This book explores the visual transformation of the contemporary European city, focusing on the most emblematic and visibly wounded of all European cities Berlin.
Taking as its subject the "intricately assembled, relentlessly disassembling metropolitan screen," it charts the virulent implosions of culture, the distortions and violence that give city-living its fractured and hallucinatory quality.
Provocatively written as a series of inter-locking poetic fragments, the text evokes the formation of metropolitan "identity" as it ricochets between the physical surface of the city and the...

Swiss photographer Jean Mohr has traveled the globe documenting the lives of the dispossessed, the marginalized and the overlooked for over forty years. In 1996, while convalescing from a serious operation in the mountains near Geneva known locally as "The Edge of the World," Mohr realized that he had come close to the edge of his own existence. Having recovered, he was inspired to revisit places that had struck him as being at the edge of the world in the course of his long career, places which were remote in terms of both common experience and geographical location.
Each set of...

Kuala Lumpur is the postmodern city writ large, a city that, within the short span of a decade, has been transformed from a sleepy capital into a technological marvel with a thriving, diverse and affluent cultural life. Using anecdotes, classic Malay myths and tales, and observations based on real and imaginary wanderings through the city, Ziauddin Sardar traces Kuala Lumpur's origins and charts the remarkable changes experienced by the city and its people, including both the recent economic crisis and the vicious power struggle between Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad and his ex-Deputy Anwar...

Macao, an archipelago attached to China, is a place whose name is redolent with myth, legend and history. Established by the Portuguese in 1557, Macao s role as the Portuguese trading base for East Asia, and also as the outpost for the Christian Church in the area, meant that since its very beginning it has been a region where disparate peoples and beliefs have met, mingled and learned to co-exist. Its position, conveniently located on China s doorstep, ensured that trade flourished; it became a rich warehouse, where more goods were exchanged than anywhere else in the world. It was also a...

Las Vegas, an artificial city brought to life in the heart of the Mojave desert, is the ultimate urban temptation: its shopping malls, theme parks and casinos offer an unceasing parade of entertainments and diversions. Its architecture combines slick, commercial seduction with a childish, cartoon-like appearance; its streets and arcades are constantly animated with visitors and residents willingly submitting to the opium of this spectacular place.
Las Vegas has always fascinated those who write about the American malaise, from Tom Wolfe to J. G. Ballard, but Begout reveals the city s...

Warsaw has an unenviable reputation in the minds of many: often invoked as the epitome of the brutal environment produced by Soviet aesthetics and planning, its name conjures up a grey, faceless world of tower blocks and Orwellian governmental buildings; its image perhaps more so than that of any other city in the former Soviet block inextricably tied to the fate of the Communist system. Warsaw appears to have been locked in the vice of history crushed by one totalitarian system, remade by another, only now being liberated by market forces. The history of this power play is only one of the...

Cambodia has a long and rich history, first becoming an artistic and religious power in Southeast Asia in the Angkor period (802 1432), when its kings ruled from vast temple complexes at Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom. The cultural influence of Cambodia on other countries in the region has been enormous, quite out of keeping with its reduced territory and limited political and economic power today.
In Cambodia, writer and photographer Michael Freeman examines the country s present troubled situation in the light of its political and cultural history, looking at many aspects of modern...

Cairo is a 1,400-year-old metropolis whose streets are inscribed with sagas, a place where the pressures of life test people's equanimity to the very limit. Virtually surrounded by desert, sixteen million Cairenes cling to the Nile and each other, proximities that color and shape lives. Packed with incident and anecdote Cairo: City of Sand describes the city's given circumstances and people's attitudes of response. Apart from a brisk historical overview, this book focuses on the present moment of one of the world's most illustrious and irreducible cities.
Cairo steps inside...