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 Cerdá s Teoría general de la urbanización, 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
Felicity Scott