Marxism and Urban Culture is the first volume to reconcile social science and humanities perspectives on culture. Covering a range of global cities—Bologna, Buenos Aires, Guatemala City, Liverpool, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Mahalla al-Kubra, Mexico City, Montreal, Osaka, Strasbourg, Vienna—the contributions fuse political and theoretical concerns with analyses of urban cultural practices and historical movements, as well as urban-themed literary and filmic art. Conceived as a response to the persistent rift between disciplinary Marxist approaches to culture, this book prioritizes the urban problematic and builds implicitly and explicitly on work by numerous thinkers: not only Karl Marx but also David Harvey, Henri Lefebvre, Friedrich Engels and Antonio Gramsci, among others. Rather than reanimate reductive views either of Marx or of urban theory, the chapters in Marxism and Urban Culture speak broadly to the interdisciplinary connections that are increasingly the concern of cultural scholars working across and beyond the boundaries of geography, sociology, history, political science, language and literature fields, film studies, and more. A foreword written by Andy Merrifield (the author of Metromarxism) and an introduction by Benjamin Fraser (the author of Henri Lefebvre and the Spanish Urban Experience) situate the book’s chapters firmly in interdisciplinary terrain.

This innovative text uses the lens of culture to examine the various theoretical perspectives and paradigms of urban analysis. It explores the city's impact on how we make and consume all types of culture—art, music, literature, architecture, film, and more—not only illustrating the effects the urban environment has on the production of culture, but, at times, how culture has influenced the city. Theoretically diverse, Urban Culture employs the major theoretical perspectives in sociology and the major paradigms in Urban Sociology and Urban Studies: Urban Ecology, Marxism, New Urbanism, Socio-Psychological Perspective, Structuralists/Econometrics, and Urban Elites/ Entrepreneurs. Urban Terrorism is also addressed to provide a timely examination of the cultural impact and sociological effects of terrorism in an urban setting.

A review of the original French edition of this book in the American Journal of Sociology hailed it as "the most finished product yet to emerge from the new (Marxist) school of French urban sociology... The aim of the book is nothing less than to reconceptualize the field of urban sociology. It is carried out in two stages: a critique of the literature of urban sociology (and urbanization) and an attempt to lay the Marxist bases for a reconstructed urban sociology." The problems facing the world's cities, whether problems of development or of decay, cannot be solved until they have been diagnosed. The race riots in Detroit, the shantytowns of Paris, the financial crisis of New York must not be seen in isolation. The mushrooming cities of the third world, demolition and urban sprawl at home are located in a network of economics, social welfare and power politics, and the decisions we are called upon to make elude us in a fog of ideology. This brilliant exposition of the function of the city in social, economic and symbolic terms illuminates the creation and structuring of space by action administrative, productive and more immediately human. The interaction of environment and life-style, the complex of market forces and state policy against a background of traditional social practice is scrutinized with the aim of establishing concepts and research methods that will enable us to come to grips with the cities themselves and the way in which we view them. Castells draws on urban renewal in Paris, the English New Towns, the American megalopolis for concrete data in his empirical and theoretical investigation. In this English edition, a new Part V has been added on urban development in America. The chapters on the pobladores in Chile and the struggle of the FRAP in Quebec have been greatly extended and an Afterword traces the development of research in the past five years. -- Amazon.com.

In this work, Katznelson critically analyzes the development of Marxist scholarship on cities in the last quarter century. He demonstrates how some of the most important weaknesses in Marxism as a social theory can be remedied by forcing it to seriously engage with cities and spatial concerns, and explains the significant shortcomings even of this "improved" Marxism. Katznelson explores how a Marxism that is open to engagement with other social-theoretical traditions can help illuminate our understanding of cities and the patterns of class and group formation that have characterized urban life in the West.

*What is distinctive about urban life? *What key trends have shaped the contemporary city? *How have the city and urban cultures been explained by sociology and cultural studies? This is the first book to explore cities and urban life from the perspectives of both sociology and cultural theory. Through an interdisciplinary approach and use of case material, the book demonstrates that the 'real' city of physicality and struggle and the 'imagined' city of representations are entwined in the construction of urban cultures. Starting with a comparison of the rural and the urban, the book considers ways of imagining the city and of conceptualising urban cultures. It goes on to investigate the implications of several pivotal urban and cultural trends, such as the use of the arts and local cultures in city re-imaging, and the ways in which modernism, postmodernism and globalisation have shaped the built environment and the orientation of academic enquiry. Also examined is the way in which representations of the urban landscape in film, literature, art, and popular texts, have informed dominant ideas about the way certain city spaces - including city centres, urban waterfronts, and so-called 'global cities' - should look, function and 'feel'. Designed as a text for undergraduate courses in cultural studies, sociology and wider social science, this book traces the development of urban environments from the nineteenth century to the present, and illuminates the nature of urban life.

Offers an innovative, interdisciplinary approach which opens up new ways of understanding urban culture and space. The author approaches the city as essentially a 'material' place where people live, work, and participate in social practices within historical limits set not by sensory experience or cultural meanings but material social conditions.

This title provides a picture of the state of Marxist thinking. It aims to provoke a debate that will be of interest to those concerned with the status and development of Marxism and also to theorists in all fields of the human sciences.

Marxism and Social Movements is the first sustained engagement between social movement theory and Marxist approaches to collective action. The chapters collected here, by leading figures in both fields, discuss the potential for a Marxist theory of social movements; explore the developmental processes and political tensions within movements; set the question in a long historical perspective; and analyse contemporary movements against neo-liberalism and austerity. Exploring struggles on six continents over 150 years, this collection shows the power of Marxist analysis in relation not only to class politics, labour movements and revolutions but also anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles, community activism and environmental justice, indigenous struggles and anti-austerity protest. It sets a new agenda both for Marxist theory and for movement research. Contributors include: Paul Blackledge, Marc Blecher, Patrick Bond,Chik Collins, Ralph Darlington, Neil Davidson, Ashwin Desai, Jeff Goodwin, Chris Hesketh, Gabriel Hetland, Elizabeth Humphrys, Christian Høgsbjerg, David McNally, Trevor Ngwane, Heike Schaumberg and Hira Singh.