Cities and Cultures

Cities and Cultures

Author: Malcolm Miles

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-04-26

Total Pages: 460

ISBN-13: 1134257708

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Cities and Cultures is a critical account of the relations between contemporary cities and the cultures they produce and which in turn shape them. The book questions received ideas of what constitutes a city's culture through case studies in which different kinds of culture - the arts, cultural institutions and heritage, distinctive ways of life - are seen to be differently used in or affected by the development of particular cities. The book does not mask the complexity of this, but explains it in ways accessible for undergraduates. The book begins with introductory chapters on the concepts of a city and a culture (the latter in the anthropological sense as well as denoting the arts), citing cases from modern literature. The book then moves from a critical account of cultural production in a metropolitan setting to the idea that a city, too, is produced through the characteristic ways of life of its inhabitants. The cultural industries are scrutinised for their relation to such cultures as well as to city marketing, and attention is given to the European Cities of Culture initiative, and to the hybridity of contemporary urban cultures in a period of globalisation and migration. In its penultimate chapter the book looks at incidental cultural forms and cultural means to identify formation; and in its final chapter, examines the permeability of urban cultures and cultural forms. Sources are introduced, positions clarified and contrasted, and notes given for selective further reading. Playing on the two meanings of culture, Miles takes an unique approach by relating arguments around these meanings to specific cases of urban development today. The book includes both critical comment on a range of literatures - being a truly inter-disciplinary study - and the outcome of the author's field research into urban cultures.


Urban Culture

Urban Culture

Author: Alan C Turley

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-09-07

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 131734264X

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This innovative text uses the lens of culture to examine the various theoretical perspectives and paradigms of urban analysis. It explores the city's impact on how we make and consume all types of culture—art, music, literature, architecture, film, and more—not only illustrating the effects the urban environment has on the production of culture, but, at times, how culture has influenced the city. Theoretically diverse, Urban Culture employs the major theoretical perspectives in sociology and the major paradigms in Urban Sociology and Urban Studies: Urban Ecology, Marxism, New Urbanism, Socio-Psychological Perspective, Structuralists/Econometrics, and Urban Elites/ Entrepreneurs. Urban Terrorism is also addressed to provide a timely examination of the cultural impact and sociological effects of terrorism in an urban setting.


The Cultures of Cities

The Cultures of Cities

Author: Sharon Zukin

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Published: 1996-01-23

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 9781557864376

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How do cities use culture today? Building on the experience of New York as a "culture capital" Sharon Zukin shows how three notions of culture - as ethnicity, aesthetic, and marketing tool - are reshaping urban places and conflicts over revitalization. She rejects the idea that cities have either a singular urban culture or many different subcultures to argue that cultures are constantly negotiated in the city's central spaces - the streets, parks, shops, museums, and restaurants - which are the great public spaces of modernity. While cultural gentrification may contribute to making our cities both safer and more civilised places to live, it has its darker side. Beneath the perceptions of "civility" and "security" nurtured by cultural strategies, Zukin shows an aggressive private-sector bid for control of public space, a relentless drive for expansion by art museums and other non-profit cultural institutions, and an increasing redesign of the built environment for the purposes of social control. Tying these developments to a new "symbolic economy" based on tourism, media and entertainment, Zukin traces the connections between real estate development and popular expression, and between elite visions of the arts and more democratic representations. Going beyond the immigrants, artists, street peddlers, and security guards who are the key figures in the symbolic economy, Zukin asks: Who really occupies the central spaces of cities? And whose culture is imposed as public culture? Combining cultural critique, interviews, autobiography and ethnography, The Culture of Cities is a compelling account of the public spaces of modernity as they are transformed into new, more troubling landscapes.


Cities and Cultures

Cities and Cultures

Author: Malcolm Miles

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-04-26

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1134257716

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Cities and Cultures is a critical account of the relations between contemporary cities and the cultures they produce and which in turn shape them. The book questions received ideas of what constitutes a city's culture through case studies in which different kinds of culture - the arts, cultural institutions and heritage, distinctive ways of life - are seen to be differently used in or affected by the development of particular cities. The book does not mask the complexity of this, but explains it in ways accessible for undergraduates. The book begins with introductory chapters on the concepts of a city and a culture (the latter in the anthropological sense as well as denoting the arts), citing cases from modern literature. The book then moves from a critical account of cultural production in a metropolitan setting to the idea that a city, too, is produced through the characteristic ways of life of its inhabitants. The cultural industries are scrutinised for their relation to such cultures as well as to city marketing, and attention is given to the European Cities of Culture initiative, and to the hybridity of contemporary urban cultures in a period of globalisation and migration. In its penultimate chapter the book looks at incidental cultural forms and cultural means to identify formation; and in its final chapter, examines the permeability of urban cultures and cultural forms. Sources are introduced, positions clarified and contrasted, and notes given for selective further reading. Playing on the two meanings of culture, Miles takes an unique approach by relating arguments around these meanings to specific cases of urban development today. The book includes both critical comment on a range of literatures - being a truly inter-disciplinary study - and the outcome of the author's field research into urban cultures.


Cities of Culture

Cities of Culture

Author: Deborah Stevenson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-08-15

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 1134084358

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Culture now has a prominent place on the urban policy and re-profiling agendas of cities around the world. City-based cultural planning emphasising creativity in all its guises has emerged as a significant local policy initiative, while the notion of the ‘creative city’ has become an urban imaging cliché. The proliferation of local blueprints for cultural planning/creative cities has been remarkable, while supra-state bodies such as the European Union and UNESCO are also fostering the use of culture in strategies to revive cities and urban economies and to brand places as ‘different’. Cities of Culture highlights significant trends in cultural planning since its inception, revealing and analysing key discourses and influential (globally-circulating) manifestos and processes, as well as their interpretation and implementation in specific places. With reference to examples drawn from Europe, Australia, Asia and North America, Cities of Culture provides insights into the application of urban cultural strategies in different local, national and international contexts, highlighting regularities, tensions and intersections as well as core underpinning assumptions. This book explores the now-pervasive expectation that cultural planning is capable of achieving a wide range of social, economic, urban and creative outcomes. It will be of interest for students and scholars of urban sociology, urban studies, cultural policy studies and human geography.


