Urban Geography: A Critical Introduction

Urban Geography presents a comprehensive introduction to a wide range of critical themes and concepts in contemporary urban geography, including patterns and processes of urbanization, urban development, urban planning, and life experiences in modern cities. Building upon a wide range of topical examples and illustrative case studies from cities across the world, the text brings to light the key ideas, concepts, and themes most widely utilized in critical geographical approaches to contemporary urban spaces.Initial chapters offer an introduction to critical approaches to the city before exploring the evolution of contemporary global processes of urbanization and urban development. These are followed by more in-depth coverage of such topics as labor, planning, place marketing, social reproduction, nature, experience, art, culture, citizenship, and alternative urban spaces. Individual chapters strike a careful balance between depictions of the diversity of ordinary urban geographies and analyses of the networks, flows, and relations that increasingly connect cities and urban spaces at the global level.Urban Geography offers valuable insights into critical geographical approaches to the modern city, and investigates the diverse set of policies, practices, communities, and challenges that shape contemporary urbanism.This book's cover shows the Ashton Canal dissecting the formerly industrial area of Ancoats in Manchester, England. Urban landscapes like this one speak to how cities change in tandem with social, economic, and architectural transformations over time. A heartland of nineteenth-century urban industrialism, Ancoats is now rebranded as -New Islington-and, as the contemporary apartment buildings along the canal suggest, is undergoing gentrification. Cities are always changing. This book explains how, why, where, and in whose interests.
"An excellent textbook for urban geography courses: accessible, comprehensive, and stimulating. For the student who wants to know how and why cities continue to matter, Andrew E.G. Jonas, Eugene McCann, and Mary Thomas have produced a pedagogic tour-de-force." Kevin Ward, University of Manchester, United Kingdom"An excellent and comprehensive introduction to cities' uneven geographies and the diverse processes and experiences that co-produce them. Each of its empirically rich and theoretically rigorous chapters will engage, excite, and extend students, while giving them a solid grounding." Pauline McGuirk, Director, Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, University of Newcastle, AustraliaUrban Geography presents a comprehensive introduction to a wide range of critical themes and concepts in contemporary urban geography, including patterns and processes of urbanization, urban development, urban planning, and life experiences in modern cities. Building upon a wide range of topical examples and illustrative case studies from cities across the world, the text brings to light the key ideas, concepts, and themes most widely utilized in critical geographical approaches to contemporary urban spacesInitial chapters offer an introduction to critical approaches to the city before exploring the evolution of contemporary global processes of urbanization and urban development. These are followed by more in-depth coverage of such topics as labor, planning, place marketing, social reproduction, nature, experience, art, culture, citizenship, and alternative urban spaces. Individual chapters strike a careful balance between depictions of the diversity of ordinary urban geographies and analyses of the networks, flows, and relations that increasingly connect cities and urban spaces at the global levelUrban Geography offers valuable insights into critical geographical approaches to the modern city, and investigates the diverse set of policies, practices, communities, and challenges that shape contemporary urbanism. This book's cover shows the Ashton Canal dissecting the formerly industrial area of Ancoats in Manchester, England. Urban landscapes like this one speak to how cities change in tandem with social, economic, and architectural transformations over time. A heartland of nineteenth-century urban industrialism, Ancoats is now rebranded as "New Islington" and as the contemporary apartment buildings along the canal suggest, is undergoing gentrification. Cities are always changing. This book explains how, why, where, and in whose interests
Urban Geography a comprehensive introduction to a variety of issues relating to contemporary urban geography, including patterns and processes of urbanization, urban development, urban planning, and life experiences in modern cities. Reveals both the diversity of ordinary urban geographies and the networks, flows and relations which increasingly connect cities and urban spaces at the global scale. Uses the city as a lens for proposing and developing critical concepts which show how wider social processes, relations, and power structures are changing. Considers the experiences, lives, practices, struggles, and words of ordinary urban residents and marginalized social groups rather than exclusively those of urban elites. Shows readers how to develop critical perspectives on dominant neoliberal representations of the city and explore the great diversity of urban worlds.