Capital relates to cities in all kinds of ways. 1 Cities can both represent capitalism in its most virtuous state, or be the site of its rapid degeneration. As sites for massive volumes of capital accumulation as well as centres of concentrated pov- erty and hotspots of resistance, it should come as no surprise that Marxist studies of urban processes have come in various forms. But what unites them is that they exist within a tension between the ‘urban’ and the political economy at large. In this respect, there are two positions that are equally misleading. One ignores the particularities of the urban and materiality of the city, while the other exag- gerates its importance. From the first position, the city is annihilated by the wider capitalist economy; in the second the city lights blind us from seeing capital- ism altogether. More aligned with the first position, we arguably find Friedrich Engels, who – according to Merrifield – looked at the city and ‘saw little apart from capitalist modernization’ (2002: 65). Closer to the latter we arguably find Henri Lefebvre, where ‘the urban’ – according to Smith – became ‘the motive force of historical change’ (2003: xvi). Tensions between spatial forms and social relations, between the spheres of the urban and the wider economy, have followed urban Marxism for decades, and will follow us through the paper. I second Sharon Zukin, who argues that cities appear to be ‘one of those social creations that tease the limits of autonomy’ (2006: 105), both reflecting underlying social structures as well as shaping them in various ways. Grasping the exact connections and relations between ‘the urban’ and the wider economy is a difficult, if not impossible, task. The city should rather be 82 The Urban Ståle Holgersen BK-SAGE-SKEGGS_ET_AL-210248-Chp82.indd 1503 09/10/21 9:14 PM