Cities of Difference

by Fincher, Ruth; Jacobs, Jane M.

• ISBN13: 9781572303119
• ISBN10: 1572303115
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-03-20
• Publisher: The Guilford Press

Summary

How can contemporary theories of difference enhance our understanding of traditional urban studies concerns such as housing, labor markets, and structures of state entitlement? What are the connections between urban space and identity politics? This provocative text provides fresh perspectives on the fragmented city within a cultural political economy framework. Contributors explore the role of race, ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality, able-bodiedness, and other axes of difference in the geography of postmodern cities. Using a range of cutting-edge theoretical and methodological approaches, the book probes the relationship of the broader realities of urban life--economic polarization, gentrification, and the proliferation of sites of consumption to the everyday life and political power of different communities.

Author Biography

Ruth Fincher is Professor of Urban Planning at the University of Melbourne, Australia, where she has lectured since 1986. She received her doctorate in Geography from Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, and has been on the faculty at McGill University and McMaster University in Canada. Her research, teaching, and publications focus primarily on critical urban studies, feminist theories of the state, multiculturalism and immigration, and sociospatial polarization.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction	1	(25)
Jane M. Jacobs
Ruth Fincher
2 Grids of Difference: Place and Identity Formation	26	(23)
Geraldine Pratt
3 In the Right Place at the Right Time? Life Stages and Urban Spaces	49	(20)
Ruth Fincher
4 Suburban Stories, Gendered Lives: Thinking through Difference	69	(20)
Robyn Dowling
5 Justice and the Disabling City	89	(31)
Brendan Gleeson
6 Community Responses to Human Service Delivery in U.S. Cities	120	(29)
Lois M. Takahashi
7 Sexuality and Urban Space: Gay Male Identity Politics in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia	149	(28)
Lawrence Knopp
8 Sexing the City	177	(24)
Liz Bondi
9 Sites of Difference: Beyond a Cultural Politics of Race Polarity	201	(25)
Kay Anderson
10 Contesting Social Relations in Communal Places: Identity Politics among Asian Communities in Dar es Salaam	226	(26)
Richa Nagar
Helga Leitner
11 Staging Difference: Aestheticization and the Politics of Difference in Contemporary Cities	252	(27)
Jane M. Jacobs
12 Whose City? Gender, Class, and Immigration in Globalizing European Cities	279	(22)
Eleonore Kofman
13 Social Polarization and the Politics of Difference: Discourses in Collision or Collusion?	301	(16)
Katherine Gibson
Index	317