City and society (Vol. 23, No. 1)

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City & Society 23(1) includes four articles, and Leeds Book Prize acknowledgment essays by the 2009 (Bob White) and 2010 (Philippe Bourgois) winners. While the four papers were independently submitted, they could easily have been put together as a special issue about global circulation. The papers examine processes of global movement of people, ideas, goods, and things. They explore topics of migration, housing forms and types, fashion and cars in parts of the world that are more frequently debated on the pages of City and Society (China and the Middle East), and others that get less attention (Eastern Europe, here Hungary; and the Pacific Islands, here Guam). The authors look at mobility and circulation as engines of change, producers of continuity, shapers of identities, and makers or chaos. Krisztina Fehérváry examines how the single family house in Hungary represents postsocialist trends on Hungary. This type of housing both marks and negotiates the emergence of a new middle class and its respective lifestyles in the country. Tiantian Zheng explores the role of Korean and Japanese fashion in the production of new urban subjectivities and understandings of globalization and cosmopolitanism in China. Lola Quan Bautista analyzes the construction of housing or housing compounds of migrants from the Pacific island of Chuuk in Guam. Finally Kristin Monroe discusses traffic and circulation in Beirut. She illustrates how the flow (or obstruction) of traffic is affected by political transformations, and is discussed by locals as a symbols of the city and nation's overall state of affairs or wellbeing.