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During the first half of the 20th century, Atlantic City was the nation's most popular middle-class resort — the home of the famed Boardwalk, the Miss America Pageant, and the board game Monopoly. By the late 1960s, it had become a symbol of urban decay and blight. Several decades and a dozen casinos later, Atlantic City is again one of America's most popular tourist spots, with thirty-five million visitors a year. Yet most stay for a mere six hours, the city doesn't have a single movie theater and its one supermarket is a virtual fortress. This book uses the case of Atlantic City to discuss the boundaries of public space in urban America. It argues that in the past public space was not about democracy but about exclusion. During Atlantic City's heyday, African Americans were kept off the Boardwalk and away from the beaches. Desegregation overturned this racial balance in the mid-1960s, making the city's public spaces more open and democratic and many middle-class Americans fled to suburban-style resorts such as Disneyworld. With the opening of the city's first casino in 1978, the urban balance once again shifted and tourists were deliberately kept away from the city's grim reality and its predominantly poor African American residents. The narrative of this book points to the troubling fate of urban America, and the observations and conclusions of this book to implications for those interested in urban studies, sociology, planning, architecture, and history.

This book is about the renaissance of cities in the 21st century and their increasing role as centers of creative economic activity. It attempts to put some conceptual and descriptive order around issues of urbanization in the contemporary world, emphasizing the idea of the social economy of the metropolis, which is to say, a view of the urban organism as an intertwined system of social and economic life played out through the arena of urban space. The book opens with a review of some essentials of urban theory. It aims to re-articulate the urban question in a way that is relevant to city life and politics in the present era. It then analyses the functional characteristics of the urban economy, with special reference to the rise of a group of core sectors such as media, fashion, music, etc. focused on cognitive and cultural forms of work. These sectors are growing with great rapidity in the world’s largest cities at the present time, and they play a major role in the urban resurgence that has been occurring of late. The discussion then explores the spatial ramifications of this new economy in cities and the ways in which it appears to be ushering in major shifts in divisions of labor and urban social stratification, as marked by a growing divide between a stratum of elite workers on the one side and a low-wage proletariat on the other.

This cross-disciplinary, ethnographic, contextualized, and empirical book explores the meaning and significance of urban space, and maps the spatial inscription of power on the mega-city of Cairo. Suspicious of collective life and averse to power-sharing, Egyptian governance structures weaken but do not stop the public's role in the remaking of their city. What happens to a city where neo-liberalism has scaled back public services and encouraged the privatization of public goods, while the vast majority cannot afford the effects of such policies? Who wins and losses in the “march to the modern and the global” as the government transforms urban spaces and markets in the name of growth, security, tourism, and modernity? How do Cairenes struggle with an ambiguous and vulnerable legal and bureaucratic environment when legality is a privilege affordable only to the few or the connected? This companion to Cairo Cosmopolitan (AUC Press, 2006) further develops the central insights of the Cairo School of Urban Studies.

This important book presents new international comparative research that engages critically with Lefebvre’s spatial theories and challenges recent thinking about the nature of urban space. The book elucidates the production of urban public space and in so doing stimulates a rethinking of Lefebvre’s spatial theories and the essence of public space. The two main research objectives are to tease out the implications of the production of space for post-industrial city transformation and to unravel the role of differential space in such transformation. Empirically the research is grounded in three iconic post-industrial cities: Vancouver, Canada; Lowell, Massachusetts, US; and Manchester, England. Although strongly rooted theoretically, the book locates the conceptual ideas in the practice of urban policy making, urban planning and the politicised everyday use of public space. Extensive original archival research and interview research in the three cities forms the basis for an exploration of how urban public spaces, especially what Lefebvre calls differential space, are socially produced. Spatial coalitions, counter-representations and counter-projects are seen as vital elements in such processes. Differential space is shown to erupt through the vulnerabilities of neo-capitalist abstract space. The book demonstrates the importance of inclusive differential space for everyday democratic life in cities. The book contributes critically to the post-industrial city comparative analysis literature and provides an accessible guide for those who care about cities, public space, city planning and urban policy.

The built environment in today's hybrid cities is changing radically. The pervasiveness of networked mobile and embedded devices has transformed a predominantly stable background for human activity into spaces that have a more fluid behavior. Based on their capability to sense, compute, and act in real time, urban spaces have the potential to go beyond planned behaviors and, instead, change and adapt dynamically. These interactions resemble improvisation in the performing arts, and this book offers a new improvisation-based framework for thinking about future cities. The book moves beyond the smart city concept by unlocking performativity, and specifically improvisation, as a new design approach and explores how city lights, buses, plazas, and other urban environments are capable of behavior beyond scripts. Drawing on research of digital cities and design theory, the book makes improvisation useful and applicable to the condition of today's technology-imbued cities and proposes a new future for responsive urban design.

Security in the Bubble is about the struggles of urbanites to come to terms with life in the city as dangerous. This book examines newly emerging aesthetic, affective and inclusionary spatialities of security governance. Urban South Africa is an especially pertinent site for such an endeavour: post-apartheid South Africa has reinvented space, using it as a technique of governance in more “positive” and sophisticated ways that ultimately alter the landscape of urban fragmentation. No longer reducible to the after-pains of racial apartheid nor to a new class segregation, this fragmentation is now better conceptualized as a heterogeneous ensemble of bubbles of (imagined) safety. Security in the Bubble is about the political dilemma that this landscape of bubbles creates: Security can only be achieved through particularistic strategies against the commons of the city. The book traces two emerging urban regimes of governing security in contemporary Durban: handsome space and instant space. Handsome space is about aesthetic and affective communication as means to make places safe. Instant space addresses the personal crime-related “navigation” systems of urban residents as they circulate through the city. In both regimes, security is not conceived as a public good, but as a situational experience. The logic of these regimes cuts across distinctions of private and public places or informal and formal actors of security governance and follows remarkably similar rationales of ordering, whether in a bar, a city improvement district, or an informal parking lot.

Kinesthetic City takes as its premise the idea that moving bodies, place, history, and identity are mutually productive. Analyzing both everyday movement and contemporary concert dance in five Chinese urban sites – Shanghai, Taipei, Hong Kong, New York's Chinatown, and the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles – this book explores transnational formations of Chineseness. Not definable by national boundaries, biological essences, central political systems, or even shared cultural norms, Chineseness is a mobile yet abiding idea. This book examines the ways that Chineseness is, at key historical moments, highly contested in each of these cities while paradoxically sustained as a collective consciousness across all of them. It argues that global communities can be studied through an investigation of dance and everyday movement practices as they are situated in particular places and times. This project claims choreography not only as an object of study, however. That is, it relies not merely upon movement analyses of concert dance in these Chinese cities, but also upon kinesthesia — one dancer-scholar's somatic sensation of movement — as a way to analyze these urban spaces. Choreography serves as both subject and method in this book. Kinesthetic City expands the fields of dance studies and Asian/Asian American studies by placing personal kinesthetic experience of city space in dialogue with a study of aesthetic movement practices in order to theorize the ways in which choreography, broadly conceived, is productively intertwined with processes of space, time, and community formation in a globalized era.