The Postmodern Urban Condition

ISBN-13: 9780631209881 / Angielski / Miękka / 2001 / 352 str.

Michael J. Dear; M. J. Dear

Opis

This book will change the way we understand cities. It provides readers with not only an introduction to cities and urbanism in the postmodern world but also overturns many common assumptions about urban structure.

Recenzje

"An instant classic that belongs in every college and research library in the English–speaking world." CHOICE <!––end––>

"...a thoughtful, wide ranging, and ardent analysis of urbanisation at the end of the millenium." Mike Samers, University of Liverpool.

"Michael Dear′s book has surely achieved its objective: to be not only provocative, but also deeply engaging, its evocations and intellectual traces raising issues of the greatest importance for reflection and action by urban scholars and other citizens." ANNALS of the Association of American Geographers

Spis treści

Preface.

Acknowledgements.

Introduction.

1. Taking Los Angeles Seriously.

2. Mapping the Postmodern.

3. Postmodern Bloodlines: From Lefebvre to Jameson.

4. The Premature Demise of Postmodern Urbanism.

5. Reading the Modern City: A Colonial History of Los Angeles 1781–1991.

6. Deconstructing Urban Planning.

7. Postmodern Urbanism.

8. A Tale of Two Cities 1. Tijuana.

9. Film, Architecture and Filmspace.

10. A Tale of Two Cities 2. Las Vegas.

11. From Sidewalk to Cyberspace (and Back to Earth Again).

12. The Personal Politics of Postmodernity.

13. The Power of Place.

14. The Geopolitics of Postmodernity.

15. Epistemological Politics.

Epilogue: Beyond Postmodernism.

A Beginner′s Guide to Postmodernism.

Index.

O autorze

Michael Dearis Professor of Geography and Director of the Southern California Studies Center at the University of Southern California. He was recently a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1989. He received Honors from the Association of American Geographers in 1995. He is the author/editor of ten books including Rethinking Los Angeles (with H. Eric Schockman and Greg Hise, 1996) and Urban Latino Cultures–La vida latina en LA (with Gustavo Leclerc and Paul Villa, 1999)as well as over 100 journal articles and reports.

Blurb

This book will change the way we understand cities. It not only provides readers with an introduction to cities and urbanism in the postmodern world but also overturns many common assumptions about urban structure. Dear′s analysis combines concepts of postmodernism, space, and the urban to trace the genesis of a postmodern urban condition. He provides an understanding of the intellectual, moral and political consequences of postmodernism and an evaluation of the role of space and place in contemporary social theory and philosophy.

The book′s introductory chapters lay out in a concise manner the principal themes in urban theory, postmodern thought, and spatial analysis. From this, Dear constructs the fabric of a postmodern urbanism, employing the precepts of Henri Lefebvre and Fredric Jameson, together with a careful reading of the landscapes of contemporary cities, including the prototypical postmodern metropolis of Los Angeles among others.

In the book′s final section, Dear examines some consequences of postmodern urbanism, and begins the task of defining an urban agenda for the twenty–first century. He shows how urban studies have been transformed by postmodernism, and builds a postmodern politics that encompasses the individual and the global. Drawing as much from fiction and film, politics and history, architecture and cultural studies, as from urbanism and geography, Dear presents his vision of a twenty–first century dominated by global megacities and uncovers new ways of understanding how cities are made.