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• 1. Introduction
• 2. Historians and the Urban Question
• 3. The Economic Significance of Cities
• 4. Urbanism As Ways of Life
• 5. 'Urban' Problems and Governance
• 6. Beyond City Limits: Connections and Comparisons
• 7. Conclusion.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Most historians and social scientists treat cities as mere settings. In fact, urban places shape our experience. There, daily life has a faster, artificial rhythm and, for good and ill, people and agencies affect each other through externalities (uncompensated effects) whose impact is inherently geographical. In economic terms, urban concentration enables efficiency and promotes innovation while raising the costs of land, housing, and labour. Socially, it can alienate or provide anonymity, while fostering new forms of community. It creates congestion and pollution, posing challenges for governance. Some effects extend beyond urban borders, creating cultural change. The character of cities varies by country and world region, but it has generic qualities, a claim best tested by comparing places that are most different. These qualities intertwine, creating built environments that endure. To fully comprehend such path dependency, we need to develop a synthetic vision that is historically and geographically informed.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• 1. Up: The most visible part of a city's skyline is the skyscraper - do you know how they're built?
• 2. Switch: Sparks will fly - we'll explore the role of electricity, and you'll understand how the grid works
• 3. Wet: Cities can't survive without water, and they produce a lot of waste. Expect toilet humour!
• 4. Way: Let's head out on the open road, and explore beautiful bridges and the science of traffic jams
• 5. Drive: What good is a road without a car? Here we'll talk about everything from tyres to fuel cells
• 6. Loco: We'll dig our very own tunnel, and you'll discover why 'leaves on the line' cause problems
• 7. Connect: Cities contain other less obvious networks - food and goods, communications and money
• 8. City: Spend a day of discovery in an imaginary future city.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Cities are a big deal. More people now live in them than don't, and with a growing world population, the urban jungle is only going to get busier in the coming decades. But how often do we stop to think about what makes our cities work? Cities are built using some of the most creative and revolutionary science and engineering ideas - from steel structures that scrape the sky to glass cables that help us communicate at the speed of light - but most of us are too busy to notice. Science and the City is your guidebook to that hidden world, helping you to uncover some of the remarkable technologies that keep the world's great metropolises moving. Laurie Winkless takes us around cities in six continents to find out how they're dealing with the challenges of feeding, housing, powering and connecting more people than ever before. In this book, you'll meet urban pioneers from history, along with today's experts in everything from roads to time, and you will uncover the vital role science has played in shaping the city around you. But more than that, by exploring cutting-edge research from labs across the world, you'll build your own vision of the megacity of tomorrow, based on science fact rather than science fiction. Science and the City is the perfect read for anyone curious about the world they live in.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Contents Preface Introduction: The Urban Apparatus
• 1. City, Country, World
• 2. Financial Imaginaries
• 3. The Thing About Cities
• 4. Public and Common(s)
• 5. Horizons of Thought
• 6. Polis = Oikos
• 7. Notes of the Housing Question
• 8. Broken Windows
• 9. Beijing in Detroit
• 10. Infrastructure and Mediapolitics Notes Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Urbanization is a system of power and knowledge, and today\u2019s city functions through the expansive material infrastructures of the urban order. In The Urban Apparatus, Reinhold Martin analyzes urbanization and the contemporary city in aesthetic, socioeconomic, and mediapolitical terms. He argues that understanding the city as infrastructure reveals urbanization to be a way of imparting functional, aesthetic, and cognitive order to a contradictory, doubly bound neoliberal regime.Blending critical philosophy, political theory, and media theory, The Urban Apparatus explores how the aesthetics of cities and their political economies overlap. In a series of ten essays, with a detailed theoretical introduction, Martin explores questions related to urban life, drawn from a wide range of global topics-from the fiscal crisis in Detroit to speculative development in Mumbai to the landscape of Mars, from discussions of race and the environment to housing and economic inequality. Each essay proposes a particular \u201cmediator\u201d (or a material complex) that is shaped by imaginative practices, each answering the question \u201cWhat is a city, today?\u201d The Urban Apparatus serves as an \u201curban\u201d bookend to the architectural questions explored by Martin in his earlier book Utopia\u2019s Ghost, and ultimately offers readers a way to think politically about urbanization.