Urban Enigmas: Montreal, Toronto, and the Problem of Comparing Cities (Volume 2) (Culture of Cities) - Hardcover

Sloan, Johanne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0773531815 ISBN 13: 9780773531819

Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007

Synopsis

The practice of comparison is implicit in every act of imagining, representing, and studying urban experience. Urban Enigmas contributes to recent interdisciplinary interest in cities by introducing comparison as a key methodology for urban cultural analysis. Contributors, part of the collaborative research project The Culture of Cities: Montreal, Toronto, Dublin, and Berlin, address theoretical and methodological aspects of comparison, while case-studies examine the mutually constituted identities of Montreal and Toronto through examples of travel writing, public art, film festivals, theatrical performances, diasporic communities, ethnic festivals, and urban media. Comparison is shown to be not only something performed by experts but a deeply embedded, everyday social practice that contributes to the mutable identities of cities. Urban Enigmas demonstrates that the accumulation of urban actions, encounters, experiences, and relationships create distinctive patterns that make it possible to recognize the particularity of cities.

About this title

About the Author

Johanne Sloan teaches art history at Concordia University.

Edition details

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0773531815
• ISBN 13: 9780773531819
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 312