Brenner reformulates the urban question as a struggle over the production and reorganisation of geographical scale. His iconic idea is that globalisation does not dissolve territory into a homogeneous world space; it generates a contradictory “explosion of spaces” in which urban, regional, national and supranational scales are continually rearranged. The theoretical contribution extends Lefebvre’s spatial dialectic by treating scale not as a pre-given ladder but as a historically produced and politically contested configuration. Methodologically, Brenner reads capitalist restructuring through the simultaneous processes of integration, fragmentation, polarisation and reterritorialisation, connecting institutional change to transformed urban regions. The conceptual operation is rescaling: apparently local urban processes become intelligible as moments within broader reorganisations of state power and accumulation. The wider bridge reaches political geography, state theory, globalisation studies and critical urbanism. The city consequently ceases to be a bounded object and becomes a strategic site through which scalar hierarchies are constructed, destabilised and temporarily fixed.
URBANISM MEETS ART