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• The Emancipatory City - Loretta Lees Urban (Re)Visions PART ONE: CITIES OF (IN)DIFFERENCE Domesticating Monsters - Susan Ruddick Cartographies of Difference and the Emancipatory City Zero Tolerance, Maximum Surveillance? Deviance, Difference and Crime Control in the Late Modern City - Nicholas Fyfe Impurity and the Emancipatory City - Les Back and Michael Keith Young People, Community Safety and Racial Danger The Emancipatory Community? Place, Politics and Collective Action in Cities - James DeFilippis and Peter North PART TWO: EMANCIPATORY PRACTICES Sites of Public (Homo)Sex and the Carnivalesque Spaces of Reclaim the Streets - Gavin Brown Inventing New Games - David Pinder Unitary Urbanism and the Politics of Space Everyday Rationality and the Emancipatory City - Gary Bridge Urban Escapades - Quentin Stevens Play in Melbourne's Public Spaces PART THREE: UTOPIC TRAJECTORIES The Urban Basis of Emancipation - Jennifer Robinson Spatial Theory and the City in South African Politics Water, Modernity and Emancipatory Urbanism - Matthew Gandy In Search of the Horizon - Geraldine Pratt and Rose Marie San Juan Utopia in The Truman Show and The Matrix Ghosts and the City of Hope - Steve Pile REFLECTIONS The 'Emancipatory' City? - Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift The Right to the City - David Harvey.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

'"The Emancipatory City" is a wonderful addition to a growing literature on the public culture of the city. In these spaces, tolerance and intolerance, difference and indifference, transgressions, resistances, and playful spontaneity erupt to give texture to urban life. The book broadens our gaze and deepens our understanding of how cities enable people to express themselves and be free' - Robert A. Beauregard, New School University, New York.Who are cities for? What kinds of societies might they most democratically embody? And, how can cities be emancipatory sites? The ambivalent status of urban space in terms of emancipation, democratisation, justice and citizenship is central to recent work in urban geography, 'new' cultural geography, critical geography and postmodern planning, as well as literature on urban social justice, public space and the politics of identity. Seeking alternative and progressive visions of the emancipatory city through an exploration of the tensions and possibilities between the freedoms and constraints offered by the city, the authors of "The Emancipatory City?" build on this wealth of current perspectives to present a critical analysis of urban experience.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• From the city to urban society
• Blind field
• The urban phenomenon
• Levels and dimensions
• Urban myths and ideologies
• Urban form
• Toward an urban strategy
• The urban illusion
• Urban society.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Originally published in 1970, The Urban Revolution marked Henri Lefebvre's first sustained critique of urban society, a work in which he pioneered the use of semiotic, structuralist, and poststructuralist methodologies in analyzing the development of the urban environment. Although it is widely considered a foundational book in contemporary thinking about the city, The Urban Revolution has never been translated into English--until now. This first English edition, deftly translated by Robert Bononno, makes available to a broad audience Lefebvre's sophisticated insights into the urban dimensions of modern life.Lefebvre begins with the premise that the total urbanization of society is an inevitable process that demands of its critics new interpretive and perceptual approaches that recognize the urban as a complex field of inquiry. Dismissive of cold, modernist visions of the city, particularly those embodied by rationalist architects and urban planners like Le Corbusier, Lefebvre instead articulates the lived experiences of individual inhabitants of the city. In contrast to the ideology of urbanism and its reliance on commodification and bureaucratization--the capitalist logic of market and state--Lefebvre conceives of an urban utopia characterized by self-determination, individual creativity, and authentic social relationships.A brilliantly conceived and theoretically rigorous investigation into the realities and possibilities of urban space, The Urban Revolution remains an essential analysis of and guide to the nature of the city.Henri Lefebvre (d. 1991) was one of the most significant European thinkers of the twentieth century. His many books include The Production of Space (1991), Everyday Life in the Modern World (1994), Introduction to Modernity (1995), and Writings on Cities (1995).Robert Bononno is a full-time translator who lives in New York. His recent translations include The Singular Objects of Architecture by Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel (Minnesota, 2002) and Cyberculture by Pierre L�vy (Minnesota, 2001).
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Acknowledgements. Introduction.
• 1. The Legibility of the Everyday City: Introduction. The New Urbanism in Context. The Flaneur 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.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

This book develops a fresh and challenging perspective on the city. Drawing on a wide and diverse range of material and texts, it argues that too much contemporary urban theory is based on nostalgia for a humane, face-to-face and bounded city. Amin and Thrift maintain that the traditional divide between the city and the rest of the world has been perforated through urban encroachment, the thickening of the links between the two, and urbanization as a way of life. They outline an innovative sociology of the city that scatters urban life along a series of sites and circulations, reinstating previously suppressed areas of contemporary urban life: from the presence of non-human activity to the centrality of distant connections. The implications of this viewpoint are traced through a series of chapters on power, economy and democracy. This concise and accessible book will be of interest to students and scholars in sociology, geography, urban studies, cultural studies and politics. .
(source: Nielsen Book Data)