Deleuze and the City Frichot, Hélène; Gabrielsson, Catharina; Metzger, Jonathan ...
03/2016
eBook, Book
Defining the lives of most the world's population, the question of 'the city' is one of the most urgent issues of our time. This volume gathers some of the most original thinkers in contemporary ...urban studies to how Deleuze and Guattari are essential for thinking through the landscapes that constitute 'the city' today.
In 2008 for the first time the majority of the planet's inhabitants lived in cities and towns. Becoming globally urban has been one of mankind's greatest collective achievements over time and raises ...many questions. How did global city systems evolve and interact in the past? How have historic urban patterns impacted on those of the contemporary world? And what were the key drivers in the roller-coaster of urban change over the millennia — market forces such as trade and industry, rulers and governments, competition and collaboration between cities, or the urban environment and demographic forces? The Oxford Handbook of Cities in World History offers a detailed comparative study of urban development from ancient times to the present day. The book explores not only the main trends in the growth of cities and towns across the world — in Asia and the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and the Americas — and the different types of cities from great metropolitan centres to suburbs, colonial cities, and market towns, but also many of the essential themes in the making and remaking of the urban world: the role of power, economic development, migration, social inequality, environmental challenge and the urban response, religion and representation, cinema, and urban creativity. Split into three parts covering ancient cities, the medieval and early modern period, and the modern and contemporary era, it begins with an introduction identifying the importance and challenges of research on cities in world history as well as the crucial outlines of urban development since the earliest cities in ancient Mesopotamia to the present.
Cities of Medieval Iran brings together studies in urban geography, archaeology, and history of medieval Iranian cities, covering the millennium from 500 to 1500 AD, with a focus on urban actors ...themselves.
We live in a self-proclaimed Urban Age, where we celebrate the city as the source of economic prosperity, a nurturer of social and cultural diversity, and a place primed for democracy. We proclaim ...the city as the fertile ground from which progress will arise. Without cities, we tell ourselves, human civilization would falter and decay. In Cities in the Urban Age, Robert A. Beauregard argues that this line of thinking is not only hyperbolic—it is too celebratory by half.For Beauregard, the city is a cauldron for four haunting contradictions. First, cities are equally defined by both their wealth and their poverty. Second, cities are simultaneously environmentally destructive and yet promise sustainability. Third, cities encourage rule by political machines and oligarchies, even as they are essentially democratic and at least nominally open to all. And fourth, city life promotes tolerance among disparate groups, even as the friction among them often erupts into violence. Beauregard offers no simple solutions or proposed remedies for these contradictions; indeed, he doesn't necessarily hold that they need to be resolved, since they are generative of city life. Without these four tensions, cities wouldn't be cities. Rather, Beauregard argues that only by recognizing these ambiguities and contradictions can we even begin to understand our moral obligations, as well as the clearest paths toward equality, justice, and peace in urban settings.
