Extreme Europe - Softcover

Barber, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1861890915 ISBN 13: 9781861890917

Publisher: Reaktion Books, 2001

Synopsis

Extreme Europe explores the urban extremes of Europe in their cultural, physical, geographical and mythical dimensions, considering the history and visual culture of Europe in the decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Barber's purpose is to examine Europe's cities and their surrounding areas as sites of a conflict between the mesmerizing, all-engulfing power of visual media and the barely surviving traces of tenacious historical culture; his premise is that the "breakdown zones" at Europe's urban edges are the sites where its oppositional and most vital images and languages are being created today.

Barber sets out to explore and define Europe's political and conceptual edges, first making a circuit eastwards through Albania to Turkey, then south- and westwards along the Mediterranean coast, with stops in Crete and Marseille. The book's two other sections move, first, through several decades of history as they can be read in both the surviving and the transformed fabrics of Berlin, and, finally, through the frayed, disaffected multicultural landscapes of Paris's outer suburbs.

About this title

About the Author:

Stephen Barber is professor in the Faculty of Art, Design, and Architecture at Kingston University. 

About this edition

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1861890915
• ISBN 13: 9781861890917
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160