Reimagining Urban Marxisms Rethinking Thinkers, Texts, and Challenges

Preface

Francesco Biagi

List of Contributors

SECTION 1 Theories and problems

1 Against the planetarization of the metabolic rift and of the urban

Brian M. Napoletano, John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Pedro S. Urquijo

2 The urbanization of capitalism: the contemporary relevance of David Harvey’s Marxism

Greig Charnock and Ramon Ribera-Fumaz

3 Architecture, fetishism and the value-form

Douglas Spencer

4 The voluntarist prisoners of architecture: from the Marxist theory of crisis to the culture of crisis and back

William Orr and Ricardo Ruivo

5 Toward a Marxist critique of urban postmodernism: Lefebvre against the “spatial turn”

Francesco Biagi

SECTION 2 The new housing question

6 Historicizing urban political economy: financialization, platformization, and the past and present of urban studies

Simone Tulumello

7 Gentrification and the housing crisis from the lens of Marxist and critical urban theory

Luís Mendes

8 Value grabbing in the city: rent extraction and the building safety crisis

Frances Brill and Callum Ward

9 Social struggles around rental housing in Germany: toward a post-neoliberal transformation of housing regulation?

Sebastian Schipper

10 Disentangling the secondary circuit of capital: the place of rental housing

Bernd Belina

SECTION 3 Expanding Anti-colonial Marxist horizons: exploring possibilities

11 Imperial landscapes: learning from Milton Santos

Stefan Kipfer

12 Cities and Marxist critical thinking: reflections from Brazil

Carlos Vainer, Raquel Rolnik, Cibele Saliba Rizek, and Ana Fernandes

13 Race and class in peripheral cities from a decolonial lens: notes from Brazilian cities

Renato Emerson Nascimento dos Santos

14 Contribution of Marxist political theory to a geography of crime

César Ricardo Simoni Santos

Index

Biography

Francesco Biagi earned his PhD in “political sciences” with a focus on “sociology, history and political culture” from the University of Pisa (Italy) in 2018. Currently, he serves as a researcher in “social theory” at CIAUD, the Research Centre for Architecture, Urbanism, and Design at the Lisbon School of Architecture, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal. He is also a fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History, NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities, affiliated with IN2PAST – the Associate Laboratory for Research and Innovation in Heritage, Arts, Sustainability, and Territory. His research interests encompass political and social theory, with a particular emphasis on the role of urban–rural relations in the historical transformations of capitalism. He has contributed significantly to this field through his publications, including the monographs: Henri Lefebvre: Una teoria critica dello spazio (2019) and Henri Lefebvre’s Critical Theory of Space (2020). Additionally, he has edited the Italian editions of two volumes by Lefebvre: Espace et politique: Le Droit à la ville II and La pensée marxiste et la ville.