Full Description
Cities are becoming increasingly fragmented materially, socially, and spatially. From broken toilets and everyday things, to art and forms of writing, fragments are signatures of urban worlds and provocations for change. In Fragments of the City, Colin McFarlane examines such fragments, what they are and how they come to matter in the experience, politics, and expression of cities. How does the city appear when we look at it through its fragments? For those living on the economic margins, the city is often experienced as a set of fragments. Much of what low-income residents deal with on a daily basis is fragments of stuff, made and remade with and through urban density, social infrastructure, and political practice. In this book, McFarlane explores infrastructure in Mumbai, Kampala, and Cape Town; artistic montages in Los Angeles and Dakar; refugee struggles in Berlin; and the repurposing of fragments in Hong Kong and New York. Fragments surface as material things, as forms of knowledge, as writing strategies. They are used in efforts to politicize the city and in urban writing to capture life and change in the world's major cities. Fragments of the City surveys the role of fragments in how urban worlds are understood, revealed, written, and changed.
Contents
List of Figures
Prologue
Reading Fragments
Pursuing Fragments
Routes
On the Margins
An Urban World
Pulling Together, Falling Apart
Materializing the City
Urban Life Support
Volumetric Urbanism
Fragmenting Cities
Social Infrastructure
Care and Consolidation
Knowing Fragments
In the Relation
Presence-Absence
The Gap
Knowledge Fragments
Writing in Fragments
Montaging Urban Modernity
Without Closure
Points of Departure
Fragments and Possibility
Political Framings
Attending to Fragments Maintaining
In-Between Generative Translation
Reformation Junk Art
Relocating Surveying Wholes
Political Becoming
Occupation Being Present
Provisioning Value Exhibiting Stories
Walking Cities
Encountering the City
Intersecting Writings
Routes and Their Limits
Remnants
Space and Time
In Completion
An Exploded View
Experimenting
Connective Devices
Excursions
Notes
Bibliography
Index
