armed with insights on (1) where multiplicity exists in and alongside the conjunctural encounters of urbanism, neoliberalism, and capitalism; or (2) on how to exploit the opportunities that reside within this multiplicity to generate other outcomes.

To be fair, the political project of Cities in Global Capitalism is not to explore this multiplicity. Its absence was a source of frustration with the book's style of analysis, but also a productive provocation. The analysis carefully characterizes the emergent scenarios where capitalism and neoliberalism's seemingly endless adaptiveness and elasticity succeed. We do not get glimpses, however, of what Holloway (2010) called the “cracks” in capitalism, where neoliberal capitalist adaptive experimentation goes awry, does not quite absorb everything, does not come off as intended, or flat out misses it target. Or when neoliberal capitalist strategies are hybridized, infected with strains of welfarism, collective values, nonmarket technologies whereby the end result might no longer be recognized as simply neoliberal or purely capitalist? So as I became absorbed in the book—and it is an absorbing read—I wondered what kinds of politically effective, generative knowledges might result from exploring this underbelly of multiplicity, alongside building understandings of neoliberal capitalism's colonizing successes? What would the book's analysis yield were it more embracing of multiplicity and if the concept of ambivalence it deploys were more widely scoped?

For instance, Rossi's critique of the corporatized sharing economy is insightful, but what would happen if the sharing economy were not imagined as limited to its deeply problematic corporate iterations—the Ubers and AirBnBs; if its technologies were acknowledged as able to do more than provide the basis for reinventing and reembedding postcrisis capitalism and consumption; and if its potentials were not written off as “illusory” (p. 88)? Could we understand the sharing economy across the multiplicity of its realization and the multiple logics (Scaraboto 2015) that coexist within it: including its cooperative forms, it anticonsumerist forms, forms that are not inevitably productive of an individualized, entrepreneurialized self? Could we then reveal capacities that are not singularly embedded (paraphrasing) in neoliberalism's political-moral engine for disseminating the totalizing life regime of consumerism? This would allow us to turn our attentions to figuring out ways to defend, promulgate, and institutionalize its other potentials. Rossi tantalizingly hints, for instance, at the tensions between the “prosumer” phenomenon of the sharing economy and corporate rationalization and control, but the analysis does not pause here to explore what productive, generative strategies might be leveraged from these tensions.

Second, what if urban creativity and alternative food movements were not written off as “another facet of global homogenisation and capitalist commodification” (p. 121), inevitably “absorbed into the value system of capitalist urbanism” (p. 102) as their alternative subjectivities are seduced and normalized? Could we explore and amplify the multiplicity of their various forms and capacities, forewarned by the kinds of understanding of their vulnerability to neoliberal capitalism's seductive capacities that Cities in Global Capitalism expertly provides. Of course, neoliberal capital is imbricated in these phenomena, and has demonstrated a potential to embrace them, but this is not the limit of what they are and might produce. To make my point, let me quote Julia Gillard, former Australian Prime Minister and the victim of outrageous misogyny from conservative opponents and the media. When asked if misogyny explained her political demise, she responded: “It doesn't explain everything, it doesn't explain nothing. It explains some things.” My suggestion is that there might be an advantage to be gained from dwelling longer on the aspects of these urban phenomena that neoliberal capitalism does not explain, and asking, what else, including what kinds of political potential and biopolitical productivities might be generated here. This, of course, requires explicit politicization and challenges urban scholarship to better resource and progress this.

Of course history forewarns us that neoliberal capitalism is adept at undermining or obliterating alternatives and Rossi sheds illuminating light on emergent modes of doing this in postcrisis global capitalism. To address this colonizing capacity, we need to understand how it does this, yes. Then, forewarned, we need also to consider (1) how to promulgate, protect, and amplify what exists within urban phenomena that is not explained by neoliberal capitalism and that might offer alternative possibilities; (2) how to render these alternatives adaptive and absorptive; and (3) in light of the understandings Cities in Global Capitalism offers us, how might scholarly analysis and theorization contribute to this?

To conclude, Cities in Global Capitalism provides a careful exploration of the cross-fertilizing layers of the urbanization, globalization, and neoliberalization nexus and gives us effective heuristics to help characterize the weft and warp of the fabric being woven around us. The book's polemical style, its leaning toward the metatheoretical in which capitalism is “no longer merely incorporating key aspects of society into its system, but encompassing everything, including life itself” (p. 7) is, I think, a knowing provocation for urban politics. Tantalizingly, Rossi comes to urban politics literally on the book's final page. The book has whetted my appetite for a sequel, where I would look forward immensely to seeing Rossi's thinking on the possibilities for urban politics that arise from the book's claims.

The title of this well-crafted and provocative monograph, Cities in Global Capitalism, captures very well the explanatory scope and ambition of the book, as well as the essence of Ugo Rossi's distinctive approach. The book cuts a bold and original path into (and through) the field of critical urban studies—one that on some accounts is more contested, and perhaps more conflicted, than ever before—with the benefit of both creative purpose and constructive intent. Rossi models an accommodating style of combinatorial theorizing that is quite effective in generating more than the sum of its parts; his inclusive and expansive approach is refreshingly free of ax-grinding or partisanship, but neither is it meekly eclectic. The book cuts its own path—between poststructuralism and political economy, and between postcolonial and Euro-American urbanism—to open up some different and novel horizons for theorizing around urbanization, urbanity, and cities. Rossi does not repeat the error of positioning cities “under” capitalism, but he makes the case that they cannot be understood “outside” it, either. More particularly, he avers that, “Today, the study of the city–capitalism nexus cannot be separated from an analysis of globalization and neoliberalism, understood as pervasive forces exerting influence over potentially any aspect of economic life” (p. 5).

