Fragments of the City

Making and Remaking Urban Worlds

Colin McFarlane

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780520382244
• eBook ISBN: 9780520382251
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Social Sciences

Cities are becoming increasingly fragmented materially, socially, and spatially. From broken toilets and everyday things, to art and forms of writing, fragments are signatures of urban worlds and provocations for change. In Fragments of the City, Colin McFarlane examines such fragments, what they are and how they come to matter in the experience, politics, and expression of cities. How does the city appear when we look at it through its fragments? For those living on the economic margins, the city is often experienced as a set of fragments. Much of what low-income residents deal with on a daily basis is fragments of stuff, made and remade with and through urban density, social infrastructure, and political practice.In this book, McFarlane explores infrastructure in Mumbai, Kampala, and Cape Town; artistic montages in Los Angeles and Dakar; refugee struggles in Berlin; and the repurposing of fragments in Hong Kong and New York. Fragments surface as material things, as forms of knowledge, as writing strategies. They are used in efforts to politicize the city and in urban writing to capture life and change in the world's major cities. Fragments of the City surveys the role of fragments in how urban worlds are understood, revealed, written, and changed.

Index

abstraction, xii, 4, 21, 80, 82, 103

accountability, 9, 140, 142

Acquah, Betty, 137

ACTogether (NGO in Uganda), 169, 171

Adorno, Theodor, 65–66, 83, 90, 103, 138; on hope in fragmented form, 107, 219; individual historical experiences of, 106

advertising, 42, 96

Afghanistan, refugees from, 18, 121, 156, 157, 158

African Americans, 108, 128–32

African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL), 122, 127

Agarwal, Shraddha, 32

agency, 68, 79, 146, 247n37, 249n37

Aggregate Lost (Maher), 134

Ahmad-Hassan, Alnour, 148

Akasegawa, Genpei, 206–7

Allert, Franz, 157, 158

All Our Kin (Stack), 56

Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), 152, 225

Ambani, Mukesh, 28

Ambeka, Snehal, 142

Amin, Ash, 15–16, 18, 77, 133; on “infrastructural turn,” 50; on sensorial experience of the city, 179

Amsterdam, 42

Anatsui, El, 135–36

Angel, Shlomo, 44

Apnalaya (NGO in Mumbai), 31, 33

Arcades Project, The (Benjamin), 87, 88, 91, 92, 95, 96; discussions of flaneur in, 179; Haussmannization challenged in, 126

archaeology, 8, 70, 72, 74, 138

architecture, xi, 38, 92; in London, 96; perpetual change and, 37; porosity and, 198; process of becoming and, 74; social infrastructures and, 53, 56

Architecture of Density (Wolf), 194, 196

archives, urban, 17, 133

Arendt, Hannah, 89, 91

art, 6, 19, 42, 103; of Basquiat, 104–5; experiments in relocating, 133–39; junk art in Los Angeles, 129–32; public art in Berlin, 188, 190, 190; street art in Bushwick (New York), 201, 202, 203

Arte Povera, 105

art history, 8, 138

ASSEMBLY HOUSE 150 (experimental art space), 134

asylum seekers, 18, 120, 153

A...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Prologue
• Reading Fragments
• Pursuing Fragments
• Pulling Together, Falling Apart
• Knowing Fragments
• Writing in Fragments
• Political Framings
• Walking Cities
• In Completion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index