How did Manchester became the poster-child of neoliberal urbanisation, and what can the people that live there do about it? In cities across the world, gentrification and the housing crisis are facts of life. But how did we get to this point? And is there any way we can fight back? A good place to begin answering these questions is Manchester, England. Over the last thirty years, corporate developers, rentier capitalists and boosterist politicians have reshaped Manchester in their image, replacing its working-class communities, public spaces and affordable housing with skyscrapers, luxury developments and a private rental market that creates wealth for rentiers and impoverishes everybody else. The Rentier City traces this story, showing how it fits within the longer history of Manchester. In doing so unveils a larger story of the relationship between capital and our cities, between rentier and rentee, and gives us a blueprint of how fight back against rentier capitalism and take back control of the cities we live in.
A pioneering text which covers the urban society of early modern Europe as a whole. Challenges the usual emphasis on regional diversity by stressing the extent to which cities across Europe shared a common urban civilization whose major features remained remarkably constant throughout the period. After outlining the physical, political, religious, economic and demographic parameters of urban life, the author vividly depicts the everyday routines of city life and shows how pitifully vulnerable city-dwellers were to disasters, epidemics, warfare and internal strife.
The Second Edition of Economic Theory and the Cities has been revised and expanded with both the graduate student and the practicing professional in mind. Providing a state-of-the-art synthesis of important theoretical topics in urban economics, the volume emphasizes the fundamental links between urban economics and new developments in mainstream economic theory. From the Preface: In this book I present what I believe to be the most important theoretical topics in urban economics. Since urban economics is a rather diffuse field, any presentation is necessarily selective, reflecting personal tastes and opinions. Given that, I note on what basis I chose the material that is presented and developed.First, the basic spatial model of a monocentric city is presented, since it lays the foundation for thinking about many of the topics in urban economics. The consideration of space and spatial proximity is one central feature of urban economics that distinguishes it from other branches of economics. The positive and negative externalities generated by activities locating in close spatial proximity are central to analysis of urban phenomena. However, in writing this book I have tried to maintain strong links between urban economics and recent developments in mainstream economic theory. This is reflected in the chapters that follow, which present models of aspects of the most important topics in urban economics--externalities, housing, transportation, local public finance, suburbanization, and community development. In these chapters, concepts from developments in economics over the last decade or so are woven into the traditional approaches to modeling these topics. Examples are the role of contracts in housing markets and community development; portfolio analysis in analyzing housing tenure choice and investment decisions; the time-inconsistency problem in formulating long-term economic relationships between communities, developers, and local governments; search in housing markets; and dynamic analysis in housing markets and traffic scheduling. The book ends with chapters on general equilibrium models of systems of cities, demonstrating how individual cities fit into an economy and interact with each other. This book is written both as a reference book for people in the profession and for use as a graduate text. In this edition, a strong effort has been made to present the material at a level and in a style suitable for graduate students. The edition has greatly expanded the sections on housing and local public finance so these sections could be studied profitably by a broad range of graduate students. Recommended prerequisites are an undergraduate urban economics course and a year of graduate-level microeconomic theory. It is possible that the book can be used in very advanced undergraduate courses if the students are well versed in microeconomics and are quantitatively oriented. - Focus on the basic spatial model of the monocentric city - Expanded sections on housing and local public finance - Discussion of the critical role of spatial proximity of different economic activities, such as housing, transportation, and community development
The Later Medieval City, 1300-1500, the second part of David Nicholas's ambitious two-volume study of cities and city life in the Middle Ages, fully lives up to its splendid precursor, The Growth of the Medieval City. (Like that volume it is fully self-sufficient, though many readers will want to use the two as a continuum.) This book covers a much shorter period than the first. That traced the rise of the medieval European city system from late Antiquity to the early fourteenth century; this offers a portrait of the fully developed late medieval city in all its richness and complexity. David Nicholas begins with the economic and demographic realignments of the last two medieval centuries. These fostered urban growth, raising living standards and increasing demand for a growing range of urban manufactures. The hunger for imports and a shortage of coin led to sophisticated credit mechanisms that could only function through large cities. But, if these changes brought new opportunities to the wealthy, they also created a growing problem of urban poverty: violence became endemic in the later medieval city. Moreover, although more rebellions were sparked by taxes than by class conflict, class divisions were deepening. Most cities came to be governed by councils chosen from guild-members, and most guilds were dominated by merchants. The landowning elite that had dominated the early medieval cities of the first volume still retained its prestige, but its wealth was outstripped by the richer merchants; while craftsmen, who had little political influence, were further disadvantaged as access to the guilds became more restricted. The later medieval cities developed permanent bureaucracies providing a huge range of public services, and they were paid for by sophisticated systems of taxation and public borrowing. The survival of their fuller, richer records allow us not only to apply a more statistical approach, but also to get much closer, to the splendours and squalors of everyday city-life than was possible in the earlier volume. The book concludes with a set of vibrant chapters on women and children and religious minorities in the city, on education and culture, and on the tenor of ordinary urban existence. Like its predecessor, this book is massively, and vividly, documented. Its approach is interdisciplinary and comparative, and its examples and case studies are drawn from across Europe: from France, England, Germany, the Low Countries, Iberia and Italy, with briefer reviews of the urban experience elsewhere from Baltic to Balkans. The result is the most wide-ranging and up-to-date study of its multifaceted subject. It is a formidable achievement.
