Jonathan Rutherford

This collection of essays brings together young writers, mostly in their 20s, to reflect upon the possibilities and problems of being young in the late 20th century. Topics covered include: New Labour and generation X; the disconnection of young people from the mainstream and especially economic life; the cultural politics of dance, techno and ecstacy; the identifications and narratives of young Britons of African and South Asian descent; and young politics, from trade unions and political parties to DÌY. The book e×plores the nature of generational differences, similarities and connection.

Politics, Pleasures and Predicaments

Young Britain

Rowena Chapman

First published in 1988, this is a collection of articles exploring the meaning of masculinity, work, at home, in politics and in love. Looking at fashion, images of black men, heterosexuality, feminism, the new man and families, it examines some of the growing uncertainties about what it means to be male today.

Unwrapping Masculinity

Male Order

This collection of essays addresses the issues and concerns raised by the emphasis on society not as a series of homogeneous interlocking blocks, but as a plethora of different, sometimes overlapping and often conflicting communities. Reflecting, for example, on the experience of the GLC's attempt to create a new "majority of minorities" and on the clash of values and beliefs over "The Satanic Verses," these pieces explore both the opportunities and problems presented by the growing diversity of communities, cultures and identities in contemporary society. Topics covered include: consumerism and the impact of green politics; racism and psychoanalysis; ethics and values; AIDS and citizenship; and feminism and age

Community, Culture, Difference

Identity

Subtitle on spine and cover reads Reflections on masculinity and empire.

Reflections on Race, Masculinity and Empire

Forever England

Since the mid-1980s, telecommunications and information technologies (IT) have become more intensely bound up than ever before in the social, economic, political and cultural processes and transformations which are increasingly concentrated in and between key strategic urban places across the globe. By analysing telecommunications developments in Paris and London, this book offers an explicit comparative and cross-national approach to the development of urban telecommunications infrastructures and to the development of global cities through a focus on these crucial infrastructures. engagement with the most relevant and recent debates and theories in urban studies, geography and planning. By examining differing, but parallel influences of national, urban and local contexts, processes and practices bound up in telecommunications developments, the book firmly underlines the inherently territorial basis of these developments and their multi-scalar elements and implications, all of which are being reinforced by the current stringent strategic retrenching of telecommunications operations around the globe.

Comparing the Territorialities of Telecommunications Developments in Paris and London

A Tale of Two Global Cities

This book explores urban futures in the making, as seen through the lens of urban infrastructure. The book describes how socio-technical arrangements of energy and water provision are being recast in continuing efforts towards realising ‘sustainable’ transformation of cities. It critically investigates how infrastructure comes to matter by analyzing the shifting capacities and entanglements of diverse actors with these systems, the various means they use to envision, enact and contest changes, and the wide-ranging social and political implications of emerging infrastructure transitions. Drawing on original research into urban infrastructure debates and projects in Stockholm and Paris, the author develops a novel conceptual framework for studying and acknowledging the active, vital role of infrastructure in constituting a material politics of urban transformation. Straddling the latest theoretical insights and empirical investigation of urban planning practice and socio-technical engineering of systems and flows, Redeploying Urban Infrastructure forges new, timely reflections and perspectives which will be of interest to the growing multidisciplinary community of scholars investigating infrastructure and to academics and practitioners with a concern for understanding the wider politics of urban futures.

The Politics of Urban Socio-Technical Futures

Redeploying Urban Infrastructure

Samuel Alexander

Ted Trainer is an Australian scholar-activist who defends an 'eco-anarchist' perspective he describes as the Simpler Way. His vision is of a world where self-governing communities live materially simple but sufficient lives, in harmony with ecological limits. This anthology brings together some of Trainer's most insightful and provocative essays

Collected Writings of Ted Trainer

The Simpler Way

An Anatomy of Love

I Am No Longer Myself Without You

Olivier Coutard

Cities around the world are undergoing profound changes. In this global era, we live in a world of rising knowledge economies, digital technologies, and awareness of environmental issues. The so-called "modern infrastructural ideal" of spatially and socially ubiquitous centrally-governed infrastructures providing exclusive, homogeneous services over extensive areas, has been the standard of reference for the provision of basic essential services, such as water and energy supply. This book argues that, after decades of undisputed domination, this ideal is being increasingly questioned and that the network ideology that supports it may be waning. In order to begin exploring the highly diverse, fluid and unstable landscapes emerging beyond the networked city, this book identifies dynamics through which a ‘break’ with previous configurations has been operated, and new brittle zones of socio-technical controversy through which urban infrastructure (and its wider meaning) are being negotiated and fought over. It uncovers, across a diverse set of urban contexts, new ways in which processes of urbanization and infrastructure production are being combined with crucial sociopolitical implications: through shifting political economies of infrastructure which rework resource distribution and value creation; through new infrastructural spaces and territorialities which rebundle socio-technical systems for particular interests and claims; and through changing offsets between individual and collective appropriation, experience and mobilization of infrastructure. With contributions from leading authorities in the field and drawing on theoretical advances and original empirical material, this book is a major contribution to an ongoing infrastructural turn in urban studies, and will be of interest to all those concerned by the diverse forms and contested outcomes of contemporary urban change across North and South.

Jonathan Rutherford

About

Books

Join the club