Guillermo Jajamovich 2018: Puerto Madero in Motion [Puerto Madero en Movimiento]. Buenos Aires: Teseo

Abstract

listening to it with a slight sense of confused amazement: alongside packing in a third of previously unaired performances-including some sudden bits of Bob Dylan in the midst of a hitherto unknown track-the album simply re-played, in partly different keys, some of the 'best of' I was expecting. In a way this was a treat, but it also stripped away R.E.M.'s work and recast some of their classics in different forms, even going against the group's original ethos to some extent. Without trying to draw too many parallels here, Neil Brenner's New Urban Spaces left me with something of the same feeling. While it reinterprets some well-established tenets of urban political writing, it does so with the author presenting a new version of familiar arguments alongside another, stronger argument-which, a little like Unplugged, proves that theory is never really fixed in time and is always subject to change.By that metric, Brenner's most recent monograph is a challenging, dense and surprising read that will likely reshape our understanding of the long-established scholarship of one of the world's finest contemporary urban theorists. Conveniently summarized in a table on page 10, the book is pretty much a 'Brenner Reader' put together by Brenner himself. It follows his 2016Critique of Urbanization-which already argued in part against 'locking in' scholarship-and moves towards a very explicit re-examination of his scholarship over the last two decades. This entails on the one hand collecting together a series of classic chapters from Neil Brenner's scholarship for re-publication-some of which are at the heart of previously published popular This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. This is the author manuscript accepted for publication and has undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article as