Life in the city can be both liberating and oppressive. The contemporary city is an arena in which new and unexpected personal identities and collective agencies are forged and at the same time the major focus of market forces intent on making all life a commodity. This book explores both sides of the urban experience, developing a perspective from which the contradictory nature of the politics of the city comes more clearly into view.

Dialectical Urbanism discusses a range of urban issues, conflicts and struggles through detailed case studies set in Liverpool, Baltimore, New York, and...

Life in the city can be both liberating and oppressive. The contemporary city is an arena in which new and unexpected personal identities and collective agencies are forged and at the same time the major focus of market forces intent on making all life a commodity. This book explores both sides of the urban experience, developing a perspective from which the contradictory nature of the politics of the city comes more clearly into view.

Dialectical Urbanism discusses a range of urban issues, conflicts and struggles through detailed case studies set in Liverpool, Baltimore, New York, and...

We have lost our amateur spirit and need to rediscover the radical and liberating pleasure of doing things we love.

In The Amateur, thinker Andy Merrifield shows us how the many spheres of our lives--work, knowledge, home, politics--have fallen into the hands of box tickers, bean counters and pedants. In response, he corrals a team of independent thinkers, wayward poets, dabblers and square pegs who challenge accepted wisdom. Such figures as Charles Baudelaire, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Edward Said, Guy Debord, Hannah Arendt and...