Suchergebnisse

This book examines a cycle of films about migration made in the late 1990s and 2000s. It argues that these films present a novel (and radical) aesthetic of planetary urbanization based upon the mobility of the migrant and the dissolution of the city. A stimulating cinematic analysis of our expanding urban fabric, it offers an alternative to the 'cultural cityism' of many other films about migration. The author demonstrates that this particular film cycle offers a rare, sustained consideration of the travails and struggles for urban life by migrants beyond and without the city. Yet the city haunts these films like a spectre: the city that has been lost, the 'present' city that excludes and the possible 'cities of refuge' of the future. Offering new insights into the cinematic portrayal of the figure of the migrant and how this is constructed in relation to urbanization processes, this book will appeal to students and scholars of sociology, film and media studies, human geography, and urban studies. Gareth Millington is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of York, UK

Adopting a perspective inspired by Henri Lefebvre, this book considers the spread of multiculture from the central city to the periphery and considers the role that 'race' continues to play in structuring the metropolis, taking London, New York and Paris as examples.

AbstractThis article explores cultural cityism at a time when a more expansive, 'planetary' urbanization is argued to have superseded 'the city' as the dominant urban form. It takes an essentially Lefebvrian problematic and works this through an examination of one aspect of contemporary metropolitan culture, the L.S. Lowry exhibition at Tate Britain, held in the summer of 2013. The article scrutinizes the juxtaposition of Lowry's images of the industrial city with the image of 'global', corporate London provided by Tate Britain itself. The exhibition is presented as evidence of Lefebvre's argument that although the urban core has imploded and exploded, through images the city 'can perpetuate itself, survive its conditions'. Taking stock also of the preponderance of city images in culture more widely, it is argued such images make a fetish of the city, producing also an 'urban pastoral' that obscures the defining characteristics of urban life today. Finally, Benjamin's concept of the 'dialectical image' and Rancière's notion of the 'sentence image' are invoked to capture the flashing together of past and present city images and the opportunities for critical reflection this constellation presents.

Abstract
This article examines how Marshall Berman's writings on urban culture and politics illuminates and extends our understanding of the role that culture plays in Henri Lefebvre's emancipatory notion of the right to the city, a role that tends to be underplayed by contemporary critical urbanists. The article begins by summarizing Lefebvre's arguments about the importance of culture in understanding the right to the city. Next, it is suggested that Berman understands culture in two ways that are helpful in terms of augmenting Lefebvre's arguments. The first is urban culture as spectacle and the second is culture as appropriation. The article then reviews Berman's account of the birth of hip hop from the South Bronx in order to demonstrate how urban culture is imbricated in the right to the city before discussing the implications and challenges posed by Berman's arguments.

AbstractThis paper considers how literary and cinematic constructions of Essex noir expose the darker, chaotic sides to working‐class embourgeoisement: initially via post‐War suburbanisation and later, via Margaret Thatcher's attempt to encourage competitive individualism and entrepreneurship. Noir angles a "dark mirror" to suburban Essex and develops a distinctive aesthetics of social and cultural change, while also puncturing myths of social mobility and suburban security. The paper points to both affinities and breaks between noir's bleak pessimism and Walter Benjamin's understanding of history as overcoming the concept of progress.

Commentaries on the London riots of August 2011 have tended to ignore the urban context of the disturbances or have treated the city and the urban as an implicit part of their analysis - merely as a backdrop to events. This paper offers an urban perspective in arguing that the socio-spatiality of contemporary London - the legacy of competing forms of urban modernism - plays a critical role in explaining how and why the disturbances unfolded in the highly idiosyncratic form they did. The first stage of the analysis introduces competing notions of urban modernism ranging from a modernism of the street, to a modern urbanism of welfarist/statist control and finally a deregulated neoliberal (post)modernism. Second, the socio-spatial dimensions of contemporary London are outlined. Third, the article moves to contrast the 'inner city' riots of Brixton 1981 and what is described here as the 'anti-riots' of August 2011. In the fourth section the events of August 2011 are argued to be part of a dialectic between the homogenisation, fragmentation and hierarchization of London-space and the resilience of an urban modernism that seeks to re-engage with the experience of the city as totality, as a sum of human efforts.

Understand crime, understand the city -- Place and locality: neighbourhoods and crime -- Urban economies -- Governance and social control in the urban arena -- Policing, the police and social order in the city -- Urban violence -- Housing systems, housing tenure and the dis/orderly city -- The political economy of urban safety

Urban Criminology offers an accessible analysis of our urban condition, viewed through the prism of crime, disorder and social harm. This book gathers cutting-edge treatments, research field reports and critical examinations of crime and harm in cities, from the disciplines of urban studies and criminology. The social, economic and political composition of cities and the various inequalities that mark out and drive the problem of crime in many cities today are foregrounded. Readers follow a series of thematic engagements, generating a deeper understanding of a range of key areas that include problems of violence, social and spatial divisions, housing, policing and the role of the urban economy in issues of financial crime. This book comes at a time of rising crime in many cities and complex responses by city administrations and communities. It presents a critical, political thesis - that crime in cities must be understood with reference to the varying social structures, political forces and economic opportunities of cities. These influences intersect to produce dramatic variations in victimisation and attempts at social control, often felt most strongly around class and gender divisions. To understand crime, we must better understand the life of the city. Urban Criminology seeks to present an integrated framework that brings to life these key issues and seeks to enthuse students of our urban condition - to locate the harms within it and to identify ways of reducing the risk of crime. This book is ideal reading for all students with an interest in cities, crime, community life, urban sociology and urban cultures.

Abstract
Here, we introduce a series of concepts and debates that provide a meta-context for the papers on the topic of working-class heritage and the city that follow. We propose Henri Lefebvre's seminal work on the dissolution of the city as a theoretical framing device via brief detours through notions of museification, authenticity and 'communicity'. The fundamental problematic, as we see it, is that urban working-class heritage is symptomatic of the dissolution of the industrial city and an attempt – conditioned by economic, social, cultural and political imperatives – to reimagine and/or reconfigure the legacies of this city. While we agree that heritage is an active process – it is selected, curated, narrated and interpreted, or 'decoded' by individuals and social groups in a reflexive manner – we also suggest, on the evidence of the papers collected here, that working-class heritage delivers an ambivalent experience and response.

Drawing on research carried out in the Parisian banlieue of La Courneuve, this article contributes to the sociological analysis of urban marginalisation in post-riot France. Beginning with a discussion of the broad relationship between society and space, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's relational understanding of social space and how these complexities are inscribed in the urban, it moves on to consider how this relates to Lefebvre's production of space thesis. The main body of the article outlines some of the ways in which territorial stigmatisation is imposed and reproduced. Empirical material is treated here as 'diagnostic' of the symbolic domination that blights La Courneuve. Yet this material is also illuminative of the irregular and scattered forms that resistance to territorial stigma takes. It is suggested that the complex relationship between social and physical space is expressed through the construction of symbolic geographies of domination/resistance and negotiated through intricate 'entanglements of power'.