The Material City
eBook - ePub

The Material City

Bodies, Minds, and the In-Between

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Material City

Bodies, Minds, and the In-Between

About this book

Redirecting examinations of the culture of the city away from its customs, art, and amenities to focus on the mental life of modern society, Alan Blum explores the methods cities and their subjects use to find meaning in the context of urban life, in particular the city's relationships to social change and what has traditionally been identified as justice.

The Material City pictures the city as a landscape of diverse clashes over beliefs, a site that exhibits interpretive collisions over globalization, gentrification, innovation, preservation, market value, popular culture, crowds, consumption, urban governance, and different strategies for healing the democratic city's ever-present conflicts over these concerns. Each chapter uses a problem of urban life to observe and analyze assumptions and values that are typically taken for granted and unspoken, using elements of the philosophy of Plato as well as the work of modern thinkers such as Georg Simmel, Gertrude Stein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Virginia Woolf, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Lacan.

The Material City translates contested views of everyday life and its management into a deeper reflection on urbanity as a system of desire. The historical and the contemporary metropolis alike are shown to be sites where the enigma of mortality – and its relation to pleasure, comedy, and fate – plays out.

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Yes, you can access The Material City by Alan Blum in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Urban Sociology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover Page
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  5. Acknowledgments
  6. Indebtedness
  7. Preamble
  8. 1 Strategy of Analysis
  9. 2 The Material Context of Urban Life
  10. 3 The Material View of Ambiguity: The Weight of Numbers
  11. 4 Use Value, Exchange Value
  12. 5 The City as a Writing Machine
  13. 6 Figures of Enlightenment: Globalization, Gentrification
  14. 7 Perpetuity
  15. 8 Publicity and the Project as Scene
  16. 9 Urban Governance
  17. 10 The Desire for Justice in Everyday Life
  18. 11 The Legacy of Care
  19. 12 The Soul of the City/The Soul of Inquiry
  20. References
  21. Index