ABSTRACT
Over the past two decades, new global conceptions of the urban have widely contested the idea of city as analytical category, once the core of discourses of urban form in architecture and urbanism. Central to these studies was a materialist critique of modern society and urban form based on contradictions inscribed in residential types, morphologies, and urban infrastructure. For theorists across Southern Europe and beyond, the spatial organization of production coincided with the city formal structure, historically produced by the organization of the social body and the economic system. More than revealing the structural contradictions in urban growth, morphological studies provided planning with tools for manipulating the urban structure in defense against speculative development.
Although the contemporary scales of the urban dimension permanently challenged the typo-morphological apparatus and the idea of the city, this chapter argues that a materialist approach to social inequality, architecture, and urban form remains critical to urban studies. Current far-reaching theories of urbanization risk leveling problematic social differentials under the totalizing category of urban society. By revisiting the principles and methods of the materialist critique, this chapter highlights the role architecture plays in the pursuit of equitable alternatives in the planning and management of urban form.
