Afterword: New Spaces of Urbanization

This chapter presents the elements of a reinvigorated approach to critical urban theory that could help decipher the multiplication of urban transformations within and beyond major metropolitan regions under early twenty-first-century capitalism. It also advances a systematic critique of the narrowly city-centric conceptions of urbanization that underpin influential recent declarations of a majority-urban world. In thus proceeding, this chapter introduces new layers of meaning, and additional sociospatial dimensions, to the scale-attuned theorization of the capitalist urban fabric elaborated in the book’s previous chapters, especially with reference to the spatiotemporal dynamics of extended urbanization. A central challenge, within this framework, is to connect the restructuring of major cities and metropolitan regions to the colossal, if variegated, social, infrastructural, and ecological transformations that are unfolding in the world’s industrializing hinterlands to support the restless metabolism of capitalist urbanization. The chapter concludes by emphasizing the importance of a (reinvented) critical urban theory to the collective project of imagining, and ultimately pursuing, alternative forms and pathways of urbanization.