This book investigates the iconic architectural cultural spaces of the contemporary cityscape as engines of regeneration. Promising much to their fading locales, these spaces locate culture in the space where production once ruled in order to revitalise post-industrial urban provinces. With close attention to four sites across the UK, Urban Constellations engages with the work of Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard, to read these spaces and in so doing, offer a critical intervention into the theory and experience of contemporary cityscapes. Developing the notion of surface ethnography as a methodological approach to examining the form of cultural experience produced by urban cultural spaces, the author sheds light on the manner in which they transform cultural spectatorship, express wider political and ecological concerns and offer differing views to the ’native’ and the ’tourist’ in the construction of local history. The book also examines the decline of the idea that iconic projects can drive regeneration, in the failures and delays that can beset such undertakings. Offering a rich examination of the legacy of urban change in its most recent formulation - that of cultural regeneration - this book reveals the fragile potential of the spaces produced by contemporary ’dream houses’ and as such, will be of interest to scholars of cultural studies, sociology and social theory, urban studies, cultural geography and architecture.

The changes wrought by industrialization in the nineteenth century were heralded by many as the inevitable march of progress. Yet a fair share of critics opposed the encroachment of modernity into everyday life. Wedding Walter Benjamin's critique of urban modernity with several canonical works of fiction, Patricia McKee's study challenges the traditional ways we look at Victorian literature and culture. In Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, Jude the Obscure, and "In the Cage," characters struggle to find a place for the parts of the self that do not fit the conventional image of middle-class Victorian success in the rapidly expanding world of metropolitan London. Reading Constellations focuses on this tension, exploring how characters attempt to fit in or adapt to urban society. Throughout, Patricia McKee draws on Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history to examine the aforementioned works of fiction by Dickens, Hardy, and James. The dialectical notion of the "constellation" is deployed in each chapter to read moments in which past and present collide and the ways these writers "open out" the representation of the city to new modes of articulation and-through narrative perception-the reader's perception of the phenomena of the city, its place as the exemplar of modernity, and the ways in which it determines subjectivity. Benjamin's concept of "colportage" is also used as a tool to demonstrate how Victorian fiction distributes and alters various possibilities in time and space. Ultimately, Reading Constellations demonstrates how Victorian fiction imagines a version of urban modernity that compensates for capitalist development, reassembling parts of experience that capitalism typically disintegrates.

In the era of the Anthropocene, site matters are more pressing than ever. Building on the concepts, theories, and multi-disciplinary approaches raised in the first edition, this publication strives to address the changes that have taken place over the last 15 years with new material to complement and re-position the initial volume. Reaching across design disciplines, this highly illustrated anthology assembles essays from architects, landscape architects, urban designers, planners, historians, and artists to explore ways to physically and conceptually engage site. Thoughtful discourse and empirically grounded pieces combine to provide the language and theory to contextualize the meanings of site in the built environment. The increasingly complex hybridity of constructed environments today demands new tools for thinking about and working with site. Drawing contributions from outside and within the traditional design disciplines, this edition will trace important developments in site thinking with new essays on topics such as climate change, landscape as infrastructure, shifts from global to planetary urbanization debates, and the proliferation of participatory site transformation practices. Edited by two leading practitioners and academics, Site Matters juxtaposes timeless contributions from individuals including Elizabeth Meyer, Robert Beauregard, and Robin Dripps with original new writings from Peter Marcuse, Jane Wolff, Neil Brenner, and Thaisa Way, amongst others, to recontextualize and reignite the debate around site. An ideal text for students, academics, and researchers interested in site and design theory.

One of the trends in twentieth century architecture and planning has been to denigrate and ignore the site, or larger context (both physical and social), surrounding a building or set of buildings. Focussing on Le Corbusier's designs, Site Matters presents that first considered theory and vocabulary for the inevitable reaction against Modernism in planning, beginning in the 1960s and swelling through the 1980s as architects and planners alike developed a new appreciation of site, reincorporating the wider context into their plans. Theoretical essays and empirically grounded pieces combine to provide the language and theory of this re-emergence of site, looking at Le Corbusier's designs, contemporary suburbs, and the planning agendas involved at the World Trade Center site. Groundbreaking and innovative, Site Matters provides valuable theory and vocabulary for planners and architects.

Scholars have conducted the study of culture in two general ways: as an observer science, where behavior and world-views are measurable, rational, and subject to impartial examination; and as an interpretive art, where a scholar actually participates in the understanding of cultures. In view of increasingly manifest problems with both stances, Joseph D. Lewandowski proposes an alternative, one that capitalizes on the strengths of both schools of interpretation and in fact underpins the work of major social theorists of the modern era, including Adorno, Foucault, and Bourdieu. Gathering insights from a wide array of anthropologists, archaeologists, and philosophers and applying them to case studies in the United States, Lewandowski develops a practical model of culture and method of interpretation that are built around the concept of "constructing constellations." According to this concept?drawn from the work of Simmel, Kracauer, Benjamin, and Adorno?cultures are made up of social fields, embedded social practices that are continually created and patterned in certain ways, akin to constellations. The constellations of embedded actions and beliefs in different settings, such as ghetto life in New York or the world of boxing in Chicago, are, Lewandowski argues, observable, measurable, and ultimately comparable.

