Description
Book SynopsisSustainability and the City: Urban Poetics and Politics contributes to third-generation discourse on sustainable development by considering, through a humanistic lens, theories and practices of sustainability in a wide range of urban cultures. It demonstrates cities' inextricability from discussions on sustainability because not only is the world urbanizing at an unprecedented rate but also cities are primary locations of the circulation of excess capital, socioeconomic divisions and hierarchies, political resistance, friction between human and non-human worlds, and the confluence of art, policy, and identity formation in placemaking. With essays by scholars working in a variety of fieldsfrom architecture to literature to music to sociologythis collection maintains that any hope for achieving urban sustainability will require taking seriously the ways in which cities are imagined. Efforts to make cities sustainable must fully incorporate the humanities because critical endeavors and cr
Trade ReviewCities do not arise from the sole will and skill of architects, planners, surveyors, and politicians. They have to be nurtured by their inhabitants. Sustainability and the City: Urban Poetics and Politics aims at understanding urban sustainability by deciphering the eternal game between what the authorities, whatever their form, try to impose on the social fabric, and what the social fabric impose on the authorities, through deception or force, through confrontation or bargaining. It is a book of great interest to anyone thinking about cities and sustainability. -- François Mancebo, Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne
This fascinating volume thinks through the complexities of environmental issues in urban space. The interdisciplinary breadth and accessibility of its essays is unmatched. -- Sunny Statler-Pace, Auburn University
Table of ContentsLauren Curtright, “Introduction: The Role of the Humanities in Urban Sustainability” Part I: Conceptualizing Urban Sustainability 1.Christopher Schliephake, “The Imaginative Fabrics of Urban Sustainability: From Metaphor to Matter and from Management to Culture in Eco(logical) City (Re-)Design” 2.Anirban Adhya and Philip D. Plowright, “Wilderness as City: Conflicting Values in Framing Sustainable Urbanism” 3.Karim Wagih Fawzi Youssef, “Unraveling the Poles of Suburb and City” 4.Iuliu Ratiu, “The Rhetoric of Sustainability: Teaching Writing to (Mostly) Engineering Students in an Urban Setting” Part II: In Situ Sustainable Urbanism 5.Lea Rekow, “In a Fragile Context: Exploring the Challenges of Informal Sector Urban Gardening in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil” 6.Heide Imai, “Back to the City: Creativity and Sustainability as a New Approach to Revive the City from the Inside” 7.Claudia Mantovan, “Coexistence, Conflict, and Governance in Multi-Ethnic Districts: Two Case Studies in the Municipalities of Padua and Venice, Italy” 8.Joseph Donica, “The Erosion of the Cultural Commons and the Possibilities of Participatory Urbanism: Public Art in New Orleans, Detroit, and Port-au-Prince” Part III: Representations of Sustainability and the City 9.Alexander Kleinschrodt, “The Ambivalence of Noise: Requiem for Fossil Fuels by Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger” 10.Lisa FitzGerald, “Urban Ecology: Envisioning and Aestheticizing Modernity in Samuel Beckett’s Not I” 11.Katarzyna Szalewska, “Sustainable Urban Development and Literature: A Central-European View” 12.Mehdi Kochbati, “Exploring the American City’s Environment: Friction between Fluctuating Urban Sustainability, Modern Myths of Space, and Memory Places in the Works of Paul Auster” 13.Caitlin Yocco-Locascio, “Trash That Connects: The Everyday Rhizome of Cédric Klapisch’s Paris”
