ABSTRACT
The Routledge Companion to Urban Imaginaries delves into examples of urban imaginaries across multiple media and geographies: from new visions of smart, eco, and resilient cities to urban dystopias in popular culture; from architectural renderings of starchitecture and luxury living to performative activism for new spatial justice; and from speculative experiments in urban planning, fiction, and photography to augmented urban realities in crowd-mapping and mobile apps.
The volume brings various global perspectives together and into close dialogue to offer a broad, interdisciplinary, and critical overview of the current state of research on urban imaginaries. Questioning the politics of urban imagination, the companion gives particular attention to the role that urban imaginaries play in shaping the future of urban societies, communities, and built environments. Throughout the companion, issues of power, resistance, and uneven geographical development remain central. Adopting a transnational perspective, the volume challenges research on urban imaginaries from the perspective of globalization and postcolonial studies, inviting critical reconsiderations of urbanism in its diverse current forms and definitions. In the process, the companion explores issues of Western-centrism in urban research and design, and accommodates current attempts to radically rethink urban form and experience.
This is an essential resource for scholars and graduate researchers in the fields of urban planning and architecture; art, media, and cultural studies; film, visual, and literary studies; sociology and political science; geography; and anthropology.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|2 pages
Eco and resilient
chapter 7|13 pages
Formal encounters in two tales of toxicity
part II|2 pages
Smart and digital
chapter 9|12 pages
The origin of the smart city imaginary
part III|2 pages
Connected and consuming
chapter 16|15 pages
Beyond East-meets-West
chapter 17|15 pages
Toward a photographic urbanism?
chapter 18|16 pages
Macau’s materialist milieu
part IV|2 pages
Uneven and divided
chapter 23|14 pages
Chicano Park’s urban imaginary
chapter 27|14 pages
Imagining the entitled middle-class self in the global city
part V|2 pages
Speculative and transformative