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The city has always been a locus of research and discussion within the debates of modernity and, more recently, postmodernity. This volume brings together some of the most recent and exciting work on the city from within sociology and cultural studies. The book is organised around the following major themes: the theoretical imagination; ethnic diversity and the politics of difference; memory and nostalgia; and the complex and complimentary narrative of the city ways.While these representations bring the past and the present together, the final section of the book elaborates the present and future in relation to the idea of the virtual city. Hence, the world of cyberspace not only recasts our imaginaries of space and communication, but has a profound effect on the sociological imagination itself.
Randol Contreras came of age in the South Bronx during the 1980s, a time when the community was devastated by cuts in social services, a rise in arson and abandonment, and the rise of crack-cocaine. For this riveting book, he returns to the South Bronx with a sociological eye and provides an unprecedented insiderÕs look at the workings of a group of Dominican drug robbers. Known on the streets as ÒStickup Kids,Ó these men raided and brutally tortured drug dealers storing large amounts of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and cash. As a participant observer, Randol Contreras offers both a personal and theoretical account for the rise of the Stickup Kids and their violence. He mainly focuses on the lives of neighborhood friends, who went from being crack dealers to drug robbers once their lucrative crack market opportunities disappeared. The result is a stunning, vivid, on-the-ground ethnographic description of a drug robberyÕs violence, the drug market high life, the criminal life course, and the eventual pain and suffering experienced by the casualties of the Crack Era. Provocative and eye-opening, The Stickup Kids urges us to explore the ravages of the drug trade through weaving history, biography, social structure, and drug market forces. It offers a revelatory explanation for drug market violence by masterfully uncovering the hidden social forces that produce violent and self-destructive individuals. Part memoir, part penetrating analysis, this book is engaging, personal, deeply informed, and entirely absorbing.
This dissertation gives an account of encounters between architecture and planning education in America during the quarter century running from the height of the Great Depression through to the launch of Sputnik, approximately 1933 to 1957. During this period, planning education progressed from its status as a sub-component of landscape architecture and sometime fellow traveler with architectural education to a parallel recognition within the university environment as a legitimate division coordinated with these other two. Yet during the same time, professional architecture education also underwent a significant transformation, emerging as a component of higher education in which valued forms of academic research that interfaced with design were newly in place and increasingly central to the field. The dissertation argues that these parallel transformations, entailing struggles between research and design, depended heavily upon the ongoing emergence of new organizational, funding and administration practices simultaneously within the federal government and the modern research university, transformations linked to the emergence of the social sciences as an interdisciplinary mediating force within the various different locations of research activities within American society.
Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination explores the relationship between the constructions and representations of the relationship between time and the city in literature published between the late eighteenth century and the present. This collection offers a new way of reading the literary city by tracing the ways in which the relationship between time and urban space can shape literary narratives and forms. The essays consider the representation of a range of literary cities from across the world and consider how an understanding of time, and time passing, can impact on our understanding of the primary texts. Literature necessarily deals with time, both as a function of storytelling and as an experience of reading. In this volume, the contributions demonstrate how literature about cities brings to the forefront the relationship between individual and communal experience and time.
This volume examines the dynamic interplay between what theoretical perceptions tell us about urban life and how ordinary people interpret and respond to the actual experience of living in cities. Major focuses are the primacy of social interaction for an understanding of urban life, and the strategies people use to create "community" in environments which, many theorists believe, promote only alienation and social disintegration. This new edition incorporates a strongly interdisciplinary perspective and includes new chapters on significant topics that have received little critical attention in the field.
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.
The author focuses on one of the most important religious centers in Africa: the Yoruba city of Ile-Ife in southwest Nigeria. The spread of Yoruba traditions in the African diaspora has come to define the cultural identity of millions of black and white people in Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, and the United States. He describes how the city went from great prominence to near obliteration and then rose again as a contemporary city of gods. Throughout, he corroborates the indispensable linkages between religion, cosmology, migration, and kinship as espoused in the power of royal lineages, hegemonic state structure, gender, and the Yoruba sense of place.
How can we learn from a multicultural society if we don’t know how to recognise it? The contemporary city is more than ever a space for the intense convergence of diverse individuals who shift in and out of its urban terrains. The city street is perhaps the most prosaic of the city’s public parts, allowing us a view of the very ordinary practices of life and livelihoods. By attending to the expressions of conviviality and contestation, ‘City, Street and Citizen’ offers an alternative notion of ‘multiculturalism’ away from the ideological frame of nation, and away from the moral imperative of community. This book offers to the reader an account of the lived realities of allegiance, participation and belonging from the base of a multi-ethnic street in south London. ‘City, Street and Citizen’ focuses on the question of whether local life is significant for how individuals develop skills to live with urban change and cultural and ethnic diversity. To animate this question, Hall has turned to a city street and its dimensions of regularity and propinquity to explore interactions in the small shop spaces along the Walworth Road. The city street constitutes exchange, and as such it provides us with a useful space to consider the broader social and political significance of contact in the day-to-day life of multicultural cities. Grounded in an ethnographic approach, this book will be of interest to academics and students in the fields of sociology, global urbanisation, migration and ethnicity as well as being relevant to politicians, policy makers, urban designers and architects involved in cultural diversity, public space and street based economies.