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What is Critical Urban Theory?Critical
urban theory involves the critique of ideology and the critique of power,
inequality, injustice and exploitation, at once within and among cities.
Brenner, N. (2009). What is critical
urban theory? City, 13(2–3),
198–207.
Brenner,
N. (2017).Critique of urbanization: Selected essays. Bauverlag ;
Birkhauser.Source:https://www.birkhauser.ch/books/9783035607956But
what exactly is critical urban theory? Neil Brenner, a prominent critical urban
theorist, addressed this question in a paper published in the journal City in
2009. The paper was later included in Brenner's book, Critique of
urbanization: Selected essays. In this work, Brenner traces the origins of
the concept of critique and the emergence and evolution of critical theory. He
identifies four key elements of critical theory and then shifts to discuss the
position of urban question within critical social theory. Brenner emphasizes
that in the era of planetary urbanization, critical theory and critical urban
theory are inextricably linked.Below
is an edited excerpts from Chapter 2 of Critique of urbanization: Selected
essays.What
is critical urban theory? This phrase is generally used as a shorthand
reference to the writings of leftist or radical urban scholars during the
post-1968 period – for instance, those of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Manuel
Castells, Peter Marcuse and a legion of others who have been inspired or
influenced by them. Critical urban theory rejects inherited disciplinary
divisions of labor and statist, technocratic, market-driven and market-oriented
forms of urban knowledge. In this sense, critical theory differs fundamentally
from what might be termed “mainstream” urban theory – for example, the approaches
inherited from the Chicago School of urban sociology, or those deployed within
technocratic or neoliberal forms of policy science. Rather than affirming the
current condition of cities as the expression of transhistorical laws of social
organization, bureaucratic rationality or economic efficiency, critical urban
theory emphasizes the politically and ideologically mediated, socially
contested and therefore malleable character of urban space – that is, its continual (re)construction as a site, medium and
outcome of historically specific relations of social power.Critical
urban theory is thus grounded on an antagonistic relationship not only to
inherited urban knowledges, but more generally, to existing urban formations.
It insists that other, more democratic, socially just and sustainable forms of
urbanization are possible, even if such possibilities are currently being
suppressed through dominant institutional arrangements, practices and
ideologies. In short, critical urban theory involves the critique of
ideology and the critique of power, inequality, injustice and exploitation, at
once within and among cities.However,
the notions of critique, and more specifically of critical theory, are not
merely descriptive terms. They have determinate social-theoretical content that
is derived from various strands of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment social
philosophy, especially within the work of Hegel, Marx and the Western Marxian
tradition. Some of the key arguments of the Frankfurt School provide a crucial,
if often largely implicit, reference point for the contemporary work of
critical urbanists.We
are witnessing nothing less than an urbanization of the world – the
planetary “urban revolution”anticipated in the 1970s by Henri Lefebvre. Under conditions of increasingly
generalized, worldwide urbanization, the project of critical social theory and
that of critical urban theory have been mutually intertwined as never before.Critique and critical social theoryThe
modern idea of critique is derived from the Enlightenment and was developed
most systematically in the work of Kant, Hegel and the Left Hegelians. But it assumed
a new significance in Marx’s work, with the development of the notion
of a critique of political economy. For Marx, the critique of political economy
entailed, on the one hand, a form of Ideologiekritik (critique of ideology), an
unmasking of the historically specific myths, reifications and antinomies that
pervade bourgeois forms of knowledge. Just as importantly, Marx understood the
critique of political economy not only as a critique of ideas and discourses
about capitalism, but as a critique of capitalism itself, and as a contribution
to the collective effort to transcend it. In this dialectical conception, a key
task of critique is to reveal the contradictions within the historically
specific social totality formed by capitalism.This
approach to critique is seen to have several important functions. First, it
exposes the forms of power, exclusion, injustice and inequality that underpin
capitalist social formations. Second, for Marx, the critique of political
economy is intended to illuminate the landscape of ongoing and emergent
sociopolitical struggles: it connects the ideological discourses of the
political sphere to the underlying (class) antagonisms and social forces within
bourgeois society. Perhaps most crucially, Marx understood critique as a means
to explore, both in theory and in practice, the possibility of forging
alternatives to capitalism. A critique of political economy thus served to show
how capitalism’s contradictions simultaneously undermine the system, and point
beyond it, towards other ways of organizing societal capacities and
society/nature relations.In
the 20th century, Marx's critique of political economy was integrated into
diverse traditions of critical social analysis, among which the Frankfurt
School's critical social theory most systematically explored critique as a
methodological, theoretical, and political issue. In 1937, Max Horkheimer first
introduced the term "critical theory." This concept was further
developed by his colleagues Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. In his 1964
classic One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse proposed that critical theory encompasses
an immanent critique of the contemporary forms of capitalist society. Marcuse's
work was directly tied to the core of Marx's critique of political economy—exploring
the contradictions within existing social relations to uncover latent emancipatory
alternatives. In the 1980s, Jürgen Habermas steered
critical theory in new directions, bringing it to a more mature form.Key elements of critical theory: four propositionsThere
are, of course, profound epistemological, methodological, political and
substantive differences among writers such as Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse and
Habermas. Nonetheless, it can be argued that their writings collectively
elaborate a core, underlying conception of critical theory. This conception can
be summarized with reference to four key propositions: critical theory is
theory; it is reflexive; it involves a critique of instrumental reason; and it
is focused on the disjuncture between the actual and the possible. These
propositions should be understood as being inextricably intertwined and
mutually constitutive; the full meaning of each can only be grasped in relation
to the others (Figure 2.1).
