Ash Amin

Nigel Thrift

This book develops a fresh and challenging perspective on the city. Drawing on a wide and diverse range of material and texts, it argues that too much contemporary urban theory is based on nostalgia for a humane, face-to-face and bounded city. Amin and Thrift maintain that the traditional divide between the city and the rest of the world has been perforated through urban encroachment, the thickening of the links between the two, and urbanization as a way of life. They outline an innovative sociology of the city that scatters urban life along a series of sites and circulations, reinstating previously suppressed areas of contemporary urban life: from the presence of non-human activity to the centrality of distant connections. The implications of this viewpoint are traced through a series of chapters on power, economy and democracy. This concise and accessible book will be of interest to students and scholars in sociology, geography, urban studies, cultural studies and politics. .

Reimagining the Urban

Cities

Mike Crang

Thinking Space looks at a range of social theorists and asks what role space plays in their work, what difference (if any) it makes to their concepts, and what difference such an appreciation makes to the way we might think about space.

Thinking Space

Are British research universities losing their way or are they finding a new way? Nigel Thrift, a well-known academic and a former Vice-Chancellor, explores recent changes in the British research university that threaten to erode the quality of these higher education institutions. He considers what a research university has now become by examining the quandaries that have arisen from a succession of misplaced strategies and false expectations. Challenging both higher education policy and leadership, he argues that the focus on student number growth and a series of research policy missteps has upset research universities’ priorities just at a point in the history of planetary breakdown when their research is most needed.

Redesigning Research Universities

The Pursuit of Possibility

Seeing like a city means recognizing that cities are living things made up of a tangle of networks, built up from the agency of countless actors. Cities must not be considered as expressions of larger paradigms or sites of human effort and organization alone. Within their density, size and sprawl can be found a world of symbols, bodies, buildings, technologies and infrastructures. It is the machine-like combination, interaction and confrontation of these different elements that make a city. Such a view locates urban outcomes and influences in the character of these networks, which together power urban life, allocating resources, shaping social opportunities, maintaining order and simply enabling life. More than the silent stage on which other powers perform, such networks represent the essence of the city. They also form an important political project, a politics of small interventions with large effects. The increasing evidence for an Anthropocene bears out the way in which humanity has stamped its footprint on the planet by constructing urban forms that act as systems for directing life in ways that create both immense power and immense constraint.

Seeing Like a City

Seeing like a city means recognizing that cities are living things made up of a tangle of networks, built up from the agency of countless actors. Cities must not be considered as expressions of larger paradigms or sites of human effort and organization alone. Within their density, size and sprawl can be found a world of symbols, bodies, buildings, technologies and infrastructures. It is the machine-like combination, interaction and confrontation of these different elements that make a city. Such a view locates urban outcomes and influences in the character of these networks which together power urban life, allocating resources, shaping social opportunities, maintaining order and simply enabling life. More than the silent stage on which other powers perform, they represent the essence of the city. They also form an important political project, a politics of small interventions with large effects. The increasing evidence for an Anthropocene bears out the way in which humanity has stamped its footprint on the planet by constructing urban forms that act as systems for directing life in ways that create both immense power and immense constraint. Seeing like a city means re-energizing the social scientific study of the urban to chart the path to equity and justice.

Richard Peet

First published in 1989. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

New Models In Geog

Jon May

Timespace undermines the old certainties of time and space by arguing that these dimensions do not exist singly, but only as a hybrid process term. The issue of space has perhaps been over-emphasised and it is essential that processes of everyday existence, such as globalisation and environmental issues and also notions such as gender, race and ethnicity, are looked at with a balanced time-space analysis. The social and cultural consequences of this move are traced through a series of studies which deploy different perspectives - structural, phenomenological and even Buddhist - in order to make things meet up. The contributors provide an overview of the history of time and introduce the concepts of time and space together, across a range of disciplines. The themes discussed are of importance for cultural geography, sociology, anthropology, cultural and media studies, and psychology.

Geographies of Temporality

Timespace

Seeking to reinvigorate the political Left, Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift advocate an experimental "world-making" politics that is able to adapt to changing circumstances, shifting categories, and emergent problems.

New Openings for the Left

Arts of the Political

Through a combination of social theory, polemic and close attention to empirical detail, author Nigel Thrift demonstrates how and why cities cause mass animal death and hasten the destruction of the planet. The book then attempts to set out how 'we' can navigate out of the current situation and towards a world in which cities no longer act as killers but become aligned with the lives of other beings.

Killer Cities

Peter Williams

This book is abut the place of space in the study of class formation. It consists of a set of papers that fix on different aspects of the human geography of class formation at different points in the history of Britain and the United States over the course of the last 200 years. The book shows that the geography of class formation is a valuable and cross-disciplinary tool in the study of modern societies, integrating the work of human geographers with that of social historians, sociologists, social anthropologists and other social scientists in an enterprise which emphasises the essential unity of social science.

