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Cities, Politics & Power
ISBN-13: 9780415365796 / Angielski / Twarda / 2010 / 212 str.
Traditionally, the study of 'power in the city' was confined to the institutions of urban government and the actors involved in contesting and making political decisions in and for metropolitan societies. Increasingly, however, attention has turned to the function of the city not only as a centre of urban governance but as a major economic, social, cultural and strategic force in its own right. Cities, Politics and Power combines this traditional concern with how the cities in which we live are organized and run with a broader focus on cities and urban regions as multiple sites and agents of power. This book is divided into five sections, with a short introduction outlining the argument and organisation of the text. Part two charts the development of the urban polity and considers the ways in which coercion and force continue to be used to segregate, oppress and annihilate urban populations. Part three critically examines the key collective actors and processes that compete for and organise political power within cities, and how urban governance operates and interacts with lesser and greater scales of government and networks of power. Part four then explores the ways in which 'the political' is constituted by urban inhabitants, and how social identity, information and communication networks, and the natural and built environment all comprise intersecting fields of urban power. The conclusion calls for a broader theoretical and thematic approach to the study of urban politics. This book makes extensive use of comparative and historical case studies, providing broad coverage of politics and urban movements in both the Global North and the Global South, with a particular focus on the UK, USA, Canada, Latin America and China. It is written in an accessible and lucid style and provides suggestions for further reading at the end each chapter.
The text provides a critical introduction into how, on whose behalf, and with what consequences the cities in which we live are run. The five sections begin with a short introduction that anticipates and explains the argument and organisation of the book. It then proceeds from the study of urban political behaviour through to an analysis of urban governance and policy making where key theories are explained and explored in the context of comparative case studies. The penultimate section considers how forms of social identity and information and communication processes serve to shape the urban world, and I demonstrate how urban form and the built environment can be analysed in terms of the resources of power available to different groups of urban actors. In the conclusion the author calls for a reformulation of the methods by which political and social scientists have interpreted power in urban societies.
Distinctive features of this volume are its holistic view of urban power, its application of key theories to real world examples (especially from the Global South), and a narrative structure that is sensitive to the historical and comparative context in which urban political systems have developed.
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