Urban Theory Books

New and Published Books

1. China's New Urbanization Strategy

   By China Development Research Foundation

   Series: Routledge Studies on the Chinese Economy

   Urbanization is one of the major challenges facing China. Of China’s 1.3 billion people, around half still live in rural areas. There has been huge migration from rural areas to cities in recent years, a trend that is likely to continue strong for some time. The strains that this vast migration...

   Published January 15th 2013 by Routledge
2. Politics of Urbanism

   Seeing Like a City

   By Warren Magnusson

   Series: Interventions

   To see like a city, rather than seeing like a state, is the key to understanding modern politics. In this book, Magnusson draws from theorists such as Weber, Wirth, Hayek, Jacobs, Sennett, and Foucault to articulate some of the ideas that we need to make sense of the city as a form of political...

   Published December 16th 2012 by Routledge
3. Michael J. Shapiro

   Discourse, Culture, Violence

   Edited by Terrell Carver, Samuel Chambers

   Series: Routledge Innovators in Political Theory

   Michael J. Shapiro’s writings have been innovatory with respect to the phenomena he has taken to be political, and the concomitant array of methods that he has brilliantly mastered. This book draws from his vast output of articles, chapters and books to provide a thematic yet integrated account of...

   Published April 22nd 2012 by Routledge
4. The New Violent Cartography

   Geo-Analysis after the Aesthetic Turn

   Edited by Samson Opondo, Michael Shapiro

   Series: Interventions

   This edited volume seeks to propose and examine different, though related, critical responses to modern cultures of war among other cultural practices of statecraft. Taken together, these essays present a space of creative engagement with the political and draw on a broad range of cultural contexts...

   Published April 18th 2012 by Routledge
5. The City as Target

   Edited by Ryan Bishop, Gregory Clancey, John W. Phillips

   Series: Postcolonial Politics

   Bringing together scholars from a diverse range of disciplines, The City as Target provides a sustained and critical response to the relationship between the concept of targeting (in its many forms) and notions of understanding, imagining and shaping the urban. Among the many spatial and graphic...

   Published March 20th 2012 by Routledge
6. Urban Theory Beyond the West

   A World of Cities

   Edited by Tim Edensor, Mark Jayne

   Since the late eighteenth century, academic engagement with political, economic, social, cultural and spatial changes in our cities has been dominated by theoretical frameworks crafted with reference to just a small number of cities. This book offers an important antidote to the continuing...

   Published November 9th 2011 by Routledge
7. Rights of Passage

   Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public Flow

   By Nicholas Blomley

   Series: Social Justice

   Rights of Passage: Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public Flow documents a powerful and under-researched form of urban governance that focuses on pedestrian flow. This logic, which Nicholas Blomley terms 'pedestrianism', values public space not in terms of its aesthetic merits, or its success in...

   Published October 5th 2011 by Routledge
8. Urban Assemblages

   How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies

   Edited by Ignacio Farías, Thomas Bender

   Series: Questioning Cities

   This book takes it as a given that the city is made of multiple partially localized assemblages built of heterogeneous networks, spaces, and practices. The past century of urban studies has focused on various aspects—space, culture, politics, economy—but these too often address each domain and the...

   Published August 16th 2011 by Routledge
9. Globalization, Modernity and the City

   By John Rennie Short

   Series: Routledge Studies in Human Geography

   We live in a world of big cities. Urbanization, globalization and modernization have received considerable attention but rarely are the connections and relations between them the subjects of similar attention. Cities are an integral part of the network of globalization and important sites of...

   Published July 24th 2011 by Routledge
10. Material Powers

    Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn

    Edited by Tony Bennett, Patrick Joyce

    Series: CRESC

    This edited collection is a major contribution to the current development of a ‘material turn’ in the social sciences and humanities. It does so by exploring new understandings of how power is made up and exercised by examining the role of material infrastructures in the organization of state...

    Published October 3rd 2010 by Routledge