Cities: Reimagining the Urban

by Ash Amin, Nigel Thrift

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.

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Genres: Urban Studies, Geography, Cities, Social Science, Nonfiction, Urbanism, Sociology

192 pages, Paperback

First published April 28, 2002

Reviews

[Gijs]

tja

best stom eigenlijk

[Andrew]

It's hard to know where I stand on this one.

Here we have two cogent theorists, working together, who have done some research, have some decent ideas about how cities function, and yet have produced a book with some remarkably empty-headed ideas about the modern city. I suppose they wanted to reverse the gloom and doom of previous Marxist denunciations. So they politicize the personal into nonsense, veering dangerously close to Richard Florida levels of vapidity.

Books like this remind me of how Deleuzean thought gets much-abused. Some Deleuzean thinkers (viz. Soja, Negri) employed it for liberation. Others become stooges of neoliberalism. Soja, Cresswell, and Massey are all better postmodernist interpreters of space. Published in '02, before the great ugliness of the '00s really took shape, it was probably written at one of the last times when theory this floaty could be taken seriously.

[Lori · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good content but very difficult read. You tend to have to reference other authors and sources as you're reading this. Two stars for this reason only.