Metro-Marxism as a Paradigm of Urban Research

Non-Marxists cannot develop an urban theory of totality because they cannot understand the city from the viewpoint of praxis and dialectic. Although Marx and Engels provided clues to analyze urban problems and urban forms with historical materialism, they also caused a debate on the study of “society in cities” or of “urban society”. With the deepening of the process of human urbanization, the demands of both theory and practice make it necessary to clarify “Metro-Marxism” as a paradigm of urban research. The social reality explored by Marxism is the concrete totality of human production of their own way of life, and the city is a certain way of human production of their own life, so the study of the city must place it in the social totality constituted by human production activities. Nowadays, the city has become the conscious way for human beings to produce their own life and the leading component of social and historical development. As the Marxist paradigm of urban research and the contemporary Marxist philosophical paradigm, metro-Marxism takes the “city” which contains rich contradictions as the problematic, and dialectically understands and reveals the urban reality of the modern world from the viewpoint of praxis which is a combination of micro-perspectives and macro-perspectives, and truly explores the social and historical theory of human living condition, living contradiction, life style and meaning of life. Specifically, it is devoted to constructing the social and historical interpretation model of the urban form, launching the criticism of urban political economy and urban culture, and providing the theory of urban revolution linked to the practice of human liberation.