Contemporary urban consumption touches the everyday lives of most citizens and permeates discussion of society and culture today. Consuming Cities looks at this topic from perspectives in both sociology and cultural theory, drawing together references from mainstream and also less obvious sources in both literatures. Each chapter includes a specific case of a city or aspect of consumption, ranging from a history of urban consumption, gambling to the consumption of culture and its place in tourism to the consumption palace of the cruise liner. This definitive and accessible book will...

Public art - the making, management and mediation of art outside its conventional location in museums and galleries, and the livable city - a concept involving user-centred strategies for urban planning and design, are both socially produced but have emerged from different fields and tend to be discussed in isolation.
This book applies a range of critical perspectives which have emerged from different disciplines - art criticism, urban design, urban sociology, geography and critical theory - to examine the practice of art for urban public spaces, seeing public art from positions outside...

This volume makes a significant contribution to the debate about the development of post-communist civil society by focusing on its alleged 'dark side', i.e., on the groups that are excluded from 'civil society' on both conceptual and normative grounds. The chapters, written by specialists in the field, explore in rich empirical detail the complexities involved when such groups - like the skinheads in Hungary, the farmers' 'Self Defence' movement in Poland or the war-veterans in Croatia - challenge the state, engage in community activism, or get involved in protest actions. It also offers a...

Can art or architecture change the world? Is it possible, despite successive failures, to think of a new cultural avant-garde today? What would this mean? Urban Avant-Gardes and Social Transformation attempts to contribute to debate on these questions, by looking back to past avant-gardes from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by examining the theoretical and critical terrain around avant-garde cultural interventions, and by profiling a range of contemporary cases of radical cultural practices. The first section spans the late 19th to the mid 20th centuries, exploring the avant-gardes...

Urban Avant-Gardes presents original research on a range of recent contemporary practices in and between art and architecture giving perspectives from a wide range of disciplines in the arts, humanities and social sciences that are seldom juxtaposed, it questions many assumptions and accepted positions.

This book looks back to past avant-gardes from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries examining the theoretical and critical terrain around avant-garde cultural interventions, and profiles a range of contemporary cases of radical cultural practices. The author brings...

This volume brings together commentaries from a wide range of contemporary disciplines and fields relevant to urban culture, form and society. The book concerns cities in the broadest sense, not just as buildings and spaces but also as processes and events or sites of occupation, in which meanings are constructed in many ways. The contributors draw on their specialist areas of research to inform the debate, but they also speculate as to how cities will be shaped in the 21st century. Not all the contributors share the same viewpoint but they are all concerned with underlying issues such as...

Urban Futures brings together commentaries from a wide range of contemporary disciplines and fields relevant to urban culture, form and society. The book concerns cities in the broadest sense, not just as buildings and spaces, but also as processes and events or sites of occupation, in which meanings are constructed in many ways. The contributors draw on their specialist areas of research to inform current debate, but they also speculate as to how cities will be shaped in the 21st century.
Specific areas of research include homeless people's organisations and restoration ecology...

Cities are both products of culture, and sites where culture is made and received. By presenting the very best of classic and contemporary writing on the culture of cities, The City Cultures Reader provides an accessible overview of the diverse material on the interface between cities and culture.

The extensively revised and updated second edition now features fifty generous writings (of which thirty-eight are new) organised into ten parts which explore themes such as: what is a city?; what is culture?; symbolic economies; the culture industry; culture and technologies;...

Cities are both products of culture, and sites where culture is made and received. By presenting the very best of classic and contemporary writing on the culture of cities, The City Cultures Reader provides an accessible overview of the diverse material on the interface between cities and culture. The extensively revised and updated second edition of The City Cultures Reader now features fifty generous writings (of which thirty-eight are new) organised into ten parts which explore themes such as: what is a city?; what is culture?; symbolic economies; the culture industry; culture and...

Cities and Cultures is a critical account of the relations between contemporary cities and the cultures they produce and which in turn shape them. The book questions received ideas of what constitutes a city's culture through case studies in which different kinds of culture - the arts, cultural institutions and heritage, distinctive ways of life - are seen to be differently used in or affected by the development of particular cities. The book does not mask the complexity of this, but explains it in ways accessible for undergraduates.

The book begins with...