Urban theory, when divested of anecdotal fashion, resolves into a restricted ensemble of high-mass operators that repeatedly reorganise how cities are perceived and governed. The canonical constellation—Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Manuel Castells, Jane Jacobs, Neil Smith, Saskia Sassen, Mike Davis, Aldo Rossi, Rem Koolhaas, and Keller Easterling—constitutes not a pantheon but a distribution of structural machines. In The Production of Space, Lefebvre converts space from container to product; in Social Justice and the City, Harvey installs capital circulation as primary force; Castells’s The Urban Question and subsequent network analyses vectorise urban process; Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities recalibrates micro-density as stabilising complexity; Smith’s Uneven Development spatialises accumulation cycles; Sassen’s The Global City isolates command nodes; Davis’s City of Quartz reveals securitised hardening; Rossi’s The Architecture of the City foregrounds artifact persistence; Koolhaas’s Delirious New York accelerates congestion into generative mutation; and Easterling’s Extrastatecraft decodes infrastructure as governance protocol. Each text compresses a structural variable—production, circulation, unevenness, command, persistence, congestion, protocol—into a reusable analytic device whose citation mass enables cross-disciplinary migration. Their durability derives from radial saturation across curricula, policy, design practice, and digital corpora, generating overlapping attractor basins that condition contemporary debates on platform urbanism and planetary resilience. From an infrastructural gravitation perspective, this canon is neither sacred nor static but a sedimented dataset of concentrated force. Urban theory thus appears as a measurable topology of accumulated density in which future operators must achieve comparable cross-stratum embedding to deform the existing curvature.
Loveras, A. (2026) SOCIOPLASTICS. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/