Rereading Cities in the Context of the Transition from Classical Urban Theories to Critical Urban Theories

Having begun to gain importance since the foundation of civilizations, cities have continually been in a state of change and transformation. On the other hand, the modern phenomenon of urbanization originated after the Industrial Revolution. With the industrialization movements, cities are areas where the plus value is produced. Furthermore, the need for the labor force for production initiated the migration to cities and the proletariat culture in cities brought about the class consciousness. The class analyses on the European cities by Marx and Engels later laid the groundwork for the critical urban theories. In the 1920s, the city was first addressed as a research object by the Chicago School and the spatial organization of the city was examined. After the 1970s, radical theoreticians examined the city via the capital accumulation process and dealt with the spatialization of capital and the social movements. So, the critical perspective on the present cities, which entered the rule of the capitalist accumulation processes, offered a structural analysis for the urbanization of neoliberalism. In this context, the study aims to discuss the contributions to be made by the economic and political perspectives to understand the present cities and to offer a new form of reading for the urbanization of neoliberalism by providing a background on the classical urban theories