Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs and Memories

by Westwood,Sallie

• ISBN13: 9780415144308
• ISBN10: 0415144302
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 1996-12-10
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

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. Scripts, Sign's and Memoriesis organized around four major themes: urban theory; ethnic diversity and the politics of difference; memory and nostalgia; and the image of the city in film, literature and the media. In each section the contributors explore ideas of past and present within the imagined space of the city. The final section, on the virtual city, pushes this to its logical conclusion in a lively discussion of the city of the future as we begin to imagine it now through the dystopia of cyberpunk and the imagined utopia of the community of the internet.

Table of Contents

Figures	vii
List of contributors	viii
Acknowledgements	x
IMAGINING CITIES	1	(260)
Sallie Westwood
John Williams
Part I Theorising cities
Six Discourses on the Postmetropolis	19	(12)
Edward W. Soja
Imagining the Real-Time City: Telecommunications, Urban Paradigms and the Future of Cities	31	(19)
Stephen Graham
Chaotic Places or Complex Places? Cities in a Post-Industrial Era	50	(23)
David Byrne
Part II Racial/spatial imaginaries
Out of the Melting Pot into the Fire Next Time: Imagining the East End as City, Body, Text	73	(13)
Phil Cohen
White Governmentality: Urbanism, Nationalism, Racism	86	(18)
Barnor Hesse
Migrant Spaces and Settlers' Time: Forming and De-Forming an Inner City	104	(23)
Max Farrar
Part III Nostalgia/memory
Looking Backward, Nostalgia and the City	127	(13)
Elizabeth Wilson
Authenticity and Suburbia	140	(12)
David Chaney
`Proper Little Mesters': Nostalgia and Protest Masculinity in De-Industrialised Sheffield	152	(29)
Ian Taylor
Ruth Jamieson
Part IV Narrating cityscapes
This, Here, Now: Imagining the Modern City	181	(21)
James Donald
(Re) Placing the City: Cultural Relocation and the City as Centre	202	(17)
Tim Hall
Anglicising the American Dream: Tragedy, Farce and the `Postmodern' City	219	(16)
Julie Charlesworth
Allan Cochrane
Part V Virtual cities
Cyberpunk as Social Theory: William Gibson and the Sociological Imagination	235	(14)
Roger Burrows
Cities, Subjectivity and Cyberspace	249	(12)
Graham B. McBeath
Stephen A. Webb
Bibliography	261	(18)
Index	279