Description
Book SynopsisSeeing like a city means recognizing that cities are living things made up of a tangle of networks, built up from the agency of countless actors. Cities must not be considered as expressions of larger paradigms or sites of human effort and organization alone.
Trade Review‘Amin and Thrift are a magnificent duet, conjuring for the reader a sensorium of the intersecting forces affecting and shaped by the sociotechnical systems making up the urban. Here, cities are the locus through which to rethink the very composition of our world and how we might remake, with reinvestment in the provisioning of public goods, a more judicious, viable place within it.’
AbdouMalique Simone, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and Goldsmiths, University of London‘This is a book that needed to be written. It takes us beyond the common notion of cities as settings, and pulls us into layer after layer of what constitutes the urban. Written in a highly conceptualized way, it gives us the full experience of theoria in its original meaning: seeing.’
Saskia Sassen, Columbia University, author of Expulsions
"With this book and their earlier
Cities: Reimagining the Urban (2000), Amin and Thrift present a compelling theoretical argument and take an extreme position amongst those who resist the determinativeness and embrace the relationality of cities. [...N]ot to know its argument is to be uneducated in the world of urban theory. Still, this is not a book for the faint-hearted. It offers no reassurance [...] that change can be managed and all will be well. Rather, it challenges us to re-think our fundamental understandings of what we mean by a city."
Robert Beauregard, Urban Studies
