Urban Geography: A Critical Introduction (Critical Introductions to Geography)

Urban Geography a comprehensive introduction to a variety of issues relating to contemporary urban geography, including patterns and processes of urbanization, urban development, urban planning, and life experiences in modern cities. * Reveals both the diversity of ordinary urban geographies and the networks, flows and relations which increasingly connect cities and urban spaces at the global scale * Uses the city as a lens for proposing and developing critical concepts which show how wider social processes, relations, and power structures are changing * Considers the experiences, lives, practices, struggles, and words of ordinary urban residents and marginalized social groups rather than exclusively those of urban elites * Shows readers how to develop critical perspectives on dominant neoliberal representations of the city and explore the great diversity of urban worlds

Andrew E.G. Jonas holds a Chair in Human Geography at the University of Hull in the UK. His co-edited books include The Urban Growth Machine; Critical Perspectives Two Decades Later (1999, with David Wilson), Interrogating Alterity (2010, with Duncan Fuller and Roger Lee), and Territory, the State and Urban Politics (2012, with Andy Wood). He serves on the editorial boards of Urban Geography and Territory Politics and Governance. Eugene McCann is a Professor of Geography at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. He is co-editor, with Kevin Ward, of Mobile Urbanism: Cities & Policymaking in the Global Age (2011) and, with Ronan Paddison, Cities & Social Change: Encounters with Contemporary Urbanism (2014). Mary Thomas is Associate Professor in Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Ohio State University. She is the author of Multicultural Girlhood: Racism, Sexuality, and the Conflicted Spaces of American Education (2011), and co-editor of A Companion to Social Geography (2011).

List of Figures vii List of Tables xi List of Boxes xii Acknowledgments xiv Preface xvi 1 Approaching the City 1 2 Cities for Whom? The Contours and Commitments of Critical Urban Geography 27 3 Production, Economy, and the City 53 4 A World of Cities 77 5 Labor and the City 100 6 The City and Social Reproduction 122 7 Governing the City: The State, Urban Planning, and Politics 141 8 Experiencing Cities 162 9 Molding and Marketing the Image of the City 184 10 Nature and Environment in the City 206 11 Urban Arts and Visual Cultures 229 12 Alternative Urban Spaces and Politics 252 13 Urban Crises 274 14 Epilogue: Critical Urban Geographies and Their Futures 299 Glossary 307 References 325 Index 347