Description
Book SynopsisGlobal Downtowns weaves together rich cultural materials from North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America to explore the most iconic space of modern urban imagery and identity. Essays bring diverse downtowns to life while probing deeper shared theoretical and pragmatic questions of power, division, consumption, and conflict.
Trade Review"
Global Downtowns succeeds brilliantly in its quest to unpack the complexities of downtown creation (and recreation) in global (and globalizing) cities, and it should be of lively interest to urban scholars, senior undergraduates and Masters-level urban studies students, and to urbanists more generally." *
Journal of Regional Science *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Globalizing Downtown
-Gary W. McDonogh and Marina Peterson
PART I. IMAGINATION
1. Toward a Genealogy of Downtowns
-Robert Rotenberg
2. From Peking to Beijing: Production of Centrality in the Global Age
-Xuefei Ren
3. Simulations of Barcelona: Urban Projects in Port Spaces (1981- 2002)
-Francesc Magrinyà and Gaspar Maza
4. Urbanist Ideology and the Production of Space in the United Arab Emirates: An Anthropological Critique
-Ahmed Kanna
PART II. CONSUMPTION
5. Reaching for Dubai: Nashville Dreams of a Twenty-First-Century Skyline
-Richard Lloyd and Brian D. Christens
6. From National Utopia to Elite Enclave: "Economic Realities" and Resistance in the Reconstruction of Beirut
-Najib Hourani
7. When the Film Festival Comes to (Down)Town: Transnational Circuits, Tourism, and the Urban Economy of Images
-William Cunningham Bissell
8. The Future of the Past: World Heritage, National Identity, and Urban Centrality in Late Socialist Cuba
-Matthew J. Hill
PART III. CONFLICT
9. Utopia/Dystopia: Art and Downtown Development in Los Angeles
-Marina Peterson
10. "Slum-Free Mumbai" and Other Entrepreneurial Strategies in the Making of Mumbai's Global Downtown
-Liza Weinstein
11. Downtown as Brand, Downtown as Land: Urban Elites and Neoliberal Development in Contemporary New York City
-Julian Brash
12. Beside Downtown: Global Chinatown
-Gary W. McDonogh and Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong
Notes
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
