1. On the racialized dimension of class identity, see David Roediger, Wages of Whiteness (New York: Verso, 1991).

2. Stanley Aronowitz, The Politics of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1992), 32. Emphasis in the original. My position converges in many (but not all) respects with Edward W. Soja's eloquent arguments for replacing radical political economy with a postmodern cultural politics as the basis of critical urban theory. See “Margin/Alia: Social Justice and the New Cultural Politics,” in The Urbanization of Injustice, ed. Andy Merrifield and Erik Swyngedouw (New York: New York University Press, 1997).

3. My aim here, it should be emphasized, is not to show, yet again, the inadequacy of class reductionism. More than enough has been written about this issue, although I will discuss it at several points throughout what follows, where doing so appears necessary to the larger argument.

4. “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.” Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works in One Volume (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1968), 96.

5. See, for example, Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1997).

6. See Aristide Zolberg and Long Litt Woon, “Why Islam Is Like Spanish: Cultural Incorporation in Europe and the United States,” Negotiating Difference Series, ICMEC Working Papers, International Center for Migration, Ethnicity, and Citizenship at the New School for Social Research, June 1997.

7. These trends are not so new. As early as 1937, Robert Park spoke about hybridity, migration, and the interpenetration of cultures. Race and Culture (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1950), 373.

8. See Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991).

9. Craig Calhoun, “Social Theory and the Politics of Identity,” in Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, ed. Craig Calhoun (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 23.

10. Individualism can be seen as an extreme variant of the politics of difference (atomism), but it is also an example of a universalism in which everyone is reduced to an identical basis. On the convergence of individualism and communitarianism, see Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), chapter 8.

11. As Craig Calhoun has put it, these perspectives reflect the reduction (particularly in the West) of the high levels of “systematicity of identity schemes” characterizing earlier, more communitarian social formations. Social Theory, 11.

12. See Madan Sarup, Identity, Culture, and the Postmodern World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996).

13. Ivan Illich, H₂O and the Waters of Forgetfulness: On the Historicity of Stuff (Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1985), 8.

14. See Mathew Edel, Elliot Sclar, and Daniel Luria, Shaky Palaces: Homeownership and Social Mobility in Boston's Suburbanization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), chapters 9–11.

15. Castells's recent formulation of the Network Society remains trapped within a physicalist conception of space. In his view, the central conflict in the

16. Michael Kearney, “The Effects of Transnational Culture, Economy, and Migration on Mixtec Identity in Oaxacalifornia,” in Michael Peter Smith, The Bubbling Cauldron: Race, Ethnicity, and the Urban Crisis, ed. Michael P. Smith and Joe R. Feagin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 229.

17. Elijah Anderson, Streetwise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), for example, chapter 6.

18. Claude S. Fischer, To Dwell among Friends: Personal Networks in Town and City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Barry Wellman, “The Community Question,” American Journal of Sociology 84 (March 1979).

19. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 81.

20. Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York: The Russell Sage Foundation, 1984), and The Contentious French (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1986), 272.

21. See Edward W. Soja, “Los Angeles, 1965–1992,” in Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja, The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); and Manuel Castells, The Informational City (New York: Blackwell, 1989).

22. Sharon Zukin, The Culture of Cities (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995), chapter 1.

23. Saskia Sassen, The Global City (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991); Susan Fainstein, The City Builders (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995).

24. John R. Logan and Harvey Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).

25. Castells, The Network Society, 467.

26. See Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, A.D. 990–1990 (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990); and Ira Katznelson, Marxism and the City (Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1992), especially chapter 5.

27. The project is “critical” in the sense that it is sensitive to the forces blocking greater democratic transformations, “urban” because of the centrality of spatiality to its analysis of social forms (not merely because it takes its object as the “city”), and “theory” in that it retains the (modernist?) hope of synthetic, positive knowledge. Although recent developments in philosophy and social theory have posed serious challenges to the program of theoretical narratives, there are still important grounds for maintaining such a research program, particularly if it can integrate within it the postmodern suspicion of the real and a nonreductive approach to representation.

28. Mike Savage and Allen Warde, Urban Sociology, Capitalism, and Modernity (New York: Continuum, 1993), 31.

29. See Susan Fainstein and Clifford Hirst, “Urban Social Movements,” in Theories of Urban Politics, ed. David Judge, Gerry Stoker, and Harold Wollman (London: Sage, 1995).