The book persuasively conveys a sense of the “historical present,” focusing intently on present-day problematics but at the same time endeavoring to contextualize them in a nonstagist, nondiffusionist fashion. Its spatiotemporal imaginary is likewise attuned to multipolarity, to variegation, and to uneven development, while calling attention to the jumbling, tangling, and recombination of urban forms. In a productive way, the planetary and the particular are cohabiting here. So it is that neoliberal globalization and the “relentless expansion of urbanization” is linked to the complex (re)production of polycentric development and the “coexistence of different hegemonies across the planet,” in this case animated primarily by three historical “emergences,” those associated with financial power, with the entrepreneurialization of governance and subjectivities, and with the ascendancy of cognitive capitalism (pp. 24–25). Operating in complex conjunction, in what is invoked as an era or age (but not really a stage) of neoliberal globalism, this triadic schema frames the central arguments of the book.

Financialization is read both in longue-durée terms, as an episodic process of capital switching into secondary (real estate) and tertiary (knowledge) circuits, and as an ambient condition of everyday life, from biopolitical governance to debt-bearing subjectivities. Entrepreneurialization is likewise read as a widely distributed subjectivity as well as a normalized mode of governance. Cognitive-cultural capitalism is called on as an indexical matrix for a host of “creative,” “smart,” and “startup” city formulations. The arguments are clearly keyed into the restructuring present—the domain of critical urban studies—but they are also presented as intensifications of what are extended historical processes, as “long-term features of the urban phenomenon” (p. 50). From this perspective, cities are in capitalism in a Deleuzo–Guattarian sense; they are understood to be “in a relationship of immanence with global capitalism understood as an ‘ontological machine’ creating new subjectivities through relations of both subjection and enlivenment” (p. 17). This is a distinctive way to read the cities–capitalism nexus, in the context of a promiscuous array of neoliberal governmentalities, but it also presents some (new) challenges.

The first of my general comments I make under the heading of post marks. There are post marks of many kinds in the book, which in both direct and indirect ways can be interpreted as indicators of its quite distinct position in the canon of contemporary urban studies. This critical reading of capitalist urbanization comes after Harvey but it does not go after Harvey. Instead, his various contributions on post-Fordist urban cultures, on circuits of capital, on accumulation by dispossession, and more, play something like a foundational role in the book, even as they are extensively leavened with, augmented by, and elaborated with Foucauldian formulations, as well as with insights from Hardt and Negri, Agamben, Benjamin, Debord, and so on. Courtesy of an expressly polyvocal analysis of capitalism's urban nexus (p. 25), Rossi borrows liberally from neo-Marxism and from poststructuralist thought, in a complementary rather than a combative spirit, to explore the intersecting domains of capitalist restructuring and biopolitical transformation, striving not to privilege one over the other. He explicitly “accepts” the postcolonial critiques of urban studies that have been advanced by Robinson, Roy, and others, placing much greater emphasis, by way of what is articulated as a corrective of sorts, on “the role played by capitalism as the driving force behind global urbanization and urbanism” (pp. 13, 54).

Acknowledging the need to look beyond the West (and the Western city), Rossi nevertheless insists on the fundamental (and fundamentally connective) role of globalizing capitalism on both sides of the North–South and East–West divides in actually existing urban conditions and in urban theory, going a step further to portray this as a specifically neoliberal mode of globalizing capitalism. The very fact that these might be read in some quarters as fighting words, of course, speaks to the extent to which some formulations of postcolonial urbanism have opted to hold capital-N Neoliberalism at arm's length, or to insist on its provincialization to the territories of the North Atlantic, portraying as exotic, alien, or exceptional the diverse mobilizations and manifestations of market rule outside this supposed “heartland.” This said, the caution against the casual or complacent universalization of theory claims must surely be taken seriously (even if the question of how to contextualize such claims remains an open and challenging one), especially in light of the long and sorry history of models developed in privileged sites being taken as diagnostic indicators of the supposed deficits and disorders of others. Hence the need for critical theories of “globalizing” phenomena, practices, forces, and formulas—such as those associated with so-called neoliberal urbanism—to recognize uneven geographical development at the “front end,” in a (pre)constitutive way, and for such theories to be constructed, and reconstructed, through multisited investigations, through conceptually positioned stress tests, and through ongoing interrogation across conjunctures, articulations, localized contexts, and so forth. It is just as important to do this work of conjunctural theorizing in the Global North as in the Global South, of course—maybe even more so (Peck 2017).

Rossi aligns his own project with attempts to reconcile, or at least straddle, what are portrayed as “two distinct … projects” in urban-studies research (p. 83), first, political-economy arguments concerning regulatory transformation and the hegemony of market-oriented development, and second, work in the governmentality tradition that has emphasized entrepreneurializing subjectivities and migrating technologies of rule, which have been marled by a “larger refusal of economistic understandings of neoliberalism and globalization” (p. 84). Himself refusing to elide political economy with economism, Rossi boldly addresses the claims of the book to the global realm and to what Robinson (2011) called the “world of cities,” including those of the postcolonies. It must be said, however, that in this light, there are some lingering tensions in the architecture of the book's argument, which positions as truly pivotal the financial crisis of 2008 and the ensuing “Great Recession [as] the first structural and global crisis since the advent of neoliberal globalization” (p. 11), which makes frequent recourse to a formulation of post-Fordism at least somewhat predicated on a geographically specific cluster of Fordist-Keynesian forebears, and that draws disproportionately (although not exclusively) on European and North American illustrations. One need not have confused neoliberalism with a strictly Euro-American category of analysis to recognize that there could be questions about issuing putatively “global” claims from this conjuncturally specific pivot point. One would not necessarily be denying the global reach of the post-2008 crisis to insist that both the moment itself, and the socioeconomic and governmental histories that preceded it, looked quite different from, say, China or Brazil or India. In other words, the transition imaginary is perhaps not as global as it might appear.

