The Politics of the Encounter: Urban Theory and Protest under Planetary Urbanization, published by the UGA Press, is an interrogation of the city as a site of both theoretical inquiry and global social struggle. The city, writes author and independent scholar Andy Merrifield, remains “important, virtually and materially, for progressive politics.”
And yet, Merrifeld notes, more than 40 years have passed since Henri Lefebvre advanced the powerful ideas that still undergird much of the thinking about urbanization and urban society.
Merrifield rethinks the city in light of the vast changes to Earth since 1970, when Lefebvre’s seminal Urban Revolution was first published. At the same time, he expands on Lefebvre’s notion of “the right to the city,” which was first conceived in the wake of the 1968 student uprising in Paris.
Merrifeld argues we need to think less of cities as “entities with borders and clear demarcations between what’s inside and what’s outside” and emphasize instead the effects of “planetary urbanization.”