As Andrew M. Gardner explains in The Fragmentary City, in Qatar and elsewhere on the Arabian Peninsula, nearly nine out of every ten residents are foreign noncitizens. Many of these foreigners reside in the cities that have arisen in Qatar and neighboring states. The book provides an overview of the gulf migration system with its diverse migrant experiences. Gardner focuses on the ways that demography and global mobility have shaped the city of Doha and the urban characteristics of the Arabian Peninsula in general. Building on those migrant experiences, the book turns to the spatial politics of the modern Arabian city, exploring who is placed where in the city and how this social landscape came into historical existence. The author reflects on what we might learn from these cities and the societies that inhabit them. In The Fragmentary City, Andrew M. Gardner frames the contemporary cities of the Arabian Peninsula not as poor imitations of Western urban modernity, but instead as cities on the frontiers of a global, neoliberal, and increasingly urban future.
Widely recognized as a groundbreaking text, The New Urban Sociology is a broad and expert introduction to urban sociology that is both relevant and accessible to the student. A thought leader in the field, the book is organized around an integrated paradigm (the sociospatial perspective) which considers the role played by social factors such as race, class, gender, lifestyle, economics, culture, and politics on the development of metropolitan areas. Emphasizing the importance of space to social life and real estate to urban development, the book integrates social, ecological and political economy perspectives and research through a fresh theoretical approach. With its unique perspective, concise history of urban life, clear summary of urban social theory, and attention to the impact of culture on urban development, this book gives students a cohesive conceptual framework for understanding cities and urban life. In this thoroughly revised 5th edition, authors Mark Gottdiener, Ray Hutchison, and Michael T. Ryan offer expanded discussions of created cultures, gentrification, and urban tourism, and have incorporated the most recent work in the field throughout the text. The New Urban Sociology is a necessity for all courses on the subject.
The Companion to Medieval Palermo offers a panorama of the history of Medieval Palermo from the sixth to the fifteenth century. Often described by contrast with the communal reality of Medieval Italy as submitted to a royal (external) authority, the city is here given back its density and creativity. Important themes such as artistic and literary productions, religious changes or political autonomy are thus explored anew. Some fields recently investigated are the object of particular scrutiny: the history of the Jews, Byzantine or Islamic Palermo are among them. Contributors are Annliese Nef, Vivien Prigent, Alessandra Bagnera, Mirella Cassarino, Rosi Di Liberto, Elena Pezzini, Henri Bresc, Igor Mineo, Laura Sciascia, Gian Luca Borghese, Sulamith Brodbeck, Benoît Grévin, Giuseppe Mandalà, and Fabrizio Titone.
This book offers a new perspective on the issue of modernity through a series of interconnected essays. Drawing centrally on the works of Castoriadis, Luhmann, Heller and Lefort, and in critical discussion with Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, Adorno, Habermas and Taylor, the author argues that modernity is not only a unique historical creation but also a multiple one. With a focus on five broad themes - the problem of understanding of modernity after the decline of grand narratives; the complexity of the modern condition; politics, especially with reference to freedom and totalitarian regimes; the variety and density of modern life; and the centrality of a concept of culture to social and critical theory - John Rundell advances the view that modernity is not the outcome of an evolutionary process or historical development, but is unique and indeterminate, as are the constitutive dimensions that can be identified as 'modern'. There are, then, different modernities. A rigorous engagement with a range of prominent and contemporary social theorists, Imaginaries of Modernity casts new light on the significance of understanding the multidimensional character of modernity and the plurality of its forms beyond the conventional paradigms associated with only the West. As such, it will appeal to scholars of social theory, critical theory, sociology and philosophy concerned with questions of culture, politics and modernity.
The British Sociological Association held a conference on the theme "Sociology and History". In 1964, E.H. Carr had called for an open frontier between the disciplines. This book examines the traffic across this frontier and in particular, what might be called the sociological uses of history.
