The City Cultures Reader

Routledge Urban Reader Series

by Iain Borden (Editor), Tim Hall (Editor), Malcolm Miles (Editor)

Cities are both products of culture, and sites where culture is made and received. By presenting the very best of classic and contemporary writing on the culture of cities, The City Cultures Reader provides an accessible overview of the diverse material on the interface between cities and culture.
The extensively revised and updated second edition of The City Cultures Reader now features fifty generous writings (of which thirty-eight are new) organised into ten parts which explore themes such as: what is a city?; what is culture?; symbolic economies; the culture industry; culture and technologies; everyday lives; contesting identity; boundaries and transgressions; utopias and dystopias; and possible urban futures.
Designed to aid student understanding, this new edition now features extensive introductory sections that define both the city and culture. Part introductions outline the major themes, whilst introductions to the individual writings explain their interest and significance to wider debates. Annotated further reading is also provided at the end of each Part.

Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Iain Borden is Professor of Architecture and Urban Culture at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, London, England.

His research explores how architecture and cities are experienced and re-used by the public.

Architecture and cities are crucial to how people live and society operates. Without homes, shops and parks, without offices, workplaces and airports, our world would grind to a halt. As a historian and theorist of architecture and urban culture, he is interested not just in how our cities function but also how they are designed, what they mean to people and how they are experienced.

To do this, he has studied a diverse range of subjects and places, from Italian renaissance piazzas to surveillance cameras in shopping malls, from architectural modernism to recent postmodernism, from issues of gender and ethnicity in cities to the way architecture is represented in cinema and photography. In particular, he has completed an in-depth study of the urban practice of skateboarding, looking at how skateboarders adopt modern cities as their own pleasure-ground, creating a culture with its own architecture, clothes, attitudes and social benefits. He has also extended this investigation into the world of automobile driving, looking at movies to explore how people’s experiences of the city from the car changes their engagement with architecture and urban space. Recent work explores how specific places and buildings in cities worldwide can be encountered through different kinds of social engagement, such as memory and risk-taking.