Free Culture and the City examines how and why free software spread beyond the world of hackers and software engineers and became the basis for an urban movement now heralded by scholars as a model for emulation. By the late 1990s, digital activists embraced a philosophy of free software and "free culture" in order to take control over their cities and everyday lives. Free culture, previously tethered to the digital realm, was cut loose and used to reclaim and resculpt the city. In Madrid the effects were dramatic. Common sights in the city were abandoned as industrial factories turned into autonomous social centers, urban orchards, guerrilla architectural camps, or community hacklabs. Drawing on two decades of ethnographic and historical work with free culture collectives in Madrid, Free Culture and the City shows how, in its journey from the digital to the urban, the practice of liberating culture required the mobilization of, and alliances between, public art centers, neighborhood associations, squatted social centers, hackers, intellectual property lawyers, street artists, guerrilla architectural collectives, and Occupy assemblies.

The Power of Culture in City Planning focuses on human diversity, strengths, needs, and ways of living together in geographic communities. The book turns attention to the anthropological definition of culture, encouraging planners in both urban and cultural planning to focus on characteristics of humanity in all their variety. It calls for a paradigm shift, re-positioning city planners’ "base maps" to start with a richer understanding of human cultures. Borrup argues for cultural master plans in parallel to transportation, housing, parks, and other specialized plans, while also changing the approach of city comprehensive planning to put people or "users" first rather than land "uses" as does the dominant practice. Cultural plans as currently conceived are not sufficient to help cities keep pace with dizzying impacts of globalization, immigration, and rapidly changing cultural interests. Cultural planners need to up their game, and enriching their own and city planners’ cultural competencies is only one step. Both planning practices have much to learn from one another and already overlap in more ways than most recognize. This book highlights some of the strengths of the lesser-known practice of cultural planning to help forge greater understanding and collaboration between the two practices, empowering city planners with new tools to bring about more equitable communities. This will be an important resource for students, teachers, and practitioners of city and cultural planning, as well as municipal policymakers of all stripes.

In the accounts compiled in this book, ethnography occurs through processes of material and social interventions that turn the field into a site for epistemic collaboration. Through creative interventions that unfold what we term as “fieldwork devices”—such as coproduced books, the circulation of repurposed data, co-organized events, authorization protocols, relational frictions, and social rhythms—anthropologists engage with their counterparts in the field in the construction of joint anthropological problematizations. In these situations, the traditional tropes of the fieldwork encounter (i.e. immersion and distance) give way to a narrative of intervention, where the aesthetics of collaboration in the production of knowledge substitutes or intermingles with participant observation. Building on this, the book proposes the concept of “experimental collaborations” to describe and conceptualize this distinctive ethnographic modality.

At a time when incivility appears to be on the rise and increasingly tolerated, Diane Kalen-Sukra's new book, Save Your City, is a vital call to action for communities and leaders everywhere. The book takes readers from the very beginning of democracy to the challenges being addressed by communities today. This special Municipal World edition contains a forward by George B. Cuff and an exclusive companion workbook.

The author argues that "race" as a social construction is one of the most powerful categories for constructing urban mythologies about blacks, and that this is significant in a dominant white supremacist culture that equates blackness and black people with both danger and the exotic. The book examines how these myths are realized in the material landscapes of the city, in its racialization of black residential space through the imagery of racial segregation. This imagery along with the racializing of crime portrays black residential space as natural "spaces of pathology," and in need of social control through policing and residential dispersion and displacement. It is in this context that Haymes proposes the development of a pedagogy of black urban struggle that incorporates critical pedagogy.

This lively and highly innovative book reconstructs the texture and meaning of popular pleasure in the Victorian entertainment industry. Integrating theories of language and social action with close reading of contemporary sources, Peter Bailey provides a richly detailed study of the pub, music-hall, theatre and comic newspaper. Analysis of the interplay between entrepreneurs, performers, social critics and audience reveals distinctive codes of humour, sociability and glamour that constituted a new populist ideology of consumerism and the good time. Bailey shows how the new leisure world offered a repertoire of roles that enabled its audience to negotiate the unsettling encounters of urban life. Bailey offers challenging interpretations of respectability, sexuality, and the cultural politics of class and gender in a distinctive, personal voice.

Motor City Movie Culture, 1916–1925 is a broad textured look at Hollywood coming of age in a city with a burgeoning population and complex demographics. Richard Abel investigates the role of local Detroit organizations in producing, distributing, exhibiting, and publicizing films in an effort to make moviegoing part of everyday life. Tapping a wealth of primary source material—from newspapers, spatiotemporal maps, and city directories to rare trade journals, theater programs, and local newsreels—Abel shows how entrepreneurs worked to lure moviegoers from Detroit's diverse ethnic neighborhoods into the theaters. Covering topics such as distribution, programming practices, nonfiction film, and movie coverage in local newspapers, with entr'actes that dive deeper into the roles of key individuals and organizations, this book examines how efforts in regional metropolitan cities like Detroit worked alongside California studios and New York head offices to bolster a mass culture of moviegoing in the United States.

Planning for a City of Culture gives us a new way to understand how cities use arts and culture in planning, fostering livable communities and creating economic development strategies to build their brand, attract residents and tourists, and distinguish themselves from other urban centers worldwide. While the common thinking on creative cities may coalesce around the idea of one goal––economic development and branding––this book turns this idea on its head. Goldberg-Miller brings a new, fresh perspective to the study of creative cities by using policy theory as an underlying construct to understand what happened in Toronto and New York in the 2000s. She demystifies the processes and outcomes of stakeholder involvement, exogenous and endogenous shocks, and research and strategic planning, as well as warning us about the many pitfalls of neglecting critical community voices in the burgeoning practice of creative placemaking. This book is an essential resource in examining the development and sustainability of the global trend of integrating arts and culture in city planning and urban design that has become an international phenomenon. Perfect for students, scholars, and city-lovers alike, Planning for a City of Culture illuminates the ways that this creative city trend went global, with the two case study cities serving as perfect illustrations of the power and promise of arts and culture in current and future municipal strategies. Please visit Shoshanah Goldberg-Miller's website for more information and research: www.goldberg-miller.com

The widespread concept of the 'postmodern city' is frequently linked to the decline of traditional manufacturing industries and a corresponding wane of white working-class culture. In place of these appear flexible working practices, a diversified workforce, and a greater emphasis on consumption, leisure, and tourism. Illustrated by an interdisciplinary study of Leeds, a typical postmodern city, this volume examines how such cities have reinvented themselves - commercially, politically and spatially - over the past two decades. The work addresses issues like cultural policy, city-centre development, sport, leisure and identity, and explores different urban processes in relation to changing configuration of class, gender and ethnicity in the postmodern city.