My other observations I gather under the heading of life itself. A complaint that is often heard about accounts that afford centrality to neoliberal hegemony or generalized processes of neoliberalization is that they are “inflationist”; that is, that they make something large and promiscuous and indiscriminate and omnipresent out of something that could (or should) be understood to be small(er), more particular, more specific, and more localized (see Collier 2012; M. Dean 2012). From a political-economy perspective, it can be countered that neoliberalization need not—in fact should not—be conceived as an all-saturating, complete, or “total” phenomenon, that it is constitutively variegated and not just variable in a contingent manner (Brenner, Peck, and Theodore 2010; Peck 2017). This perspective is characterized rather differently in Cities in Global Capitalism, however, where is it equated with a somewhat flat-footed conception of neoliberalism as “an elite-led external force, circulating across the globe, originating from ‘somewhere’ and being exported ‘elsewhere,’” with geography exerting “determinant” effects on revealed variegation (pp. 17, 144). Setting aside the veracity of this portrayal, which I question from the preceding perspective, the (alternative) conception of neoliberalism offered in the book is more of a biopolitical one: positioned “in a relation of immanence with global capitalism,” and therefore baked into the cake or otherwise rendered in solution, neoliberalism is said to have been metabolized “into the living tissue of the capitalist city,” where it exists as “the political-moral engine for the adoption and dissemination of a totalizing life regime in cities across the world” (pp. 17, 78, 90).

Read as a different kind of total condition, evidently, Rossi's absorptive and more ambient reading of neoliberalism finds expression in the lived proliferation of a (now familiar) cabal of overindulged model subjects, such as hipster gentrifiers, tech entrepreneurs, and creative types (p. 181), which in a sense become the cultural carriers of the thing that on this telling is neoliberalization. As more-than-mere-cogs in that ontological machine, these precociously occupied subject positions are where neoliberalism is held to live, rather than (say) in the corridors of power, in the high offices of corporate control, or in the dull compulsion of competitive relations. The conspicuous ubiquity of such figures (even though their social worlds have a distinctive geography, too) has become a veritable cliché of urban life in many parts of the world, and one of the images that today's ever-more narcissistic cities prefer to see when they admire themselves in the mirror. To theorize with (and from) such subject positions, however, risks a certain affirmative circularity, in its own way validating an actual social significance (and explanatory priority), even while properly refusing presumptuous claims to a monopoly of creativity, reason, innovation, and progress. Perhaps the “worldwide success of [Richard] Florida's theory of the creative class and its transmutation into subsequent theorizations of smart and start-up urbanism” (p. 109) do indeed need to be taken seriously, although it is arguably the case that they are less credible as urban-sociological prognoses than they are as proxy evidence for the exhaustion of several generations of bootstrapping growth-machine strategies, the diminished and elusive returns to which have become (necessary?) objects of symbolical mystification.

There is no doubt that neoliberalization is manifest in (diverse) urban lifestyles and (nonsingular) economic cultures, as well as in governing programs, policy paradigms, and regulatory orders, but there is also a price to be paid for declaring that neoliberalism is rather amorphously everywhere (and that it does not, in fact, come from somewhere, in class, gender, social, historical, or spatial terms). Specifying the historical geographies of neoliberalization (complex, multilayered, and polycentric as they are) is arguably necessary, not least as a counter to simplified stories of top-down imposition or radial diffusion, or as a rejoinder to those purveyors of alternative facts. The creative class surely have a lot to answer for, but even I would hesitate before giving them star billing in the (re)production of neoliberalism, or implicating them too directly in the poisonous politics of Berlusconi and Trump—which is where the book ends with its discussion of “the city–capitalism nexus as the realm of the ambivalent” (p. 178). True, it might be to oversimplify things to indict the bankers, the political elites, and the 1 percent for all the dysfunctions of late neoliberalism, in its sprawling and variegated form. Although it might be tempting to round up (or round on) the hipsters, this is hardly sufficient either. The everydayness of neoliberalism is, for my money, a question of the complex and commonsensical hegemony of market rule, a condition that spans the structural and the subjective, the consenting and the contested, the big and the small, while being neither tendentially uniform nor potentially complete. It is not simply “up there,” for sure. Here, Rossi makes the case that neoliberalism now lives in the city itself. In us.

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) opened A Thousand Plateaus with the words, “The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd” (3). Like Deleuze and Guattari, Ugo Rossi is several. I think that in this book there are at least two Ugos: a good Ugo and a bad Ugo. The bad Ugo tells us that everything that is still free is being ineluctably captured by global capitalism. The good Ugo wants to find a way out of this mess, and he understands that we are already capable of doing so. In the book, the bad Ugo is stronger, and the text usually speaks in his voice. The good Ugo is weaker, but he is there. In what follows I want to urge us, and Ugo, to let the bad Ugo go, and learn to recognize, and to listen to, the good Ugo.

