Urban power and politics are topics of abiding interest for students of the city. This exciting collection of essays explores how Europe’s cities have been governed across the last 500 years. Taken as a whole, it provides a unique historical overview of urban politics in early modern and modern Europe. At the same time, it guides the reader through the variety of ways in which power and governance are currently understood by historians and new directions in the subject.The essays a...

This book explores how Latin America indicated an autonomous form of postcolonialism that was marked by the production of multiple conceptualisations of time. The analysis particularly focuses on iconic urban transformations in capital cities such as Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Brasilia, diachronically, and investigates each case’s specific representations of past, present, and future. By exploring these three episodes, the book shows how Latin America’s postcolonialism involved specifi...

This book examines the phenomenon of urban fear – the increasing anxiety over crime and violence in Western cities despite their high safety – with a view to developing a comprehensive, critical, exploratory theory of fear, space, and urban planning that unravels the paradoxes of their mutual relations. By focusing especially on the southern European cities of Palermo and Lisbon, the book also aims to expand upon recent studies on urban geopolitics, enriching them from the perspective of o...

In this light, the designation « urban processes and change » acts to concentrate observations on aspects of social economy and the generation of urban cultures that seek to reopen questions about the aspirations and practices which configure specific instances of African urbanity. These considerations also entail the everyday life processes through which urban residents, associated through various networks and institutions, mediate different dimensions of power. The question is how they p...

This book develops academic understanding of Muslim urban space by pursuing the structural logic of the premodern Arab-Muslim city, or medina. With particular reference to The Book of Walls, an historical discourse of Islamic law whose primary subject is the wall, the book determines the meaning of a wall and then uses it to analyze the space of Fez.One of a growing number of studies to address space as a category of critical analysis, the book makes the following contribu...

In Being Urban, Simon Goldhill and his team of outstanding urbanists explore the meaning of the urban condition, with particular reference to the Middle East. As Goldhill explains in his introduction, ‘What is a good city?’, five questions motivate the book:How can a city be systematically planned and yet maintain a possibility of flexibility, change, and the wellbeing of citizens?How does the city represent itself to itself, and image its past, its present and its...

The world is re-enchanted. The sacred returns. And so does ex-angel Robert Hunger to the west coast streets of Terminal City. There to witness the great sorting mix of atheism, evolution, the Christian supernatural, European paganism and indigenous culture at the end of our epoch. Who will triumph? Who will falter? Or will a new synthesis prevail as one age turns to another…The literary perspective disappears. The novel declines. Only the epic is left standing to bear our culture, ...

In the last fifty years, folklorists have amassed an extraordinary corpus of contemporary legends including "the Choking Doberman," "the Eaten Ticket," and "the Vanishing Hitchhiker." But what about the urban legends of the past? These legends and tales have rarely been collected, and when they occasionally appear, they do so as ancestors or precursors of the urban legends of today, rather than as stories in their own right.In The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Leg...

During the first half of the twentieth 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, compared by journalists to bombed-out Dresden and war-torn Beirut. 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 ...

The subject of driverless and even ownerless cars has the potential to be the most disruptive technology for real estate, land use, and parking since the invention of the elevator. This book includes new research and economic analysis, plus a thorough review of the current literature to pose and attempt to answer a number of important questions about the effect that driverless vehicles may have on land use in the United States, especially on parking. Simons outlines the history of disrupti...

As sites of continual change and transformation, cities are fundamentally forgetful places. Yet at the same time, urban areas are also homes to museums and archives that collect and exhibit the past-a key cultural, political, and economic activity. This book looks at that paradox through the example of Berlin to see how the city has responded to challenges to memory created by rapid changes in politics, economics, society, and the built environment, ultimately arguing that the recovery of ...

Global urbanization promises better services, stronger economies, and more connections; it also carries risks and unforeseeable consequences. To deepen our understanding of this complex process and its importance for global sustainability, we need to build interdisciplinary knowledge around a systems approach. Urban Planet takes an integrative look at our urban environment, bringing together scholars from a diverse range of disciplines: from sociology and political science to evolutionary ...