Perhaps the most curious feature of Ugo Rossi's well‐conceived, theoretically rich, and in places eloquent book is its sunny cover art. It is of an urban landscape bathed in gold, populated by Lowry‐like stick figures milling happily among city buildings. The problem is that the art contradicts the content of the book. Rossi's portrayal of the urban landscape of cities in global capitalism after the ‘Great Contraction' (the 2008 financial crisis and recession) is relentlessly bleak and chilling. Even in Lowry's dreary coloured depictions of mid‐century urban industrial (Fordist?) North‐West England there is vitality, possibly even hope, among the ant‐like swarms of people that populate his landscapes. For Rossi there might be hope, but not now for contemporary urban dwellers. As he argues, a combination of neoliberalism and globalization have done them in. It is true that the book offers occasional glimmers of light, but they are quickly snuffed out by Rossi's crushing dark theoretical surround.
That theoretical surround draws from and tries to join together a long‐list of left‐wing social theorists: Adorno, Agamben, Benjamin, Debord, Deleuze, Foucault, Gramsci, Hardt, Harvey, Horkheimer, Jessop, Lukács, Marcuse, Negri, Polanyi, and of course Marx. Foucault's biopolitics meets Marx's subsumtion meets Polyani's double movement meets Harvey's secondary circuit of capital. On the surface, this seems like a doomed project, bound to end in disappointment, maybe chaos, possibly madness. But Rossi's great achievement is that he almost pulls it off. The Introduction is especially deft in forging connections, making these different theorists talk to one another, and in the process constructing a persuasive narrative of global capitalist urban life post‐2008. The Introduction alone is worth the price of admission. It provides an original, up‐to‐the‐minute (Brexit and Trump are in there), creative framework and overview of cities in global capitalism that is rare. Others in the field of urban studies provide narrower depictions, specific in‐depth explanations. But Rossi gives you the whole show; tries to explain it all. It takes chutzpah. It is grand theorizing, but not necessarily grand theory because of Rossi's theoretical eclecticism. It is not only, but also. Seemingly, Rossi hasn't met a social theory of the left he doesn't like, or he can't use.
Rossi's central contention is that the advent of globalization and neoliberalism from the 1980s made the relation between urbanization and capitalism ever stronger, the two now forming an inseparable whole. Urbanization is capitalism, capitalism is urbanization. There is nothing outside that relation, and no point in searching for external explanations. Everything that is important happens within the urban‐capitalist nexus. The emergent effects produced by the internal dynamic among globalization, neoliberalism, urbanization, and capitalism form the present moment, constitute the oppressed now.
In the first substantive chapter of the book (of five), Rossi argues that the recent internal dynamic of that capitalism‐urbanization nexus gives rise to a troika of determining forces. Each is historically deep seated, but under the new conjuncture takes on renewed vigour and weight. Furthermore, as Rossi notes, each of the three forces has become a key constituent of both contemporary capitalism and urbanization, thus demonstrating that the latter have become one and the same. The first is financial capital, primarily organized and controlled by a few world cities, but also underpinning the pervasive turn within capitalism as a whole towards the financialization of everything, and everywhere. The second is entrepreneurialism that varies from urban growth coalitions to the sharing economy of Uber and Airbnb to its most insidious form, the Foucauldian ‘entrepreneurialization of the self', the subsumption of the quotidian details of everyday life to the calculus of marketization. And the third is cognitive capital, that is, making money from creativity, present from the very first stirrings of modern cities, but now under globalization and neoliberalism taking the specific form of high‐tech development, and driving growth within contemporary capitalism and urbanization.
With this basic frame in hand, Rossi's remaining chapters examine the contemporary capitalist‐urban nexus and its associated triad of forces in relation to: first, globalization (Chapter 2); second, neoliberalism (Chapter 3); third, diffused forms of spatial homogeneity – McDonaldization, Disneyfication, and Guggenheimization (Chapter 4); and fourth, geographical and temporal differentiation (Chapter 5). All of this is lucidly conveyed, with different ideas from different social theorists usefully and creatively worked into the material throughout. As a project, Rossi's is ambitious and sweeping, but it is never out of control, the arguments always systematic and tightly drawn. If anything, it is too tightly drawn. There is not much room for messiness. Michael Mann ([
There is another way I want Rossi's scheme to be less tidily complete, and taking me back to the start of my review. For much of the book it appears that there is no way out of the generalized misery that is constitutively built into the very structure of Rossi's analysis. That's what makes the book appear so bleak, the future it paints so hopeless. There is no outside to the capitalism‐urbanization nexus. It is airless. Everyone is stuck inside, subject to its seeming irrevocable grinding logic, and determining not only economic life, but life itself in all forms. Everything is subsumed as the iron cage of neoliberal, globalized urbanism descends after 2008. It is a view perhaps even more pessimistic than Foucault on one of his worst days. Even when Rossi discusses ‘living in an age of ambivalence’ in the Conclusion, which might suggest a contradiction that could be exploited for progressive political purposes, what he actually means is that capitalism is dastardly in two ways, positively and negatively. You can’t win. All that said, there are odd moments when Rossi recognizes the audacity of hope (for example, on p. 145 and pp. 170–171). In those passages cities in global capitalism appear not quite so totalizing and suffocating. Air holes are drilled, and possibilities for a resuscitated life appear briefly conceivable. I just wish there were more of those moments, though, more air holes.
1 Mann M ( 1986 ) The sources of social power: A history of power from the beginning to 1760. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
By Trevor J. Barnes