The Questioning Cities series brings together an unusual mix of urban scholars under the title. Rather than taking a broadly economic approach, planning approach or more socio-cultural approach, it aims to include titles from a multi-disciplinary field of those interested in critical urban analysis. The series thus includes authors who draw on contemporary social, urban and critical theory to explore different aspects of the city. It is not therefore a series made up of books which are largely case-studies of different cities and predominantly descriptive. It seeks instead to extend current debates, through in most cases, excellent empirical work, and to develop sophisticated understandings of the city from a number of disciplines including geography, sociology, politics, planning, cultural studies, philosophy and literature. The series also aims to be thoroughly international where possible, to be innovative, to surprise, and to challenge received wisdom in urban studies. Overall, it will encourage a multi-disciplinary and international dialogue always bearing in mind that simple description or empirical observation, which is not located within a broader theoretical framework, would not - for this series at least - be enough.
By William J. Weston
April 18, 2019
This book identifies a distinctive kind of urban neighborhood that is on the rise throughout the USA, the dense, walkable, mixed-use bourgeois-bohemian suburb or the "boburb." It looks at case studies of areas to live in Louisville, Kentucky. Based on scores of interviews with college ...
Edited
By Henrik Ernstson, Erik Swyngedouw
December 20, 2018
Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-obscene: Interruptions and Possibilities centres on how to organize anew the articulation between emancipatory theory and political activism. Across its theoretical and empirical chapters, written by leading scholars from anthropology, geography, urban ...
Edited
By Christoph Lindner
March 31, 2016
What connects garbage dumps in New York, bomb sites in Baghdad, and skyscrapers in São Paulo? How is contemporary visual culture – extending from art and architecture to film and digital media – responding to new forms of violence associated with global and globalizing cities? Addressing such ...
Edited
By Anders Blok, Ignacio Farías
January 21, 2016
Invoking the notion of ‘cosmopolitics’ from Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers, this volume shows how and why cities constitute privileged sites for studying the search for and composition of common worlds of cohabitation. A cosmopolitical approach to the city focuses on the multiple assemblages of...
By Brendan Gleeson
April 24, 2015
This book will speak to the new human epoch, the Urban Age. A majority of humanity now lives for the first time in cities. The city, the highest invention of the modern age, is now the human heartland. And yet the same process that brought us the city and its wonders, modernisation, has also thrown...
By Scott A. Bollens
April 07, 2015
Cities, Nationalism, and Democratization provides a theoretically informed, practice-oriented account of intercultural conflict and co-existence in cities. Bollens uses a wide-ranging set of over 100 interviews with local political and community leaders to investigate how popular urban policies can...
By Lucia Sa
October 25, 2007
The modern metropolis has been called 'the symbol of our times', and life in it epitomizes, for many, modernity itself. But what to make of inherited ideas of modernity when faced with life in Mexico City and São Paulo, two of the largest metropolises in the world? Is their fractured reality, their...
By Jennifer Robinson
December 08, 2005
With the urbanization of the world's population proceeding apace and the equally rapid urbanization of poverty, urban theory has an urgent challenge to meet if it is to remain relevant to the majority of cities and their populations, many of which are outside the West. This groundbreaking book ...
By Sophie Watson
June 22, 2006
Some cities have grown into mega cities and some into uncontrolled sprawl; others have seen their centres decline with populations moving to the suburbs. In such times, questions of the public realm and public space in cities warrant even greater attention than previously received. Concerned with ...
By John Rennie-Short
May 27, 2004
Exploring the connections between globalization and urbanization, this notable book places particular emphasis on understanding the economic function of global cities, the political process of globalizing cities, and the cultural significance of cosmopolitan cities. The book explores the...
Edited
By Ignacio Farías, Thomas Bender
August 17, 2011
This book takes it as a given that the city is made of multiple partially localized assemblages built of heterogeneous networks, spaces, and practices. The past century of urban studies has focused on various aspects—space, culture, politics, economy—but these too often address each domain and the ...
Edited
By Peter Taylor, Ben Derudder, Pieter Saey, Frank Witlox
March 22, 2012
Despite traditionally being a strong research topic in urban studies, inter-city relations had become grossly neglected until recently, when it was placed back on the research agenda with the advent of studies of world/global cities. More recently the ‘external relations’ of cities have taken their...
