Urban Theory

This interdisciplinary introduction to urban theory explains how the concepts that help us understand the contemporary urban experience have developed and been applied. It discusses a wide range of work - within political science, economics, geography and sociology. Reviewing the core issues in urban theory, the authors demonstrate different ways of understanding urban inequalities and social justice for all students and researchers of the city.

What is Urban Theory? How can it be used to understand our urban experiences? Experiences typically defined by enormous inequalities, not just between cities but within cities, in an increasingly interconnected and globalised world. This book explains:

• Relations between urban theory and modernity in key ideas of the Chicago School, spatial analysis, humanistic urban geography, and radical' approaches like Marxism
• Cities and the transition to informational economies, globalization, urban growth machine and urban regime theory, the city as an actor
• Spatial expressions of inequality and key ideas like segregation, ghettoization, suburbanization, gentrification
• Socio-cultural spatial expressions of difference and key concepts like gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and culturalist perspectives on identity, lifestyle, subculture

• How cities should be understood as intersections of horizontal and vertical of coinciding resources, positions, locations, influencing how we make and understand urban experiences.Critical, interdisciplinary and pedagogically informed - with opening summaries, boxes, questions for discussion and guided further reading - Urban Theory: A Critical Introduction to Power, Cities and Urbanism in the 21st Century provides the tools for any student of the city to understand, even to change, our own urban experiences.

  Autorentext

Alan Harding is Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Heseltine Institute for Public Policy and Practice at the University of Liverpool Management School in the UK. Previously, he held posts at Manchester, Salford and Liverpool John Moores universities. His research interests are in urban and regional development, governance and policy and he has acted as an advisor on these issues for a wide range of leading agencies with interests in this field.

Talja Blokland (1971) is an urban sociologist who has worked at Yale University, the University of Manchester and various Dutch universities. Since 2009, she has held the chair of Urban and Regional Sociology at Humboldt University in Berlin. Her publications include Urban Bonds (Polity 2003), Networked Urbanism (edited with Mike Savage, Ashgate 2008) and various articles on race and ethnicity in the city, poor neighbourhoods, urban violence, gentrification, urban middle classes and neighbourhood relations and everyday interactions.

Inhalt

1. WHAT IS URBAN THEORY?
   Urban Studies and Urban Theory
   What is Urban?
   What is Theory?
   And So What on Earth is Urban Theory?
   
   2. URBAN THEORIES UNDER CONDITIONS OF MODERNITY
      The Chicago School and Urban Ecology
      Urban Geography and Spatial Analysis
      The Community Power Debate
      Humanistic (Urban) Geography
      'Radical Approaches
      The Legacy of Previous Theories and Their Challenges
   3. FROM THE URBAN CRISIS TO THE 'TRIUMPH OF THE CITY'
      Cities as Actors in a Globalising Economy
      Urban Decline and Obsolescence
      Urban Economic Renaissance
      Discussion
   4. CAN CITIES ACT? URBAN POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE QUESTION OF AGENCY
      The Rediscovery of Agency Within Urban Theory
      Introducing American Urban Political Economy
      Urban Regimes and Growth Machines
      The Normative Dimension
      Critiques and Applications
   5. SPATIAL EXPRESSIONS OF INTRA-URBAN INEQUALITIES
      Inequalities Versus Differentiations: Vertical and Horizontal Paradigms
      Cities as Sites of Resources: Space and Inequalities
      Segregation
      Suburbanization
      Gentrification
      Ghettoization as a Spatial Process of Marginalization
      Neighbourhood Effects: Spatial Profit and Disadvantage
   6. SPATIAL EXPRESSION OF DIFFERENTIATION
      The Cultural Turn
      The City as a Realm of Community and Lifestyle
      The Subcultural Thesis
      The Representational City: Public Space
      Cultural Diversity: Identities in Public Space
      Conclusion: Cities as Matrix of Resources
   7. URBAN THEORY RECONSIDERED
      The Crisis in Urban Theory Revisited
      The Performance of Theories
      The Commensurability of Theories
      Theory, Politics and Practice
      A New Urban Agenda?