New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood - Tapa dura

This book is a tremendous achievement. It combines a rare theoretical sophistication with informed empirical insight, and it should be read, and read closely, by anyone with an interest in state intervention and restucturing. (Mark Goodwin - Environment and Planning A)

Honourable Mention (Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award 2005, Political Sociological Section, American Sociological Association)

For a long time, analysts of capitalism laid out their explanations as if space did not matter. Radical geographers, city planners, and students of popular politics then began complaining about the neglect of space, and setting concrete studies of urban change in the context of abstractly framed geographic theories. Neil Brenner takes the whole discussion a step farther, bringing together a knowledgeable critique and synthesis of previous thinking about 'state spaces,' important new ideas about regional policy under today's capitalism, and deeply documented comparisons of European regions. Students of political processes have much to learn from this book. (Charles Tilly, Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science, Columbia University)

Neil Brenner brings together the cutting edges of the new economic and political geographies to produce a creatively transdisciplinary geopolitical economy of the territorial state and the re-scaling of the contemporary world. This is critically spatialized social science at its best: astutely comprehensive in its theoretical scope, pointedly insightful in its assessment of European planning practices, and richly empirical in its argument and analysis. The scales of accomplishment are enormous. (Edward W. Soja, Professor of Urban Planning, UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research)

Brenner brilliantly traces how urban governance has become one of the strategic sites for fundamental transformations of national statehood. The book takes us to analytic zones we did not know existed. Great and original. (Saskia Sassen, Author, Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization)

intellectually rich and challenging. Brenner seamlessly moves between major intellectual traditions, confidently borrowing and recombining arguments and perspectives. The claims are sophisticated and certain to recast debates about the role of cities in the era of globalization. (Contemporary Sociology, 35.1, January 2006)

In this synthetic, interdisciplinary work, Neil Brenner develops a new interpretation of the transformation of statehood under contemporary globalizing capitalism. Whereas most analysts of the emergent, post-Westphalian world order have focused on supranational and national institutional realignments, 'New State Spaces' shows that strategic subnational spaces, such as cities and city-regions, represent essential arenas in which states are being transformed. Brenner traces the transformation of urban governance in western Europe during the last four decades and, on this basis, argues that inherited geographies of state power are being fundamentally rescaled. Through a combination of theory construction, historical analysis and cross-national case studies of urban policy change, 'New State Spaces' provides an innovative analysis of the new formations of state power that are currently emerging.

This is a mature and sophisticated analysis by a major young scholar