City Living: How Urban Spaces and Urban Dwellers Make One Another

City Living explores the relationship between urban spaces, urban dwellers, and how they make, shape, and change one another. It argues that cities are contested territories that shape and are shaped by their dwellers and that repurposed cities can show how material spaces shape and constrain the agency and experience of dwellers.

Format: Hardback
Length: 328 pages
Publication date: 02 February 2022
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc

City Living is a captivating exploration of urban spaces, urban dwellers, and the profound ways in which they interact and shape one another. With an ever-increasing global population, more than 50% of the world's population now resides in cities, creating a diverse and dynamic urban landscape. As downtown cores undergo gentrification and globalization, they become increasingly diverse, encompassing a wide range of factors such as race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, sexuality, and age.

However, alongside this urban growth, we are witnessing the early stages of a period of intense civil unrest. During such times, cities become the focal points of tensions, resistance, and negotiations, serving as the primary sites where conflicts are concentrated, negotiated, and performed. Understanding cities and contemporary city living is therefore urgent and exciting from nearly every disciplinary and political perspective.

Quill R. Kukla, in his groundbreaking work, offers the first systematic philosophical investigation of city life and city dwellers. Drawing on empirical and ethnographic research from geography, anthropology, urban planning, and various other disciplines, Kukla delves into the intricate relationship between cities and their inhabitants. The book begins with a philosophical exploration of spatially embodied agency, examining the unique forms of agency and spatiality that characterize urban life. It explores how gentrification unfolds and is experienced at the level of embodied agency, arguing that gentrifying spaces are contested territories that are shaped and shaped by their dwellers.

Kukla then moves on to examine repurposed cities, which are cities designed to support a specific sociopolitical order but which have subsequently collapsed, leaving new dwellers to utilize the space in novel ways. Through detailed original ethnography of the repurposed cities of Berlin and Johannesburg, Kukla makes a compelling case that in these cities, the physical infrastructure remains, but the sociopolitical order has shifted, creating new opportunities and challenges for urban dwellers.

City Living is a thought-provoking and insightful exploration of the complex dynamics between urban spaces, urban dwellers, and the broader social, political, and economic contexts in which they exist. It sheds light on the transformative power structures that shape cities, the experiences of diverse urban populations, and the potential for cities to be agents of change and resilience in the face of adversity. This book is a valuable resource for scholars, policymakers, and urban enthusiasts alike, as it provides a comprehensive and interdisciplinary perspective on the ever-evolving world of city living.

Weight: 618g
Dimension: 166 x 243 x 32 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780190855369