Description
Book SynopsisThis book develops a fresh and challenging perspective on the city. Amin and Thrift maintain that the traditional divide between the city and the countryside has been perforated through urban encroachment, the thickening of the links between the two, and urbanization as a way of life.
Trade Review"An important recent intervention in debates about the city, and a response to the tendency of urban geography to focus on the big issues at the expense of the everyday. It places the seemingly trivial and mundane at the heart of a reimagined geography of cities as connected, distributed and plural."
Times Higher Education "In this important and provocative book, Amin and Thrift set out the rudiments of what might be termed a 'post -urban sociology...The book is certainly an intellectual tour-de-force. It fizzes with ideas and brings a range of novel perspectives to bear...I will certainly be looking forward to reading the future works 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 everyday workings of the metropolis in new ways, that we re-cognize urban complexities, that we resensitize ourselves to all the transitory conjunctures and disjunctures through which the urban is perpetually (re)constituted, that we reconceive the terrain of urban political possibility. In short, if there is one book to be read on contemporary urban phenomena, this is unquestionably it."
Allan Pred, University of California at Berkeley
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements.
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.
