Abstract

Birthed by and in turn giving substantive content to Harvey’s historical materialist manifesto for urban studies, it is possible to think of the New Urban Politics (NUP) thesis as in many ways a talented sibling carrying the hopes and aspirations of an expectant parent. Harvey’s mission of course was to persuade urban scholars that there existed an inescapable embroilment of urban processes in capitalism’s histories and geographies; cities were both constituted by and in turn were constitutive of, capitalism and its trajectories. The contribution of the NUP thesis was to mobilise this analytical framework to make sense of epochal transformations in the governance of the contemporary capitalist city and therein to provide insights into the ways in which, at this historical moment, Western cities might be apprehended as key sites in the struggle over the division of the national product.