Appearing together in English for the first time, three politically charged sci-fi graphic novellas by a pioneering French comics artist. Dark, smart, and indomitably cool, the 70s and 80s dystopian vision of Chantal Montellier still unsettle. Visitors to an underground mall must recreate civilization after a nuclear strike may have wiped out the rest of humanity. Newlyweds find themselves implicated in a government eugenics program. A disembodied authority reprimands a man for stepping out of view of a security camera. In this collection of three novellas – Wonder City, Shelter, and 1996 –published together in English for the first time, Montellier’s blend of dark humor, gripping storytelling, and consistent focus on the perils of totalitarianism, shows her to be a master of both comics and science fiction. Social Fiction includes a Q&A between Chantal Montellier and Geoffrey Brock.

While some cities owe their existence to lumber or oil, turpentine or steel, Kansas City owes its existence to food. From its earliest days, Kansas City was in the business of provisioning pioneers and traders headed west, and later with provisioning the nation with meat and wheat. Throughout its history, thousands of Kansas Citians have also made their living providing meals and hospitality to travelers passing through on their way elsewhere, be it by way of a steamboat, Conestoga wagon, train, automobile, or airplane. As Kansas City’s adopted son, Fred Harvey sagely noted, “Travel follows good food routes,” and Kansas City’s identity as a food city is largely based on that fact. Kansas City: A Food Biography explores in fascinating detail how a frontier town on the edge of wilderness grew into a major metropolis, one famous for not only great cuisine but for a crossroads hospitality that continues to define it. Kansas City: A Food Biography also explores how politics, race, culture, gender, immigration, and art have forged the city’s most iconic dishes, from chili and steak to fried chicken and barbecue. In lively detail, Andrea Broomfield brings the Kansas City food scene to life.

Addresses the relationships between what modern-day experts say to each other and to their constituencies Technical Knowledge in American Culture addresses the relationships between what modern-day experts say to each other and to their constituencies and whether what they say and do relates to the larger culture, society, and era. These essays challenge the social impact model by looking at science, technology, and medicine not as social activities but as intellectual activities.

This book explores the possibility to observe the lives of cities through ubiquitous information obtained through social networks, sensors and other sources of data and information, and the ways in which this possibility describes a new form of Public Space, which can be used to define new forms of citizenship and participated city governance. The work is the result of years of research across sciences, arts, design, ethnography, cultural geography, performed by multiple researchers, understanding the Relational Ecosystems of cities (the flows of relation, information, knowledge and emotion in the city) and using them to reinterpret the concept of Urban Acupuncture: from the Third Space, Third Landscape and Third Generation City, to the Third Infoscape; from Urban Acupuncture to Digital Urban Acupuncture. The book starts by exploring the many theories and methodologies which have been used to try to capture and use the revolutionary potential found in the daily lives of cities. From De Certeau, to Latour, Bateson, Bhabha, and all the way to Castells, Clèment, Boyd, Casagrande. In a progression which moves from the Third Space (Soja, De Certeau), to the Third Landscape (Clèment), to the Third Generation City (Casagrande), to the Third Paradise (Pistoletto), the book arrives at a definition of the Third Infoscape, following up on Kevin Lynch: a new legibility and imageability of the city. Its main themes and objectives lie in the desire to observe and understand the radical transformation of the definitions, boundaries and configurations of what we call public and private spaces, in different cultures and communities, in the age of communication, information and knowledge, and to use these understandings to formulate a set of working hypotheses for the positive, constructive, active and participatory usage of these transformed scenarios, contributing to the re-definition of concepts such as citizenship, city-governance, urban planning, civic decision-making, and more. And using, in the process, techniques such as Urban Acupuncture, Actor-Network Theory, Diasporic analysis, Peer-to-peer Urbanism and more. Multiple real-life research scenarios and documented case studies will be used, from 4 continents, coming from our research and from other international contributions.