Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid’s ‘Elements for a New Epistemology of the Urban’ argues that contemporary urbanisation can no longer be understood through the inherited image of the city as a bounded settlement opposed to countryside, wilderness or hinterland. Their central claim is that the urban is not an empirical object but a theoretical category, meaning that it must be constructed through concepts rather than simply observed as a visible form. Against city-centred approaches, they propose planetary urbanisation as a framework for understanding how capitalism reorganises territories far beyond dense metropolitan cores. Mines, logistics corridors, data centres, agro-industrial zones, energy grids, waste sites, oceans and former wilderness areas are all incorporated into urban processes because they sustain the metabolism of distant agglomerations. The chapter distinguishes concentrated urbanisation, where people, infrastructure and capital cluster in cities; extended urbanisation, where remote landscapes are operationalised to support urban life; and differential urbanisation, where inherited spatial arrangements are repeatedly destroyed and remade. This triad is crucial because it shows that the urban is a process, not a fixed form. The authors also insist that urbanisation is multidimensional, involving spatial practices, territorial regulation and everyday life. This means that the urban is produced not only through buildings and infrastructures, but also through governance, labour, displacement, routine and struggle. Ultimately, Brenner and Schmid make an epistemological and political intervention: if urbanisation has become planetary, then urban theory must abandon the rural/urban binary and analyse the uneven, contested networks through which contemporary life is organised. The urban is therefore not merely where people live; it is the planetary fabric through which capitalism extracts, connects, regulates and transforms the world.
