Fragments of the City: Making and Remaking Urban WorldsCities 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. |
Contents
Routes | 3 |
Everyday arrangements Khar Mumbai | 5 |
On the Margins | 14 |
pulling together falling apart | 21 |
Toilet block in Rafiq Nagar Mumbai | 27 |
Deonar waste ground Mumbai | 31 |
Volumetric Urbanism | 36 |
Inside Torre David | 38 |
Value | 162 |
Flyer for the Celebrating Namuwongo exhibition | 165 |
Assembling the exhibition | 167 |
Opening day | 168 |
Encountering the City | 175 |
40 | 186 |
Berlin fragments | 189 |
Spoke and wheel sculpture | 190 |
Latrine in Rafiq Nagar Mumbai | 47 |
Social Infrastructure | 50 |
The residents of Namuwongo involved in the research | 55 |
knowing fragments | 61 |
PresenceAbsence | 69 |
The Gap | 75 |
Without Closure | 94 |
political framings | 111 |
1 | 114 |
23 | 122 |
Reformation | 128 |
Political Becoming | 144 |
Moabit near the LaGeSo building | 155 |
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Common terms and phrases
Accessed August accessed July activists Adorno Africa Arcades Arcades Project argued artists Ash Amin become Berlin Cambridge Cape Town challenge city’s connections context cultural densities Deonar Development economic emerges encounter everyday example exhibition experience flaneur focus frag fragment urbanism gender gentrification Geography Global South groups Hong Kong housing increasingly inequality Jazeel Journal of Urban Kampala kinds Kishik knowledge fragments LaGeSo Lefebvre living London London Overground Manhattan Project margins material fragments McFarlane ment Moabit Moabit Hilft modern multiple Mumbai Namuwongo neighborhoods NGOs Oxford particular potential poverty produced provisions Purifoy reflect refugees Regional Research relations residents Right to Pee Routledge sanitation São Paulo Slum social infrastructures Solnit spatial stories street struggle Subaltern Studies Theory things tion toilet blocks Uganda University Press Urban and Regional urban condition urban space urban world Verso violence walking Walter Benjamin waste whole women writing York