30. Claus Offe, “New Social Movements: Expanding the Boundaries of Institutional Politics,” Social Research 52, no. 4 (winter 1985).

31. Manuel Castells has described these tensions in The City and the Grassroots (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), part 2.

32. Alain Touraine, The May Movement, Revolt and Reform: May 1968—The Student Rebellion and Workers' Strikes—The Birth of a Social Movement, trans. Leonard F. X. Mayhew (New York: Random House, 1971), 23 ; Daniel Singer, Prelude to Revolution: France in May 1968 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1970), x.

33. See Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994), and Henri Lefebvre, Le Droit a la ville (Paris: Anthropos, 1968).

34. Manuel Castells, The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977), 1–2, viii.

35. It is obvious that a formulation such as the separation between workplaces and community residential spaces harbors implicit gender assumptions, such that “work” occurs only outside the home. I use the formulation not because I neglect this gender dimension of space and class but because it is the point of departure for my critique of the androcentric assumptions of Marxian urbanism in Chapter 3.

36. Erik Olin Wright et al., The Debate on Classes (New York: Verso, 1989), 207.

37. David Harvey, Consciousness and the Urban Experience: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 37; Ira Katznelson, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 6, 9; Castells, The City and the Grassroots, 68–69.

38. I do not provide more than a schematic overview here. For more comprehensive assessments related to the many subareas, such as economic geography, urban culture, and urban politics, see variously, Katznelson, Marxism and the City, which remains the most extensive and positive evaluation; Savage and Warde, Urban Sociology; Peter Saunders, Social Theory and the Urban Question, 2d ed. (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986); Chris G. Pickvance, “Marxist Theories of Urban Politics,” in Theories of Urban Politics, ed. David Judge, Gerry

39. Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (London: Routledge, 1996).

40. See Merrifield and Swyngedouw, eds., The Urbanization of Injustice.

41. Mike Savage, Review of Marxism and The City, by Ira Katznelson, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 17, no. 1 (1993): 139.

42. Nigel Thrift, “An Urban Impasse?” Theory, Culture, and Society 10 (1993): 229–38. This review essay itself harbors some curious ambiguities. While taking Zukin and others to task for remaining too faithful to the framework of political economy, he seems to imply that the “impasse” refers not to these approaches but to the new work that is seeking to break away from it. He then ends up confusingly suggesting that it is the work of these very political economists (Sassen, Zukin) that can help us out of the impasse!

43. Although see the debate within economic geography in Richard Walker, “Regulation and Flexible Specialization as Theories of Capitalist Development: Challenges to Marx and Schumpeter?” in Spatial Practices, ed. Helen Ligget and David Perry (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1995).

44. Katznelson, Marxism and the City, chapter 4.

45. Anthony D. King, for example, argues for this emphasis on culture as representing a paradigm shift from the political economy orientation of the earlier period. “Introduction: Cities, Texts, and Paradigms,” in Re-Presenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the Twenty-first-Century Metropolis, ed. Anthony D. King (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 2. See also the essays in this collection, which are presented as examples of this new paradigm.

46. See Helen Liggett, “City Sights/Sites of Memories and Dreams,” in Spatial Practices, an intriguing attempt to bring Barthes and Lefebvre together for urban analysis.

47. For example, Dennis Cosgrove and Mona Domosh, “Author and Authority: Writing the New Cultural Geography,” in Place/Culture/Representation, ed. James Duncan and David Ley (London: Routledge, 1993). Many of the other papers in this collection of the new cultural geography, especially the essays by Derek Gregory and John Agnew, deal with related themes.

48. Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Places (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996).

49. Christine Boyer Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), for example, xi.

50. Zukin, The Culture of Cities, 1–15.

51. Manuel Castells, The End of the Millennium (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998), 168.

52. David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996); Fredric Jameson, “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” in Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991).

53. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1992).

54. Stephen Elkin, City and Regime in the American Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Ira Katznelson, “Social Justice, Liberalism, and the City,” in The Urbanization of Injustice, ed. Andy Merrifield and Erik Swyngedouw (New York: New York University Press), 1997.

