“This collection of 65 academic essays covers everything from the role of dance in shaping cities to race and class in South Africa to the application of military techniques to city planning … The destructive effects of global capital and neo-liberal politics are much explored. Throwing out striking insights and facts… [it offers] useful and necessary responses to significant changes in the world.” The Observer
“This new volume is in six sections, each introduced by an editorial overview… The individual chapters range from theoretical politics and sociology to the practicalities of maintaining high rise housing. Films and novels provide examples in many sections. Sometimes a chapter can be a surprise … there is something new and something very familiar in each … Geographers and sociologists will get much from this book, and there is material for architects and politicians. There is also something in the book for the ordinary city dweller.” Reference Reviews
“Of great interest to upper-level undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars of urban studies, as well as those in urban planning, urban sociology, and urban geography … Recommended.” Choice
Drawing together leading scholars from a variety of academic disciplines, this entirely new collection of commissioned essays reports the leading edge of research and analysis into the contemporary urban condition. With more than half of the world’s population living in urban environments, cities are places of huge complexity and diversity and the processes, networks, and structures that bind them together reach out across the globe.
This volume considers the state of the city and contemporary urbanization from a range of intellectual and international perspectives. Whilst considering established themes, such as urban divisions and differences, publics and cultures, politics and planning, The New Blackwell Companion to the City also addresses new debates concerning materiality, mobilities, affect, and the environment.
Incorporating international examples from the US to Europe, and China to South Africa, this book explores the economic, social, cultural, environmental, and political issues that flow from and within the modern city.
From the Back Cover
Drawing together leading scholars from a variety of academic disciplines, this entirely new collection of commissioned essays reports the leading edge of research and analysis into the contemporary urban condition. With more than half of the world’s population living in urban environments, cities are places of huge complexity and diversity and the processes, networks, and structures that bind them together reach out across the globe.
This volume considers the state of the city and contemporary urbanization from a range of intellectual and international perspectives. Whilst considering established themes, such as urban divisions and differences, publics and cultures, politics and planning, The New Blackwell Companion to the City also addresses new debates concerning materiality, mobilities, affect, and the environment.
Incorporating international examples from the US to Europe, and China to South Africa, this book explores the economic, social, cultural, environmental, and political issues that flow from and within the modern city.
About the Author
Gary Bridge is Professor of Urban Studies at the School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol. He is the author of Reason in the City of Difference: Pragmatism, Communicative Action and Contemporary Urbanism (2005), and co-editor of Gentrification in a Global Context (with Rowland Atkinson, 2005), and The Blackwell City Reader, second edition (with Sophie Watson, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) and Mixed Communities: Gentrification by Stealth? (with Tim Butler and Loretta Lees, 2012).
Sophie Watson is Professor of Sociology at the Open University and Co-Director of the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change. She is the author of City Publics: The (dis)enchantments of Urban Encounters (2006), co-author of Surface City: Sydney at the Millennium (1997), and co-editor of Postmodern Cities and Spaces (1995), Metropolis Now (1994), and The Blackwell City Reader, second edition (with Gary Bridge, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), among other publications.
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