Re-shaping Cities: How Global Mobility Transforms Architecture and Urban Form

This original collection examines how architectural ideas, social models and building forms circulate round the world and become mediated and adapted to local conditions. The book shows how types such as skyscrapers, mosques or living history museums are imported, adapted and contested in different societies and how urban landscapes are reshaped by the global circulation of models drawn from elsewhere.

Written by scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds –architecture, anthropology, geography, linguistics, science studies and sociology – the book draws its inspiration from a series of different approaches and offers both original theoretical reflection and carefully crafted case-studies.

Michael Guggenheim is Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Zürich. He has done research on environmental experts and is currently completing a research project on the history of the concept of change in the use of buildings and conversion practices.

Ola Söderström is Professor of Social and Cultural Geography at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland. He has published widely on social and cultural dimensions of urban change and more specifically on visuality in urban planning, gentrification and urban globalisation.