55. Derek Gregory, “Interventions in the Historical Geography of Modernity: Social Theory, Spatiality, and the Politics of Representation,” in Place/Culture/Representation, ed. James Duncan and David Ley (London: Routledge, 1992).

56. Nancy Duncan, ed., BodySpace: Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1996); Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

57. This problematic of the postmodern fascination with surfaces is a theme found throughout Slavoj Žižek's writings. For a clear early discussion, see Žižek's “Beyond Discourse Analysis,” in Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, trans. Jon Barnes (London: Verso, 1990).

58. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 237.

59. Savage and Warde, Urban Sociology, 133.

60. Kaja Silverman, Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996), 1–2.

61. Michael Peter Smith, “Postmodernism, Urban Ethnography, and the New Social Space of Ethnic Identity,” Theory and Society 21 (1992): 493–531.

62. See Judith Butler's interesting analysis of the “production of the visible” in the Rodney King affair, “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia,” in Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising, ed. Robert Gooding-Williams (New York: Routledge, 1993).

63. Michael Peter Smith, “Postmodernism,” 509.

64. Lawrence Grossberg has made the most explicit argument against perspectives that seek to deconstruct binary oppositions, for they remain trapped, he claims, within the modernist framework that from the beginning constituted itself in terms of its difference with its other, namely, tradition and the ancients. “Identity and Cultural Studies—Is That All There Is?” in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London: Sage, 1996).

65. See, for example, Gayatri C. Spivak, The Post-Colonial City: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (New York: Routledge, 1990), 51.

66. Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

67. Patricia Clough, “Poststructuralism and Postmodernism: The Desire for Criticism,” Theory and Society 21 (1992): 543–52.

68. See Renato Rosaldo's analysis of “borderland” individuals, communities, and institutions, in chapter 9 of Culture and Truth, 2d ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993).

69. Smith appears to conflate concepts such as “global,” “macro,” “structure,” and so on, with each other. See Janet Wolff, “The Real City, the Discursive City, the Disappearing City: Postmodernism and Urban Sociology,” Theory and Society 21 (1992): 553–60.

70. Louis Althusser, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Verso, 1979), 188.

71. Lest the mention of Althusser in a not wholly unsympathetic tone set off alarm bells in some readers, it should be emphasized that in my view, the theoretical contribution of the notion of “contradiction and overdetermination” can be, and should be, separated from the political positions he embraced, as well as the “philosophy” of Marxism as the science of science that he used to rationalize these positions.

72. Michael Peter Smith, “Postmodernism,” 504.

73. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 149.

74. See Michael Peter Smith and Joe R. Feagin's introduction to The Bubbling Cauldron, 5.

75. I have taken the concept of the “imaginal” geography from the muchneglected work of Henri Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shi'ite Iran, 2d ed., trans. Nancy Pearson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), and the notion of “stuff” from Ivan Illich's discussion of Bachelard's The Poetics of Space in his poetic H₂O and the Waters of Forgetfulness.

76. Striking in this regard is Castells's intellectual trajectory. Having “abandoned” Marxism in City and the Grassroots, his subsequent work comes close to embracing a technological determinism straight out of volume 3 of Capital. More on this in the next chapter.

77. For one exception (although only partly influenced by poststructuralist ideas), see Michael Piore, Beyond Individualism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).

78. For example, Uwe Becker argues that Laclau's and Mouffe's reformulation replaces essentialism with subjectivism: “Class Theory: Still the Axis of Critical Social Scientific Analysis?” in Erik Olin Wright et al., The Debate on Classes, 134. And see Katznelson, Marxism and the City, 89, where he claims that they reject structure in favor of agency. As will become clear, I do not think these criticisms are valid, even though Laclau's and Mouffe's presentation can lend itself to misinterpretation.

79. Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), 20–21.

80. I have adopted this approach as a structural device to avoid repetition as much as possible. This is not to suggest, for example, that only Castells's work can be charged with essentialism or Harvey's with functionalism. Indeed, the work of each also can be interpreted in terms of the critiques of the others.

81. This procedure is coincident with what in Althusserian terms would be the “production of the concept” of Marxian urbanism. It is consistent, as I understand it, with Savage and Warde's plea for analytical approaches that break with narrativization.

82. The chapters do not claim to be a comprehensive analysis of each author's writings. Their work is treated only in reference to the specific problem at hand.