The Urban Apparatus
eBook - ePub

The Urban Apparatus

Mediapolitics and the City

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

The Urban Apparatus

Mediapolitics and the City

About this book

Urbanization is a system of power and knowledge, and today’s city functions through the expansive material infrastructures of the urban order. In The Urban Apparatus, Reinhold Martin analyzes urbanization and the contemporary city in aesthetic, socioeconomic, and mediapolitical terms. He argues that understanding the city as infrastructure reveals urbanization to be a way of imparting functional, aesthetic, and cognitive order to a contradictory, doubly bound neoliberal regime.

Blending critical philosophy, political theory, and media theory, The Urban Apparatus explores how the aesthetics of cities and their political economies overlap. In a series of ten essays, with a detailed theoretical introduction, Martin explores questions related to urban life, drawn from a wide range of global topics—from the fiscal crisis in Detroit to speculative development in Mumbai to the landscape of Mars, from discussions of race and the environment to housing and economic inequality. Each essay proposes a particular “mediator” (or a material complex) that is shaped by imaginative practices, each answering the question “What is a city, today?” 

The Urban Apparatus serves as an “urban” bookend to the architectural questions explored by Martin in his earlier book Utopia’s Ghost, and ultimately offers readers a way to think politically about urbanization.

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Yes, you can access The Urban Apparatus by Reinhold Martin in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Architecture & Architecture Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. Preface
  7. Introduction: The Urban Apparatus
  8. 1. City, Country, World
  9. 2. Financial Imaginaries
  10. 3. The Thing about Cities
  11. 4. Public and Common(s)
  12. 5. Horizons of Thought
  13. 6. Polis = Oikos
  14. 7. Notes on the Housing Question
  15. 8. Broken Windows
  16. 9. Beijing in Detroit
  17. 10. Infrastructure and Mediapolitics
  18. Notes
  19. Index