The Postmodern Urban Condition

by Michael J. Dear

This book will change the way we understand cities. It provides readers with not only an introduction to cities and urbanism in the postmodern world but also overturns many common assumptions about urban structure.

Genres: Cities, Geography, Urbanism, Nonfiction

352 pages, Hardcover

First published January 16, 1991

Reviews

[Andrew]

I’m not big on the word “postmodern,” whether as a descriptor or a pejorative. As a young lit nerd, I failed to see any meaningful discussion between “postmodern” literature of the ‘60s and ‘70s and the modernist wham-bam of the interwar period, and likewise the philosophers who got classed as “postmodern” mostly seemed to be continuing projects that began in the 19th Century (in the streets I can greet ya, about blunts I’ll Nietzsche). As a term not for the ideas of “postmodernity,” but the economic and historic condition thereof, well I can deal with that. Keep reading.

So Dear correctly analyzes some of the maladies of the postmodern city, but he seems to believe the solution would come through postmodern thought, which he doesn’t define terribly well, rather than those old cogent doctrines of empirical analysis and socialist politics. And in doing so he’s constantly on the defensive vis a vis enemies of what he identifies as postmodernist thought, and he just can’t stop whinging about how postmodernists don’t get respect. When he invokes the people I believe to be non-bullshit who are often classed as postmodernists (Soja, for instance), he further whinges about their remnant Marxism. Then he talks about how he used to believe in Marxism and scientific empiricism and how they bullied him in college because of his background. Men will write a 400-page geography text instead of going to therapy, it seems…