This innovative text uses the lens of culture to examine the various theoretical perspectives and paradigms of urban analysis. It explores the city's impact on how we make and consume all types of culture-art, music, literature, architecture, film, and more-not only illustrating the effects the urban environment has on the production of culture, but, at times, how culture has influenced the city.

Theoretically diverse, Urban Culture employs the major theoretical perspectives in sociology and the major paradigms in Urban Sociology and Urban Studies: Urban Ecology, Marxism,...

Well-written and extremely topical, Deciphering the City efficiently deals with the large and small issues facing cities today. A focus on globalization's impact on the role of cities, an explicit mission to drive home the applied nature of urban studies to students. This innovative text offers an exciting introduction to the history, issues, problems, potential solutions and challenges, facing cities in the developed and the developing world for the twenty-first century.

Globalization has changed the roles of cities in the global economy and this text begins with an introduction to...

Have you ever wondered how the water in your faucet gets there? Where your garbage goes? What the pipes under city streets do? How bananas from Ecuador get to your local market? Why radiators in apartment buildings clang? Using New York City as its point of reference, The Works takes readers down manholes and behind the scenes to explain exactly how an urban infrastructure operates. Deftly weaving text and graphics, author Kate Ascher explores the systems that manage water, traffic, sewage and garbage,...

With more than half the world's population now living in urban areas, urbanisation is undoubtedly one of the most important phenomena of the 21st century. However, despite increasing recognition of the critical relationship between economic and social development in cities, gender issues are often overlooked in understanding the complexities of current urbanisation processes. This book seeks to rectify this neglect.

Gender, Asset Accumulation and Just Cities explores the contribution that a focus on the gendered nature of asset accumulation brings to the goal of achieving...

This book is about the "public realm," defined as a particular kind of social territory that is found almost exclusively in large settlements. This particular form of social-psychological space comes into being whenever a piece of actual physical space is dominated by relationships between and among persons who are strangers to one another, as often occurs in urban bars, buses, plazas, parks, coffee houses, streets, and so forth. More specifically, the book is about the social life that occurs in such social-psychological spaces (the normative patterns and principles that shape it, the...