Urban Imaginaries

Locating the Modern City

Alev Cinar, Thomas Bender

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9780816654239
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

For millennia, the city stood out against the landscape, walled and compact. This concept of the city was long accepted as adequate for characterizing the urban experience. However, the nature of the city, both real and imagined, has always been more permeable than this model reveals.

 

The essays in Urban Imaginaries respond to this condition by focusing on how social and physical space is conceived as both indefinite and singular. They emphasize the ways this space is shared and thus made into urban culture. Urban Imaginaries offers case studies on cities in Brazil, Israel, Turkey, Lebanon, and India, as well as in the United States and France, and in doing so blends social, cultural, and political approaches to better understand the contemporary urban experience.

 

Contributors: Margaret Cohen, Stanford U; Camilla Fojas, De Paul U; Beatriz Jaguaribe, Federal U of Rio de Janeiro; Anthony D. King, SUNY Binghamton; Mark LeVine, U of California, Irvine; Srirupa Roy, U of Massachusetts, Amherst; Seteney Shami, Social Science Research Council; AbdouMaliq Simone, New School U; Maha Yahya; Deniz Yükseker, Koç U, Istanbul.

 

Alev Çinar is associate professor of political science and public administration at Bilkent University, Turkey. Thomas Bender is university professor of the humanities and history at New York University.

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION. The City: Experience, Imagination, and Place
• Boundaries, Networks, and Cities: Playing and Replaying Diasporas and Histories
• PART I. The City and Its Boundaries
• PART II. Competing Narratives of the City: Contested Inclusions and Exclusions
• PART III. The City and the Vision of the Nation
• CONCLUSION. Reflections on the Culture of Urban Modernity
• CONTRIBUTORS
• INDEX