New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question argues that the urban can no longer be understood as a bounded city opposed to suburb or countryside, but as a multiscalar process produced through capitalism, state power and uneven spatial transformation. Brenner critiques twentieth-century urban studies for treating the city as a discrete territorial unit, a “container” with clear limits. Against this horizontal geography, he proposes a vertical and relational reading: the urban is formed through shifting relations between local, regional, national, global and planetary scales. The book therefore reframes the urban question as a scale question, asking how urbanization is produced through processes of scaling and rescaling. Central to this argument is the role of the state. Brenner rejects the idea that globalization weakens the state; instead, he shows that state institutions actively reorganize urban space by promoting competitiveness, infrastructure, investment zones and new forms of metropolitan governance. Urbanization is thus not only the growth of cities, but the transformation of a wider capitalist urban fabric: dense centres, logistics corridors, hinterlands, extractive landscapes and operational territories. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey, Brenner distinguishes the city from the urban: the city is only one historical form within a broader process of urbanization. This shift allows him to criticise “methodological cityism”, the tendency to assume the city as the natural unit of urban research. The book’s theoretical force lies in showing that contemporary urbanization is polymorphic, uneven and increasingly planetary, shaped by implosion into dense centres and explosion across territories that support capital accumulation. Rather than offering a closed theory, Brenner presents scale as a powerful but limited analytical tool, later opening toward the question of planetary urbanization. His contribution is decisive for critical urban theory because it displaces the city as object and replaces it with the restless, conflictual and historically mutable production of urban space itself.