The bad Ugo roots himself in the tradition of critical urban studies, in concepts such as urban entrepreneurialism, growth machines, flexible specialization, post-Fordist industrialization, city regions, producer services, creative cities, global cities, neoliberalism, entrepreneurialization, policy mobility, McDonaldization, primitive accumulation through dispossession, financialization, and planetary urbanization. This tradition is a tradition of sadness in the Spinozan sense. It tells us, relentlessly, that global capitalism is ineluctably or inevitably or unavoidably incorporating more and more areas of human existence into its logic. There is nothing we can do. Let me give you an idea of the bad Ugo's voice: Global capitalism is

constantly deepening the commodification and entrepreneurialization of society. (p. 13)

The phenomenon of financialization … has expanded socially, permeating every aspect of social life and, ultimately, life itself. (p. 25)

A key effect of the deep neoliberalization of the urban environment is that the capitalist logic has widened its reach by subsuming the lives of urban residents within the intrinsic mechanisms of financial capitalism. (p. 32)

In a context already characterized by the entrepreneurialization and commodification of everything … the sharing economy quickly gets subsumed. (p. 88)

He accepts and offers evidence for Debord's “integrated society of the spectacle” in which “the spectacle has spread itself to the point where it now permeates all reality.” (p. 102)

An entrepreneurial approach … is the new orthodoxy defining today's urban condition among policymakers… . This approach to contemporary urbanism cannot be questioned by public policy, which has to prioritize marketing campaigns, partnership building and pro-business urban regeneration initiatives. (p. 55)

Some hope emerges when Ugo says that the book will offer “an ambivalent picture of capitalist urbanism” (p. 79, italics added). We anticipate that there might be some hesitancy, or contradiction, or indecision within capitalist urbanism, some crack, some opportunity for resistance and for alternatives. This ambivalence, however, turns out to mean merely that capitalist urbanism oppresses us in two ways: through the “negative subjection” of austerity and through the “affirmative mobilization” of our communicative and cognitive potential in ways that advance a capitalist agenda (p. 79). Capitalism always wins, and scholars like us are reduced to merely discovering the new ways it does so.

The only thing people get to do in this story is be entrepreneurialized, colonized, financialized, and commodified. We are all of us merely healthy cells, waiting around to be metastasized. There is no good air to breathe, no room for resistance, or alternatives, or flight, or escape, or autonomy in this story. There is no room for an examination of our own power. In this story, the spread of capitalism appears ineluctable.

To be clear, the problem with the bad Ugo is not that he talks about unpleasant topics. The problem is that he is telling the story badly. It is a story that only makes things worse. As I said before, it is a story of sadness in Spinoza's sense. That means it is a story that diminishes our capacity to act, because it makes it seem as though evil things are on the horizon, they are coming toward us, and there is nothing we can do to prevent them from taking over everything. Having told us this, over and over, the bad Ugo (and the sad tradition he roots himself in) do not really have a next move. One gets the impression we are just supposed to concur ruefully and call it a day.

The good Ugo is there, lurking, however. Near the end of the book, he raises his hand to say that “it is important to avoid conveying an essentializing, metaphysical understanding of capitalism as an impersonal force somehow naturally or mechanically [or ineluctably] expanding across space and society” (p. 145). Clearly the bad Ugo wasn't listening, as we saw earlier. Even if the bad Ugo might not affirm, if pressed, this essentializing understanding of capitalism as inevitable, he definitely conveys it, unmistakably.

The good Ugo keeps his hand in, though. He writes sentences like the one on p. 145. He tentatively embraces postcolonial and Global South critiques. He writes the glorious pages 170 and 171, where we get some account of what we are capable of, of how we might resist and imagine alternatives to the spread of capitalism. He declares that he is inspired by Hardt and Negri's commonwealth, Virno's forms of life, and Agamben's use of bodies.

Unhappily, though, the bad Ugo intervenes to miss the gist of what Hardt and Negri and Virno and Agamben are trying to say. They are searching for that which is inappropriable, unaxiomatizeable—that which is unalterably ours and can never be capital's. Hardt and Negri don't find commonwealth in the city just so they can ruefully report that capital has appropriated and controlled it, as the bad Ugo does several times (e.g., pp. 47, 48, 110, 140).

That is telling the story badly. Hardt and Negri find commonwealth to tell the story well: It is the multitude that has the capacity to produce wealth in the world, that has produced the wealth that exists in the world. Capital is nothing more than a parasitical entity that only survives through its desperate, lurching attempts to capture the wealth that the multitude has produced. The multitude holds the cards. So, they argue, it needs to realize itself as a body and appropriate to itself its own wealth, that which properly belongs to it. Hardt and Negri are telling a story about our own capacities, our own ability to make a future for ourselves on our own terms. They are not telling a story about the ineluctable process by which capitalism captures and controls all elements of our lives. Not at all.

Similarly, if more abstractly, Agamben is searching for that which is inappropriable, unexchangeable, unmonetizeable, and uncommodifiable. In his ontology, use, habit, and practice are conceptualized as necessarily the lived activity of bodies. They cannot be separated or abstracted from those bodies, and so they can never be commodified. They can never be sold to a capitalist. He is trying to tell us that capitalism's attempt to commodify all of us, all of our bodies, and all of life isn't an ineluctable process; it's an impossible project. The bad Ugo misses Agamben's overriding message, and he trains his attention only on how capitalism does sometimes capture or subsume some of the forms of life we produce.

