Hypercity: The Symbolic Side of Urbanism

by Ato Quayson

Cities are sites of multiple meanings and symbols, ranging from statues and street names to festivals and architecture. Sometimes the symbolic side of urbanism is so strong that it outshines reality -- then we speak of hypercity. Urban symbolic ecology and hypercity studies are relatively new fields that deal with the production, distribution and consumption of symbols and meanings in urban space, timely concerns in an era of increasing globalization and competition between mega-urban regions. This volume, which presents a detailed introduction to the new fields, followed by case studies of the cultural layer of symbolism in Brussels (Belgium), Cape Town (South Africa), Cuenca (Ecuador), Delft (The Netherlands), Kingston (Jamaica), Ljubljana (Slovenia), Paris (France) and cities in Italy and Indonesia, amply demonstrates that the time has come for urban symbolic ecology and hypercity studies to be included in regular urban studies training in the fields of anthropology, sociology and architecture.

Hardcover

First published August 23, 2006

About the author

Ato Quayson is Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism, Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing, Calibrations: Reading for the Social, and Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, as well as editor of the two-volume Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, coeditor of A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism Studies and general editor of the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry.