Imagining Urban Complexity: A Humanities Approach in Tropes, Media, and Genres

Imagining Urban Complexity introduces passionate and critical perspectives on the link between the humanities and urban studies. It emphasizes tropes, media, and genres as cultural techniques that shape complexity in urban environments by distributing affordances, modes of sensing, and modes of sense-making.

Focusing on urban political and cultural dynamics in 24 global cities, the book shows that urban environments are thematized in literature and art, but are also entities that are shaped, perceived, interpreted, and experienced through sense-making techniques that have long been central concerns of the humanities. These techniques, the book argues, activate a dialectic between urban imaginations and cancellations. Tropes, media, and genres are aesthetically and politically powerful: they propel imaginations and open up multiplicities of urban possibilities, they naturalize actualized orders, and they cancel alternatives. The book moves between close readings of city spaces and more systemic and infrastructural approaches to urban environments, providing tools and strategies that can be adapted and extended to understand urban complexity in different cultural and political contexts.

The book speaks to global audiences from a continental philosophical tradition. It is relevant to undergraduates, postgraduates, and academic researchers in the fields of critical urban studies, urban design, comparative literature, cultural studies, cultural analysis, ecocriticism, political theory, and ethics.

Frans-Willem Korsten is professor of Literature, Culture, and Law at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society and professor of Literature and Society at the Erasmus School of Philosophy. He was responsible for the Dutch Research Council (NWO) internationalization program "Precarity and Post-Autonomia: The Global Heritage" and took part in the NWO/Research Foundation Flanders (FWO)–funded program "Imagineering Techniques in the Early Modern Period." He currently takes part in a program funded by the NWO entitled "Playing Politics: Media Platforms, Making Worlds." He published extensively on the Dutch Republican baroque, theatricality, and sovereignty (A Dutch Republican Baroque; 2017), and on the relation between literature, art, politics, justice, and law―Art as an Interface of Law and Justice: Affirmation, Disturbance, Disruption (2021) and Cultural Interactions: Conflict and Cooperation (2022).

Anthony T. Albright is a PhD candidate and lecturer at the Leiden University Center for the Arts in Society. He received a bachelor of arts (BA) with a concentration in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and a master of arts (MA) in Media Studies from Leiden University.