Manuel Castells' The Urban Question A Review Essay

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Abstract
The Urban Question, by Manuel Castells, is an important contri bution to the growing Marxist critique of urban studies. The book's central criti cism is that the histoncal relativity of the term "urban" makes the urban field one without a rigorously defined object. As such, urban studies becomes an ideology which masks social relations with environmental determinism. Castells puts for ward the hypothesis that the term "urban" refers to the ideological apprehension of the collective reproduction of labor power in capitalist societies. He under takes several empirical and theoretical studies that are not very useful because they rely on an eclectic, formalistic empiricism. The hypothesis that the "urban" is an ideology reflecting reproduction requires a rigorous formulation of the specificity of "reproduction," "ideology," and the "urban" in relation to the mode of production. The so-called "ideological instance" actually refers to particular relations produced in the capitalist mode of production. I suggest that the "urban" simultaneously refers to the processes of socialization of production, realization of surplus value, and collective reproduction of labor power.

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