Critical theory is theoryIn
the Frankfurt School, critical theory is unapologetically abstract. It is
characterized by epistemological and philosophical reflections; the development
of formal concepts, generalizations about historical trends; deductive and
inductive modes of argumentation; and diverse forms of historical analysis. It
may also build upon concrete research, that is, upon an evidentiary basis,
whether organized through traditional or critical methods. It is, in this
sense, a theory.Critical
theory is thus not intended to serve as a formula for any particular course of
social change; it is not a strategic map for social change; and it is not a
practical manual for social movements. It may – indeed, it should – have mediations to the realm of practice, and it is explicitly
intended to inform the strategic perspective of progressive, radical or
revolutionary social and political actors. But, at the same time, crucially,
the Frankfurt School conception of critical theory is focused on a moment of
abstraction that is analytically prior to the famous Leninist question of “What is to be done?”Critical theory is reflexiveIn
the Frankfurt School tradition, theory is understood to be at once enabled by,
and oriented towards, specific historical conditions and contexts. This
conceptualization has at least two key implications. First, critical theory
entails a total rejection of any standpoint – positivistic, transcendental,
metaphysical or otherwise – that claims to be able to
stand “outside” of the
contextually specific time/space of history. All social knowledge, including
critical theory, is embedded within the dialectics of social and historical
change; it is thus intrinsically contextual.Second,
Frankfurt School critical theory transcends a generalized hermeneutic concern
with the situatedness of all knowledge. It is focused, more specifically, on
the question of how oppositional, antagonistic forms of knowledge, subjectivity
and consciousness may emerge within an historical social formation.Critical
theorists confront this issue by emphasizing the fractured, broken or
contradictory character of capitalism as a social totality. If the totality
were closed, noncontradictory or complete, there could be no critical
consciousness of it; there would be no need for critique; and indeed, critique
would be structurally impossible. Critique emerges precisely insofar as society
is in conflict with itself, that is, because its mode of development is
self-contradictory.In
this sense, critical theorists are concerned not only to situate themselves and
their research agendas within the historical evolution of modern capitalism.
