“I’ll begin with the following hypothesis: society has been completely urbanized.” –Henri Lefebvre, La révolution urbaine (1970) In 1970, Henri Lefebvre put forward the radical hypothesis of the complete urbanization of society, a circumstance that in his view required a radical shift from the analysis of urban form to the investigation of urbanization processes. Drawing together classic and contemporary texts on the “urbanization question”, this book explores various theoretical, epistemological, methodological and political implications of Lefebvre’s hypothesis. It assembles a series of analytical and cartographic interventions that supersede inherited spatial ontologies (urban/rural, town/country, city/non-city, society/nature) in order to investigate the uneven implosions and explosions of capitalist urbanization across places, regions, territories, continents and oceans up to the planetary scale.

In Berlin, science, architecture, and the city are interwoven in a unique way: What was originally a single palace in the historic center gradually developed to become a comprehensive academic landscape, in which three large universities today shape the city. Taking a multi-perspectival approach, this architectural guide asks how the growth of Berlin as a metropolis has been linked to the development of science and how its various disciplines have been able to realize their demands for buildings to carry out research and teaching and to hold scientific collections. In five chapters, the authors guide readers through various locations in Mitte, Charlottenburg, Dahlem, Adlershof, and Buch and show how questions about the representation and functionality of buildings, their conversion, or even their relocation to the outskirts of the city were reconciled with the expansion of infrastructure and contemporary ideas about urban planning. The book’s critical and detailed look at the architectures of science, the genesis of which it traces over more than two centuries, sheds new light on Berlin’s university landscape. At the same time, it allows to rediscover the political and social zeitgeist in the buildings of science. In cooperation with Gabriele Metzler (concept) and Konrad Angermüller (design) and with additional contributions by Nils Exner and Sascha Morawe Also available in German: ISBN: 978-3-86859-595-6