Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822342715 ISBN 13: 9780822342717

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2008

Synopsis

Other Cities, Other Worlds brings together leading scholars of cultural theory, urban studies, art, anthropology, literature, film, architecture, and history to look at non-Western global cities. The contributors focus on urban imaginaries, the ways that city dwellers perceive or imagine their own cities. Paying particular attention to the historical and cultural dimensions of urban life, they bring to their essays deep knowledge of the cities they are bound to in their lives and their work. Taken together, these essays allow us to compare metropolises from the so-called periphery and gauge processes of cultural globalization, illuminating the complexities at stake as we try to imagine other cities and other worlds under the spell of globalization.

The effects of global processes such as the growth of transnational corporations and investment, the weakening of state sovereignty, increasing poverty, and the privatization of previously public services are described and analyzed in essays by Teresa P. R. Caldeira (São Paulo), Beatriz Sarlo (Buenos Aires), Néstor García Canclini (Mexico City), Farha Ghannam (Cairo), Gyan Prakash (Mumbai), and Yingjin Zhang (Beijing). Considering Johannesburg, the architect Hilton Judin takes on themes addressed by other contributors as well: the relation between the country and the city, and between racial imaginaries and the fear of urban violence. Rahul Mehrotra writes of the transitory, improvisational nature of the Indian bazaar city, while AbdouMaliq Simone sees a new urbanism of fragmentation and risk emerging in Douala, Cameroon. In a broader comparative frame, Okwui Enwezor reflects on the proliferation of biennales of contemporary art in African, Asian, and Latin American cities, and Ackbar Abbas considers the rise of fake commodity production in China. The volume closes with the novelist Orhan Pamuk’s meditation on his native city of Istanbul.

Contributors: Ackbar Abbas, Teresa P. R. Caldeira, Néstor García Canclini, Okwui Enwezor, Farha Ghannam, Andreas Huyssen, Hilton Judin, Rahul Mehrotra, Orhan Pamuk, Gyan Prakash, Beatriz Sarlo, AbdouMaliq Simone, Yingjin Zhang

About this title

From the Publisher:

"Other Cities, Other Worlds offers quite brilliant and absorbing accounts of urban imaginaries in major cities outside the West. This is not just another globalization book but one of real distinction about contemporary urban life `elsewhere.'"--George Marcus, co-author of Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary

"Other Cities, Other Worlds is interdisciplinary in the best sense of the term. Architects and architectural historians and critics, art curators, anthropologists, cultural analysts and social theorists, historians and sociologists speak to and through each other, relating older urban forms to emergent ones, drawing on contemporary critical theory developed in the metropoles but put to new work. This book will affect how we think of globalization itself, as not just a top-down linear form of development and displacement but a far more complex set of interactions that the contributors do a very good job of beginning to comprehend."--David Theo Goldberg, author of The Racial State

From the Back Cover:

""Other Cities, Other Worlds "is interdisciplinary in the best sense of the term. Architects and architectural historians and critics, art curators, anthropologists, cultural analysts and social theorists, historians and sociologists speak to and through each other, relating older urban forms to emergent ones, drawing on contemporary critical theory developed in the metropoles but put to new work. This book will affect how we think of globalization itself, as not just a top-down linear form of development and displacement but a far more complex set of interactions that the contributors do a very good job of beginning to comprehend."--David Theo Goldberg, author of "The Racial State"

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0822342715
• ISBN 13: 9780822342717
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336
• Editor: Huyssen Andreas