Writing cities 1

Dublin Core

The writing which this volume brings together is as multifaceted as are its objects of investigation. Ranging from theoretical or design-based perspectives to historical and politically charged foci, the chapters reflect an amalgam of concerns with the social, visual, political and material aspects of developed and developing cities. While all share a passion for cities and incorporate the use of visual material as either objects of investigation or illustrative accompaniments to textual or ethnographic analyses, the mixed methodologies and theoretical paradigms employed reflect a wider academic trend towards a critical cross-breeding of disciplines for a more expansive, and arguably more inclusive, conceptualisation of the urban. The chapters reveal the city through the lenses offered by different fields, and speak to the multiple sites involved in the production, contestation and experiences of urban spaces. Each chapter offers explorations of the spatial and temporal scales of urban transformations, centring on the authoritative and oppositional acts that simultaneously make the city. In this sense, there is an inclination towards analysing representations of urban change, and the ways in which transformations are reflected in the fabric of city space and life. The authors address the politics and experience of urban change by travelling imaginatively between the past and the present, the abstract and the specific, the global and the local, the human and the material, and the social and the technological. In their creative engagements with the many textures of `the city´, they suggest the need for us, as readers, to pause, revise, and re-envision our own sense of urban forms and futures.