1st Edition

Cities, Citizens, and Technologies Urban Life and Postmodernity

By Paula Geyh Copyright 2009
    264 Pages
    by Routledge

    264 Pages
    by Routledge

    This book is about the contemporary city and those who live in it. It is thus also about the urban world of the era (extending roughly from the 1960s to the present) that we see as postmodern, and specifically about how the postmodern city is changing under the impact of globalization and new information and communication technologies. In particular, Geyh explores how the urban spaces of postmodernity (parks, plazas, streets, sidewalks) and postmodern urban subjectivities and communities respond to and create each other--how they become mutually constructing. While there is much in this book about what makes a city "postmodern," its primary focus is on how the postmodern city is experienced by its inhabitants, and in this respect the book is also a study of everyday life in the postmodern era. As such, it deals not only with the ways in which the postmodern city has developed out of economic, technological, political, and cultural structures that are different from those of the modern city, but also with how the postmodern city changes our ways of knowing and experiencing the world and ourselves as postmodern urban subjects, as citizens of postmodernity.

    Introduction; 1. Legible Cities: Urban Spaces and Subjects; 2. Urban Grids and Urban Imaginary: City to Cyberspace, Cyberspace to City; 3. The City of Control and the Polis; 4. City Moves: Urban Spaces and Motion; 5. Global Cities and Citizens

    Biography

    Paula Geyh is an associate professor of English at Yeshiva University and a co-editor of Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology.

    "This book is beautifully written ... It is refreshing to read such a passionately argued text, obviously the work of someone with a strong sense of social conscience."
    --Media, Culture & Society (David W. Hill, University of York, UK)