Cities of Difference - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1572303107 ISBN 13: 9781572303102

Publisher: The Guilford Press, 1998

Synopsis

How can contemporary theories of difference enhance our understanding of traditional urban studies concerns such as housing, labor markets, and structures of state entitlement? What are the connections between urban space and identity politics? This provocative text provides fresh perspectives on the fragmented city within a cultural political economy framework. Contributors explore the role of race, ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality, able-bodiedness, and other axes of difference in the geography of postmodern cities. Using a range of cutting-edge theoretical and methodological approaches, the book probes the relationship of the broader realities of urban life--economic polarization, gentrification, and the proliferation of sites of consumption to the everyday life and political power of different communities.

About this title

About the Author

Ruth Fincher is Professor of Urban Planning at the University of Melbourne, Australia, where she has lectured since 1986. She received her doctorate in Geography from Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, and has been on the faculty at McGill University and McMaster University in Canada. Her research, teaching, and publications focus primarily on critical urban studies, feminist theories of the state, multiculturalism and immigration, and sociospatial polarization.

Jane M. Jacobs is Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of Melbourne. Since earning her PhD from University College London, she has published widely in the area of cultural geography. Her specific interests include racialized identity politics, urban studies, and postcolonialism. She is author of Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City and coauthor of Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Preface
1. Introduction, Jacobs and Fincher
2. Grids of Difference: Place and Identity Formation, Pratt
3. In the Right Place at the Right Time?: Life Stages and Urban Spaces, Fincher
4. Suburban Stories, Gendered Lives: Thinking through Difference, Dowling
5. Justice and the Disabling City, Gleeson
6. Community Responses to Human Service Delivery in U.S. Cities, Takahashi
7. Sexuality and Urban Space: Gay Male Identity Politics in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, Knopp
8. Sexing the City, Bondi
9. Sites of Difference: Beyond a Cultural Politics of Race Polarity, Anderson
10. Contesting Social Relations in Communal Places: Identity Politics among Asian Communities in Dar es Salaam, Nagar and Leitner
11. Staging Difference: Aestheticization and the Politics of Difference in Contemporary Cities, Jacobs
12. Whose City?: Gender, Class, and Immigrants in Globalizing European Cities, Kofman
13. Social Polarization and the Politics of Difference: Discourses in Collision or Collusion?, Gibson

Edition details

• Publisher: The Guilford Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1572303107
• ISBN 13: 9781572303102
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 322
• Editor: Ruth Fincher, Jane M. Jacobs