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Visible Cities, Global Comics: Urban Images and Spatial Form

Benjamin Fraser

The story of comics is also the story of the modern city. Visible Cities, Global Comics thus makes urban contribution to an interdisciplinary phase in comics studies. Striking a balance between ... More

The story of comics is also the story of the modern city. Visible Cities, Global Comics thus makes urban contribution to an interdisciplinary phase in comics studies. Striking a balance between descriptive, historical, analytical and theoretical modes, Fraser’s research monograph explores representations of the city in a selection of comics from across the globe. First, this book brings insights from urban theory to bear on specific comics texts; and second, it uses comics texts to elucidate themes of urbanism, architecture, planning and the cultures of cities in works from the 18th through the 21st centuries. Throughout, close readings of comics by artists from a range of locations—Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, England, France, Holland, Japan, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, the United States, and Uruguay—contribute to an exploration of larger urban themes. Chapters include “The Modern City Streets” (ch. 1), “The Passions of Everyday Urban Life” (ch. 2), “Urban Planning, Built Environment and the Structure of Cities” (ch. 3), “Architecture, Materiality and the Tactile City” (ch. 4), and “Danger, Disease and Death in the Graphic Urban Imagination” (ch. 5). Fraser’s writing presumes no previous knowledge of either urban theory or the ninth art. Readers are introduced to names, places, historical events, urban thinkers, and formal elements of the comics medium with which they may not be familiar. In the process, each chapter introduces readers to specific comics artists and texts and investigates a range of matters pertaining to the medium’s spatial form, stylistic variation, and cultural prominence.Less

Market Cities, People Cities: The Shape of Our Urban Future

Kevin T. Smiley

Michael Oluf Emerson (ed.)

Cities are diverging in our contemporary era. Specifically, we use our analysis of Copenhagen and Houston to argue that cities exist for one of two reasons: for markets or for people. Market Cities ... More

Cities are diverging in our contemporary era. Specifically, we use our analysis of Copenhagen and Houston to argue that cities exist for one of two reasons: for markets or for people. Market Cities (such as Houston) are dedicated to an unfettered free market ethos, individualism, and tolerance of high levels of inequality and decentralized governance, among other characteristics. By contrast, People Cities (such as Copenhagen) have a much greater collective ideal that drives the city toward attenuating inequality, strengthening government, and sanctioning “people-focused” policies and urban form. The first four chapters of the book showcase “how it happens” by introducing the perspective and studying the histories of the cities. We also showcase how government deeply shapes each type of city as well as the critical role that residents play in underpinning or contesting their city. The second part of the book (chapters 5 through 9) investigates “why it matters.” We discuss the implications of living in a Market City or People City for transportation, land-use planning, the environment, diversity, inequality, segregation, crime, and immigration. We also extend our perspective to a wider range of cities, making suggestions on how to apply the ideas presented in the book. Finally, we conclude by discussing how social change within the city might occur and best be accomplished.Less

Education Policy and Racial Biopolitics in Multicultural Cities

Kalervo N. Gulson and P. Taylor Webb

Attempts at educational equity amount to local activities performed within unequal and disjunctive political forces. As a politics, educational equity is redolent of the conditions that produce ... More

Attempts at educational equity amount to local activities performed within unequal and disjunctive political forces. As a politics, educational equity is redolent of the conditions that produce unequal schooling in the first place. Based on a four-year multi-modal study, this book identifies the forces that produced unequal schooling opportunities for Black families in Toronto, Canada, while simultaneously identifying the conditions that generated an Africentric Alternative School for these families and the Black community. The book identifies how the conditions that created unequal schooling were some of the very conditions that produced educational equity in the form of the school. This includes four preconditions to relay an account of the school’s origin, including biopolitics, neoliberalism, the politics of recognition, and the city and its relationships to ideologies of race and multiculturalism. Each precondition is discussed in a separate chapter and in relation to a significant policy event that precipitated the becoming of the Africentric Alternative School. The book utilises an unique feature by developing a ‘subtext’ that accompanies each chapter, whereby the authors reflect upon the theoretical and methodological choices in each corresponding chapter. The book concludes how this particular analysis of education policy can be used to map constellations of power and force that have a large degree of influence over policy subjects and policy actors, in concerted attempts to identify the important preconditions that shape recurring attempts at racial justice.Less

