The Spaces of the Modern City: Imaginaries, Politics, and Everyday Life

Gyan Prakash, Kevin M. Kruse

Princeton University Press, Feb 24, 2008 - Architecture - 457 pages

By United Nations estimates, 60 percent of the world's population will be urban by 2030. With the increasing speed of urbanization, especially in the developing world, scholars are now rethinking standard concepts and histories of modern cities. The Spaces of the Modern City historicizes the contemporary discussion of urbanism, highlighting the local and global breadth of the city landscape.

This interdisciplinary collection examines how the city develops in the interactions of space and imagination. The essays focus on issues such as street design in Vienna, the motion picture industry in Los Angeles, architecture in Marseilles and Algiers, and the kaleidoscopic paradox of post-apartheid Johannesburg. They explore the nature of spatial politics, examining the disparate worlds of eighteenth-century Baghdad, nineteenth-century Morelia, Cold War-era West Berlin, and postwar Los Angeles. They also show the meaning of everyday spaces to urban life, illuminating issues such as crime in metropolitan London, youth culture in Dakar, "memory projects" in Tokyo, and Bombay cinema. Informed by a range of theoretical writings, this collection offers a fresh and truly global perspective on the nature of the modern city.

The contributors are Sheila Crane, Belinda Davis, Mamadou Diouf, Philip J. Ethington, David Frisby, Christina M. Jiménez, Dina Rizk Khoury, Ranjani Mazumdar, Frank Mort, Martin Murray, Jordan Sand, and Sarah Schrank.

Contents

• Streets Imaginaries and Modernity Vienna Is Not Berlin: 21
• The Global Spaces of Los Angeles 1920s1930s: 58
• Architecture at the Ends of Empire Urban Reflections between Algiers and Marseille: 99
• The City in Fragments Kaleidoscopic Johannesburg after Apartheid: 144
• SPATIAL POLITICS: 179
• Violence and Spatial Politics between the Local and Imperial Baghdad 17781810: 181
• From the Lettered City to the Sellers City Vendor Politics and Public Space in Urban Mexico 18801926: 214
• The City as Theater of Protest West Berlin and West Germany 19621983: 247
• Nuestro Pueblo The Spatial and Cultural Politics of Los Angeles Watts Towers: 275
• SPACES OF EVERYDAY LIFE: 311
• Morality Majesty and Murder in 1950s London Metropolitan Culture and English Modernity: 313
• ReImagining an African City Performing Culture Arts and Citizenship in Dakar Senegal 19802000: 346
• Street Observation Science and the Tokyo Economic Bubble 19861990: 373
• Spectacle and Death in the City of Bombay Cinema: 401
• Contributors: 433
• Index: 437

Popular passages

Page 16 - Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985...‎

Page 6 - The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world.... The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space.‎

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Spaces of the Modern City: Imaginaries, Politics, and Everyday Life; Book collections on Project MUSE; Volume 2 of Publications in Partnership with the Shelby Cullom Davis Cen; Volume 2 of Publications in Partnership with the Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton University
• Editors: Gyan Prakash, Kevin M. Kruse
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2008
• ISBN: 0691133433, 9780691133430
• Length: 457 pages
• Subjects: Architecture / Urban & Land Use Planning; Political Science / Public Policy / City Planning & Urban Development; Social Science / Sociology / Urban