Alan Harding & Talja Blokland 
Urban Theory 
A critical introduction to power, cities and urbanism in the 21st century

What
is Urban Theory? How can it be used to understand our urban experiences? Experiences typically defined by enormous inequalities, not just
between cities but
within cities, in an increasingly interconnected and globalised world. This book explains:

• Relations between urban theory and modernity in key ideas of the Chicago School, spatial analysis, humanistic urban geography, and ‘radical′ approaches like Marxism


• Cities and the transition to informational economies, globalization, urban growth machine and urban regime theory, the city as an ‘actor’


• Spatial expressions of inequality and key ideas like segregation, ghettoization, suburbanization, gentrification


• Socio-cultural spatial expressions of difference and key concepts like gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and ‘culturalist’ perspectives on identity, lifestyle, subculture


• How cities should be understood as intersections of horizontal and vertical – of coinciding resources, positions, locations, influencing how we make and understand urban experiences.

Critical, interdisciplinary and pedagogically informed – with opening summaries, boxes, questions for discussion and guided further reading –
Urban Theory: A Critical Introduction to Power, Cities and Urbanism in the 21st Century provides the tools for any student of the city to understand, even to change, our own urban experiences.

Jadual kandungan

1. WHAT IS URBAN THEORY?

Urban Studies and Urban Theory

What is Urban?

What is Theory?

And So What on Earth is Urban Theory?

2. URBAN THEORIES UNDER CONDITIONS OF MODERNITY

The Chicago School and Urban Ecology

Urban Geography and Spatial Analysis

The Community Power Debate

Humanistic (Urban) Geography

‘Radical′ Approaches

The Legacy of Previous Theories and Their Challenges

3. FROM THE URBAN CRISIS TO THE ‘TRIUMPH OF THE CITY’

Cities as Actors in a Globalising Economy

Urban Decline and Obsolescence

Urban Economic Renaissance

Discussion

4. CAN CITIES ACT? URBAN POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE QUESTION OF AGENCY

The Rediscovery of Agency Within Urban Theory

Introducing American Urban Political Economy

Urban Regimes and Growth Machines

The Normative Dimension

Critiques and Applications

5. SPATIAL EXPRESSIONS OF INTRA-URBAN INEQUALITIES

Inequalities Versus Differentiations: Vertical and Horizontal Paradigms

Cities as Sites of Resources: Space and Inequalities

Segregation

Suburbanization

Gentrification

Ghettoization as a Spatial Process of Marginalization

Neighbourhood Effects: Spatial Profit and Disadvantage

6. SPATIAL EXPRESSION OF DIFFERENTIATION

The Cultural Turn

The City as a Realm of Community and Lifestyle

The Subcultural Thesis

The Representational City: Public Space

Cultural Diversity: Identities in Public Space

Conclusion: Cities as Matrix of Resources

7. URBAN THEORY RECONSIDERED

The ′Crisis′ in Urban Theory Revisited

The Performance of Theories

The Commensurability of Theories

Theory, Politics and Practice

A New Urban Agenda?

Mengenai Pengarang

Talja Blokland (1971) is an urban sociologist who has worked at Yale University, the University of Manchester and various Dutch universities. Since  2009, she has held the chair of Urban and Regional Sociology at Humboldt University in Berlin. Her publications include Urban Bonds (Polity 2003), Networked Urbanism (edited with Mike Savage, Ashgate 2008) and various articles on race and ethnicity in the city, poor neighbourhoods, urban violence, gentrification, urban middle classes and neighbourhood relations and everyday interactions.