Understanding and predicting the behaviour of natural and human environmental systems is crucial for the effective management of the Earth’s limited resources. Recently, great advances have been made through spatial modelling. This book provides a snapshot of the latest research in modelling technologies and methodologies within five environmental fields; the cryosphere, hydrology, geomorphology, vegetation interfaces and urban environments. Spatial Modelling of the Terrestrial Environment deals with the use of remote sensing, numerical models and GIS in addressing important natural and human environmental sciences issues, focusing on the theory and application of modelling remotely sensed data within the context of environmental processes. Extensive case material exemplifies the latest research and modelling paradigms presented in the book.

Queer premises provide vital social and cultural infrastructure – a queer infrastructure – connecting different generations and locations, facilitating the movement of resources, across and beyond the city. Queer Premises offers evidence for how London's diverse LGBTQ+ populations have embedded themselves into urban space, systems and resources. It sets out to understand how, across their different material dimensions, bars, cafés, nightclubs, pubs, community centres, and hybrids of these typologies, have been imagined, created and sustained. From the 1980s to the present, Campkin asks how, where, and why these venues have been established, how they operate and the purposes they serve, what challenges they face and why they close down.

The urban condition is today being radically transformed. Urban restructuring is accelerating, new urban spaces are being consolidated, and new forms of urbanization are crystallizing. In New Urban Spaces, Neil Brenner argues that understanding these mutations of urban life requires not only concrete research, but new theories of urbanization. To this end, Brenner proposes an approach that breaks with inherited conceptions of the urban as a bounded settlement unit-the city or the metropolis-and explores the multiscalar constitution and periodic rescaling of the capitalist urban fabric. Drawing on critical geopolitical economy and spatialized approaches to state theory, Brenner offers a paradigmatic account of how rescaling processes are transforming inherited formations of urban space and their variegated consequences for emergent patterns and pathways of urbanization. The book also advances an understanding of critical urban theory as radically revisable: key urban concepts must be continually reinvented in relation to the relentlessly mutating worlds of urbanization they aspire to illuminate.

Religious Pluralism and the City challenges the notion that the city is a secular place, and calls for an analysis of how religion and the city are intertwined. It is the first book to analyze the explanatory value of a number of typologies already in use around this topic – from "holy city" to "secular city", from "fundamentalist" to "postsecular city". By intertwining the city and religion, urban theory and theories of religion, this is the first book to provide an international and interdisciplinary analysis of post-secular urbanism. The book argues that, given the rise of religiously inspired violence and the increasing significance of charismatic Christianity, Islam and other spiritual traditions, the master narrative that modern societies are secular societies has lost its empirical plausibility. Instead, we are seeing the pluralization of religion, the co-existence of different religious worldviews, and the simultaneity of secular and religious institutions that shape everyday life. These particular constellations of "religious pluralism" are, above all, played out in cities. Including contributions from Peter L. Berger and Nezar Alsayyad, this book conceptually and empirically revokes the dissolution between city and religion to unveil its intimate relationship, and offers an alternative view on the quotidian state of the global urban condition.

The United Nations estimates that by 2030, more than two-thirds of the total world population will live in urban areas. Most of this increase will take place not in Europe or in the United States but in the megacities and newly emerging urban regions of what used to be called the developing world. Urban studies is an expansive and growing field, covering many disciplines and professional fields, each with its own schedule of conferences, journals, and publication series. These two volumes address the specific theories, key studies, and important figures that have influenced not just the individual discipline but also the field of urban studies more generally. The Encyclopedia of Urban Studies is intended to present an overview of current work in the field and to serve as a guide for further reading in the field. Key Features Includes important work and traditions from each of the urban disciplines, including urban anthropology, urban economics, urban geography, urban history, urban politics, urban psychology, and urban sociology Addresses both the growth and expansion of urban areas (urbanization) and the nature and quality of urban life (urbanism) Demonstrates the international and interdisciplinary nature of the field with contributions from scholars in many different countries Confronts a number of important issues, ranging from individual problems of poverty to societal problems of provision of adequate housing and social exclusion Provides entries on a number of cities, including those in different historical periods and regions of the world and those that have been important in the development of urban studies Key Themes Disciplinary Approaches in Urban Studies Urban Studies—Topical Areas Urban Issues Urban Planning Urban Theory Urban Transportation Urban Culture Places Cities Persons The Encyclopedia of Urban Studies serves as an introduction to topics of significance in urban studies for an audience that includes undergraduate students, beginning graduate students of urban studies and the related urban disciplines, a broader public that has an interest in the new urban world, and even established teachers and scholars who are exploring new areas of study.