Metropolis on the Styx

Metropolis on the Styx
Author: David Lawrence Pike
Publisher:
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2007
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

Pike considers how underground spaces and their many myths have organized ways of seeing, thinking about, and living in the modern city. He details the emergence of the vertical city in the imagination of 19th century Paris and London, a city whose ground level was replete with passages between above and below.

The Dead City

The Dead City
Author: Paul Dobraszczyk
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2017-06-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1786722402

The Dead City unearths meanings from such depictions of ruination and decay, looking at representations of both thriving cities and ones which are struggling, abandoned or simply in transition. It reveals that ruination presents a complex opportunity to envision new futures for a city, whether that is by rewriting its past or throwing off old assumptions and proposing radical change. Seen in a certain light, for example, urban ruin and decay are a challenge to capitalist narratives of unbounded progress. They can equally imply that power structures thought to be deeply ingrained are temporary, contingent and even fragile. Examining ruins in Chernobyl, Detroit, London, Manchester and Varosha, this book demonstrates that how we discuss and depict urban decline is intimately connected to the histories, economic forces, power structures and communities of a given city, as well as to conflicting visions for its future.

Corruption Plots

Corruption Plots
Author: Malini Ranganathan
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2023-04-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 150176876X

Corruption Plots illuminates how corruption is fundamental to global storytelling about how states and elites abuse entrusted power in late capitalism. The millennial city of the global South is a charged setting for allegations of corruption, with skyscrapers, land grabs, and slum evictions invoking outrage at deepening economic polarization. Drawing on ethnography in Bengaluru and Mumbai and a cross-section of literary and cinematic stories from cities around the world, Malini Ranganathan, David L. Pike, and Sapana Doshi pay close attention to the racial, caste, class, and gender locations of the narrators, spaces, and publics imagined to be harmed by corruption. Corruption Plots demonstrates how corruption talk is leveraged to make sense of unequal spatial change and used opportunistically by those who are themselves implicated in wrongdoing. Offering a wide-ranging analysis of urban worlds, the authors reveal the ethical, spatial, and political stakes of storytelling and how vital it is to examine the corruption plot in all its contradictions.

Embodying Cape Town

Embodying Cape Town
Author: Shannon M. Jackson
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2017-07-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137587113

This book examines the reciprocity that exists between the body and the urban built environment. It will draw on archival and ethnographic research as well as an interdisciplinary literature on cultural materialism, semiotics, and aesthetics to challenge dualist interpretations of four different points of historical-material contact in Cape Town, South Africa. Each chapter attends to different groups, social practices, and historical periods, but all share the fundamental questions: how does material culture reflect the way social agents make meaning through bodily contact with urban built form, and how does such meaning challenge the ways bodies are objectified? Further, how can we make sense of the historical processes embedded in the objectification of bodies without treating the social and the material, the mental and the physical as separate realities?

Riding the New York Subway

Riding the New York Subway
Author: Stefan Hohne
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2021-02-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 026236199X

A history of New York subway passengers as they navigated the system's constraints while striving for individuality, or at least a smooth ride. When the subway first opened with much fanfare on October 27, 1904, New York became a city of underground passengers almost overnight. In this book, Stefan Höhne examines how the experiences of subway passengers in New York City were intertwined with cultural changes in urban mass society throughout the twentieth century. Höhne argues that underground transportation--which early passengers found both exhilarating and distressing--changed perceptions, interactions, and the organization of everyday life.

"Iron, Ornament and Architecture in Victorian Britain "

Author: Paul Dobraszczyk
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 578
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1351562088

Vilified by leading architectural modernists and Victorian critics alike, mass-produced architectural ornament in iron has received little sustained study since the 1960s; yet it proliferated in Britain in the half century after the building of the Crystal Palace in 1851 - a time when some architects, engineers, manufacturers, and theorists believed that the fusion of iron and ornament would reconcile art and technology and create a new, modern architectural language. Comprehensively illustrated and richly researched, Iron, Ornament and Architecture in Victorian Britain presents the most sustained study to date of the development of mechanised architectural ornament in iron in nineteenth-century architecture, its reception and theorisation by architects, critics and engineers, and the contexts in which it flourished, including industrial buildings, retail and seaside architecture, railway stations, buildings for export and exhibition, and street furniture. Appealing to architects, conservationists, historians and students of nineteenth-century visual culture and the built environment, this book offers new ways of understanding the notion of modernity in Victorian architecture by questioning and re-evaluating both Victorian and modernist understandings of the ideological split between historicism and functionalism, and ornament and structure.

London's Underground Spaces

London's Underground Spaces
Author: Haewon Hwang
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2013-07-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0748676082

This study explores how writers such as Charles Dickens, George Gissing, Bram Stoker and Mary Elizabeth Braddon negotiated the dirt and messiness of underground spaces and how, in spite of the transformation of London through underground sewers, underground railway and suburban cemeteries, these spaces are surprisingly absent from their works.

Racing the Street

Racing the Street
Author: Robert J. Topinka
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2020-08-18
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0520975057

Racing the Street traces the history of how race was used as a technology for gathering, assembling, and networking the early cosmopolitan city. Drawing on an archive that ranges from engineering blueprints and parliamentary committee reports to sensationalistic pamphlets and periodical press accounts, Robert J. Topinka conducts an original genealogy of the nineteenth-century London street, demonstrating how race as a technology gathers, sorts, and assembles the teeming particularities of the street into a manageable network. This interdisciplinary study offers a novel approach to the intersections of race, rhetoric, media, technology, and urban government.

Disrupted Cities

Disrupted Cities
Author: Stephen Graham
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2010-06-10
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1135851980

Bringing together leading researchers from geography, political science, sociology, public policy and technology studies, Disrupted Cities exposes the politics of well-known disruptions such as devastation of New Orleans in 2005, the global SARS outbreak in 2002-3, and the great power collapse in the North Eastern US in 2003. But the book also excavates the politics of more hidden disruptions: the clogging of city sewers with fat; the day-to-day infrastructural collapses which dominate urban life in much of the global south; the deliberate devastation of urban infrastructure by state militaries; and the ways in which alleged threats of infrastructural disruption have been used to radically reorganize cities as part of the ‘war on terror’. Accessible, topical and state-of-the art, Disrupted Cities will be required reading for anyone interested in the intersections of technology, security and urban life as we plunge headlong into this quintessentially urban century. The book’s blend of cutting-edge theory with visceral events means that it will be particularly useful for illuminating urban courses within geography, sociology, planning, anthropology, political science, public policy, architecture and technology studies.