Neil Brenner is the Lucy Flower Professor of Urban Sociology, Director of the Urban Theory Lab (UTL), and Chair of the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU) at the University of Chicago. He is a critical urban theorist, sociologist, and geographer who is interested in all aspects of research on cities and urbanization within the social sciences, the environmental humanities, the design disciplines, and environmental studies. His writing and teaching focus on the theoretical, conceptual and methodological dimensions of urban questions, and especially on the challenges of reinventing our approach to urbanization in relation to the planetary socioenvironmental crises of our time. 

Over the last 25 years, Brenner has made influential contributions to scholarly debates on critical urban theory, the critique of capitalist urbanization, urban restructuring, state space, the political economy of rescaling, variegated neoliberalization, and, most recently, planetary urbanization. Brenner previously served as Professor of Urban Theory at the Graduate School of Design (GSD), Harvard University, and as Professor of Sociology and Metropolitan Studies, New York University. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science (University of Chicago, 1999), an MA in Geography (UCLA, 1996), and a BA in Philosophy, summa cum laude (Yale, 1991).

Brenner is the author of New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question (Oxford, 2019), Critique of Urbanization: Selected Essays (Bauwelt Fundamente, 2016), and New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood (Oxford, 2004) and the editor of Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization (Jovis, 2014), Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City (with Peter Marcuse and Margit Mayer; Routledge, 2011; and Spaces of Neoliberalism (with Nik Theodore; Blackwell, 2002). Two new collaborative books by Brenner and his collaborators in the Urban Theory Lab appeared in Fall 2025:  Data-Spheres of Planetary Urbanization (with Grga Bašić, Mariano Gomez-Luque, and Nikos Katsikis) and Environments of Planetary Urbanization (with Swarnabh Ghosh and Nikos Katsikis). Brenner's current work, undertaken in collaboration with Swarnabh Ghosh of Harvard University, is focused on planetary urbanization, the spatial metabolism of fossil energy, and biospheric collapse.