Fragments of the City: Making and Remaking Urban Worlds

Cities are becoming increasingly fragmented materially, socially, and spatially. From broken toilets and everyday things, to art and forms of writing, fragments are signatures of urban worlds and provocations for change. In Fragments of the City, Colin McFarlane examines such fragments, what they are and how they come to matter in the experience, politics, and expression of cities. How does the city appear when we look at it through its fragments? For those living on the economic margins, the city is often experienced as a set of fragments. Much of what low-income residents deal with on a daily basis is fragments of stuff, made and remade with and through urban density, social infrastructure, and political practice. In this book, McFarlane explores infrastructure in Mumbai, Kampala, and Cape Town; artistic montages in Los Angeles and Dakar; refugee struggles in Berlin; and the repurposing of fragments in Hong Kong and New York. Fragments surface as material things, as forms of knowledge, as writing strategies. They are used in efforts to politicize the city and in urban writing to capture life and change in the world's major cities. Fragments of the City surveys the role of fragments in how urban worlds are understood, revealed, written, and changed.

Author: Colin McFarlane
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 10/05/2021
Pages: 328
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.91w x 0.94d
ISBN13: 9780520382244
ISBN10: 0520382242
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Human Geography
- Social Science | Sociology | Urban
- Political Science | Public Policy | City Planning & Urban Development

About the Author
Colin McFarlane is Professor of Urban Geography at Durham University, UK. His work focuses on the experience and politics of urban life. He is author of Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage.