ABSTRACT
Urbanization is rapidly accelerating, and extending ever more densely, if unevenly, across the earth’s surface. The combined demographic, economic, socio-technological, material-metabolic and sociocultural processes of urbanization have resulted in the formation of a globalized network of spatially
concentrated human settlements and infrastructural configurations in which major dimensions of modern capitalism are at once concentrated, reproduced and contested. This pattern of increasingly globalized urbanization contradicts earlier predictions, in the waning decades of the twentieth century, that the era of urbanization was nearing its end due to new information technologies (such as the internet), declining
globe.” Examining the new urbanization as an expression of global capitalism in the post-World War II and postCold War contexts, they see new global cities that are increasingly detached from nation-states and subject to “supranational or global forces” that have been explored by neo-Marxists like Lefebvre, David Harvey (p. 270), and Manuel Castells (p. 229). In the eyes of these theorists, they observe, urbanization has now become “an active moment within the ongoing production and transformation of capitalist socio-spatial configurations.”
