Circulation and Urbanization

Circulation and Urbanization is a timely and powerful retheorization both of the "urban" and of processes of urbanization, artfully marking out the complex and often elusive historical entanglements of spatial orders, forms of management, technologies of political power, legal frameworks, economic relations, and infrastructures of circulation as they emerged in the 19th century. Taking as a starting point Ildefonso Cerda's Teoria general de la urbanizacion, Adams brilliantly resituates the epistemic and political legacy of this landmark study, offering at once a prehistory of the contemporary nexus of space, the state, security, and capital, and a conceptual toolbox, even a cartography for understanding how power functions within cities and populations, and upon subjects, through circulation and urbanization. The book's ramifications are rich and manifold, for this interdisciplinary study also harbours a cogent diagram for confronting such processes with new political strategies, for opening up new types of political space. -- Felicity Scott Adams shatters conventional urban thought to reveal (and revel in) the circulatory logics at the heart of urbanization. A truly eye-opening book. -- Philip Steinberg Urbanists of the world: rethink your most basic assumptions! In this path-breaking intervention, Ross Exo Adams reveals that "cities" are only one dimension of the urban problematique. His wide-ranging explorations radically destabilize contemporary urban ideologies. They also produce a strikingly original perspective on the historicity and present situation of cities, urbanization, infrastructure, territory and design. This is essential reading for anyone concerned to understand and shape the worlds of urbanization we have inherited from earlier rounds of capitalist industrial development, state strategy and everyday insurgency. -- Neil Brenner