Cities: Reimagining the Urban / Edition 1

by Ash Amin, Nigel Thrift

Overview

This book develops a fresh and challenging perspective on the city. Drawing on a wide and diverse range of material and texts, it argues that too much contemporary urban theory is based on nostalgia for a humane, face-to-face and bounded city. Amin and Thrift maintain that the traditional divide between the city and the rest of the world has been perforated through urban encroachment, the thickening of the links between the two, and urbanization as a way of life.

They outline an innovative sociology of the city that scatters urban life along a series of sites and circulations, reinstating previously suppressed areas of contemporary urban life: from the presence of non-human activity to the centrality of distant connections. The implications of this viewpoint are traced through a series of chapters on power, economy and democracy.

This concise and accessible book will be of interest to students and scholars in sociology, geography, urban studies, cultural studies and politics.

.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745624143
Publisher:	Polity Press
Publication date:	04/22/2002
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.02(w) x 9.01(h) x 0.65(d)

About the Author

Ash Amin is Professor of Geography at the University of Durham.

Nigel Thrift is Professor of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements.

Introduction.

1. The Legibility of the Everyday City:.

Introduction.

The New Urbanism in Context.

The Flâneur and Transitivity.

Rhythms and Rhythmanalysis.

Urban Footprints and Namings.

A Basic Ontology.

2. Propinquity and Flow in the City:.

Introduction.

The Nostalgic City.

Near and Far.

Distanciated Communities.

The Restless Site.

Conclusion.

3. Cities in a Distanciated Ecomony:.

Introduction.

The Urbanised Economy.

Cities as Sites.

Conclusion.

4. The Machinic City:.

Introduction.

Circulation.

The City of Passions.

The Engineering of Certainty.

5. Powerful Cities:.

Introduction.

Diagrams of Power.

Escape Attempts.

But!!!.

Conclusion.

6. The Democratic City:.

Introduction.

‘Creating a Democratic Public'.

Political City.

Rights to the City: A Politics of the Commons.

A Mobile Politics.

Afterword: Testing New Ground.

References.

Index.

Editorial Reviews

"An important recent intervention in debates about the city, and aresponse to the tendency of urban geography to focus on the bigissues at the expense of the everyday. It places the seeminglytrivial and mundane at the heart of a reimagined geography ofcities as connected, distributed and plural."
Times Higher Education

"In this important and provocative book, Amin and Thrift set outthe rudiments of what might be termed a 'post -urbansociology...The book is certainly an intellectual tour-de-force. Itfizzes with ideas and brings a range of novel perspectives tobear...I will certainly be looking forward to reading the futureworks of these writers"
Sociology

"A wonderfully incisive dissection of new configurations of"cities" in the contemporary world."
John Urry, Lancaster University

"A brilliant re-viewing of cities. Bursting with fresh insights,it demands that we see and hear urban life and the everydayworkings of the metropolis in new ways, that we re-cognize urbancomplexities, that we resensitize ourselves to all the transitoryconjunctures and disjunctures through which the urban isperpetually (re)constituted, that we reconceive the terrain ofurban political possibility. In short, if there is one book to beread on contemporary urban phenomena, this is unquestionablyit."
Allan Pred, University of California at Berkeley

From the Publisher