A scenic walk through Brenner’s New Urban Spaces in Toronto

Abstract

This article reviews Brenner’s most recent monograph, New Urban Spaces, in which he demonstrates his systematic and decades-long effort into developing new epistemological perspectives, conceptual proposals, and methodological strategies for urban investigation in our so-called global ‘urban age’. We use images taken in the city of Toronto to interpret and visually explain some of Brenner’s key concepts and arguments. In our critical assessment, we point out that Brenner’s abstract theorizing and overgeneralization may have provoked an ignorance of the local variations in effect globally and a failure to tease out specific testable hypotheses for urban investigation. To conclude, we introduce a newly developed scenic approach, one that extends Brenner’s view on the urban by stressing the importance of local variations and testable hypotheses.