Producing and governing inequalities under planetary urbanization: From urban age to urban revolution?

While urban inequalities have become ubiquitous globally, there is still much debate on how we might conceptualise the forces that produce, reproduce and govern them. As an introduction to this themed issue, the present essay situates its contributions as a critical intervention with the Urban Age thesis. In particular, we focus on the prevalent Urban Age narrative that couples a standardized prescription for economic growth with a risk-management agenda to govern the political expectations, environmental pressures, large-scale migrations, and industrial creative destruction inherent to rapid urban growth. The most prominent alternative to this discourse, the Planetary Urbanization thesis, draws on the Marxist work of Henri Lefebvre, who foresaw the urbanization of the globe and argued that in the future urbanization instead of industrialization would become the driving force of capitalist accumulation. Despite some excellent insights into understandings of the urban as a global process, the Planetary Urbanization literature has yet to dig deep into just how urbanization might drive future accumulation, and even more, how inequalities might be structured and governed in such a world. We argue that the production and governance of urban inequality are intrinsically intertwined with an urbanization-driven capital accumulation. However, such a conjuncture is wrought with contradictions, notably the political limits to rising inequality.