Take over the city: spatial composition in Italian autonomy

This talk is about the relationship between class struggle and urban development.

Engaging with critical urban theory and strands of 1970s Italian Marxism, this talk will draw out the relevance of this thought for political organising today. Based on the recent publication of Take Over the City: Spatial Composition in Italian Autonomy (2026), it seeks to rectify this lacuna by way of a ‘spatial composition’ analysis, a spatially inflected interpretation of class composition, the signature theoretical manoeuvre of operaismo, showing how this concept sheds new light not only on the mass urban struggles of the ‘Take over the City’ movements of 1970s Italy but contemporary urban contestation over social reproduction today.

Meet our speaker and chair

Neil Gray is an independent researcher, writer, editor and urban theorist based in Glasgow. He has written widely for academic and non-academic publications and is a former editor of Variant magazine and co-founder of Material magazine. He is the editor of Rent and its Discontents: A Century of Housing Struggle (Bloomsbury, 2018) and the author of Take Over the City: Spatial Composition in Italian Autonomy (Common Notions Press, 2026).

Fran Tonkiss is Martin White Professor of Sociology. Her research and teaching are in the fields of urban and economic sociology. Her work focuses on urban inequalities, urban design and development, social and spatial divisions, and the socio-economic organisation of urban space. She is a member of the editorial boards of the British Journal of Sociology, City and Economy and Society.

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