First published in 1997, Imagining Cities gives students access to the most exciting recent work on the city from within sociology, cultural studies and cultural geography. Contributions are grouped around four major themes:
- The theoretical imagination
- Ethnic diversity and the politics of difference
- Memory and nostalgia
- The city as narrative
The book considers the interplay of past and present, imagined and substantive, and links present and future in examining the idea of the virtual city. Here, the world of cyberspace not only recasts views of space and communication, but has a profound impact on the sociological imagination itself.
Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgements Imagining Cities Part I:
Theorising Cities
1. Six Discourses on the Postmetropolis
2. Imagining the
Real-Time City: Telecommunications, Urban Paradigms and the Future of Cities
3. Chaotic Places or Complex Places? Cities in a Post-Industrial Era Part II:
Racial/Spatial Imaginaries
4. Out of the Melting Pot Into the Fire Next Time:
Imagining the East End as City, Body, Text
5. White Governmentality:
Urbanism, Nationalism, Racism
6. Migrant Spaces and Settlers Time: Forming
and De-Forming an Inner City Part III: Nostalgia/Memory
7. Looking Backward,
Nostalgia and the City
8. Authenticity and Suburbia
9. Proper Little
Mesters: Nostalgia and Protest Masculinity and De-Industrialised Sheffield
Part IV: Narrating Cityscapes
10. This, Here, Now: Imagining the Modern City
11. (Re)Placing the City: Cultural Relocation and the City as Centre
12.
Anglicising the American Dream: Tragedy, Farce and the Postmodern City Part
V: Virtual Cities
13. Cyberpunk as Social Theory: William Gibson and the
Sociological Imagination
14. Cities, Subjectivity and Cyberspace Bibliography
Index
Sallie Westwood, John M Williams