The good Ugo sees what Agamben is trying to do, though, and Hardt and Negri. He wants to bring it to the surface. On pages 170–71, when the clouds part and we see what the alternative might be like, we can see that the good Ugo wants to turn his gaze away from capitalism, and toward us. He wants to learn what we are capable of. I imagine that the good Ugo agrees with me, that we should stop telling this story, “cease pouring it out like a sewer,” as Deleuze and Guattari would say (via Henry Miller). That's what he is trying to say on page 145. Still, most of the book tells the sad story nevertheless.

In closing, I want to express my hope, and my suspicion, that although the bad Ugo, the one who reads and speaks in a tradition of sadness, is predominant in this book, he is nevertheless the older Ugo, the one that is part of Ugo's past, the Ugo that is withering away. The good Ugo, although his voice is weaker, is the Ugo who is emerging, the Ugo who is growing stronger, the Ugo that is to come. In my hope I can see the daybreak on the horizon, the coming into his own of the good Ugo. His voice is growing louder, and I can't wait to hear more of what he has to say.

This is a book of considerable learning and intellectual subtlety. It is focused on an attempt to disentangle some of the foremost social and political currents that appear at points of intersection between urbanization, globalization, and the dynamics of capitalism in the twenty-first century. Rossi begins his analysis by affirming the central—and entirely appropriate—idea that we can only understand contemporary cities by reference to capitalism, and conversely that capitalism itself is shaped in essential ways by the phenomenon of urbanization. From this point of departure, Rossi goes on to expatiate at length on what he sees as the fundamental issues that lie at the city–capitalism nexus in the current conjuncture, namely, financial power, entrepreneurialism, and cognitive capital. Financial power resides in institutions that control the massive amounts of money and investment capital that circulate through world capitalism. As recent events have dramatically demonstrated, the incautious exercise of this power can exert deeply malignant effects on cities. Entrepreneurialism is manifest in the rise and spread of the individual stakeholder as an active force in neoliberal society, and by extension, it can be linked to the Foucauldian notion of the “entrepreneurialization of the self,” as revealed by the intensifying breakdown of corporatist or communal social arrangements and the biopolitical subsumption of human consciousness into the ideological priorities of the capitalist project. Cognitive capital, for its part, refers to the circumstance that in the digital age, the mental (and I would add cultural) faculties of workers have become crucial elements of the forces of production. Among other things, the intensifying role of cognitive and cultural capital in contemporary society is leading to a broad aestheticization of the commodity system and the symbolic elaboration of life in general.

These overarching concepts frame a narrative that moves smoothly through four substantive chapters. The argument sets out by reviewing concepts of world cities and global city regions, with passing gestures to recent debates around planetary urbanism and postcolonial theory. Rossi then proceeds to examine neoliberalism as a basic complement of cognitive capitalism and globalization, with special reference to its reinforcing influence on individualism and consumptionist ideologies. There follows on from this an account of the “one-dimensional city” and its symptomatic expression in McDonaldization, Disneyfication, and Guggenheimization, which Rossi presents as important symptoms of the homogenization of consumers' tastes and preferences in the age of neoliberal globalization. Finally, he comes back to the question of cognitive capitalism, with an emphasis on the city as a locus of biopower and on the deepening entrepreneurialization of society and the self in capitalist cities.

There is much else in the rich intellectual mosaic presented by Rossi, but this brief summary will suffice to give an indication of the book's theoretical engagements and its broad discursive strategy. In the remainder of this commentary I want to address what I see as a major point of contention raised by Rossi's argument as a whole. In fact, the particular point I want to make is pertinent to a critical examination of much of the current literature on urban studies generally, and so although I use Rossi's work as a launching platform for my discussion, my remarks are actually addressed to a far wider field of urban research. My essential line of commentary here can be summed up in this question: What is it that constitutes the urban in contemporary society and how can we subject it to meaningful analysis?

This question is prompted by a growing sense as I read Rossi's book that the urban is never quite present in the text except as a receptacle of more widely ranging social forces. Rossi's method proceeds by picking up on major concerns in capitalism broadly conceived and then seeking to apply these to an understanding of the city. So far, so good. This method, however, essentially boils down to thinking of the city as a site of social condensation rather than an active force of social development in its own right. In particular, various social, cultural, and political processes can be observed to operate at this site, but in Rossi's account, their systematically urban content (if any) remains largely undefined. For example, financial power is certainly concentrated in cities, but in precisely what ways and to what extent (if at all) can it be considered to be an urban phenomenon? In the absence of a clear problematization of the urban as such, the overall result is analogous to the view that Saunders (1981) articulated long ago to the effect that the city is no more than a container of “modern society.” Saunders then proposed that the city in practice is just an incoherent and essentially meaningless amalgam of social phenomena, and when we consider much that passes for urban studies today, he might be taken to have been not far wrong.