Just as crucially, they want to understand what it is about modern capitalism
that enables their own and others’ forms of critical
consciousness.Critical theory entails a critique of instrumental reasonThe
Frankfurt School critical theorists developed a critique of instrumental
reason. Building on Max Weber’s writings, they argued against the
societal generalization of a technical rationality oriented towards the
purposive-rational (Zweckrationale ), an efficient linking of means to ends,
without interrogation of the ends themselves. This critique had implications
for various realms of industrial organization, technology and administration,
but most crucially here, Frankfurt School theorists also applied it to the realm
of social science.In
this sense, critical theory entails a forceful rejection of instrumental modes
of social scientific knowledge – that is, those designed to render
existing institutional arrangements more efficient and effective, to manipulate
and dominate the social and physical world, and thus to bolster current forms
of power. Instead, critical theorists demanded an interrogation of the ends of
knowledge, and thus, an explicit engagement with normative-political questions.Frankfurt
School scholars argued that a critical theory must make explicit its
practical-political and normative orientations, rather than embracing a narrow
or technocratic vision. Instrumentalist modes of knowledge necessarily
presuppose their own separation from their object of investigation. However,
once that separation is rejected, and the knower is understood to be embedded
within the same practical social context that is being investigated, normative
questions are unavoidable. The proposition of reflexivity and the critique of
instrumental reason are thus directly interconnected.Consequently,
when critical theorists discuss the so-called theory/practice problem, they are
not referring to the question of how to “apply”theory to practice. Rather, they are thinking this dialectical relationship in
exactly the opposite direction – namely, how the realm
of practice (and thus, normative-political considerations) always already
inform the work of theorists, even when the latter remains on an abstract
level.Critical theory emphasizes the disjuncture between the
actual and the possiblethe
Frankfurt School embraces a dialectical critique of capitalist modernity – that
is, one that affirms the possibilities for human liberation that are opened up
by this social formation while also criticizing its systemic exclusions,
oppressions, injustices and irrationalities. The task of critical theory is
therefore not only to investigate the forms of domination, scarcity and waste
associated with modern capitalism, but equally, to excavate the emancipatory
possibilities that are embedded within, yet simultaneously suppressed by, this
very system.In
much Frankfurt School writing, this orientation involves a “search
for a revolutionary subject,” that is, the concern to
find an agent of radical social change that could realize the possibilities
unleashed yet suppressed by capitalism. However, given the Frankfurt School’s abandonment of any hope for a proletarian-style revolution, their
search for a revolutionary subject during the postwar period generated a rather
gloomy pessimism regarding the possibility for social transformation and,
especially in the work of Adorno and Horkheimer, a retreat into relatively
abstract philosophical and aesthetic concerns.Marcuse,
by contrast, presents a very different position on this issue in the opening
chapter of One-Dimensional Man. Here, he agrees with his Frankfurt School
colleagues that, in contrast to the formative period of capitalist
industrialization, late twentieth-century capitalism lacks any clear “agents
or agencies of social change”; in other words, the
proletariat was no longer operating as a class “for
itself.” Nonetheless, Marcuse insists forcefully that “the need for qualitative change is as pressing as ever before […] by society as a whole, for every one of its members.”Against
this background, Marcuse proposes that the rather abstract quality of critical
theory, during the time in which he was writing, was organically linked to the
absence of an obvious agent of radical, emancipatory social change. He argues,
moreover, that the abstractions associated with critical theory could only be
blunted or dissolved through concrete-historical struggles: “The
theoretical concepts,” Marcuse suggests, “terminate with social change.”Marcuse’s
position is reminiscent of Marx’s famous claim that all
science would be superfluous if there were no distinction between reality and
appearance. Similarly, Marcuse suggests, in a world in which radical or
revolutionary social change were occurring, critical theory would be
effectively marginalized or even dissolved – not in its
critical orientation, but as theory: it would become concrete practice. Or, to
state this point differently, it is precisely because revolutionary,
transformative, emancipatory social practice remains so tightly circumscribed
and constrained under contemporary capitalism that critical theory remains
critical theory – and not simply everyday social
practice.Critical theory and the urbanization questionWhile
Marx’s work has exercised a massive influence on the post-1968 field of
critical urban studies, few, if any, contributors to this field have engaged
directly with the writings of the Frankfurt School. Nonetheless, I believe that
most authors who position themselves within the intellectual universe of
critical urban studies would endorse, at least in general terms, the conception
of critical theory that is articulated through the four propositions summarized
above:− they insist on the need for abstract, theoretical
arguments regarding the nature of urban processes under capitalism, while
rejecting the conception of theory as being subservient to immediate, practical
or instrumental concerns;− they view knowledge of urban questions,
including critical perspectives on the latter, as being historically specific
and mediated through power relations;− they reject instrumentalist, technocratic and
market-driven forms of urban analysis that promote the maintenance and
