Princeton University Press
The Spaces of the Modern City: Imaginaries, Politics, and Everyday Life
Key Metrics
- Gyan Prakash
- Princeton University Press
- Paperback
- 9780691133430
- 9.19 X 6.31 X 1.1 inches
- 1.49 pounds
- Social Science > Sociology - Urban
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
By United Nations estimates, 60 percent of the world's population will be urban by 2030. With the increasing speed of urbanization, especially in the developing world, scholars are now rethinking standard concepts and histories of modern cities. The Spaces of the Modern City historicizes the contemporary discussion of urbanism, highlighting the local and global breadth of the city landscape.
This interdisciplinary collection examines how the city develops in the interactions of space and imagination. The essays focus on issues such as street design in Vienna, the motion picture industry in Los Angeles, architecture in Marseilles and Algiers, and the kaleidoscopic paradox of post-apartheid Johannesburg. They explore the nature of spatial politics, examining the disparate worlds of eighteenth-century Baghdad, nineteenth-century Morelia, Cold War-era West Berlin, and postwar Los Angeles. They also show the meaning of everyday spaces to urban life, illuminating issues such as crime in metropolitan London, youth culture in Dakar, memory projects in Tokyo, and Bombay cinema. Informed by a range of theoretical writings, this collection offers a fresh and truly global perspective on the nature of the modern city.
The contributors are Sheila Crane, Belinda Davis, Mamadou Diouf, Philip J. Ethington, David Frisby, Christina M. Jim�nez, Dina Rizk Khoury, Ranjani Mazumdar, Frank Mort, Martin Murray, Jordan Sand, and Sarah Schrank.
Author Bio
Gyan Prakash (born 1952) is a historian of modern India and the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University. Prakash is a member of the Subaltern Studies collective. Prakash received his Bachelor of Arts degree in history from the University of Delhi in 1973, his Master's degree in history from Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1975, and his doctorate in history from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984.
His field of research concerns urban modernity, genealogies of modernity, and problems of postcolonial thought and politics. He writes about modern South Asian history, comparative colonialism and postcolonial theory, urban history, global history, and the history of science.
Gyan Prakash is professor of modern Indian history at Princeton University and a member of the Subaltern Studies Editorial Collective.
He is the author of Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (1990), Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (1999) and Mumbai Fables (2010). Professor Prakash edited After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements (1995) and Noir Urbanisms (2010), coedited The Space of the Modern City (2008) and Utopia/Dystopia (2010), and has written a number of articles on colonialism and history writing.
He has also written several books, including Mumbai Fables (2010), which was adapted into the 2015 film Bombay Velvet directed by Anurag Kashyap.
With Robert Tignor, he introduced the modern world history course at Princeton University.
Sources: W W Norton, Penguin India, and Princeton University
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