Introduction

TbiIlkiIlg about t.ne city from t.he s t.andpoLrrt of a lIarxi:lt, and about Marxism from the standpoint of an urbanist, is fraught with a lot of difficulties. For Marxist urbanists, this double movement runs the danger of tugging one in opposite directions or else having one fall between two stools. The present offering tries to reconcile these two political and intellectual imaginations. It's my hope that what emerges in this book will help sustain (and resuscitate) Marxist theory while enriching our critical understanding of the kind of city most of us inhabit today: the capitalist city. At any rate, the act of reconciling Marxism with urbanism isn't easy. Often the difficulties I've encountered haven't just been my own scholarly failings-evident as they are; for it's equally clear that, historically, Marxism's own relationship to urbanism has been pretty stormy. And urbanism, in turn, as a broad-based social scientific discipline and practice, has frequently eyed Marxism with a fair bit of skepticism. In an odd sense, the thinkers I've selected here, and whom I base each chapter around and give my own take on, have all suffered somehow from these respective pitfalls: their urbanism has been rejected because of its Marxist overtones, or else their Marxism has been "officially"denounced (or ignored) because of its urban (and spatial) overtones. For me, it's exactlythis heterodoxy that makes each chosen thinker not only a better urbanist but also a more imaginative Marxist.