In opposition to this view of the city as a mingle-mangle, I submit that a coherent problematization of the urban process is indeed possible, and that it is essential to keep this problematization firmly in view if we wish to account in any meaningful way for the role of the city in society in general and capitalism in particular. Moreover, like many contemporary urban theorists, Rossi relies on persistent appeals to philosophers (Agamben, Deleuze, Foucault, Lazzarato, Lukács, and Virno, among others) for basic guidance in ontological and epistemological matters, with the perhaps (dare I say it) naive faith that the work of these authorities enables us to penetrate directly into the mysteries of the city. Obviously, Agamben, Deleuze, and others, are major thinkers, with much to say about the human condition and hence about many aspects of contemporary life. Most of them, however, provide commentaries that at best have a rather oblique relationship to the city in any significant sense of the term. Hence, mediating all of this complex intellectual material in a disciplined manner through an urban problematic requires a series of decisive additional maneuvers if we are to assess the due significance of the city, or better yet, urbanization, in contemporary capitalism. Let me affirm at once that Rossi's broad approach works reasonably well in terms of a general narrative about some of the more perplexing problems of existence in contemporary capitalism, even if the city never quite comes into focus in his account. We learn a great deal about things like the financial crisis, the homeownership society, policy mobilities, the rise of a cognitariat (or what Rossi, following Florida, calls the creative class), Disneyfication, austerity, the sharing economy, and much more. To rephrase my basic question, though, where precisely does the urban intersect with these matters, and what recomposition effects, if any, does it have on their substance and modes of operation? Or, to reiterate a very old question, does it follow that if something occurs in the city then it is automatically a component of the urbanization process?

I make these remarks because I want to argue that a noneclectic analysis of urban issues must be anchored firmly in a concept of the city that enables us to come to a defensible assessment of the essential as opposed to the merely contingent dimensions of urban life (cf. Storper and Scott 2016). I do not have the space to present the argument in the fullness it deserves, and so I shall take a few analytical shortcuts.

At the outset, if we want to make sense of the genesis and dynamics of urbanization in capitalism we must start, as Rossi does, with the basic logic of capitalism, but we need to push much harder on the urban consequences of this logic. In short, we need to concentrate from the beginning on core mechanisms concerning the competitive and profit-seeking proclivities of units of economic activity that bring capital and labor together in the act of production. This does not yet identify an urban process, but it now leads on to the initiation of a specifically city-centric analysis by prompting us to inquire as to why it is that capital and labor cluster together to form proto-urban concentrations of human activity and what the sociospatial consequences of this tendency might be. Consideration of this question leads further to the proposition that these concentrations occur in the first instance because the profit-oriented imperatives of production in capitalism induce a search for efficiency and competitive advantage on the part of individual producers. Among their other repercussions, these imperatives encourage complex divisions of labor to form in the guise of powerful functional interdependencies between selected individual producers. These interdependencies are highly conducive to spatial concentration, which, moreover, is self-reinforcing because it generates multiple external economies and commons effects that not only boost the efficiency and competitiveness of producers, but are also critical to the social reproduction of the labor force via the dynamics of residential space. At the same time, and in the second instance, the piling up of multiple units of capital and labor within a narrowly constrained geographic area results in complex land-allocation processes as individual land users strive to appropriate locations that provide suitable mixes of interlocational proximity to and avoidance of other land users. As these cross-currents begin to stabilize, the internal geography of the city crystallizes out into a variegated but mutually cohesive mosaic of production spaces, social spaces, and circulation spaces. In these ways, the mechanisms of capitalist society not only work their way into and through the urbanization process, but are themselves—and this point is fundamental—critically dependent on the city for their own social reproduction.

Of course, these two principal moments of the urbanization process, namely spatial concentration and the dependent intraurban distribution of production space, social space, and circulation space refer only to what I characterized earlier as a proto-urban outcome. The city in reality is obviously very much more than this, for this mesh of sociospatial relationships is interwoven with a host of additional phenomena, many of which act back reflexively on its organization and functions. Race and ethnicity, culture, the organization of family life, relations of authority and subordination, technology, architectural programs, the legal system, and so on, all play a part in the emerging fullness of the city, not in some chaotic, uncoordinated way, but only to the degree that they become intertwined elements of a specifically urban mode of spatial organization; that is, as agents in processes of spatial concentration, interaction, and differentiation in the wider context of capitalist society. A point of special importance is that this admixture of spatially integrated activities is endemically susceptible to functional breakdowns and political conflicts that lie far outside the coordinating discipline of the market. The viability of the city therefore always depends on the emergence of very specific kinds of governance arrangements that provide remedial management services (including powers of social control) that are competent in technical and political terms to intervene at the specifically urban level of scale.

All of this argument boils down to the simple but elusive principle that fruitful analysis of the city must always be capable of distinguishing between that which is essentially urban and that which is only contingently so, and this is where Rossi's book comes back into the picture. Rossi's three key variables—financial power, entrepreneurialism, and cognitive capital—are assuredly of major significance in their own right, and they are unquestionably useful points of leverage in any attempt to decipher the city–capitalism nexus. Rossi certainly goes part of the way in this direction, but his method, like that of much other work in urban studies today, consists to a significant extent in bolting big social issues like these onto an urban frame of reference that itself remains undertheorized—as opposed to picking through the ways in which their effectivity is transformed into and incorporated within an urban dynamic as such. As a consequence, his book is rather more informative about some of the basic quandaries of the current conjuncture at large than it is about the predicaments of urbanization in any strict sense.

