CityReads|A New Study Guide on Urban Studies

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 A New Study Guide on Urban Studies

A timely and comprehensive guide to urban studies

Helga Leitner, Jamie Peck, Eric Sheppard, 2019. Urban Studies Inside/Out: Theory, Method, Practice, SAGE Publications Ltd.

Source:https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/urban-studies-insideout/book258268#description

Based on a joint graduate seminar organized in 2016 by the geography departments of the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, three professors from, Helga Leitner, Jamie Peck, Eric Sheppard, co-edit and co-write a book, Urban Studies Inside/Out: Theory, Method, Practice, which provide a timely and comprehensive guide to urban studies especially the field of critical urban studies.

Contributors of this book

Urban Studies Inside-Out it is comprised of four parts.

The first part provides a brief overview of this theoretical landscape – an intellectual cartography of the current state of critical urban theory. First it points to several lines of development in the field of critical urban studies over the past two decades. Second it stresses the importance of approaching the field of critical urban studies in the spirit of a both/and approach, rather than an oppositional, either/or mentality.

Part II features a collection of short essays, each concerned with questions of methodological practice, discussing the question of methodology – of how urban scholars since the turn of the Millennium have gone about their research in order to produce empirically informed knowledge.

Part III of the book presents some concluding thoughts on the practice and purpose of Urban Studies Inside/Out. 

Part IV closes the book with a selection  of co-authored keyword ‘primers’. These are intended to provide a balanced and informative explication of a sampling of key concepts and formulations in the field of critical urban studies

Deconstructing 15 urban monographs

1. Constructing a feminist urban political economy: on Leslie Kern’s Sex and the revitalized city

Sex and the Revitalized City seeks to bring gender into the study of gentrification in a way that moves beyond the rather calcified division between production-oriented and consumption-oriented approaches to the latter. Kern demonstrates the constitutive role of gender relations in shaping the condominium-based model of development and the design features and marketing strategies with which it has become associated, using interviews and textual analysis to draw out the ways in which these are refracted and reproduced through lived, everyday experiences. 

2.Dreaming and scheming the 'world-class' city: on Asher Ghertner’s Rule by Aesthetics  

A multi-method approach is deployed in order to uncover how aesthetic norms based on ‘world-class city’ appearances are forged into a hegemonic order for governing space in Delhi, as well as the ways in which the city’s slum dwellers  simultaneously partake in and resist this

3. Fluid assemblages: on Lisa Björkman’s Pipe Politics

Lisa Björkman’s Pipe Politics, Contested Waters, a study of water, technology, and everyday life in Mumbai. Through an in-depth ethnographic study – interviewing various participants maintaining and using the water infrastructure but also attending to more-than-human agency Björkman analyzes why city residents face erratic and uncertain water supply even in a context in which water itself is not actually scarce, and how they access water on an everyday basis.

4.Constructing and contesting the banlieue: on Mustafa Dikeç’s Badlands of the Republic

Dikeç begins by deconstructing how French urban policy has imagined, articulated, and constructed the banlieue (French suburban neighborhood) as a problematic space, as a badland riven with pathologies  in need of repressive state intervention. He then discusses how these representations of the banlieue are contested by those demanding social justice from below.

5.Frustrated encounters: on Ahmed Kanna’s Dubai: The City as Corporation

This book is a study of the construction of contemporary Dubai. Combining historical analysis and ethnographic investigation, the book reconstructs how Dubai is produced spatially, and how the city is experienced by residents.

6. Rescaling the urban: on Neil Brenner’s New State Spaces

This is a book notable for its twin concerns with the urban as a (relationally defined) scale and as a significant  domain of state restructuring.

7.Ethnography in the boundary zones: on Robert Fairbanks’ How it Works

This critical ethnography with a distinctly multiscalar reach interrogates the relations between political economic structures and institutions, and everyday life and practices, in Philadelphia’s recovery houses.

8. Ethnographic exchanges: on Philippe Bourgois’ In Search of Respect

This is the result of a participant observation ethnography of the crack-dealing business in the largely Puerto Rican community of East Harlem, New York City. Against both pathologizing and sanitizing narratives of the urban poor, Bourgois develops an original and compelling analysis of the everyday reproduction of masculinized identities and behaviors, understood as a kind of oppositional culture.

9. Grounding the housing question in land: on Anna Haila’s Urban Land Rent

This is an analysis of how Singapore became a property state. Combining a genealogical analysis of the western literature on land rent with an institutional history focused on state-led institutional reforms, Haila analyzes historical and media documents, and demographic data and policies, complemented by direct observations. She makes the case that Singapore’s success in good part is due to the state’s active deployment of land and property,  

10. Mapping urban governance: on You-tien Hsing’s Great Urban Transformation

The book presents the results of a long-term study of land and property  politics in China, covering a significant span of the country’s extended period of marketization. This is a mixed-methods, multi-site study  providing multiple vantage points on the interactions between the political economy of (central) state-led implementation and complicity, co-optation, and contestation at the local scale.

11. Claiming rights to the city: on James Holston’s Insurgent Citizenship

Holston’s historical analysis of land policy and constitutional citizenship in Brazil provides insights into how and why urban peripheries have developed as spaces marked by the auto-construction of dwellings and a particular repertoire of insurgent practices.

12. Visualizing liquid cities: on Matthew Gandy’s Fabric of Space

The book tackles the interrelated issues of social and environmental transformation by way of a multi-city study of the entangled politics of water and modernity, stretching from the nineteenth century through the present and into the future， including Weimar Berlin, Lagos in the 1940s, and a future version  of London.

13 Writing the heterogeneous city: on AbdouMaliq Simone’s City Life from Jakarta to Dakar

This book unravels of the livelihood practices of ‘urban  majorities’ in City Life from Jakarta to Dakar. It focuses on the politics incumbent to this process – an "anticipatory politics" – that encompasses a wide range of practices, calculations and economies.

14. In search of ordinary 'elsewheres' in global urbanism? On Ola Söderström’s Cities in Relations

The book positions these two cities in relation to the broader fields of extra-urban relations through which they are jointly constituted, making  use of economic statistics, document analysis, interviews, and an actor– network sensibility to unpack how objects within the city are made and circulated.

15.Urban comparison, quantified: on Michael Storper, Thomas Kemeny, Naji Makarem and Taner Osman’s The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies

Los Angeles and San Francisco began in 1970 as comparably rich major metropolitan areas, but today they stand rather far apart. Why is that? This book comes to the provocative and persuasive conclusion that the answer is the “zeitgeist,” cultures of business, policy and governance that differ significantly between the two regions. To learn more , please refer to CityReads | How San Francisco Beat L.A. ?

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