Kimberly DeFazio, City of Senses: Urban Culture and Urban Space. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 190 pp. $85.00 hardcover (978-0-230-11159-2) in social sciences and humanities a prominent theme in Kimberly DeFazio's book City of Senses: Urban Culture and Urban Space, but unlike much contemporary materialism, it represents more of a return than a to material. In contrast to urban and cultural theory that treats culture as itself material, DeFazio presents a Marxist reading of materialism as historical social relations of production, and thus positions economic structure as material source of cultural. It from this perspective that City of Senses addresses global city and its sensory effects. And it is, as DeFazio herself notes, a marked departure from contemporary scholarship on urban and senses, which tends to consider analyses based on social relations of production as too reductionist. Across introduction and 5 subsequent chapters, Defazio uses examples from literature, popular culture, and social theory to critique logic of postindustrial theories, poststructuralist turn within visual studies, and materialist and aesthetic analyses that fail to connect up to relations of production. In contrast to these representations of city that divorce culture from its material base and thus limit their scope to the surface appearances of [urban] (p. 4), Defazio consistently retheorizes urban phenomena by foregrounding conditions of production of urban life. For DeFazio, both city and must be understood in relation to material relations of production: The city ... first and foremost a manifestation of material relations of labor, and culture of city and urban space develop out of this material history (p. 3, original emphasis). DeFazio speaks in opposition to theorists she believes have become distracted by sensory intensity of cities and who fail to connect perception to underlying material relations of production. This can be seen, for example, in analyses that take (perceived) changes in (cultural) realm of technology as evidence of contemporary city as discontinuous from modern--or class-based--city. DeFazio reminds readers that all technologies, even cyber-technologies, are product of human labour and used primarily to increase profits: [t]he materiality of technology not in its object body but in labor relations in which it installed (p. 25). Similarly critiqued are scholars who study sensory realm, such as affect or aesthetics, without connecting it back to material base. In bold measure she confronts leading cultural and urban theorists, including Edward Soja, Saskia Sassen, Gyan Prakash, David Harvey, and Hardt and Negri. These and other theorists' works, DeFazio suggests, obscure exploitative effects of what continues to be--despite appearances--a binary relation between those who own means of production and those who must sell their labour power. For DeFazio, sensory perception a form of false consciousness since role of is to present deeply unfair and unequal relations of capitalism as fair and equal (p. 105). What one senses in capitalism are products of capitalism, not largely invisible relations of production. Yet, while DeFazio claims that do not accurately perceive reality, she does not endorse a poststructuralist view that no essential meaning exists. …