I recognize that I am verging on what some might characterize as an overscrupulous distinction between the essential and the contingent in the urban milieu, but these remarks do not just refer to arcane matters with no further implications. To the contrary, they provide us with a means of sharpening our theoretical concepts about cities, they offer clues about how to maintain a consistent forensic aim in any given effort of analysis, and they have particular importance in informing policy analysis and policy implementation. In respect to the latter item, consider the perplexing policy problem of poverty, and the possibilities and above all the limits of an urban-based approach to its treatment. Urban interventions can certainly alleviate many aspects of poverty, but only political action at the national level can reform the overall social and property relations that fundamentally underlie poverty and maintain it as a durable dilemma within capitalism. The metaphor of the “ontological machine” proposed by Hardt and Negri (2001) offers some useful hints here. If we extend the idea beyond its original concern with the production of subjectivity, we might say that the ontological machine of the city works not on the basis of the simple spatial copresence of diverse phenomena alone, but by virtue of its functions as a generator of agglomerative and land-sorting dynamics that impart to these phenomena a specifically urban dimension. Note that many different kinds of social relata can be found in the city and yet remain external to the workings of this machine, so that, in the light of the argument laid out earlier, they are essentially extrinsic to the urbanization process, as such.

In spite of the demurrals that I have put forward, this is an important book, and a major contribution to debates about cities and society in the new phase of capitalism that is opening up in the twenty-first century. I have discussed at some length what I take to be a number of central problems not because I want to depreciate Rossi's contribution, but precisely because his stimulating argument leads directly to consideration of some of the most basic and troublesome issues in the field of urban studies today. Rossi has raised many crucial questions, and has pointed to some fundamental research puzzles. There can be little doubt that this provocative and highly informative book will be read widely not only in urban studies circles but in the much wider sphere of social science generally.

The metropolis is the site of biopolitical production because it is the space of the common, of people living together, sharing resources, communicating, exchanging goods and ideas… . Biopolitical production is transforming the city, creating a new metropolitan form. (Hardt and Negri 2009, 250–51)

The stake in all neoliberal analyses is the replacement every time of homo oeconomicus as partner of exchange with a homo oeconomicus as entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings. (Foucault [2004] 2008, 229)

In writing the book that has been so generously discussed in this forum, I have relied on two main sources of inspiration. The first is Hardt and Negri's notion of the global metropolis as a privileged site for what they called “biopolitical production”; namely, the production of capitalist subjectivity drawing on the heterogeneous set of affects, cooperative networks, emotions, socially diffused knowledge, and communicative abilities condensed within urban and metropolitan environments. The second is Foucault's idea of the “entrepreneur of himself” as a distinctive trait of advanced liberal societies. Building on this neo-Marxian-Foucauldian sensibility, my purpose in this book has been to make sense of the life-oriented reconstruction of today's “city–capitalism nexus” in the aftermath of the “great recession” of the late 2000s and the early 2010s, at the same time avoiding monodirectional understandings that place emphasis either on the negative (as in capitalism's ontologies of dispossession, from Harvey to Agamben and Lazzarato) or the positive dimensions (as in the ontology of subsumption theorized by Hardt and Negri themselves) of this incorporation of life. Rather, the entrepreneurialization of society and life itself that I have investigated in this book, arguing that it is replacing the entrepreneurialization of governance prevailing in first-generation urban neoliberalism, brings together the negative (indebtedness, eviction, deprivation, machinic enslavement) and the positive (the animating fantasies of participation, community, innovation, self-fulfillment) under second-generation, postcrisis “late neoliberalism.”

In doing so, I have centered my analytical perspective on the idea of ambivalence, as used by Italian theorist Virno (2006). This notion has allowed me to highlight the aforementioned duplicity of the city–capitalism nexus: the coexistence of a negative politics over life with a politics of life within postcrisis cities, incessantly expropriating as well as reenlivening city life through the mobilization of different cultural dispositifs. In my perspective, a progressive politics of social change has to wade through this complex duality and related processes of capitalist subjectivation.

The juxtaposition of austerity urbanism and a new wave of technology-based urban economies (the so-called technology boom 2.0) in postcrisis cities is particularly illustrative of this dynamic. On the one hand, local governments have committed to the implementation of austerity measures and other budget cutbacks within a context of economic and sociospatial restructuring caused by the global economic crisis and at a time when the housing crisis has come to hit a growing number of households customarily associated with the middle class. On the other hand, a select circle of cities have started magnetizing venture capital flows, witnessing the rise of technology-based entrepreneurship within their central areas, as the technology-based sharing economy has radically transformed the ways in which residents and consumers interact with each other in a variety of domains involving the very foundations of social life, such as mobility, food, home, and education. The latter dynamic has contrasting effects on urban societies and the imaginary of capitalism: It contributes to reenergizing the “dormant spirits of capitalism,” fostering a deepened sense of entrepreneurialism within the economy, but it also leads to the production of new inequalities of income and wealth. The U.S. economy provides clear evidence of this phenomenon: An elite of major cities (“the great American cities,” particularly those along the West and East coasts) have seen a precipitous rise in house prices and, more generally, a renewed economic growth that has benefited a circumscribed set of highly educated, skilled, and “creative” portions of the workforce (what mainstream urban economists variously define as “creative class,” “smart labor,” high-skilled workers, and the like), whereas racial minorities and other low-income groups within the same cities along with the residents of cities and rural areas in peripheral, economically struggling regions have lagged behind. It is no surprise then that sociospatial inequalities have been at the center of recent debates over the geography of electoral behavior in key capitalist countries such as the United Kingdom, after the “Brexit” vote, and the United States after the shocking election of Donald Trump in November 2016.

