Full Description
Encountering the City provides a new and sustained engagement with the concept of encounter. Drawing on cutting-edge theoretical work, classic writings on the city and rich empirical examples, this volume demonstrates why encounters are significant to urban studies, politically, philosophically and analytically. Bringing together a range of interests, from urban multiculture, systems of economic regulation, security and suspicion, to more-than-human geographies, soundscapes and spiritual experience, Encountering the City argues for a more nuanced understanding of how the concept of 'encounter' is used. This interdisciplinary collection thus provides an insight into how scholars' writing on and in the city mobilise, theorise and challenge the concept of encounter through empirical cases taken from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America and South America. These cases go beyond conventional accounts of urban conviviality, to demonstrate how encounters destabilise, rework and produce difference, fold together complex temporalities, materialise power and transform political relations. In doing so, the collection retains a critical eye on the forms of regulation, containment and inequality that shape the taking place of urban encounter. Encountering the City is a valuable resource for students and researchers alike.
Contents
1. The Possibilities of Encounter
(Helen F. Wilson and Jonathan Darling)
2. Mobilising Sentiment for Multiplicity
(Amanda Wise)
3. From Urban Talent to Commodity City: Encountering Marketplaces in the Informal Economy
(Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer)
4. Transspecies Urban Theory: Chickens in an African City
(Alice Hovorka)
5. Atmospheric Politics and Entangled Encounters: Freedom Square in Tallinn
(Tarmo Pikner)
6. On the Politics of Vision and Touch: Encountering Fearful and Fearsome Bodies in Cape Town, South Africa
(Nick Schuermans)
7. Encountering Keighley: More-than-Human Geographies of Difference in a Former Mill Town
(Dan Swanton)
8. Encountering Religion through Accra's Urban Soundscape
(Marleen de Witte)
9. Art Tactics and Urban Improvisation
(Mick O'Kelly)
10. Working across Class Difference in Popular Assemblies in Buenos Aires
(Mónica Farías)
11. Encountering Suspicion: Preemptive Security and the Urban Field of Suspects
(Stephanie Simon)
12. Encountering Havana: Texts, Aesthetics and Documentary Encounters
(Helen F. Wilson)
13. Deadly and Lively Encounters
(Jeffrey Hou)
14. Encountering what is (not) there
(Colin McFarlane)
