G. Bridge – The New Blackwell Companion to the City (2011)

Автор: G. Bridge
Название книги: The New Blackwell Companion to the City (2011)
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Социология
Страницы: 786
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

This book considers the state of the city and contemporary urbanisation from a range of intellectual and international perspectives.
The most interdisciplinary collection of its kind
Provides a contemporary update on urban thinking that builds on well established debates in the field
Uses the city to explore economic, social, cultural, environmental and political issues more broadly
Includes contributions from non Western perspectives and cities

Cities are now where more than half of humanity live and urban processes affect
the whole globe. The rates of growth, diversity of population, and complexity of
their activities, as well as the scale of the problems (and possibilities) they pose, are
breathtaking. This Companion seeks to capture the diversity and complexity of city
life and to offer routes to understanding “ the urban. ” The diversity is captured in
the range of theoretical approaches and disciplinary perspectives that the contributors
represent (including, amongst many others, geography, sociology, cultural
studies, anthropology, history, and planning). With the exception of seven chapters,
these are newly commissioned essays for this volume.
Since the publication of the fi rst Companion to the City some of the ways of
understanding the city and urban processes have changed in emphasis and new
themes have emerged. We have sought to represent this with new sections on
Materialities, Mobilities, and Affect. Although they have developed independently,
if thought of together, materialities and mobilities further animate our understanding
of cities, opening out the analysis to consider the life in what was hitherto
thought of as inert (the material infrastructure of cities) and the importance of
movements (of objects, or bacteria) previously considered insignifi cant. Affect too
deals with forces and movements in the city (the emotions, affect, embodied agency)
that have been overlooked in traditional urban analysis. We can see that the city is
part constituted through the forces of materials, objects, microbes, and emotions
– as well as humans and their projects and purposes.
Of course the more explicit and observable projects and purposes of humans are
a vital part of city life and the outcomes of the cooperation and confl icts of these
human activities are registered in the enduring themes of social division and difference;
culture and public life; planning and politics (the other themes of this and the
original Companion ). There are also major global trends that occur across the
themes. One would be the pervasiveness of the symbolic and actual power of
markets across all elements of urban life, from the economic, through to the cultural,
and even into the realms of welfare and support. This is of course particularly evident in the rapidly (albeit differentially) expanding metropolises of China and
several chapters are concerned with various aspects of urbanization and urban
growth in China. Another theme would be the increasing signifi cance of networks.
There is a continuing focus in urban studies on US and European cities and a number
of chapters consider different aspects of urbanism in these countries. There are also
a number of chapters that are concerned with the cities of the south, not just in
terms of the analysis of the social and economic conditions of poor but rapidly
growing cities, but in terms of challenging the infl uence of western modes of theorizing
and analysis in the urban studies discipline.
Since the last Companion to the City a group of scholars – NYLON – in the UK
and US (funded by the British Academy and New York University) met for three
years to discuss urban questions from a cultural, historical, and social perspective,
as these were articulated in the spaces of London and New York. Essays from most
of these scholars appear here. 1
This New Companion to the City has been conceived in relation to the second
edition of the Blackwell City Reader. This latter volume comprises already published
writings on the city which have been selected as representative of the oeuvre of texts
on the city that we consider to have been most important and infl uential. The two
texts in combination thus offer an overview of historical and contemporary thinking
on the city. The City Reader , like the New Companion , refl ects changing theoretical
perspectives, as well as a shift in location of analysis away from the global north