Cities and Urban Cultures

Cities and Urban Cultures

Author: Deborah Stevenson

Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education (UK)

Published: 2003-04-16

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 0335227988

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*What is distinctive about urban life? *What key trends have shaped the contemporary city? *How have the city and urban cultures been explained by sociology and cultural studies? This is the first book to explore cities and urban life from the perspectives of both sociology and cultural theory. Through an interdisciplinary approach and use of case material, the book demonstrates that the 'real' city of physicality and struggle and the 'imagined' city of representations are entwined in the construction of urban cultures. Starting with a comparison of the rural and the urban, the book considers ways of imagining the city and of conceptualising urban cultures. It goes on to investigate the implications of several pivotal urban and cultural trends, such as the use of the arts and local cultures in city re-imaging, and the ways in which modernism, postmodernism and globalisation have shaped the built environment and the orientation of academic enquiry. Also examined is the way in which representations of the urban landscape in film, literature, art, and popular texts, have informed dominant ideas about the way certain city spaces - including city centres, urban waterfronts, and so-called 'global cities' - should look, function and 'feel'. Designed as a text for undergraduate courses in cultural studies, sociology and wider social science, this book traces the development of urban environments from the nineteenth century to the present, and illuminates the nature of urban life.


Cities and the Cultural Economy

Cities and the Cultural Economy

Author: Thomas A. Hutton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-08-27

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 1136251413

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The cultural economy forms a leading trajectory of urban development, and has emerged as a key facet of globalizing cities. Cultural industries include new media, digital arts, music and film, and the design industries and professions, as well as allied consumption and spectacle in the city. The cultural economy now represents the third-largest sector in many metropolitan cities of the West including London, Berlin, New York, San Francisco, and Melbourne, and is increasingly influential in the development of East Asian cities (Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore), as well as the mega-cities of the Global South (e.g. Mumbai, Capetown, and São Paulo). Cities and the Cultural Economy provides a critical integration of the burgeoning research and policy literatures in one of the most prominent sub-fields of contemporary urban studies. Policies for cultural economy are increasingly evident within planning, development and place-marketing programs, requiring large resource commitments, but producing – on the evidence – highly uneven results. Accordingly the volume includes a critical review of how the new cultural economy is reshaping urban labour, housing and property markets, contributing to gentrification and to ‘precarious employment’ formation, as well as to broadly favorable outcomes, such as community regeneration and urban vitality. The volume acknowledges the important growth dynamics and sustainability of key creative industries. Written primarily as a text for upper-level undergraduate and Masters students in urban, economic and social geography; sociology; cultural studies; and planning, this provocative and compelling text will also be of interest to those studying urban land economics, architecture, landscape architecture and the built environment.


Encyclopedia of the City

Encyclopedia of the City

Author: Roger W. Caves

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 597

ISBN-13: 0415252253

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A first-class work of reference that will be both an essential resource for independent study as well as a useful aid in teaching: a solid but also provocative starting point for wider exploration of the city.


Cities, Culture and Creativity

Cities, Culture and Creativity

Author: UNESCO

Publisher: UNESCO Publishing

Published: 2021-05-25

Total Pages: 112

ISBN-13: 9231004522

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Culture and creativity have untapped potential to deliver social, economic, and spatial benefits for cities and communities. Cultural and creative industries are key drivers of the creative economy and represent important sources of employment, economic growth, and innovation, thus contributing to city competitiveness and sustainability. Through their contribution to urban regeneration and sustainable urban development, cultural and creative industries make cities more attractive places for people to live in and for economic activity to develop. Culture and creativity also contribute to social cohesion at the neighborhood level, enable creative networks to form and advance innovation and growth, and create opportunities for those who are often socially and economically excluded. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has had a deep impact on the cultural sector, yet it has also revealed the power of cultural and creative industries as a resource for city recovery and resilience. More generally, cities are hubs of the creative economy and have a critical role to play in harnessing the transformative potential of cultural and creative industries through policies and enabling environments at the local level. 'Cities, Culture, and Creativity' (CCC) provides guiding principles and a CCC Framework, developed by UNESCO and the World Bank, to support cities in unlocking the power of cultural and creative industries for sustainable urban development, city competitiveness, and social inclusion. Drawing from global studies and the experiences of nine diverse cities from across the world, the CCC Framework offers concrete guidance for the range of actors -- city, state, and national governments; creative industry and related private-sector organizations; creatives; culture professionals and civil society-- to harness culture and creativity with a view to boosting their local creative economies and building resilient, inclusive, and dynamic cities.


Cities, Culture and Granite

Cities, Culture and Granite

Author: Edmund P. Fowler

Publisher: Guernica Editions

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 120

ISBN-13: 1550711946

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In North America, we are generally desensitised to our surroundings, whether they are buildings or forests. This lack of awareness makes it easier to accept the fact that cities, towns, and suburbs are all built for us, not by us. It also makes sensible urban planning or policy difficult. The results have not been pretty. Cities are dysfunctional in part because we have built them in ways that pollute our ecosphere, something that harms our health in a direct way. Ecological stupidity is also economic stupidity, and North American urban development is incomprehensibly expensive. But cities also don't work socially: their design discourages casual public contact, which is the source of strong local communities and of self-confident collective action. Fowler points to numerous examples of humans who have transcended this culture of separation.