New state spaces: urban governance and the rescaling of statehood - Tapa blanda

This book demonstrates Neil Brenner as a leading scholar of political geography; it thus represents a synopsis of his work through the past decade and helps the reader to get a hold on a difficult and sometimes flimsy debate. The book and its arguments around the rescaling of governmental spaces can only be strongly recommended. Neil Brenner has written a book that is difficult to ignore for all with an interest not only in current debate on government restructuring, but also for all who follow the ongoing discussion on the construction of a new Europe - a Europe of New state spaces. (Geografiska Annaler, 88B)

Honourable Mention (Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award 2005, Political Sociology 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)

Neil Brenner has in the past few years made a major impact on the ways in which we understand the changing political geographies of the modern state. Simultaneously analyzing the restructuring of urban governance and the transformation of national states under globalizing capitalism, 'New State Spaces' is a mature and sophisticated analysis of broad interdisciplinary interest, making this a highly significant contribution to the subject.