The Blackwell City Reader


Book Description

Updated to reflect the most current thinking on urban studies, The Blackwell City Reader, Second Edition features a comprehensive selection of multidisciplinary readings relating to the analysis and experience of global cities. Includes new sections of materialities and mobilities to capture the most recent debates The most international reader of its kind, including extensive coverage of urban issues in Asia, China, and India Combines theoretical approaches with a wide range of geographical case studies Organized to be used as a stand-alone text or alongside Blackwell's A Companion to the City




The Blackwell City Reader


Book Description

At a time when cities are firmly back on the agenda, this Reader brings together work by prestigious academics, literary figures, political economists, geographers, film theorists, urban planners and gender theorists in order to challenge established ways of thinking about urban life. Develops a new framework for interpreting cities. Includes a variety of voices from literary figures to academics. Takes a global approach, looking at western and non-western cities. Combines canonical texts with contemporary theories on urban life. Can be used alongside 'A Companion to the City' (Blackwell Publishers, 2000).




Reason in the City of Difference


Book Description

This book re-establishes a notion of conscious agency in our understanding of urban life. Using empirical examples and drawing on pragmatist ideas of 'experience' and rationality, this text offers a new, alternative reading of the city.




The Blackwell Cultural Economy Reader


Book Description

This Reader brings together the exciting and innovative work that has appeared in the last 10 years in the growing field of cultural economy. Brings together exciting and innovative work from the last ten years in the emerging field of cultural economy. Contains a substantial introduction by the editors on the main strands and history of the cultural economy approach. Shows how the pursuit of prosperity always involves multiple and hybrid orderings that cannot be reduced to either the terms culture or economy. Shows that thinking about cultural economy is both a substantive task and a valuable contribution to knowledge. Material is organised around different links in the value chain.




A Companion to the City


Book Description

A Companion to the City provides the reader with an indispensable and authoritative overview of the key debates, controversies, and questions concerning the city from a variety of theoretical vantage points with an international perspective. Indispensable companion for students of the City. Multidisciplinary approach of interest across several fields. Includes contributions from major scholars in the field.




The Modern American Metropolis


Book Description

The Modern American Metropolis: A Documentary Reader introduces the history of American cities and suburbs through a collection of original source materials that historians have long used to make sense of the urban experience. Carefully integrates and juxtaposes the primary sources that are at the heart of the collection Revisits and compares issues and themes over time Reveals how the history of cities and suburbs is not limited to buildings, innovation, and politics, and not confined to municipal boundaries Explores a wide variety of topics, including infrastructure development, electoral politics, consumer culture, battles over rights, environmental change, and the meaning of citizenship




The Castells Reader on Cities and Social Theory


Book Description

This collection of Castells' classic writing, which also includes two new essays written specifically for this book, reflects the panoramic breadth of his knowledge, the clarity of his approach, and the scholarly rigor and intellectual depth of his theoretical methods.




Cinema and the City


Book Description

This book brings together the literature of urban sociology and film studies to explore new analytical and theoretical approaches to the relationship between cinema and the city, and to show how these impact on the realities of life in urban societies.




The New Urban Frontier


Book Description

Why have so many central and inner cities in Europe, North America and Australia been so radically revamped in the last three decades, converting urban decay into new chic? Will the process continue in the twenty-first century or has it ended? What does this mean for the people who live there? Can they do anything about it? This book challenges conventional wisdom, which holds gentrification to be the simple outcome of new middle-class tastes and a demand for urban living. It reveals gentrification as part of a much larger shift in the political economy and culture of the late twentieth century. Documenting in gritty detail the conflicts that gentrification brings to the new urban 'frontiers', the author explores the interconnections of urban policy, patterns of investment, eviction, and homelessness. The failure of liberal urban policy and the end of the 1980s financial boom have made the end-of-the-century city a darker and more dangerous place. Public policy and the private market are conspiring against minorities, working people, the poor, and the homeless as never before. In the emerging revanchist city, gentrification has become part of this policy of revenge.




Blackwell's Island


Book Description

In 1914, eleven-year-old Alex and his nine-year-old sister, Anna, are taken from New York City's Lower East Side to Blackwell's Island, where there are lunatics, prisoners, evil caretakers, ghouls, and, perhaps, their missing mother.