Imagining Cities

the long version

The city has always been a meeting point for cross-disciplinary discussion within the debates of modernity and, more recently, postmodernity. Imagining Cities gives students access to the most exciting recent work on the city from within sociology, cultural studies and cultural geography. Contributions are grouped around four major themes: the theoretical imagination; ethnicity, racisms and the politics of difference; memory and nostalgia; and the city as narrative. While these representations consider the interplay of past and the present, imagined and substantive, the final section of the book links present and future in an examination of the idea of the virtual city. Here, the world of cyberspace not only recasts our imaginaries of spaces and communication, but has a profound impact on the sociological imagination itself.