This sparkling collection takes a positive rather than a celebratory approach to the contemporary city. Its intention is to think up new strategies of inclusion which can be used to combat the strategies of inclusion deployed in existing sociospatial orders. A particular feature of the collection is its attempt to take in postcolonial situations in cities outside of the standard western examples.--Nigel Thrift, University of Bristol

This book is about the contemporary city and those who live in it. It is thus also about the urban world of the era (extending roughly from the 1960s to the present) that we see as postmodern, and specifically about how the postmodern city is changing under the impact of globalization and new information and communication technologies. In particular, Geyh explores how the urban spaces of postmodernity (parks, plazas, streets, sidewalks) and postmodern urban subjectivities and communities respond to and create each other – how they become mutually constructing. While there is much in this book about what makes a city "postmodern," its primary focus is on how the postmodern city is experienced by its inhabitants, and in this respect the book is also a study of everyday life in the postmodern era. As such, it deals not only with the ways in which the postmodern city has developed out of economic, technological, political, and cultural structures that are different from those of the modern city, but also with how the postmodern city changes our ways of knowing and experiencing the world and ourselves as postmodern urban subjects, as citizens of postmodernity.

It historicizes the contemporary discussion of urbanism, highlighting the local and global breadth of the city landscape. This interdisciplinary collection examines how the city develops in the interactions of space and imagination. The essays focus on issues such as street design in Vienna, the motion picture industry in Los Angeles, architecture in Marseilles and Algiers, and the kaleidoscopic paradox of post-apartheid Johannesburg. They explore the nature of spatial politics, examining the disparate worlds of eighteenth-century Baghdad, nineteenth-century Morelia. They also show the meaning of everyday spaces to urban life, illuminating issues such as crime in metropolitan London, youth culture in Dakar, "memory projects" in Tokyo, and Bombay cinema.

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.

This book will change the way we understand cities. It provides readers with not only an introduction to cities and urbanism in the postmodern world but also overturns many common assumptions about urban structure.

This Companion offers readers an accessible survey of the historical and symbolic relationships between literature and the city.

Written by one of America's foremost geographers, Postmodern Geographies contests the tendency, still dominant in most social science, to reduce human geography to a reflective mirror, or, as Marx called it, an "unnecessary complication." Beginning with a powerful critique of historicism and its constraining effects on the geographical imagination, Edward Soja builds on the work of Foucault, Berger, Giddens, Berman, Jameson and, above all, Henri Lefebvre, to argue for a historical and geographical materialism, a radical rethinking of the dialectics of space, time and social being. Soja charts the respatialization of social theory from the still unfolding encounter between Western Marxism and modern geography, through the current debates on the emergence of a postfordist regime of "flexible accumulation." The postmodern geography of Los Angeles, exposed in a provocative pair of essays, serves as a model in his account of the contemporary struggle for control over the social production of space.

The problem of "lost space," or the inadequate use of space, afflicts most urban centers today. The automobile, the effects of the Modern Movement in architectural design, urban-renewal and zoning policies, the dominance of private over public interests, as well as changes in land use in the inner city have resulted in the loss of values and meanings that were traditionally associated with urban open space. This text offers a comprehensive and systematic examination of the crisis of the contemporary city and the means by which this crisis can be addressed. Finding Lost Space traces leading urban spatial design theories that have emerged over the past eighty years: the principles of Sitte and Howard; the impact of and reactions to the Functionalist movement; and designs developed by Team 10, Robert Venturi, the Krier brothers, and Fumihiko Maki, to name a few. In addition to discussions of historic precedents, contemporary approaches to urban spatial design are explored. Detailed case studies of Boston, Massachusetts; Washington, D.C.; Goteborg, Sweden; and the Byker area of Newcastle, England demonstrate the need for an integrated design approach--one that considers figure-ground, linkage, and place theories of urban spatial design. These theories and their individual strengths and weaknesses are defined and applied in the case studies, demonstrating how well they operate in different contexts. This text will prove invaluable for students and professionals in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, and city planning. Finding Lost Space is going to be a primary text for the urban designers of the next generation. It is the first book in the field to absorb the lessons of the postmodern reaction, including the work of the Krier brothers and many others, and to integrate these into a coherent theory and set of design guidelines. Without polemics, Roger Trancik addresses the biggest issue in architecture and urbanism today: how can we regain in our shattered cities a public realm that is made of firmly shaped, coherently linked, humanly meaningful urban spaces? Robert Campbell, AIA Architect and architecture critic Boston Globe

A study of water at the intersection of landscape and infrastructure in Paris, Berlin, Lagos, Mumbai, Los Angeles, and London. Water lies at the intersection of landscape and infrastructure, crossing between visible and invisible domains of urban space, in the tanks and buckets of the global South and the vast subterranean technological networks of the global North. In this book, Matthew Gandy considers the cultural and material significance of water through the experiences of six cities: Paris, Berlin, Lagos, Mumbai, Los Angeles, and London. Tracing the evolving relationships among modernity, nature, and the urban imagination, from different vantage points and through different periods, Gandy uses water as a lens through which to observe both the ambiguities and the limits of nature as conventionally understood. Gandy begins with the Parisian sewers of the nineteenth century, captured in the photographs of Nadar, and the reconstruction of subterranean Paris. He moves on to Weimar-era Berlin and its protection of public access to lakes for swimming, the culmination of efforts to reconnect the city with nature. He considers the threat of malaria in Lagos, where changing geopolitical circumstances led to large-scale swamp drainage in the 1940s. He shows how the dysfunctional water infrastructure of Mumbai offers a vivid expression of persistent social inequality in a postcolonial city. He explores the incongruous concrete landscapes of the Los Angeles River. Finally, Gandy uses the fictional scenario of a partially submerged London as the starting point for an investigation of the actual hydrological threats facing that city.