“I’ll begin with the following hypothesis: society has been completely urbanized.” - Henri Lefebvre, La révolution urbaine (1970)

In 1970, Henri Lefebvre put forward the radical hypothesis of the complete urbanization of society, a circumstance that in his view required a radical shift from the analysis of urban form to the investigation of urbanization processes.

Drawing together classic and contemporary texts on the urbanization question, this book Implosions / Explosions. Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization explores various theoretical, epistemological, methodological and political implications of Lefebvre’s hypothesis. It assembles a series of analytical and cartographic interventions that supersede inherited spatial ontologies (urban/rural, town/country, city/non-city, society/nature)

“I’ll begin with the following hypothesis: society has been completely urbanized.” - Henri Lefebvre, La révolution urbaine (1970)

In 1970, Henri Lefebvre put forward the radical hypothesis of the complete urbanization of society, a circumstance that in his view required a radical shift from the analysis of urban form to the investigation of urbanization processes.

Drawing together classic and contemporary texts on the urbanization question, this book Implosions / Explosions. Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization explores various theoretical, epistemological, methodological and political implications of Lefebvre’s hypothesis. It assembles a series of analytical and cartographic interventions that supersede inherited spatial ontologies (urban/rural, town/country, city/non-city, society/nature) in order to investigate the uneven implosions and explosions of capitalist urbanization across places, regions, territories, continents and oceans up to the planetary scale.