Realising the City: Urban Ethnography in Manchester

Camilla Lewis and Jessica Symons (eds)

This book demonstrates how a city is constituted in the productive tension between making and realising, between directing activity and allowing for its emergence. It presents nine ethnographic ... More

This book demonstrates how a city is constituted in the productive tension between making and realising, between directing activity and allowing for its emergence. It presents nine ethnographic accounts across Manchester UK, including residential neighbourhoods, cultural events, public spaces, the council, areas of urban regeneration and the airport. The authors examine the dynamics of power for those developing the city, experiencing such interventions and the spaces in-between. These perspectives trace the multiple dynamics of a vibrant post-industrial city, showing how people’s decisions and actions co-produce the city and give it shape. The ethnographic accounts focus on issues including self-policing (Smith), loss and de-industrialisation (Lewis), disenfranchised football fans, (Poulton), sexuality and public space (Atkins), nurturing an emergent city (Symons), defining the commons in public spaces (Lang), conflicting futures thinking (Pieri) networked urban governance (Knox), and how airport design shapes behaviour (O’Doherty). Their specificity provides grounded contexts for identifying ideological patterns and structural processes. They demonstrate the potential of ethnographies to beyond the particular. In doing so, the contributors complicate the dominant narrative of Manchester’s renaissance as an entrepreneurial city. The Afterword argues that even though a city’s future may be planned, it does not materialise as the perfect representation of its blueprint drawings, strategies or vision documents. Instead it is realised through the accumulative efforts of all those who live and work in the city. Researchers of cities can undertake a similar distributed analysis, attending to the unexpected insights that emerge through an open and discursive ethnographic process.Less

Ecologies of Urbanism in India: Metropolitan Civility and Sustainability

Anne M. Rademacher and K. Sivaramakrishnan (eds)

Essays follow rapidly proliferating and resource-intensive Indian urbanism in everyday environments. Case studies on nature conservation in cities, urban housing and slum development, waste ... More

Essays follow rapidly proliferating and resource-intensive Indian urbanism in everyday environments. Case studies on nature conservation in cities, urban housing and slum development, waste management, urban planning, and contestations over the quality of air, water, and sanitation in Delhi and Mumbai illuminate urban ecology per-spectives throughout the twentieth century. The collection highlights how struggles over the environment and one's quality of life in urban centers are increasingly framed in terms of their future place in a landscape of global sustainability. The text brings historical particularity and ethnographic nuance to questions of urban ecology and offers novel insight into theoretical and practical debates on urbanism and sustainability.Less

Germany and the Holy Roman Empire: Volume I: Maximilian I to the Peace of Westphalia, 1493-1648

Joachim Whaley

The work offers a new interpretation of the development of German‐speaking central Europe and the Holy Roman Empire or German Reich from the great reforms of 1495–1500 to its dissolution in 1806 ... More

The work offers a new interpretation of the development of German‐speaking central Europe and the Holy Roman Empire or German Reich from the great reforms of 1495–1500 to its dissolution in 1806 after the turmoil of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. This is traditionally regarded as a long period of decline, but this work shows how imperial institutions developed in response to the crises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, notably the Reformation and Thirty Years War, and assesses the impact of international developments on the Reich. Central themes are the tension between Habsburg aspirations to create a German monarchy and the desire of the German princes and cities to maintain their traditional rights and how the Reich developed the functions of a state during this period. The work also illuminates the development of the German territories subordinate to the Reich. It explores the implications of the Reformation and subsequent religious reform movements — both Protestant and Catholic — and the Enlightenment, for the government of both secular and ecclesiastical principalities, the minor territories of counts and knights, and the cities. The Reich and the territories formed a coherent and workable system and, as a polity, the Reich developed its own distinctive political culture and traditions of German patriotism over the early modern period.Less

