Bøker i Routledge Studies in Urbanism and the City-serien

With contributions from leading authorities in the field, this book draws on the latest advances in social and urban theory, and original empirical material from North and South, to critically analyse the ongoing shifts in the relations between cities and technical infrastructure systems. It explore the urban condition beyond the realm of large networked infrastructures in globally diverse contexts.

Through analyses of public artworks that have taken the form of blockades and barricades since the 1990s, this book theorises artists' responses to global inequities as cultural manifestations of counter-revanchism in diverse urban centres.This book is the first to analyse artworks as forms of counter-revanchism in the context of the rise of the global city. How do artists channel the global spatial conflicts of the 21st century through their behaviours, actions, and constructions in and on the actually existing conditions of the street? What does it mean for artists-the very symbol of freedom of personal expression-to shut down space? To refuse entry? To block others' passage? The late critical geographer Neil Smith's influential writing on the revanchist city is used as a theoretical frame for understanding how contemporary artists engender the public sphere through their work in public urban spaces. Each chapter is a case study that analyses artworks that have taken the form of walls and barricades in China, USA, UK, Ukraine, and Mexico. In doing so, the author draws upon diverse fields including art history, geography, philosophy, political science, theatre studies, and urban studies to situate the art in a broader context of the humanities with the aim of modelling interdisciplinary research grounded in an ethics of solidarity with global social justice work. Collectively these case studies reveal how artists' local responses to urban revanchism since the end of the Cold War are productive reorientations of social relations and harbingers of worlds to come.By using plain language and avoiding excessive academic jargon, the book is accessible to a wide variety of readers. It will appeal to scholars and graduate students in the fields of studio art, modern and contemporary art history, performance studies, visual culture, and visual studies; especially in relation to those interested in conceptual practices, performance art, site-specificity, public art, political activism, and socially engaged art. Cultural geographers and urban theorists interested in the social and political ramifications of temporary and everyday urbanism will also find the analysis of artworks relevant to their own studies.

This book explores the interconnections between urbanization and capitalism to examine the current condition of cities due to capitalism. It brings together interdisciplinary insights from leading academics, activists and researchers to envision progressive, anti-capitalist changes for the future of cities.

This book sheds light on the mega-city region development in China as a new form of urbanization which plays a crucial role in the economic development of the country. It examines the challenges faced by the mega-city regions and opens up avenues for debates and further research.

This book offers original interdisciplinary insights into cities as a diachronic creation of urban art. It engages in a sequence of historical perspectives to examine urban space as an object of apparent quasi-cycles and processes of constitution, exaltation, imitation, contestation and redemption through art.

Overlooked Cities reflects and impacts the changing landscape of urban studies and geography from the perspective of smaller and more regional cities in the urban South. It critically examines the ways in which cities are uniquely positioned within different urban and knowledge hierarchies.

This edited collection brings together scholars who are explicitly and implicitly working on the connections between infrastructure and citizenship.

This book provides a model for the creation of sustainable and healthy cities in the Mediterranean region. It uses the coastal city of L¿Alfàs del Pi in Spain as an example for designing renewable and innovative urban models that offer high standards of living, wellbeing and eco-friendly advantages.

Street trade is a critical and highly visible component of the informal economy, linked to global systems of exchange. Yet policy responses are dismissive and evictions commonplace. Despite being progressively marginalised from public space, street traders in the global south are engaged in spatial and political battlegrounds to reclaim space, and claim de facto property rights over their place of work, through quiet infiltration, union power, or direct action. This book explores ''rebel streets'', the challenges faced by informal economy actors and how organised groups are seeking to reframe legal understandings to create new claims to space and urban rights. The book sets out new thinking and a conceptual framework for improved understanding of the plural relationship between law, rights, and space for the informal economy, the contest between traditional, modernist and rights-based approaches to development, and impacts on the urban working poor. With a focus on street trading, the book seeks to reframe the legal context in which modern informal economies operate, drawing on key areas of academic inquiry and case studies of how vendors are staking claim to urban rights. The book argues for a reconceptualisation of legal instruments to provide a rights-based framework for urban work that recognises the legitimacy of urban informal economies, the scope for collective management of urban resources, and the social value of public space as a site for urban livelihoods. It will be of interest to students and scholars of geography, economics, urban studies, development studies, political studies and law.

This book explores the complex interplay between the (post) modern city and new religious and spiritual movements. It develops an ethnography-based analysis of the ways in which the 'urban' inscribes itself into various religious practices and vice versa, and how religiosity and spirituality appropriate and transform the meanings of urban. The book explores a new conceptualization of the word urban that is tightly linked with qualitative ethnographic research on the ground. The book also examines how cities are considered both sites and sources of where the globalization of religions takes place, as well as the interplay of globalization to the process of localization.

