Two recent books from Neil Brenner’s Urban Theory Lab at the University of Chicago.

Neil Brenner, Swarnabh Ghosh and Nikos Katsikis, Environments of Planetary Urbanization – Jovis, December 2025

What role do spaces beyond the city play in urbanization? How have such spaces been transformed during the geohistory of capitalism? This volume brings together texts collaboratively produced by three researchers in the Urban Theory Lab to address these questions. Planetary urbanization is understood here not only with reference to the global expansion and proliferation of cities, but as an evolving web of metabolic relations between cities and the diverse operational landscapes that support them across the earth. Through studies of operational landscapes in various regions of the world and critical analyses of inherited approaches to urban theory, the authors portray capitalist urbanization as a metabolic monstrosity that degrades the biospheric foundations of both human and nonhuman life. 

• Conceptualizes planetary urbanization as a thickening web of relations between cities and operational landscapes 
• Critically evaluates and updates urban theory in relation to contemporary planetary environmental transformations and crises 
• Analyzes the essential role of mining, agriculture, and logistics in the dynamics of capitalist urbanization

Grga Bašić, Neil Brenner, Mariano Gomez-Luque and Nikos Katsikis, Data-Spheres of Planetary Urbanization – Jovis, December 2025

How can we map the urbanization of the planet in an era of climate breakdown? The Urban Theory Lab’s Data-Spheres of Planetary Urbanization confronts this question by assembling a series of experimental visualizations of the worldwide urban fabric. This book reverses the mainstream, city-centric perspective on urbanization, showing, instead, that the world of contemporary urbanization encompasses much of the planet, including apparently remote areas, wildlands, and oceans. Cities are not only producers of value, but also entropic black holes that consume surpluses produced elsewhere and project waste back into the planetary biosphere. Non-city spaces are, correspondingly, the metabolic bases of planetary urbanization.

With a foreword by Jason W. Moore, an afterword by Alexander Arroyo, and contributions by Martín Arboleda, Danika Cooper, Kian Goh, Julie Michelle Klinger, Roi Salgueiro Barrio, and Hashim Sarkis

• Shows the impact of planetary urbanization in 500 beautiful and revealing spatial data visualizations
• Highlights the importance of operational landscapes beyond the city