Germany and the Holy Roman Empire: Volume II: The Peace of Westphalia to the Dissolution of the Reich, 1648-1806

Joachim Whaley

The work offers a new interpretation of the development of German-speaking central Europe and the Holy Roman Empire or German Reich from the great reforms of 1495-1500 to its dissolution in 1806 ... More

The work offers a new interpretation of the development of German-speaking central Europe and the Holy Roman Empire or German Reich from the great reforms of 1495-1500 to its dissolution in 1806 after the turmoil of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. This is traditionally regarded as a long period of decline, but this work shows how imperial institutions developed in response to the crises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, notably the Reformation and Thirty Years War, and assesses the impact of international developments on the Reich. Central themes are the tension between Habsburg aspirations to create a German monarchy and the desire of the German princes and cities to maintain their traditional rights and how the Reich developed the functions of a state during this period. The work also illuminates the development of the German territories subordinate to the Reich. It explores the implications of the Reformation and subsequent religious reform movements – both Protestant and Catholic – and the Enlightenment, for the government of both secular and ecclesiastical principalities, the minor territories of counts and knights, and the cities. The Reich and the territories formed a coherent and workable system and, as a polity, the Reich developed its own distinctive political culture and traditions of German patriotism over the early modern period.Less

The New Arab Urban: Gulf Cities of Wealth, Ambition, and Distress

Harvey Molotch and Davide Ponzini (eds)

This book is a way to learn from the Persian Gulf – to use its cities, cultures, and politics to broaden our understanding of how wealth and power operate in the world today. To learn from cities of ... More

This book is a way to learn from the Persian Gulf – to use its cities, cultures, and politics to broaden our understanding of how wealth and power operate in the world today. To learn from cities of the Arabian Peninsula -- places like Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha -- does not mean celebrating them or ridiculing them either. It means looking closely at how they operate and their prospects for future impacts inside and outside the region. Here, a group of scholars from across the disciplines and much of the world, strives to emplace the new developments in wider histories of trade, of technology, and of design. They trace where the money, ideas and projects come from and where they end up going. They show how Gulf elites import planning and design solutions, along with brands and prestige cultural institutions, from the West – and also what they then send out. The Gulf set-ups – in real estate, finance, and governance -- function as “test beds” for new state-market arrangements. Also involved is the massive import of temporary labor and, almost incidentally, severe ecological deficit. Gulf Cities display extreme manifestations of urbanization trends that, however unanticipated in the grand traditions of urban scholarship, now impact the world.Less

The Urban Apparatus: Mediapolitics and the City

Reinhold Martin

The Urban Apparatus analyzes urbanization and the contemporary city in aesthetic, socioeconomic, and mediapolitical terms. Its main argument is that understanding the city as infrastructure (i.e. ... More

The Urban Apparatus analyzes urbanization and the contemporary city in aesthetic, socioeconomic, and mediapolitical terms. Its main argument is that understanding the city as infrastructure (i.e. hardware in all senses) reveals the category of the urban, and of urbanization, to be a way of imparting functional, aesthetic, and cognitive order to a contradictory, doubly-bound neoliberal regime, rather than an empirical or properly theoretical description of that regime. The “urban” is, in short, an apparatus of power and of knowledge. The book’s detailed theoretical introduction elaborates this thesis. It is followed by ten shorter essays, each of which explores questions related to urban life through specific examples from around the world.Less

Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media

Shannon Mattern

Offering powerful new ways of thinking about our cities, Shannon Mattern goes far beyond the historical concepts of origins, development, revolutions, and the accomplishments of an elite few. Her ... More

Offering powerful new ways of thinking about our cities, Shannon Mattern goes far beyond the historical concepts of origins, development, revolutions, and the accomplishments of an elite few. Her vivid prose leads readers through a historically and geographically broad range of stories and takes media archaeology to the city’s streets, revealing new ways to write our urban, media, and cultural histories.Less