This book explores the phenomena of the urban every day and new urban tourism. It provides a systematic framework and draws on a mix of theoretical and empirical work to look at the increasing intermingling of 'tourists' and 'residents'.

This book adopts a critical and comparative reading of urban geopolitics from different urban settings, to learn through differences rather than seeking out similarities. It brings together a range of international case studies from the Far East, South America, Eastern Europe and the Middle East to offer an in-depth understating of the worldwide contested nature of cities with a detailed review from a wide range of local contexts. This book suggests an urban ontology that moves beyond the urban `West¿ and `North¿ as well as adding a comparative¿relational understanding of the contested nature that `Southern¿ cities are developing.

This book critically examines 'smart city' discourse in terms of governance initiatives, citizen participation and policies which place emphasis on the 'citizen' as an active recipient and co-producer of technological solutions to urban problems.

The first book explore the contemporary challenges taking place in traditional retail spaces, drawing on international case studies from Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Spain, Bulgaria, &the UK. It adopts a relational and multi-scalar approach to explore markets from the inside and out, connecting to wider local, national and global processes.

Cities around the world are undergoing profound changes. In this global era, we live in a world of rising knowledge economies, digital technologies, and awareness of environmental issues. The so-called "modern infrastructural ideal" of spatially and socially ubiquitous centrally-governed infrastructures providing exclusive, homogeneous services over extensive areas, has been the standard of reference for the provision of basic essential services, such as water and energy supply. This book argues that, after decades of undisputed domination, this ideal is being increasingly questioned and that the network ideology that supports it may be waning. In order to begin exploring the highly diverse, fluid and unstable landscapes emerging beyond the networked city, this book identifies dynamics through which a ''break'' with previous configurations has been operated, and new brittle zones of socio-technical controversy through which urban infrastructure (and its wider meaning) are being negotiated and fought over. It uncovers, across a diverse set of urban contexts, new ways in which processes of urbanization and infrastructure production are being combined with crucial sociopolitical implications: through shifting political economies of infrastructure which rework resource distribution and value creation; through new infrastructural spaces and territorialities which rebundle socio-technical systems for particular interests and claims; and through changing offsets between individual and collective appropriation, experience and mobilization of infrastructure. With contributions from leading authorities in the field and drawing on theoretical advances and original empirical material, this book is a major contribution to an ongoing infrastructural turn in urban studies, and will be of interest to all those concerned by the diverse forms and contested outcomes of contemporary urban change across North and South.

Cities continue to be key sites for the production and contestation of inequalities generated by an ongoing but troubled neoliberal project. Neoliberalism¿s onslaught across the globe now shapes diverse inequalities -- poverty, segregation, racism, social exclusion, homelessness -- as city inhabitants feel the brunt of privatization, state re-organization, and punishing social policy. This book examines the relationship between persistent neoliberalism and the production and contestation of inequalities in cities across the world. Case studies of current city realities reveal a richly place-specific and generalizable neoliberal condition that further deepens the economic, social, and political relations that give rise to diverse inequalities. Diverse cases also show how people struggle against a neoliberal ethos and hence the open-endedness of futures in these cities.

This volume provides a holistic and reflexive account of the role played by automobility in differentiating social, economic and political life in the contemporary city - and the effect of city living on automobility.

With contributions from an international range of established and emerging scholars drawing upon real world examples, this title is the first to use the lens of speed to examine the postcolonial `urban revolution¿. It explores the contradictions between intended and unintended outcomes of fast cities and points to their fault lines between state sovereignty, capital accumulation and citizenship. It presents urban scholars with the theoretical, empirical and methodological challenges of mega-urbanization in the global south, as well as highlighting new theoretical agendas and empirical analyses that these new forms of city-making bring to the fore.

This book explores the challenges faced by informal economy actors, with a particular focus on street vending. It offers a conceptual framework for relationship between law, rights, and space for the informal economy, the contest between traditional, modernist and rights-based approaches to development, and impacts on the urban working poor. Drawing on a range of global case studies, the chapters explore how vendors are staking claim to urban rights. This book argues for a reconceptualization of legal instruments to provide a rights-based framework for urban work that recognises the potential for supportive governance of urban informal economies, the scope for collective management of urban resources, and the social value of public space as a site for urban livelihoods.

This book engages with the thorny question of global urban political agency. It critically assesses the now popular statement that in the context of paralysed and failing nation-state governments, cities can and will provide leadership in addressing global challenges. Collectively, the chapters in this volume contextualise urban agency in time and space and pluralise it by looking at how urban agency is nurtured through coalitions between a wide range of public and private actors. It is highly recommended reading for scholars in the fields of international relations and urban studies who are looking for an interdisciplinary and empirically grounded understanding of global urban political agency, in a diversity of contexts and a plurality of forms.