In this context, a straightforward characterization of current political scenarios in terms of a resurgent urban–rural divide has gained currency within public debates. The postelection debate in the United States is particularly illustrative of this tendency. Many commentators have indulged in forms of “cityism,” glorifying the democratic distinctiveness of the “liberal cities” being seen in contrast to losing regions that have become reservoirs of populist resentment and other “negative passions.” In my perspective, however, this view overlooks at least two things: first, Trump's urban roots as a real estate tycoon whose fortunes have been intimately linked to the exploitation of cities' built environment and communicative capital (along with Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's former prime minister, a living demonstration of the city–capitalism nexus, as I put it in the conclusion to the book); second, it ignores the fact that Trump's crusade against the “inner cities” and their living conditions conducive to crime and social deviance has drawn on a long-term, bipartisan tradition of U.S. administrations criminalizing urban environments and their racial minorities (see Hinton 2016). In Europe, cities attract international migrants and refugees but also witness inimical reactions to this influx, particularly within disenfranchised low-income neighborhoods. This means that contemporary cities, far from being happy enclaves for democracy and the ideal of an open society, are integral to the ambivalence of contemporary societies: their social hostilities, on the one hand, and their potential politics of coexistence and social justice, on the other hand. In sum, the purpose of this book has been to help the reader achieve a deeper understanding of the multiply ambivalent roles of contemporary cities within today's capitalist societies.

This leads me to the response to my critics. Both Pauline McGuirk and Mark Purcell draw attention to the alleged pessimism of my book, as proven by my parsimony with regard to details about the construction of political alternatives. In a section of chapter 5 entitled “The Revenant City,” as Mark Purcell underlines, I emphasize the potential for a politics of postcapitalist transformation immanent in the functioning of urban biopolitical economies. Today's corporatized “sharing economy” largely appropriates this potential, which is illustrative of a growing aspiration for communal life in our societies, in response to the individualized suffering brought about by the global economic crisis. In this perspective, in the conclusion I stress the need for an explicit repoliticization of community endeavors inspired by a conception of city life as a “space of the common” (Hardt and Negri 2009), as politicization staves off the ever-present risk of cooptation into the seductive dynamics of neoliberal urbanism. At the same time, despite this potential, there is no doubt that we have fallen on hard times, ones in which wars of class, race, and religion against minorities identified as enemies of global civilization have dramatically intensified in recent years (Alliez and Lazzarato 2016). If this book had been written four years ago, my account would have probably been different. In an article published in 2013, I concluded as follows (forgive me for quoting myself):

Life lies at the centre of the politics of capitalist development and restructuring in times of unresolved economic turbulences, taking the form of a dialectical biopolitics marked by the confrontation between capitalist and market subsumption, resumed state sovereignty, residents' reappropriation of life itself and the rise of social movements of unexpected intensity and geographical ubiquity, showing that “another world is possible” beyond the limits and failures of late neoliberalism. (Rossi 2013, 1073)

Four or five years later, subsequent developments have revealed a rather different picture, one resembling, as I write in the conclusion, what Polanyi wrote about historical fascism as a spectre constantly looming over capitalist societies coping with the failure of a self-regulating market economy: “fascism was an ever-given political possibility, an almost instantaneous emotional reaction in every industrial community since the 1930s. One may call it a ‘move’ in preference to a ‘movement’” (Polanyi [1944] 2001, 247). As a text purposely located in a historicized present, as both Theresa Enright and Jamie Peck underline in their commentaries, this book inevitably reflects my concerns related to the increasing likelihood of this “move.” My feeling is that mainstream understandings of advanced capitalist economies centered on the binary opposition between innovative actors, such as the creative class and the smart labor force mentioned earlier, and the rest of the workforce have contributed to reinforcing communitarian tensions, as shown in cities like San Francisco, Berlin, and London in recent years. In this sense, my characterization of urban neoliberalism as a living entity, an aspect on which Jamie Peck's commentary dwells, is intended to underscore the workings of neoliberalism not just as a set of economic policies and even a larger government rationality but as a fluctuating form of life forged by an emotional politics constantly reviving class-based tensions within capitalist societies, particularly by opposing the winners to the losers of the technology-led economy in unprecedented ways. The book can be seen largely as a history of our troubled present in which social divisions within and among cities have become increasingly visible and politicized in new forms. On the conservative side, the rise of what is customarily defined as “populist politics” is the existing response to these contradictions. On the progressive side, the pursuit of a joyous politics of encounter, mobilizing the city as a space of the common in which powerless minorities and subaltern groups meet and organize themselves into horizontally assembled collectives, appears to be an adequate alternative to the “negative passions” of populist politics. My current work, the first outcome of which will be a book edited along with Theresa Enright (Enright and Rossi 2018), goes precisely in the direction of interrogating this productive ambivalence of the “urban political” within an increasingly polarized political landscape.

Writing from a perspective attentive to the contradictions of the city–capitalism nexus, understood as a hybrid formation, I have abstained from engaging in a definitional understanding of the urban as such, a point raised by both Allen J. Scott and Lisa Björkman. Contrary to recent orientations in urban studies that tend to center scholarly debates on the definition of the urban (Brenner and Schmid 2015; Roy 2015; Scott and Storper 2015), my approach requires asking preliminarily “What is capitalism?,” as since the very beginning of this book I conceptualize the urban as intimately interlinked—in a relationship of immanence—with technology-based capitalism in the current biopolitical age. After the crisis of 2008, public debates have seen a resurgent interest in the understanding of capitalism. My book aims to bring these debates into the realm of urban studies, calling attention to the distinctive contribution that urban knowledge can provide to a transformative politics of social change in a context in which an ultimately rent-based economy, in its different articulations (from the built environment to knowledge), tends to subsume everything under itself but in doing so unwittingly creates conditions for its obsolescence.