reproduction of extant urban formations; and− they are concerned to excavate possibilities
for alternative, radical and emancipatory forms of urbanism that are latent,
yet suppressed, within contemporary cities.Of
course, any given contribution to critical urban theory may be more attuned to
some of these propositions than to others, but they appear, cumulatively, to
constitute an important epistemological foundation for the field as a whole.In
this sense, critical urban theory has developed on an intellectual and
political terrain that had already been tilled extensively not only by Marx,
but also by the various theoreticians of the Frankfurt School.Given
the rather pronounced, even divisive character of methodological,
epistemological and substantive debates among critical urbanists since the
consolidation of this field in the early 1970s, it is essential not to lose
sight of these broad areas of foundational agreement.However,
as the field of critical urban studies continues to evolve and diversify in the
early twenty-first century, its character as a putatively “critical” theory deserves to be subjected to careful scrutiny and systematic
debate. In an incisive feminist critique of Habermas, Nancy Fraser famously
asked, “What’s critical about
critical theory?” Fraser’s
question can also be posed of the field of study under discussion here: what’s critical about critical urban theory?Precisely
because the process of capitalist urbanization continues its forward movement
of creative destruction and socioterritorial transformation on a world scale,
the meanings and modalities of critique can never be held constant; they must
be continually reinvented in relation to the unevenly evolving political-economic
geographies of this process and the diverse conflicts it engenders. This is one
of the major intellectual and political challenges confronting critical urban
theorists today.Confronting
this task hinges, I submit, on a much more systematic integration of urban
questions into the analytical framework of critical social theory as a whole. As
Lefebvre presciently anticipated, the capitalist form of urbanization now
increasingly unfolds through the uneven stretching of an urban fabric across the
entire planet: it is composed not only of large, dense agglomerations and their
immediate hinterlands, but of variegated configurations of industrial land use,
infrastructural investment, logistical connectivity and socio-environmental
transformation extended throughout the world economy, including within
relatively “remote,” low-population and/or low-density
landscapes.Urbanization
is, to be sure, still manifested in the continued, massive expansion of cities,
city-regions and megacity regions, but it now equally entails the
intensification of land use, and associated large-scale infrastructure
investments, to metabolize the accelerating industrialization of capital
through extraction, cultivation, logistics and environmental management across
diverse places, territories and landscapes. We are witnessing, in short,
nothing less than the intensification and extension of capitalist urbanization
at all spatial scales, across planetary space as a whole, including not only
the earth’s terrestrial surfaces, but the underground, the oceans and even the
atmosphere itself.As
during previous phases of global capitalist development, the geographies of
urbanization are profoundly uneven, but their parameters are no longer confined
to any single type of settlement space, whether defined as a city, a
city-region, a metropolitan region or even a megacity-region. Consequently,
under contemporary circumstances, the urban can no longer be viewed as a
distinct, relatively bounded site; it has instead become a generalized,
planetary condition in and through which the accumulation of capital, the
extension of industrial infrastructure, the regulation of political-economic
life, the reproduction of everyday social relations, the production of
socionatures and the contestation of humanity’s possible futures are
simultaneously organized and fought out.In
light of this, it is increasingly untenable to view urban questions as merely
one among many specialized subtopics to which a critical theoretical approach
may be applied – alongside, for instance, the family, social psychology, education,
culture industries and the like. Instead, each of the key methodological and
political orientations associated with critical theory, as discussed above,
today requires sustained engagement with contemporary world-wide patterns of
capitalist urbanization and their far-reaching consequences for social,
political-economic and socioenvironmental relations.I
argued above that critical urbanists must work to clarify and continually
redefine the “critical” character of their theoretical
engagements, orientations and commitments in light of early twenty-first
century processes of urban restructuring. Given the far-reaching
transformations associated with such processes, the time seems equally ripe to
integrate the problematic of urbanization more systematically and
comprehensively into the intellectual architecture of critical theory as a
whole.
1.“I
feel like the pandemic was a turning point, and the world is in retreat now,
being dragged back into the past. I might even go so far as to suggest that it’s
becoming more medievalized. Globalism is in flight in a big way, with social
media, once so promising, now reaching a dead end. The image of a town
surrounded by high walls may reflect that situation, of things being blocked,
and obstructed.Perhaps
in this era we live in, older stories may reveal a kind of unexpected
resonance. I’m really hopeful about that possibility.” ―Haruki
Murakami on Rethinking Early Work, New Yorker, 2024![]()
2.“The
earth, from here, is like heaven. It flows with colour. A burst of hopeful
colour. When we’re on that planet we look up and think heaven is elsewhere, but here
is what the astronauts and cosmonauts sometimes think: maybe all of us born to
it have already died and are in an afterlife. If we must go to an improbable,
hard-to-believe-in place when we die, that glassy, distant orb with its
beautiful lonely light shows could well be it.”―Samantha Harvey, Orbital: A Novel
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