The Making of Urban Society

Class and Space (RLE Social Theory)

Steve Pile

Rejecting static and reductionist understandings of subjectivity, this book asks how people find their place in the world. Mapping the Subject is an inter-disciplinary exploration of subjectivity, which focuses on the importance of space in the constitution of acting, thinking, feeling individuals. The authors develop their arguments through detailed case studies and clear theoretical expositions. Themes discussed are organised into four parts: constructing the subject, sexuality and subjectivity, the limits of identity, and the politics of the subject. There is, here, a commitment to mapping the subject - a subject which is in some ways fluid, in other ways fixed; which is located in constantly unfolding power, knowledge and social relationships. This book is, moreover, about new maps for the subject.

Geographies of Cultural Transformation

Mapping the Subject

This Reader brings together the exciting and innovative work that has appeared in the last 10 years in the growing field of cultural economy. Brings together exciting and innovative work from the last ten years in the emerging field of cultural economy. Contains a substantial introduction by the editors on the main strands and history of the cultural economy approach. Shows how the pursuit of prosperity always involves multiple and hybrid orderings that cannot be reduced to either the terms culture or economy. Shows that thinking about cultural economy is both a substantive task and a valuable contribution to knowledge. Material is organised around different links in the value chain.

The Blackwell Cultural Economy Reader

Dean Forbes

Much rare material is incorporated in this unique account of urbanization in a developing country that was ravaged by war for twenty years. With due emphasis on the experience of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), the authors present an account of what happened to the towns and cities of Vietnam between the establishment of Ho Chi Minh's socialist state in 1954 and the mid 1980s. The story is introduced through a general theoretical and empirical account of urbanization in socialist Third World countries. The book stresses the importance of the turmoil created by warfare in directing urbanization, but it also refers to the more conventially studied determinants of the process such as the institution of a planned economy. As one of the few books highlighting the impact of warfare on urban settlements, The Price of War will interest all those interested in urbanization, development and South-East Asia. This book was first published in 1986.

Urbanization in Vietnam, 1954-1985

The Price of War

Paul Glennie

Timekeeping is an essential activity in the modern world, and we take it for granted that our lives are shaped by the hours of the day. Yet what seems so ordinary today is actually the extraordinary outcome of centuries of technical innovation and circulation of ideas about time. Shaping the Day is a pathbreaking study of the practice of timekeeping in England and Wales between 1300 and 1800. Drawing on many unique historical sources, ranging from personal diaries to housekeeping manuals, Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift illustrate how a particular kind of common sense about time came into being, and how it developed during this period. Many remarkable figures make their appearance, ranging from the well-known, such as Edmund Halley, Samuel Pepys, and John Harrison, who solved the problem of longitude, to less familiar characters, including sailors, gamblers, and burglars. Overturning many common perceptions of the past-for example, that clock time and the industrial revolution were intimately related-this unique historical study will engage all readers interested in how 'telling the time' has come to dominate our way of life.

A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales 1300-1800

Shaping the Day

This astonishing book presents a distinctive approach to the politics of everyday life. Ranging across a variety of spaces in which politics and the political unfold, it questions what is meant by perception, representation and practice, with the aim of valuing the fugitive practices that exist on the margins of the known. It revolves around three key functions. It: introduces the rather dispersed discussion of non-representational theory to a wider audience provides the basis for an experimental rather than a representational approach to the social sciences and humanities begins the task of constructing a different kind of political genre. A groundbreaking and comprehensive introduction to this key topic, Thrift’s outstanding work brings together further writings from a body of work that has come to be known as non-representational theory. This noteworthy book makes a significant contribution to the literature in this area and is essential reading for researchers and postgraduates in the fields of social theory, sociology, geography, anthropology and cultural studies.

Space, Politics, Affect

Non-Representational Theory

First Published in 1989. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Political-Economy Perspective

New Models in Geography

Killer Cities uses a combination of social theory, polemic and close attention to empirical detail to tell the story of how and why cities cause mass animal death and, in the process, hasten the destruction of the planet. This book is not just a lament, however. It is an attempt to navigate out of this mess of planned and unplanned violence towards a world in which cities no longer act as killers but become aligned with the lives of other beings. It offers pragmatic ways of diminishing the death toll and changing mindsets without ever minimizing the dilemmas that inevitably will have to be faced. Killer cities can be rehabilitated so that they offer brighter paths towards the future - for animals, for human beings, and for the planet. A new urban geography could be within our grasp. Indeed, it has to be, for all of our sakes.

Paolo Quattrone

Francois-Regis Puyou

Chris Mclean

Organizations rely extensively upon a myriad of images and pictorial representations such as budgets, schedules, reports, graphs, and organizational charts to name but a few. Visual images play an integral role in the process of organizing. This volume argues that images in organizations are ‘performative’, meaning that they can be seen as performances, rather than mere representations, that play a significant role in all kind of organizational activities. Imagining Organizations opens up new ways of imagining business through an interdisciplinary approach that captures the role of visualizations and their performances. Contributions to this volume challenge this orthodox view to explore how images in business, organizing and organizations are viewed in a static and rigid form. Imagining Business addresses the question of how we visualize organizations and their activities as an important aspect of managerial work, focusing on practices and performances, organizing and ordering, and media and technologies. Moreover, it aims to provide a focal point for the growing collection of studies that explore how various business artifacts draw on the power of the visual to enable various forms of organizing and organizations in diverse contexts.

Nigel Thrift

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