What do struggles over pipelines in Canada, housing estates in France, and shantytowns in Martinique have in common? In Urban Revolutions, Stefan Kipfer shows how these struggles force us to understand the (neo-)colonial aspects of capitalist urbanization in a comparatively and historically nuanced fashion. In so doing, he demonstrates that urban research can offer a rich, if uneven, terrain upon which to develop the relationship between Marxist and anti-colonial intellectual traditions. After a detailed dialogue between Henri Lefebvre and Frantz Fanon, Kipfer engages creole literature in the French Antilles, Indigenous radicalism in North America and political anti-racism in mainland France.

Stefan Kipfer teaches urbanization, politics and planning in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto. He has published widely on social and political theory, the city and urbanization, and comparative urban politics.

Stefan Kipfer's profile page

Urban Revolutions: Urbanisation and (Neo-) Colonialism in Transatlantic Context is the culmination of the anti-colonial, historical-geographical materialist scholarship that Stefan Kipfer has developed over many years. The book examines how Marxist and revolutionary anti-colonial currents can be fused and brought to bear on urban problematics, starting with Henri Lefebvre and Frantz Fanon. What Kipfer terms the 'Lefebvre–Fanon lineage' is then brought into different time–space contexts, where it meets ideas and praxes developed by subalterns in their respective struggles against (neo-) colonial capitalism. In an intellectual voyage that traverses Algeria, the Antilles, France and Canada, Kipfer pieces together a wide range of intellectual currents with an admirable depth and mastery.

—Prof. Laam Hae, Urban Studies Journal