Recent Neo-Marxist Urban Analysis

Despite Castells's (1976a,b,c) critique of the concept of and his call for a major reformulation of the subfield, many of the phenomena and issues studied by conventional urban researchers are also central to neo-Marxist urban research. These are studied with different analytical concepts, and often new results are produced; but as will be shown, there are also areas of agreement and convergence with conventional work. Neo-Marxist urbanists are critical of studies done by others, especially when the city or some aspect of it is viewed as separate from and independent of the larger society, when urban problems are viewed as discrete isolated phenomena, or when certain urban forms or processes are considered inevitable or universal. According to the neo-Marxists, conventional urban social science explains urban phenomena only partially, failing to identify fundamental causes. For example, a conventional explanation of US urban growth (Borchert 1967) emphasizes two factors, major changes in technology and population migrations, as principal causes of urban structural change. In a neo-Marxist analysis, however, these are not the underlying causes but instead are intermediate factors produced by something more fundamental, the basic requirements and social relations of capitalist production. In a neo-Marxist interpretation, important technological innovations, mass migration, and the urban transformations that accompanied them are all explained as results of capitalists' need for a large, cheap, easily controlled labor force and ever increased production. Another difference between conventional and neo-Marxist urban sociology lies in the latter's stress on the importance of class conflict. Conventional sociologists have emphasized urban communities' complex division of labor, which differentiates the population into interest groups, vocational types, and