Cities
Reimagining the Urban
1. Edition March 2002
192 Pages, Softcover
Wiley & Sons Ltd
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.
.
Introduction.
1. The Legibility of the Everyday City:.
Introduction.
The New Urbanism in Context.
The Flâneur and Transitivity.
Rhythms and Rhythmanalysis.
Urban Footprints and Namings.
A Basic Ontology.
2. Propinquity and Flow in the City:.
Introduction.
The Nostalgic City.
Near and Far.
Distanciated Communities.
The Restless Site.
Conclusion.
3. Cities in a Distanciated Ecomony:.
Introduction.
The Urbanised Economy.
Cities as Sites.
Conclusion.
4. The Machinic City:.
Introduction.
Circulation.
The City of Passions.
The Engineering of Certainty.
5. Powerful Cities:.
Introduction.
Diagrams of Power.
Escape Attempts.
But!!!.
Conclusion.
6. The Democratic City:.
Introduction.
'Creating a Democratic Public'.
Political City.
Rights to the City: A Politics of the Commons.
A Mobile Politics.
Afterword: Testing New Ground.
References.
Index.
response to the tendency of urban geography to focus on the big
issues at the expense of the everyday. It places the seemingly
trivial and mundane at the heart of a reimagined geography of
cities as connected, distributed and plural."
Times Higher Education
"In this important and provocative book, Amin and Thrift set out
the rudiments of what might be termed a 'post -urban
sociology...The book is certainly an intellectual tour-de-force. It
fizzes with ideas and brings a range of novel perspectives to
bear...I will certainly be looking forward to reading the future
works of these writers"
Sociology
"A wonderfully incisive dissection of new configurations of
"cities" in the contemporary world."
John Urry, Lancaster University
"A brilliant re-viewing of cities. Bursting with fresh insights,
it demands that we see and hear urban life and the everyday
workings of the metropolis in new ways, that we re-cognize urban
complexities, that we resensitize ourselves to all the transitory
conjunctures and disjunctures through which the urban is
perpetually (re)constituted, that we reconceive the terrain of
urban political possibility. In short, if there is one book to be
read on contemporary urban phenomena, this is unquestionably
it."
Allan Pred, University of California at Berkeley
Durham.
Nigel Thrift is Professor of Geographical Sciences at the
University of Bristol.
