Full Description
This interdisciplinary and critical collection of essays examines recent visual, architectural and spatial transformations in New York and other major cities in relation to issues of ethnicity, capital and culture. Innovative and wide-raning, the essays move between interpretative representations of the newly emerging metropolis and the larger theoretical and methodological questions raised by the task of representation itself. Contributors reflect on the construction of both the real and unreal city, the images, metaphors and discourses through which the contemporary city is represented, and the texts which both mediate our experience of, as well as contribute to producing, the city of the future.
Contents
Preface.- Acknowledgements.- Introduction: Cities, Texts and Paradigms; A.D. King.- PART 1: ETHNICITY, CAPITAL AND CULTURE: REPRESENTATIONS OF NEW YORK CITY.- Rebuilding the Global City: Economy, Ethnicity and Space; S. Sassen.- Space and Symbols in an Age of Decline; S. Zukin.- Return to the Future: Puerto Rican Vernacular Architecture in New York City; J. Sciorra.- After Tompkins Square Park; Degentrification and the Revanchist City; N. Smith.- PART 2: ETHNICITY, CAPITAL AND CULTURE: WRITING THE CITY IN AFRICA AND SOUTH ASIA.- Bypassing New York in Representing Eko: Production of Space in a Nigerian City; N. Nzegwu.- Exploring Colombo: The Relevance of a Knowledge of New York; N. Perera.- Mombasa: Three Stages Towards Globalization; A. Mazrui.- PART 3: URBAN CON-TEXTS: READING AND WRITING THE CITY.- The City Which is Not one; J. Tagg.- Analytic Borderlands: Race, Gender, and Representation in the New City; S. Sassen.- Silent Itineraries: Making Places in Architectural History; G. Crysler.- A Guide to Urban Representation and What to Do About It: Alternative Traditions of Urban Theory; R. Shields.- Me(trope)olis: Or Hayden White Among the Urbanists; J.S. Duncan.
